Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Coriolanus

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He’s a hard guy to look at close up.  Ralph Fiennes’s presentation of Caius Marcius Coriolanus hits with murderous intensity.  He is, as his make-up artists worked hard to show us, a “thing of blood.”

Transposing the Roman Republic to a faux-Bosnian contemporary warzone works surprisingly well, with the scruffy citizens as a rebelious mob, the Tribunes as Party Bosses, and Coriolanus and his fellow aristocrats as well-dressed generals in battle fatigues and bespoke suits.

Much of the film, esp. the early scenes in Corioles, is close-up action following the hero as warrior, heavily burdened by 21st-century battle gear, but still fighting intimate, hand to hand battles.  When he comes out of the mortal gates of the city, alone and covered with blood, it’s easy to see why he carried the day.

Fiennes is brilliant, and his movie-star face beneath make-up scarring and lots of blood communicates both Coriolanus’s powerful public inhibitions — the general seems physically unable to play to the crowd — and also his over-powerful heroic charisma.  He cannot be consul, he must be consul — and then suddenly he’s not.

The other performance that resonated was Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia.  I’m not sure she hit the final confrontation as powerfully as she might have — the famous pause, “holds her by the hand, silent,” wasn’t quite as wrenching as it might have been — but in the early scenes her palpable combination of pride, blood-lust, and maternal intimacy was gorgeous and hard to watch.  “He is wounded,” she said with a sly smile that you almost felt you weren’t supposed to see, “I thank the gods for it.”  The production cut my favorite over the top line about the breasts of Hecuba and Hector’s Achilles-split skull, but the wolf mother’s brutal pride and terrible grip on her son was wonderfully visual.

But the hero’s isolation was the main visual point.  He was a general with no allies, no connection to family or country or troops.  Even the love-fight with Aufidius was never, in this version, an attraction of near equals, but instead a lonely dragon’s futile attempt to find someone in the world as violent as powerful as him.

I saw a little trace of Voldemort only once, in the film’s final moments when, after Coriolanus has betrayed his Volscian allies and saved Rome, Aufidius’s men murder the Roman on a deserted road.  The hero opens his moth spits his final words like the Dark Lord taunting Harry —

Alone I did it.  Boy!

As good a modern Shakespeare film as I’ve seen in a while.  

Kevin Spacey as Richard III

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This is the way the Bridge Project ends: with a star chewing the scenery, not an international ensemble.  While past productions in this bi-national Atlantic-spanning series of productions have almost seemed allegories of American and British acting styles, here the big man of stage and screen carried all before him. 

He really was great fun to watch.  He twisted his body like a ruined athlete, making this a Richard whose martial prowess and physical threat seemed plenty convincing.  When crowing to himself alone onstage or working his way through a crowded council table, Spacey was in complete control.  The performance wasn’t dazzling, like McKellan’s Lear, or intensely moving, like Jacobi’s.  Maybe it’s the impending Super Bowl this weekend — I’m trying to figure out a way to root against both the Giants & the Pats — but I kept thinking I was watching a superstar athlete, someone who makes it look so easy.  He was faster, better, stronger than anyone else.

The play doesn’t give much room for co-stars, and with the possible exception of some brief flashes from resisting women — Annabel Scholey’s fiery Anne, Gemma Jones’s wandering Margaret, and later Haydn Gwynne’s Elizabeth (all Brits, btw) — nobody could really play with Richard on this stage.  Chuk Iwuji’s Buckingham had a nice turn as a political crowd-pleaser / revival tent speaker when convincing the people to make Richard king, while Spacey’s face was projected onto a large screen on the back of the stage.  The close-up of Richard’s expressive face recalled the greater physical intimacy of the camera, and the formal tension between Buckingham’s frantic play downstage and Richard’s subtle, measured acceptance on power on the screen provided a glimpse into what it must be like to work across different media.  When Richard came back to the stage, Buckingham lost his ability to match him.

The early scenes, esp the first soliloquy and wooing of Lady Anne, were the highlights, and Howard Overshown’s rendition of Clarence’s dream of drowning had real grandeur and was certainly the best Spacey-less scene.  But the production lagged just a bit, and the split-stage rendition of the Richmond / Richard parallel experiences of the night before the battle were a bit predictable.  I loved watching Richard wrestle with himself to the very end — “Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I” — and that famous line about the horse allowed Spacey to amp up the volume one last time.

I’ve had some good nights with the Bridge Project since 2009, particularly in their uneven but fun Winter’s Tale with Simon Russell Beale and Rebecca Hall and Stephen Dillane’s brilliant Prospero.  I’m not sure I always buy Sam Mendes’s direction, but I’m sorry to see this series of plays past.  What’s coming to BAM next winter?

Cruise Ship by Conrad

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The story of the Costa Concordia‘s  wreck off the Italian coast grows more Conradian by the day.  The Coast Guard officer yells at the stupefied Captain to get back on the ship and direct the rescue.  The captain claims he hadn’t meant to get into the lifeboat but tripped and fell in.

Lord Jim knows what really happened:

When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, has taken care of you.  It is as if the souls of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination.

The Times also has the story.

Sleep No More

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SNM maskAlone, masked, and silent: that’s the way to see a play.  For a couple hours last night, while wandering through six stories of a Chelsea warehouse on W. 27th that had been transformed by Punchdrunk into a Macbeth/Hitchcock noir horror fantasy, I was thinking about how elusive the theatrical transaction can be.

The place was full of great stuff, a candy shop, hospital wing, detective’s office/taxidery shop in which a fatal (stuffed) raven was disembowled to reveal a tickertape with one of the few Shakespearean lines I heard all night:

It will have blood, they say.  Blood will have blood.

There were three distinct sets of people inside: audience members like me, wearing white masks; theater staff wearing black masks and blocking access to certain rooms and stairwells; and maybe 8 or 9 actors, without masks, doing various things.

Audiences want stories, so when we saw actors doing things — dancing, packing suitcases, trying to wash their bloody hands and faces in one of many bath-tubs, or smothering King Duncan with a pile of pillows — we gathered to watch.  The scenes were brief, often powerful, and always fast: when the actors hurried on to the next room, they trailed clouds of awkwardly jostling masked audience members in their wakes.

SNMThe set was really the star, because you could play with it.  I picked up pieces of paper, sometimes founds line from Macbeth on them, examined bird skeletons, ate hard candy, played a card game with one of the actors, though he did not choose me to give a shot of (apple juice?) whiskey at the end of the game.  The soundtrack, from old Hitchcock thrillers, was gorgeous.

Some rooms were full of matter, overflowing with detail and debris.  Oothers were airy and empty.  One was a maze of leafless trees, another a spare half-grid of collapsing brick walls, thigh-high, with fake Baroque sculpture.

We wanted to see things happen, all of us in the white masks, & we hustled and wandered and sometimes broke into a jog as we tried to catch up to whatever was going on.  We saw highlight scenes from the play  — mine were the banquet, which I saw twice, the murder, the uncovering of the raven’s prophecy.  We also saw lots of not-very-Shakespearean stuff: men fighting, couples dancing, a strobe-lit orgy featuring nudity and lots of stage blood, card games, and letters being written.

Diffuse and sometimes disorienting, the performance didn’t feel like a performance.  The cast spoke little and seemed more dancers than anything — balletic, physical, intense.  When I think back to this performance I feel certain I’ll remember the McKittrick Hotel more than any of the humans inside it.6-sleep-no-more-2-430x320

 

The Swerve

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I must admit I chuckled when I read, in the second half of Stephen Greenblatt’s elegantly-written book on the rediscovery of Lucretius, that the intellectual conflict between Lorenzo Valla and Poggio Bracciolini sounded so much like the Yale seminar room in the late 90s —

How can the conflict between these two sharply opposed interpretations be resolved?  Which is it: subversion or containment?  (224)

The attendant self-citation to the earliest form of “Invisible Bullets” in Glyph (1981) was a kind of cipher, gesturing subtly to a whole host of scholarship and intellectual pretzel-making back in the New Historicist day.

But The Swerve isn’t about re-plowing old fields, or even making magisterial pronouncements.  It’s a smart, wonderfully-written — his prose has always been Greenblatt’s calling card, at least for me — detail-rich portrait of the way a single poem can come to stand for an ancient strain of inquiry that resurfaced powerfully in 16c Europe.  Unlike the New Yorker excerpt, the printed version doesn’t harp on the “Dark Ages” that preceded the Renaissance, a term that my medievalist colleagues will rightly bristle at.  Instead it’s a detailed picture of the life of Poggio the book-man.

Lots of fun, really.  There might be a semi-allegory or commentary on modern academic politics, or perhaps international institutions such as the American Academy in Rome, where much of the book was written.  But mostly I just read it for fun.

 

Google analytics for 2011

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The New Year spirit, plus I must admit a desire to avoid finishing my spring syllabi, led me to my Google Analytics page, and some 2011 Bookfish totals.

It only starts in September 2011, which I guess was when I figured out how to start Google Analytics.  But I’m still surprised.

2,330 Visits
1,578 Unique Visitors
3,227 Pageviews
1.38 Pages/Visit
00:01:58 Avg. Time on Site
74.76% Bounce Rate
67.73% % New Visits
I think I’ve only halfway into web 2.0, since I still think of this space as semi-solitary, a place to collect thoughts & images that I like, so that I can find them again.  I’ve also used it as a communication platform with my grad students, the Hungry Ocean conference, and a few other academic groups.  But it’s interesting to think that quite a few folks have found their ways to me, one way or another.
Maybe the next trick is to figure out Twitter.

 

 

New Issue of Coriolis

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A nice new issue of Coriolis is out, with a trio of articles on the state-0f-the-field in maritime and Atlantic World history.  The three authors — Josh Smith of the Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, NY; Kelly Chaves, a doctoral candidate at the University of New Brunswick; and Lincoln Paine, independent scholar and editor — make a nice survey of recent developments in maritime history, including dust-ups about how new the “new thalassologists” really are, how imperial and Anglophone the Atlantic World still is, and how much ethnohistory and especially the history of Native American cultures might add to our maritime world-views.  All three authors build on Paul Cohen’s great 2008 article, “Was there an Amerindian Atlantic?”
References to literary matters are somewhat scattered, though Hester Blum gets respectful citation and I get a quick shout-out alongside the great Mary K. Bercaw-Edwards.  Makes me wonder if a more sustained hashing out of literary-cultural-historical matters might shed light on a few things, including the bifurcated status of the ocean as preeminent symbol and structuring physical reality of the global era.  But that’s for later, or maybe for the maritime panel I’m organizing for the JCB’s 50th anniversary panel this coming June.