• Grab your current read. • Let the book fall open to a random page. • Share with us two "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page. • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from. That way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given! • Please avoid spoilers!
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange Page 5 - she's half-notes scattered / without rhythm
How about Africa, Asia, Australia? The whole world, Latta, God's world, has been the range of my travels. I haven't stuck to the schedules of the brochures and I've always allowed the ones that were willing to see, to see! - the underworlds of all places, and if they had hearts to be touched, feelings to feel with, I gave them a priceless chance to feel and be touched. And none will ever forget it, none of them, ever, never!
Tennessee Williams's The Night of the Iguana is the third play I've read this month, following Thomas Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. Incidentally, every one of these has been for a book club. In other words, none of them are something I read on my own, particularly since I usually don't read plays other than Shakespeare and a few Greek tragedies. The Night of the Iguana is the first selection of a "non-structured group read" consisting of the old 2666/Kristin Lavransdatter/Woolf in Winter circle, plus several new faces. We don't have a particular pattern this time, although somehow everything seems to sync with my literary tastes. How, I don't know because I've never been able to describe what exactly it is that I like. I can describe what I don't like but that's so negative.
The Night of the Iguana was first performed at the Royale Theatre in New York on December 28, 1961. The setting is a rundown hotel on the tropical coast of Mexico during the early years of World War II. That global calamity, however, is far far away, only occasionally intruding in the comical form of some blustering, loudmouthed German guests. The drama here is deeply personal and intimate. Larry Shannon, a defrocked Anglican priest with a taste for teenage girls, is currently employed as a tour guide. He has brought a busload of women from a female Baptist college in Texas to the establishment of one Maxine, a lusty, larger-than-life proprietor who is not mourning the recent death of her husband Fred. Shannon and Maxine have apparently known each other for years, and she recognizes the pending signs of another one of Shannon's periodic breakdowns. Dropping into the middle of all this is Hannah, a refined middle-aged New England spinster, and her grandfather Nonno, a minor Romantic poet. They travel together around the world doing sketches and reciting verse.
The impression is one of emotional, physical, and social isolation. The hotel is an island blanketed in stifling tropical steam and choked on all sides with rainforest. Only vague references are made to a nearby small town. Maxine gets away with sexually brazen behavior that will likely condemn her in the United States in this era, and Shannon is presently safe from arrest for his relationship with 17-year-old Charlotte Goodall. Any reminder of world-shaking events outside is limited to Herr Fahrenkopf's exclamations about one of the Fuhrer's speeches on the radio, which the American characters immediately dismiss as a mere annoyance. The stage direction at several points calls for the characters to be in "cells," meant to represent the rooms of the hotel but having other obvious connotations as well.
Although the setting remains fixed, Shannon and Hannah are both portrayed as perpetual travelers far from home - or rather, from their places of origin, since neither has an actual home to ever return to. Maxine's hotel is rather akin to a purgatorial stopover for people weary of the journey of life. A torpid, tumbled-down place where you have to remain for awhile until you've dealt with whatever issue you have that's taken you to the end of your rope, like the iguana struggling to escape. (A side note: Dante's Inferno presents sin as immobility, a lack of growth and movement closer to God. In complete contrast to the Mexican heat, the Ninth Circle of Hell is a frozen wasteland where the condemned are completely encased in ice. So the next time someone tells you, "When Hell freezes over. . .") There's a lot that comes out in the final act, which makes for a strong climax despite its complete lack of action beyond talking, laying on a hammock, and drinking tea. Heavy-handed, yes, but also enlightening at times and surprising in the revelations revealed about Hannah.
My initial reaction to The Night of the Iguana was similar to how I felt at first about The Cherry Orchard. Focusing entirely on human interaction seemed dull to me until both plays began to pick up about halfway through. I also loved the setting in this one and how well Tennessee Williams was able to create a vivid atmosphere of decay, stagnation, and powerful sexual tension. And a lot of the dialogue was enjoyable to read and must be wonderful to see performed. Shannon has the best lines:
[On the German family] "What in blazes is this? A little animated cartoon by Hieronymus Bosch?"
[On Hannah's poppyseed tea] "Caesar's ghost! - it could be chased by the witches' brew from Macbeth."
There is nevertheless a troubling amount of casual racism in Williams's depictions of Maxine's employees Pedro and Pancho, as you can see in the film adaptation below: the "lazy Mexican" stereotype mixed in with the "Latin lover" trope. Pancho and Pedro are basically props to flesh out Maxine's character and we never see any other Mexicans. There is something off-putting about a drama set in a foreign, non-white country starring only white Americans. But hardly unexpected, given the time in which the play was written. Beyond that, though, The Night of the Iguana is a truly intriguing character-driven story and I would very like to see the movie next.
"We might not make it. We might annihilate ourselves before that vision can ever be realized. And that would be just the most incredible waste. We're at a crossroads, and I hope we're able to take the right one. As the poet said: 'Of all the sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these. "It might have been."'"
As I struggle with this review I have due on April 1 for The Front Table, it is good to know that there are short, happy books one can turn to when the mental effort demanded by Literature threatens to induce total brain freeze. Star Trek novels are a wonderful example of this. Especially those by Peter David, which are not only fun but still contain substance.
I, Q is a very special book. It is a collaborative effort between Peter David and John de Lancie, who has played Q on The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. The arrogant, annoying, and all-powerful Q is easily Star Trek's most popular recurring character. A member of the Q Continuum, a race of omniscient god-like beings, Q is infamous for disrupting lives and civilizations with his questionable sense of humor and dangerously playful personality. Even the other Q can't stand him.
Unfortunately, God, or whatever Supreme Being created the multiverse, has decided that she is tired of watching the same old play on different stages with different characters. History in countless different universes does nothing but endlessly repeat itself. The Q Continuum is slunk in the same ennui. When you know everything and can do anything, really then, what's the point? In fact, a Q who wanted to kill himself for precisely this reason was the subject of the deeply philosophical Voyager episode "Death Wish."
Now a giant black hole has appeared that's sucking in all of reality! Including Q's wife and son!
Well, Q certainly is not going to stand by and let this happen! With the help of Captain Picard and Data, Q must travel through one bizarre realm after another, encountering old friends and foes alike, in a metaphysical quest to locate his missing family and find some way to stop everything from literally going down the drain. Along the way, he will question the nature of divinity, omnipotence, and reality's innate unreality. Given the vast scope of the book's subject material, I was expecting something longer and more epic (like Peter David's absolutely excellent Vendetta and Q-Squared), but it's just a Star Trek novel so I'm not going to quibble.
Tonight my book club met with a professor of Russian literature from a local college to discuss Anton Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard, which he completed on his deathbed in 1902. He did not live to see its 1904 premiere, directed by Constantin Stanislavski, who insisted that what Chekhov intended to be a comedy was actually a tragedy.
The plot is very simple: Lyúba is the aristocratic landowner of a large estate that includes what was once a world-renown cherry orchard. She has returned with her daughter Ánya from an extended trip abroad to increasing financial difficulty at home. Lopákhin, a wealthy businessman whose father was one of Lyúba's family's serfs, insists that she sell the estate to him so that he can demolish the cherry orchard and parcel the land into sites for the summer homes of the nouveau riche. The play also includes Lyúba's brother Gáev, her foster daughter Várya, Pétya the eternal student, Sharlótta the governess, Yepikhódov the family clerk, the maid Dunyásha, the servant Yásha who accompanied Lyúba on her travels, and Firs, an 87-year-old servant who is the oldest member of the household.
The Cherry Orchard is centered on the interaction between each of the characters and between the characters and their historical context. Czar Alexander II had issued an Emancipation Manifesto in 1861 that freed the serfs and, in the process, gradually deprived the grand estates of their cheap workforce. It was a necessary measure, however, as Russia's sorry performance in the Crimean War had made it clear that Europe's remaining feudal state needed serious reform. By Chekhov's time, the late nineteenth century, the ramifications of this measure were still being felt, as seen in the entropic atmosphere of The Cherry Orchard. An old system of stability is beginning to disintegrate into uncertainty or even chaos. The social strata is collapsing in on itself as the wealthy serfs buy their masters' land and servants like Yásha crave the trappings of status. Where they are headed, no one is certain. Pétya makes a big show of being a radical firebrand but even he is apprehensive about the possible consequences of his proto-Bolshevik ideas.
Chekhov himself, of course, was the grandson of a former serf. But despite his own deep connections to the events forming the historical basis of The Cherry Orchard, he is not entirely unsympathetic to Lyúba and Gáev. Free-spending, sexually amoral Lyúba can certainly be seen as the prototype of the decadent aristocrat but Gáev seems to recall the one positive virtue of nobility that an artist like Chekhov could appreciate. Reflecting on a bookcase that has been in the family for over a century, Gáev says:
Yes ... Quite a thing ... (He runs his hand over it.) Most honorable bookcase! Allow me to salute you for more than a hundred years of service to the glorious principles of virtue and justice. Not once in an entire century has your silent summons to productive labor faltered. (Through tears.) From generation to generation you have maintained our family's courage and faith in a better future, you have nurtured in us the ideals of goodness and social consciousness.
Whereas Pétya spouts rhetoric about "suffering and relentless hard work" bringing Russian into the modern age and Lopákhin brags about waking at four in the morning and laboring with money til night, Gáev hearkens back to the elite virtues of elegance and refinement. His occasional rhapsodies on the the beauty and value of nature and old furniture, though moving and lyrical, stand in almost pitiful contrast to the idealistic utilitarianism espoused by Pétya and, to a lesser extent, Lopákhin, who admits that reading a book only put him to sleep.
Gáev's speeches are not only irrelevant but also a source of embarrassment to the younger characters, who constantly try to shut him up. The anxiety at work on the national scale in The Cherry Orchard is expressed on a more intimate level through the relationships between individuals. No one listens to anyone else and what is expected, such as the prospective marriage between Várya and Lopákhin, never happens.
SHÁRLOTTA (pensively). I have no real identity papers, no way of knowing how old I am, but I always think of myself as young. When I was a little girl, my mother and father toured the fairgrounds giving performances, good ones too. I did the salto mortale and various other stunts. And when Mama and Papa died, a German lady saw to my education. So far, so good. Then I grew up and took a post as a governess. But don't ask me where I'm from or who I am - I don't know ... Don't ask me who my parents were or even if they were married - I don't know. (She takes a small cucumber out of her pocket and bites into it.) Don't know a thing.
(Pause)
I want so much to talk to somebody. But who? ... I'm all alone.
YEPIKHÓDOV. (playing the guitar and singing)
What care I for worldly pleasure. What care I for friend or foe...
I do so enjoy playing the mandolin!
SHÁRLOTTA. That's no mandolin; that's a guitar. (She gazes at herself in a hand mirror and powders her face.)
YEPIKHÓDOV. To a fool in love it's a mandolin...
We then have Yásha and Yepikhódov discussing the trip abroad, and then Yepikhódov boldly declaring himself to be a "man of culture" and ending his lines with "I always carry a revolver with me." The impression is of people who cannot connect or find a common ground and whose conversation is disjointed and unorganized. They are like elements that cannot coalesce or coherently arrange themselves.
Though never appearing literally, death - the inevitable result of decay and decline - has a strong symbolic presence. Firs, age 87, remembers when "we had generals and barons and admirals at our parties," whereas now Lyúba and Gáev can only beg for the postmaster and stationmaster. He recalls the fame of the cherry orchard and the high prices its produce once fetched in Moscow. "Peasants had their masters; masters had their peasants," he says. "Now they're all scattered. You don't know where you stand." But Firs is even more archaic than Gáev's speeches. At the end of the play, everyone insists he was taken to the hospital, but Firs has actually been forgotten (which he realizes) and left locked in the empty house. He goes over to the couch and lies there motionless as the curtain descends.
What happened to everyone else? We know that Lopákhin has bought the estate, Várya is going to be a housekeeper, and Gáev has accepted a post at the bank which Lyúba insisted he decline. But will they adapt? What will become of their lives in the new era?
What's next?
Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy. - Roberto Bolaño
• Grab your current read. • Let the book fall open to a random page. • Share with us two "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page. • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from. That way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given! • Please avoid spoilers!
The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams Pages 47 - So now old Freddie the Fisherman is feeding the fish - fishes' revenge on old Freddie. How about that, I ask you?
Symphony X is a great Australian progressive metal band I just found. I've been listening to this song nonstop! It's the title track from their album, Paradise Lost, based on John Milton's poem.
(Sorry about the poor quality but this was the best video I could find.)
'Still, I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We're in one, of course; but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say: "Let's hear about Frodo and the Ring!" And they'll say: "Yes, that's one of my favourite stories. Frodo was very brave, wasn't he, dad?" "Yes, my boy, the famousest of the hobbits, and that's saying a lot."'
In my previous post about The Fellowship of the Ring I discussed some of the metafictional aspects of the work. The Lord of the Rings is noted for the embedded songs, tales, and speeches which correspond with and add to the action of the main plot. Here in The Two Towers, for instance, King Théoden of Rohan, upon hearing about the Ents' battle with Saruman, is amazed that children's tales told around the campfire are seemingly coming to life. 'And now the songs have come down among us out of strange places,' he says, 'and walk visible under the Sun.' The trilogy, I observed, is a story about storytelling; it is a conscious attempt to write an epic or new mythology by referring to the time-honored forms and elements of the Grand Saga found in many cultures. In that sense, LOTR can be compared to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (which I also read this month), as a play about plays that expands on Shakespeare's famous axiom that "all the world's a stage." Both recognize and refer to themselves as works of art (artifice).
That theme of metafiction is present in The Two Towers as well, but there is also a strong environmental message developing here. Although Tolkien stated that he hated allegory and did not wish for his books to be read as such, he nevertheless presents a literal black-and-white contrast between the harmonious relationship that the Free Peoples of Middle-earth have with their beautiful lands and the ruin and corruption of the lands occupied by Sauron.
They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing - unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion. 'I feel sick,' said Sam. Frodo did not speak.
Previously we had been introduced to the Ents (tree-shepherds) and their anger at the Orcs for cutting down their beloved trees and laying waste to vast tracts of unspoiled forest. In both The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, trees are presented as intelligent beings capable of thought and feeling. In fact, they often despise sentient animal life for the intrusion and destruction frequently wrought upon forests. It is said by several characters knowledgeable of ancient lore that the woods of Middle-earth used to immense, similar to how we are told that, before the arrival of Europeans, a squirrel could travel from Delaware to New York without touching ground.
LOTR's concern with the dignity and preservation of nature (particularly Treebeard's tale of the loss of the Entwives and overall centuries-long decline of the Ents) is further bound with a larger motif also connected to the trilogy's self-awareness of itself as a literary epic. Several works of Classical literature, such as The Iliad and Ovid's Metamorphoses, refer back to an older time in which things were better than they are now: peace reigned, heroes were grander, and humans reached loftier heights. The Greek poet Hesiod's Works and Days established the "Ages of Man," which begins with the Golden Age - a Garden of Eden in which humans mingled freely with the gods - and progressively devolves until we reach the present era, the Iron Age, where strife is common and people must toil to reap bounty from the land. Similarly, in the first two book of LOTR, the old greatness and prosperity of Gondor is recalled, as is the stronger relationship once had between Elves and Men. Explains Elrond in The Fellowship of the Ring:
'In the South the realm of Gondor long endured; and for a while its splendor grew, recalling somewhat the might of Númenor, ere it fell. High towers that people built, and strong places, and havens of many ships; and the winged crown of the Kings of Men was held in awe by folk of many tongues. Their chief city was Osgiliath, Citadel of the Stars, through the midst of which the River flowed. And Minas Ithil they built, Tower of the Rising Moon, eastward upon a shoulder of the Mountains of Shadow; and westward at the feet of the White Mountains Minas Anor they made, Tower of the Setting Sun. There in the courts of the King grew a white tree, from the seed of that tree which Isildur brought over the deep waters, and the seed of that tree came from Eressëa, and before that out of the Uttermost West in the Day before days when the world was young.
'But in the wearing of the swift years of Middle-earth the line of Meneldil, son of Anárion failed, and the Tree withered, and the blood of the Númenoreans became mingled with that of lesser men. Then the watch upon the walls of Mordor slept, and dark things crept back into Gorgoroth. And on a time evil things came forth, and they took Minas Ithil and abode in it, and they made it into a place of dread; and it is called Minas Morgul, the Tower of Sorcery.'
When Sam and Frodo eventually reach Minas Morgul on their way to Mordor, it is heavily marked by the same waste and decay that characterizes all of Sauron's territory, except those newly conquered.
Even on a smaller scale, there is a very elegiac, nostalgic tone throughout LOTR. Even before Sauron's reemergence, the Elves, the wisest and most beautiful of the Free Peoples, were already in the process of leaving Middle-earth and surrendering its dominion to humans. The evil forces of Sauron are not only physically manifested in nature but also in a sort of corruption of the path of life itself. Of the adventure stories he had been told growing up, Sam Gamgee says that,
'I used to think they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting, and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folks seem to have just landed in them, usually - their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on - and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, although not quite the same - like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of tale we've fallen into?'
No one really seeks out danger and possible death. No one really wants to be caught up in war of Good v. Evil, with Evil seeming to have the upper hand and the fate of myriad innocent lives resting in one's shoulders. Many characters in LOTR lament the turn events have taken and look back to a lost peace, as well as ahead to happier times as a beacon of hope in moments of gravest peril, even if their present plight forms the basis of what will be another great saga. 'If ever beyond hope you return to the land of the living and we re-tell our tales,' says Faramir to Frodo, 'sitting by a wall in the sun, laughing at old grief, you shall tell me then.' The Free Peoples differ from Sauron and his allies in that they take this fight reluctantly as the defenders of Good. The forces of darkness start wars for power and conquest; their opponents, by contrast, are the stalwart preservers - of peace, of nature, of freedom.
In short, The Two Towers continues a great work of fiction that never ceases to hold the reader's attention. It is such straightforward storytelling and yet its themes are ancient. As the middle book The Two Towers is neither beginning or end, but nor is it merely filler. We continued the action from The Fellowship of the Ring and have set the stage for The Return of the King. And onward!
There is nevertheless a troubling racial aspect that becomes even more apparent in The Two Towers. Sauron's human allies are at different times described as "dark," "swarthy," and "black." Also refer back to Elrond's words about how 'the blood of the Númenoreans became mingled with that of lesser men,' as though purity of race is somehow vital to the preservation of virtue. Evil is also frequently portrayed as hereditary. When questioned, Tolkien always vehemently denied any racism, but you'd have to be pretty oblivious not to notice some very problematic areas in LOTR. Here is a great, balanced examination of this issue.
Check out the rest of the Lord of the Ringsread-along.
• Grab your current read.
How about Africa, Asia, Australia? The whole world, Latta, God's world, has been the range of my travels. I haven't stuck to the schedules of the brochures and I've always allowed the ones that were willing to see, to see! - the underworlds of all places, and if they had hearts to be touched, feelings to feel with, I gave them a priceless chance to feel and be touched. And none will ever forget it, none of them, ever, never!
"We might not make it. We might annihilate ourselves before that vision can ever be realized. And that would be just the most incredible waste. We're at a crossroads, and I hope we're able to take the right one. As the poet said: 'Of all the sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these. "It might have been."'"
Share Einstein On The Beach (For An Eggman) by Counting Crows
'Still, I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We're in one, of course; but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say: "Let's hear about Frodo and the Ring!" And they'll say: "Yes, that's one of my favourite stories. Frodo was very brave, wasn't he, dad?" "Yes, my boy, the famousest of the hobbits, and that's saying a lot."'
LOTR's concern with the dignity and preservation of nature (particularly Treebeard's tale of the loss of the Entwives and overall centuries-long decline of the Ents) is further bound with a larger motif also connected to the trilogy's self-awareness of itself as a literary epic. Several works of Classical literature, such as The Iliad and Ovid's Metamorphoses, refer back to an older time in which things were better than they are now: peace reigned, heroes were grander, and humans reached loftier heights. The Greek poet Hesiod's Works and Days established the "Ages of Man," which begins with the Golden Age - a Garden of Eden in which humans mingled freely with the gods - and progressively devolves until we reach the present era, the Iron Age, where strife is common and people must toil to reap bounty from the land. Similarly, in the first two book of LOTR, the old greatness and prosperity of Gondor is recalled, as is the stronger relationship once had between Elves and Men. Explains Elrond in The Fellowship of the Ring:
Even on a smaller scale, there is a very elegiac, nostalgic tone throughout LOTR. Even before Sauron's reemergence, the Elves, the wisest and most beautiful of the Free Peoples, were already in the process of leaving Middle-earth and surrendering its dominion to humans. The evil forces of Sauron are not only physically manifested in nature but also in a sort of corruption of the path of life itself. Of the adventure stories he had been told growing up, Sam Gamgee says that,
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