Shakespeare, Ibsen, The Last Unicorn, and a Big Red Rag...

[Updated August, 2017]

I used to wonder, when I was in Mr. Fischer’s English 12 class, studying Shakespeare… When we do literary analysis on the works of long-deceased authors, how do we know what these authors really meant?  Maybe all of the pretension that we heap posthumously on their work is just that – pretense, and representing nothing more than a generations-long collective best-guessing effort, that through transmission, becomes fossilized into quote-unquote scholarly analysis.  Maybe Shakespeare was just writing some cool, edgy stuff to sell tickets?

My mind goes back to my early undergraduate years at Cornell.  The year was 1988, maybe 1989.  I was up late one night, studying, in an unoccupied room in stately Goldwin Smith Hall.  As fatigue, boredom and frustration closed in on me from all sides, I took up a piece of chalk and set to declaring my frustration, in the way that only the 17 or 18-year-old I could, in the form of a colorful metaphor, possibly involving a bodily appendage not traditionally used for or while studying.  It was silly, random eruption of angst.  At some point, I left the building.
 
Sometime later that week or month, I happened across a copy of The Big Red Rag, at the time a feminist newspaper on campus.  (I think the title has remained, but it’s now an arts and entertainment publication.  Someone correct me if I am wrong?)  As I was flipping through its pages, I came across a graphic, in the middle of which was prominently displayed the very sentence I had written, and one of the Rag’s staff writers - actually a girl who had been in one of my Freshman Writing Seminars the previous year, I recognized the name - had performed an impressive deconstruction/analysis, word-by-word, of how the sentence spoke to my massive insecurities (and my attempts to compensate for them), my mommy issues, my desire to rule the world, and how I was undoubtedly a physical incarnation of the malevolent wave of misogyny that held sway in the world as she perceived it.  It was an impressive display of skillful and erudite analysis being guided by (since the original author, moi, was unavailable for comment) the desires of the analyst to conclude what she wished to conclude.  (Anybody remember Charles Manson’s “selective” interpretation of The Beatles’ “Blackbird?”) It could have been satire, I suppose.  It’s hard to tell.  If it was satire, it was artfully done.  Bravissima. If it was serious, well…

Which brings me back to Shakespeare.  How do we know that the interpretations of events we teach/learn are definitive?  How do we know what the artists intended?  How do we know what was going the mind of The Bard?  Or John Donne?  Or Edgar Allan Poe?  Or James Madison?  (What was the intent of the Framers with regard to the Second Amendment? That debate has been making the rounds lately, and I’m sure to tick off more than a few gun nuts and Libertarians when I publish my grammatical interpretation of what the Second Amendment really means…) I even read an analysis of Robert Frost’s “Birches” once that claimed that the up-and-down movement of the Frost's birch tree is a metaphor for nothing more profound than sex, or perhaps onanism. (You look the word up yourself, this is a G-rated article.) The link to that original article is now dead, but it is referenced here.

I have erstwhile written about my feelings about the “inflation” of the importance of the verse of Tupac Shakur, and don’t even get me started on the pretense heaped on certain celebrated practitioners in the art world. But I’ve always considered myself to be cynical and inquisitive enough of a critical thinker not to be sucked in by the alluring complacency of the surety that I know what’s what.  Still, when I read Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (in translation), and found a quote I recognized from a much later work, I thought I had made the discovery of the century.  In the play, Peer, the title character, embarks on a surreal set of adventures – rather like Huck Finn crossed with Odysseus – during one of which he meets with a “Voice from the Darkness,” the great Bøyg:

PEER   [tries to force a passage at another place, but strikes against something]. Who are you?
THE VOICE   Myself. Can you say the same?
PEER   I can say what I will; and my sword can smite! Mind yourself! Hu, hei, now the blow falls crushing! King Saul slew hundreds; Peer Gynt slew thousands! [Cutting and slashing.] Who are you?
THE VOICE   Myself.
PEER   That stupid reply you may spare; it doesn't clear up the matter. What are you?
THE VOICE   The great Bøyg.
PEER   Ah, indeed! The riddle was black; now I'd call it grey. Clear the way then, Bøyg!
THE VOICE   Go roundabout, Peer!
PEER   No, through! [Cuts and slashes.] There he fell! [Tries to advance, but strikes against something.] Ho, ho, are there more here?
THE VOICE   The Bøyg, Peer Gynt! the one only one. It's the Bøyg that's unwounded, and the Bøyg that was hurt, it's the Bøyg that is dead, and the Bøyg that's alive.
PEER   [throws away the branch]. The weapon is troll-smeared; but I have my fists! [Fights his way forward.]
THE VOICE   Ay, trust to your fists, lad, trust to your body. Hee-hee, Peer Gynt, so you'll reach the summit.
PEER   [falling back again]. Forward or back, and it's just as far;- out or in, and it's just as straight! He is there! And there! And he's round the bend! No sooner I'm out than I'm back in the ring.- Name who you are! Let me see you! What are you?
THE VOICE   The Bøyg.
PEER   [groping around]. Not dead, not living; all slimy; misty. Not so much as a shape! It's as bad as to battle in a cluster of snarling, half-wakened bears! [Screams.] Strike back at me, can't you?
THE VOICE   The Bøyg isn't mad.
PEER   Strike!
THE VOICE   The Bøyg strikes not.
PEER   Fight! You shall
THE VOICE   The great Bøyg conquers, but does not fight.

It’s that last line that struck me. One of my favorite novels is Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. (TLU was made into a Rankin/Bass animated feature film in 1982, screenplay by the author, starring the voices of Alan Arkin, Mia Farrow, Angela Lansbury, Rene Auberjonois, and mega-geek-cred actor Christoper Lee. Beagle earns extra geek cred for having written and directed the Trek: TNG episode “Sarek.”) In the novel, the pathos-ridden ageless and timeless Schemndrick the Magician befriends the last unicorn in the world.  Together, they travel far and wide, and eventually run up against the Red Bull, the creature responsible (sort of) for the disappearance of all the other unicorns.  Of the Bull, Schmendrick says, “The Red Bull never fights....He conquers, but he never fights.”

My brain exploded.

The Bøyg is a mysterious creature who exists outside what might be considered space-time.  He is part Tom Bombadil, part Yog-Sothoth.  I’ll let that sink in.

The Red Bull, too, “appears” from seemingly nowhere; it is unclear whether he has any real physical form, or if the Bull assumes physical form only to interact with the characters.  The caverns beneath the castle of wicked and broken King Haggard, who has more than one major secret, are said to be where the Bull’s lair is, but it is unclear who is master and who is servant.  The Bull may even be Haggard himself, somehow. 

They both conquer, but do not fight.  I became instantly certain that Beagle’s usage was a deliberate homage to The Bøyg.  I was absolutely sure of it.  How could it not be so?

Then I looked him up. Beagle, not the Bøyg or the Bull. (Living authors are a great treasure!)  And I asked him directly, via electronic message:

Hi. I'll try not to geek out too much. Huge TLU fan, and a high school English teacher in NY who is using TLU in class. I noticed that the words "he conquers but does not fight," used to describe the Red Bull, are also the words used by Ibsen (in translation) to describe the beast (The) Bøyg in Peer Gynt. I can find no scholarly mention of this curious connection, not even on fan-sites and other delicious outposts of good-natured geekery. Is the Red Bull an homage to the Bøyg? (And if so, I'm going to really have to give the Ibsen a closer read...) Thanks!

And he responded (in part):

I hate to admit this, because it reflects badly on my magpie education, but while I know a number of Ibsen's plays, I don't really know "Peer Gynt" well enough to quote from it. (Fats Waller throwing in left-hand licks from "In The Hall Of The Mountain King" for his own amusement is about as far as I get....)

If the Red Bull represents anything at all, it's the utterly unreasoning fear that I've seen take over entire populations over and over: having grown up during the Red Scare of the 1950s, I'm now seeing exactly the same blind panic in the face of the supposed World Jihad. As a Kentucky friend of mine used to say, "Some things'll scare you so bad, you'll hurt yourself." I think that's what the Red Bull's really about.

But I love even being thought of in the same breath with Ibsen. Thank you!

So much for my theory.

Tolkien was famous for not fessing up to who or what exactly Tom Bombadil is: Is he a nature spirit? A Vala? Eru Ilúvatar himself?  When someone who is not J.R.R. Tolkein (as we all, by definition, are not) makes his or her claim, however well-defended a thesis, is it really anything more than a best guess that “seems to fit the facts?” 

In the end, who are we to say definitively what character x in short story y represents, or what poem a by poet b means, or what artist p was feeling or intending to communicate when s/he painted abstract canvas q?  The secret, unless written down by the author, dies with him or her, at which point everything is more or less conjecture, isn’t it?  Put another way: is the message-directionality of expressive art forms from the writer to the reader or from the reader to the piece?  Or both? Put yet another way: from the perspective of the author (poet, playwright, lyricist), is there one “correct” interpretation of a piece, and everything else is “incorrect?” or do such creators surrender their pieces to the minds of the masses? 

If the latter is the case, then maybe that girl back at Cornell was right about me, and maybe Frost just liked to… you know (don’t make me go there).

Jewel, Tupac, and the crooked teeth that grew from concrete

[Updated August, 2017]

"Is this art or entertainment?" Jewel Kilcher once asked herself after a gig.

Most of course know her as simply “Jewel,” yet another of an endless string of celebrities whose mononymity screams pretense.   (Madonna? Cher? Diddy? Tupac? Sia?)  Or maybe her question reveals a certain sense of self-awareness, one that is often bitch-slapped out of the way by the hubris of celebrity.  After all, the “pop” in “pop song” means “popular,” whereas we tend to ascribe the more serious status of “art” in historical retrospect, when we have had the time to assess cultural impact, staying power, and so forth.

Jewel is also known for having one of the most famous books of pop-star-penned poetry in the market, the much-maligned A Night without Armor.  I wonder if it would have been so maligned if critics had not gone into the review process already knowing that Jewel was a pop-star trying to cross over.  Could she have gotten a fair trial?  Poet David Beaudouin observes: “There are people out there who have labored in the fields, teaching and writing. She hopscotched over a lot of grief that most poets have to deal with,” and laments the trendiness of the popstar-cum-poet, a phenomenon he calls the “Barnes-and-Noble-ing of American poetry.”

I remember the first time I saw a colleague using poetry from slain rapper Tupac Shakur in a high school English class.  She used the poem “The Rose that Grew from Concrete.” See the original here -- most websites and teacher handouts get the format and "spellings" wrong.

Publisher Simon and Schuster extols Tupac’s verse thus: 

His talent was unbounded, a raw force that commanded attention and respect. His death was tragic -- a violent homage to the power of his voice. His legacy is indomitable -- remaining vibrant and alive. Here now, newly discovered, are Tupac's most honest and intimate thoughts conveyed through the pure art of poetry -- a mirror into his enigmatic life and its many contradictions. Written in his own hand at the age of nineteen, they embrace his spirit, his energy ... and his ultimate message of hope. 

Really?  I mean, I used “The Rose That Grew from Concrete” in my English 9 classes to illustrate some basic figurative language devices (personification, metaphor), but I would never ascribe to it the status of high art.  Of course, Simon and Schuster has to sell books.  Do they really believe what they say in their blurb?  Is what they have to say a legitimate analysis of Tupac’s oeuvre?  Or is this just the publishing and poetry-consuming power elite (few if any of whom, perhaps, look like, talk like, sound like, and/or share many life experiences with Monsieur Shakur) hyper-exoticizing and over-romanticizing Tupac’s existence? By elevating his musings to the status of literature, we effectively put him in a museum case, safely on the other side of a velvet cordon; he is not one of us, therefore he is special. Aren’t we progressive, inclusive and hip?

Jewel, on the other hand, gets no such love. 

Forget that she lived for a decade in a van, plying her trade, the hardest-working girl in showbiz.  Her poetry is dismissed, more often than not, as amateurish.  

Of course, maybe it just is. Johns Hopkins University poetry professor Allan Grossman, while he considers Jewel to be a legitimate “American modernist poet,” confesses that:

… the subject matter is often simple, and most likely will appeal only to young people. That makes sense, given that some of the poetry in A Night Without Armor was written while Jewel was in her teens.  (Tamara Eikenberg, The Baltimore Sun, June 24, 1998)

But wait… Tupac’s verse was written “in his own hand at the age of nineteen, [and] they embrace his spirit, his energy ... and his ultimate message of hope.”  Doesn’t Jewel’s “amateurish” poetry convey, you know, any of that good stuff?  Or is there some other reason for elevating Tupac’s status?

Hold the phone, I take that back.  Jewel’s experiences do get romanticized a bit. Sayeth The Guardian UK:

Jewel has crooked teeth. This may seem unremarkable, but among American celebrities, it is a bit like having three legs. Jewel's teeth have become a kind of symbol of her 'unspoiled' upbringing, of her naturalness. Her teeth, and her undemonstrative taste in clothing. 

Ah, in the end, it all comes down to image, doesn’t it?  It’s all marketing, brand-enhancement.  Apparently, the poetry is secondary.  I don’t know if it’s relevant, but Jewel’s teeth are now straight.  Tupac, as far as I know, is still quite dead.

Is the life (or the death) of a poet relevant in assessing the “literary value” of the poetry?

In Praise of the Humble Haiku (The “Orange Juice” Theory of Poetry)

[Updated August, 2017]

Students in grades 7-9 often hate them, or at least don’t take them seriously. Many teachers seem to pass them off as mere intellectual conceits. Perhaps the idea of arbitrary constraints on personal expression seems unduly restrictive. I like to think of it instead as a challenge.

I teach my students the “orange juice” theory of poetry. What is that? So glad you asked. Consider the humble can of frozen orange juice concentrate. Imagine you take a can, let it thaw, pour a shot, and slam it. Mmmm… good right?

No, of course not. The stuff is pure, intense oranginess, compressed, concentrated, so that the barest minim contains an explosion of citrusy goodness, to the point that it’s almost overwhelming. You want juice? Add water; dilute it down, i.e. distribute the concentrated oranginess over a larger volume.

So consider the poem. Let’s set aside lengthy epics for now. Consider a basic lyric poem, a sonnet, elegy, ode – Neruda always gets me going; or a Frost joint about trees and such in blank verse, or some vintage Dickinson with her ballad stanzas, slant rhyme and iambic tetrameter; or some cool bit of free-form jazziness like Nash or cummings. Poems are like orange juice concentrate.

Wot?

Take a short story, any short story. Let’s take (because this is my blog) “The Simplest Thing in the World” by Ayn Rand, which clocks in at almost exactly 5,000 words (5,004 if you include the title). Read it, digest it, consider all it has to offer. Place it in its various contexts – the time period and social, political and historical context in which it was written, its purpose and theme, the author’s background and formative experiences, her larger oeuvre. Look at its narrative style, its point-of-view: Who is the narrator? Is he reliable? What’s his story? Is he a cipher for something, a stand-in, a metaphor? Really dig beneath the surface. Whip out Bloom’s Taxonomy and really go to town. You know you want to.

Now write a really thoughtful analysis or response. I’ll bet that your elucidation, however pedantic and erudite, would still be far less than the 4,998 words of the story itself. Put another way, the essence of the piece (the concentrate) is expressible comfortably in shorter form than the piece itself (the juice). The published story is that concentrated essence, distributed over a larger volume.

But the opposite is true of most poems. Take Frost’s “Birches,” which, at 60 lines and 510 words (511 with the title) is about as long as most poems that schoolchildren are exposed to, and longer than most. Go through the same series of questions. Really get inside the poem. As C.S. Lewis says in the last of the Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle, “the inside is bigger than the outside.” The words required (the juice) to even minimally elucidate all of the “writerly noticings” (curses to Dr. Kelly Chandler-Olcott at Syracuse University for ever introducing that term to me) far outnumber the meager 510 words that Frost uses (the concentrate) to communicate his message. The poem is the concentrated essence, stripped of unnecessary subplots, characters, wandering words, red herrings (the water); it is an intense dose of meaning, sensation, feeling, imagery, presence.

And no form of poetry, perhaps, achieves such supremely concentrated essence as the humble haiku. A really well written haiku can take seconds to read, but minutes, hours, days to wonder over. It is much harder than it looks, to write a good haiku. I’m not so sure mine are great, but I’ll present some of them anyway. Most of these were inspired by the annual Syracuse Poster Project Haiku Challenge, an event that fuses creativity with civic awareness, often with beautiful (and sometimes silly) results. Here follow some haiku I wrote, all inspired by the city of Syracuse.

In response to a news story about a criminal:

Predatory scum
Preying on the old and weak
Let there be a hell...

A random musing:

"Someday, I will glow
Just like you," said the porch light
To the bright full moon.

An homage to the dilapidated, Detroitesque streets of Syracuse, and the now-closed china factory that bears its name:

City streets, empty
Abandoned, like the china
With its once great name

In celebration of firefighters returning home from duty:

Narrow city streets
Widen, as if to welcome
Heroes coming home

City lights burn bright
The only fire left glowing
In the firemen's wake

On contemplation of a sunset as viewed through trees in a city park:

Standing here alone,
Whitman's 'Learn'd Astronomer'
Understood at last...

Trees, like people, need
To express themselves in song;
Shhh, let's listen in...

When day becomes night,
Where do red and yellow go?
Will they be back soon?

In contemplation of an ultra-modern building’s windowed façade:

Facets of jeweled glass,
A geometer's whimsy
An architect's soul

Glass palace, standing
Delicate, fragile, yet strong,
Rather like us all...

With my small squeegee,
I fear I may just have to
Be at this all day!

Heat is multiplied
By congeries of windows
We walk coolly by

On the Erie Canal:

Banks of the canal
Decked out in their Sunday best
Baptized by the waves

Punting on the Thames?
Strolling along la belle Seine?
Erie, in the Spring.

Of a young girl walking a dog:

Panting in the breeze
Racing down the shady lane
Who is walking whom?

My dog has four legs,
I have only two, that's why --
I run twice as hard!

At a jazz club:

Gin joint, spotlight hot
Waiting for the first downbeat
Calm before the storm

What's "vermouth?" he asked...
"Shhh..." she urged, impatiently,
"It's about to start..."

A girl, shoes cast aside, spinning in the fountains of a city park, amidst a gallery of statues:

Cinderella spins,
Wat'ry sentries stand in awe;
Her prince stands close by.

Without her shoes on
She can feel the city's heart
Beating through the ground.

Raven-haired beauty,
The city's concrete jungle,
Add water, then stir...