Another great read snuck into this newly created before-MLA time. In the Heart of the Great Alone, a book of photographs about two early twentieth-century southern Antarctic expeditions by Scott and Shackelton, was last year’s Christmas gift to me from Alinor. She knows me well. Hard to believe it’s taken me all year to read deeply in this beautiful book.
New Year’s Eve Fire at Short Beach
The Jewel of Oman
I missed this one earlier in the year, but it seems The Jewel of Oman, a replica 9th century Arab dhow, sailed this fall across the Indian Ocean from Oman to Singapore, along a well-traveled route of medieval Arab traders. She was built without nails, the timbers bound together by coconut fibers and sealed with goat fat. There’s a pretty good website with lots of videos too.
A Brown Style
With MLA pushed back into January, and the green vistas of spring-term leave looming, I’ve had a little time to read books that have been lying around for a while. Starting with a Christmas gift from my Marin in-laws of a few winters ago, Richard Rodriguez’s memoir and meditation Brown (2002).
It’s an engaging story about California, Stanford, and racial & cultural mixing — “Brown bleeds through the straight line, unstaunchable,” he writes on the first page. But what intrigues me about the book is its experimental, allusive, free-wheeling style. He’s a memoirist, not a researcher, though there are lots of facts to be gleaned, but he’s happy to skip logical steps and make elliptical moves. He circles around his chosen topics, so that racial mixing rubs up against the idea of California, Mexico merges with the American West, San Francisco with the Pacific.
The dilemma of California remains as Edmund Wilson described it. We have built right up to the edge of the sea. It is also that the soil and the air promote contesting legends. The earth in California is finite, animate, unreliable — the earth quakes, burns, slides into the sea. But the air is temperate — light and vast — a stepping-off place, and we have only recently discovered how.
It reminds me that the best thing about writing is that you can invent for yourself the best ways to do it.
The Girl Child
A strong La Nina in the Pacific in December 2010 may mean good fishing for Peru in the New Year. Also flooding in Asia and the Land of Oz. “The ocean rules the weather.”
From coral ashes…
The Phoenix Islands in the South Pacific are utterly isolated, unsettled, and only recently studied. When scientists arrived there around the turn of the millennium, they were amazed to find a nearly intact & undamaged coral reef system. At the time, the Micronesian nation of Kiribati, which controls the territory, leased the reef and islands to Japanese fishermen, but some clever fund-raising and negotiating ended up declaring the entire area (roughly the size of California) a World Heritage Site and off-limits to fishing.
Despite that, the coral was nearly wiped out by the hotter-than-usual El Nino of 2002-03, which raised the ocean temp by nearly a full degree Centigrade for six months.
The great news — really the best oceanic news I’ve heard in some time — is that the coral has come back. Usually dead coral gets smothered by green algae, but the Phoenix islands’ dense population of Pacific steelhead parrot fish ate the new algae, enabling new pink coralline to form a substrate for coral regeneration.
It’s all about the fish…
Winter Storm
Lunar Eclipse
Made it out of bed last night at 1:45 am to see a moon that looked suspiciously like the Apple logo with a bite taken out of the upper left hand side. Product placement? Or first solstice eclipse since 1638?
Earlier in the night, after our carol-singing party had disbanded around 9 pm, we saw an even better lunar vision: the full moon blazing, surrounded by a perfectly circular ring of clouds. The larger circle was about 5 times as big as the moon itself. No clouds inside the circle, but a wispy gray circle that seemed to hold the high clouds in the rest of the sky at bay.
Strange and beautiful things.
Are you not my mother?: Taymor’s Tempest
I’d heard about it already, so I took my grad students to Taymor’s Tempest last night with low expectations. Lots of overly sweet stuff was already baked into the cake — the Harry Potter sound-and-light show, the distracting CGI versions of Ariel, the utter failure of the universal geometry she subbed in for the masque. Plus I’ve never seen a really good Miranda, & I wonder if that version of innocence simply isn’t playable today. Felicity Jones did not change my mind.
The good things were also mostly expected — the clowns were great fun, esp Alfred Molina’s drunken sea chantey, Russell Brand’s Trinculo was manic, and the island set was stunning. I’m somewhat on the fence about Djimon Hounsou’s Caliban. Cvered in earth & moonshine, he was visually overdone, but he projected real energy & physical charisma. The conspiracy scene was impressively dramatic. I liked watching the sailors go overboard in the shipwreck scene.
But what I didn’t expect was seeing Helen Mirren, a wonderful actor, fail so miserably.
It’s a play about power, & she didn’t project it. She had the wand, raised the storm, drew the flaming circle, stage-managed the lovers, bossed around the spirit, but she didn’t wield power. It’s pedantic to carp overmuch about cuts — any film has to cut some of Shakespeare’s language — but when she faced off with Caliban at the end, it seemed meaningful that he did not speak h is final line about needing to “seek for grace.” He just turned his back on her and left. She had nothing he wanted.
It doesn’t make sense that Prospera should be weak because she’s a woman, though Taymor’s film seems, according to her interviews anyway, to be bound up in cultural fantasies about motherhood. But mothers, as Shakespeare certainly knew, are plenty authoritative and plenty scary: remember Gertrude and Volumnia. Taymor ‘s film defanged her magician, minimizing her political delinquency in Milan and downplaying her aggression toward Ferdinand & her other dependents. The camera also shot Mirren mostly from above, making her seem frail. (Caliban, by contrast, was shot mostly from below.)
I like the idea of a female Prospero. But I’ve never seen a version of The Tempest before where the bits without the wizard were always best.
Russell Brand backstory
Here’s a pretty amazing riff by Russell Brand about Trinculo’s backstory. More about Taymor’s Tempest soon.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 54
- 55
- 56
- 57
- 58
- …
- 69
- Next Page »