Steve Mentz

Went yesterday to the Amsterdam/New Amsterdam: The Worlds of Henry Hudson show at the Museum of the City of New York (5th ave at 103rd st).  Some really fantastic stuff, mostly from the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam.  There’s a model’s of Hudson’s ship, the Half-Moon, some great atlas & other books, a canon recovered from underwater, clothing, one sword and part of another…

The exhibition used a lot of reproductions and also projected images from maps on the wall, so that they could show more material.  There were several audio clips, one of a Dutch sea-chantey.  Navigational tools included a log line, magnetic and geometric compasses, and a gorgeous pair of 17c globes.

But probably the most interesting part of the show was the explicit connection between the 70-foot long space of the exhibition hall and the 70-foot long ship on which Hudson sailed upriver.  Two “sails” flew overhead, and the center of the gallery space was framed in with dark wood panels so that you felt you were on a (small) ocean-going ship.  A great way to bring the material into the lives of the audience.

Though the truth is that my daughter loved the 19c dollhouses upstairs more than even the 17c tiles that showed Dutch children at play.

It’s a slight, slim volume, but a fun read, esp for Borges nostalgists like me.  My favorite snippet comes when JLB admits he never felt compelled to finish any book (including Finnegans Wake, on which he would subsequently lecture).  “I am a pleasure-seeking reader,” he said.  “I’ve never allowed my sense of duty to have a hand in such a personal matter as that of buying books.”

I’m also reminded of how Borges help R.L. Stevenson (who I mostly think of as a boy’s novelist, much as I love *Treasure Island*, which my son & I listened to on tape last year) and Kipling, among a more usual list of suspects (Whitman, Joyce, Wilde, Carroll, Twain, the Norse and Anglo-Saxon epics, Virgil, etc).

Among modern authors who cite Borges, Manguel mentions Foucault, Umberto Eco (in *The Name of the Rose*), Goddard’s film Alphaville, George Steiner’s After Babel, and Bruce Chatwin, who calls him the Wise Old Man of Buenos Aires in his great travel memoir In Patagonia.

I’ve stolen the title, and the content, of this post from my DA student Chris Hellestrom, who did a Directed Reading course with me on Borges and Pynchon this past fall.  Chris was rightly struck by how much Thomas Nagel’s famous philosophical article, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974) sounds like a Borges story.  The article is easy enough to find online, but a few excerpts show the gist —

“Bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we [humans] possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine.”

“Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited.”

“Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like.”

The story this most reminds me of is Funes at first, though it may, upon reflection, be more like Tlon.

This is more of a preview of a future post, but I just picked up a new book called With Borges by Alberto Manguel.  It seems that Manguel, who’s now a famous writer-on-reading (I read The History of Reading some years back & enjoyed it, though I remember thinking it was somewhat Borges-lite), got his start as a teenager by reading books aloud to the blind Borges.  This short memoir is his recounting of what it was like to be a bookish teenager, working in a national library, & then called in to read to an old man who, I can only imagine, must have seemed a bit like God…

Actually sounds like a story by Borges, come to think of it…

Roberto Bolano continues to be my favorite not-all-that-new writer.  I’ve recently read *Amulet*, a great novella about the student uprisings in Mexico in 1973, and I’m currently working my way through a bilingual edition of *The Romantic Dogs*, the only book of his poems that’s appeared in English yet (I think).  (The cover has a great image of a dog on it, Bolano’s puns not being all that subtle.)

I like his manic energy more than anything — *Amulet* ostensibly takes place in a bathroom while the army occupies the university, but it’s also a portrait of Latin American literary culture in the 1970, and it moves in huge, crazy loops.

*Nazi Literature in America* is another good one, a novel in Borges-like portraits of imaginary right-wing writers from Argentina to California to Indiana.

The two master-works are *The Savage Detectives* and *2666*.

He was probably in his mid-50s, a perfectly ordinary looking sort, but he was getting a private swim lesson in the 1/2 hour before my daughter and her friend Sylvie had their lesson.  And he was terrified.  Allie, the instructor,  had him in the twelve-foot section of the pool with two noodles supporting him, and he clutched the wall for all he was worth.  He could chat about it — not quite the same as a scared child — but it was easy to see that he was really frightened.

I spoke with him during Olivia’s lesson & he said that when he was a kid someone had thrown him in the water (to “teach him to swim”) and he’d never gotten over the panic.  This summer was the first time he’d tried lessons in his life.  A very brave man.

Makes me rethink some stuff about the water – human relationship that I’ve been working on.  Swimming is nearly universal now — I wonder what the statistics are, in the US and worldwide — but it hasn’t always been, at least not everywhere.  I think the Polynesians have always been great swimmers, but in the 17c it was an exotic practice in England, even banned at Cambridge along with other Continental (ie, Italian) bad habits.  The water looks quite different if you can’t swim.

Reading the intro to the Arden 3 ed of Hamlet yesterday (as I get ready to teach next week), I was reminded that the first performance of the play for which we have clear evidence was on board a ship off the coast of Africa in 1607.  We assume it had been played in London before that — it had already been printed, in two different versions, in 1603 and 1604 — but we don’t have records of those performances.  What we have is a note in Captain William Keeling’s journal, on board the Red Dragon, dated 1607 September 5th, “we gave the tragedie of Hamlet.”  The ships were anchored off what is now Sierra Leone for six weeks, trying to re-assemble a fleet.  They also played (some version of) Richard II during the same month.

A strangely resonant beginning for the most famous play in the language…

I saw this morning in my email inbox that the Stacey Keach Lear has been extended at the STC in Washington.  Which makes me think again of the many ways in which the last scene did not live up to the promise, or the verve, of the opening.  Part of the problem, perhaps, is simply the need for things to wind down: the King dies of heartbreak and exhaustion, being “streched out” on the rack of the world (in Kent’s metaphor), but given how much energy is required of the star actor, sometimes that level of physical broken-ness is hard to pull off.  (I remember Ian McKellan had some similar problems in the last scene, and Kevin Kline, at the NY Public Theater, even more so.)

But the direction of the final scene was off too: cutting “yet Edmund was beloved” flattens this complex character, and omitting “Great thing of us forgot” may avoid an awkward laugh-line in the middle of the crisis, but it also makes the long scene less complex.  The dead Cordelia, a Goth princess no more, looks instead like a sex symbol in her tattered clothes, but that itself is distracting.  The repeated lines — “Never, never…” and “Howl, howl…” — are a challenge to any actor (was it Olivier who said the former was unplayable?), but they were among Keach’s weaker, and least inventive, moments.

Is there a tension between 1.2 (the King’s manic dance of kingdom-dividing) and 5.3 (the slow slog into death)?  Certainly there is, and perhaps it’s true that in our age-defying cultural moment we’re more open to an energetic (if mad) king than one whose heart breaks slowly.

In Edgar’s final line, about speaking “what we feel, not what we ought to say,”  he picks up the stage microphone that the King and evil daughters had used in 1.2,  We’re supposed to think, I suppose, that he’s assuming a kind of kingship (though he is on his belly and not commanding the stage), as in the revised Lear-plot in which he married Cordelia and ruled Britain.  True to recent habits, this version does not imagine any possible redemptive future for the kingdom.  But I also missed the dramatic and poetic force of the floor dropping out beneath everyone.

The best version of the first two scenes I’ve ever seen: lively, funny, musical.  They staged the two scenes in a nightclub (with a DJ & cafe tables).  1.1 was in the mensroom, with Gloucester and Kent sharing a bit of semi-privacy by the urinals.  Then 1.2 featured the musical entrances of the three daughters plus the King.  The whole set was half Eastern European state (Slovakian? Yugoslav?) and half mafia.  There was a massive — 20 x 20 feet? — portrait of a younger Stacey Keach hanging above the stage.  When the king arrived he danced with each of his girls in turn, squeezing the highly sexualized Reagan on the bottom, and then promenaded around the stage.

Cordelia, in an interesting expression of her alienation from the court, was dressed as a goth girl.

Is clearly the best “new” writer I’ve come across in a few years.  A good trick, since he’s been dead ssince 2003…