“their lips were palimpsests of secret flesh, scarred and unnaturally white, by which they all knew each other”
Photo taken at Mangia
“quite nubile young women naughtily attired in Busbies and jackboots”
Photo taken at Mac’s Club Deuce
Love’s Labor’s Lost was pretty fun to read. I particularly liked how clever the women were. Here’s just a little background about the plot: So the king of Navarre and three of his friends have all pledged to abstain from pleasure, essentially — women, food, booze — for three years while they concentrate on their studies. But a French princess and three of her friends have come to Navarre on diplomatic business.
The king’s decree says that no woman can come to his court during that time, so… what to do? Well, the princess and her ladies have to set up camp in a field. I love her response when he welcomes her:
Ferdinand. Fair princess, welcome to the court of Navarre.
Princess of France. “Fair” I give you back again; and “welcome” I have not yet: the roof of this court is too high to be yours; and welcome to the wide fields too base to be mine.
So you can see how these women aren’t gonna take any guff from those men. And they don’t.
Of course, hilarity ensues when the king and his men fall for the princess and her ladies… when they’ve sworn off women.
I watched two performances of the play: one a BBC production that’s very true to the play and quite entertaining. The other, a 2000 film by (and starring) Kenneth Branaugh, set in the 1930s… and… it’s a musical. Brannaugh does take other artistic liberties with the play, but they don’t detract from the original plot. It’s a fun one to watch for a laugh, for sure.
So sometimes it’s “Labor’s” (in The Riverside Shakespeare) and sometimes it’s “Labour’s” (the Brannaugh film, and many online references). I get that — the American spelling vs. the British… but what I don’t get is why the apostrophe? I should ask Patrick.
UPDATE 09 Jun 2013: After thinking about it some more last night and saying it out loud to Patrick, I realized it’s “Love’s Labor Is Lost.” Now that makes sense.
This is sort of a quaint little play in which friendship is tested by love and true love’s loyalty to man mirror’s true love’s loyalty to beast. The introduction to The Two Gentlemen of Verona notes that many consider it to be a “very bad play.” It is kind of weird, I’ll admit. I mean, the story goes along fairly normally, you know at a normal kind of pace and all, until, all of a sudden at the end, it just wraps up all nice and neat and, in true comedy fashion, we’re promised a wedding. Yeah, except for the abruptness of the ending, I actually liked it. But I’m no scholar.
You know how you read a book, then re-read it several years later and you’ve pretty much forgotten everything? It can be kinda cool, really. You know… you get to experience it all again and it’s like the first time.
That’s how it was with White Teeth* for me. We read it for the Civil Life reading group. Of course we met to discuss it on April 15, and I didn’t finish the book until like May 10 or something… Yeah.
It’s really a cool book. Set in London in the 70s through the 90s, it traverses time, cultures, religions…. it questions beliefs, motives, emotions… It’s really complex, yet simple at the same time.
Just go read it.
An unnamed man scurries about terrified of insect informers. The ants are gods. They inhabited the earth before man came from another planet; it has been war between them ever since. The ants have been kept at bay until now. But the spiders, along with the birds and a few others, oppose the ants. There is a chance they may be able to save man … in general that is, as a species. Our poor unnamed character, however, is doomed.
Original drawing by Patrick.
Doc Labyrinth is concerned that civilization is on the brink of destruction, as was the Roman Empire during its period of decline. What he most dreads losing is music, so he designs a machine to transform musical scores into animals so that they might survive the coming changes. But when the creatures are released into the wild, they adapt in order to defend themselves. Some, like the wagner animal, attack others. When the Doc puts a bach bug back through the machine to hear what a fugue sounds like, it is now cacophony. The experiment fails. As the narrator drives away, he sees the beethoven beetle wall himself away from the world inside a mud structure.
Oh wow. I’m glad I read a comedy before reading this one… Tarantino and Greenaway have nothing on Shakespeare. Patrick and Jim both warned me that this was probably Shakespeare’s most violent play, so I was prepared, but yeah, wow.
So it’s all about revenge. Titus, like Coriolanus, is a hero for his country, but is soon betrayed by it. Sorrow upon sorrow is heaped on him. Revenge, he needs. Revenge, he gets. But not without a price, of course… this is a tragedy, after all, and we all know how tragedies go.
I’m a little nervous about watching a performance of this (if there is one recorded), I have to say. Violence isn’t really my thing. But I’ll deal. It’s my plan and I intend to follow through with it.
UPDATE 2013-03-30 11:27: There is a recorded performance… starring Anthony Hopkins… “quid pro quo.”
A little note: I’m taking a break from Shakespeare to read White Teeth* by Zadie Smith for The Civil Life Brewing Company’s Civil Reading Group.
A crew of three visits asteroids to prospect for minerals. They come across an asteroid with all the necessary conditions to sustain life, yet is does not. They are preparing to send some pigs (at one point referred to as “hamsters” p. 132) to the surface to see if it is safe when they are hit with a blast of radiation. They evolve several million years in a moment, gainer greater tactile and cognitive powers, but lose their hair and become physically weaker. Blake becomes a megalomaniac and wants to return to earth and conquer it, then the whole universe, under the guise of helping humanity. He kills Sylvia with a disk weapon he has invented. They are heading back to Terra, but Blake’s plans are threatened when five embodiments of pure energy arrive. They kill Blake and resurrect Sylvia. They are the hamsters/pigs, who have evolved much further than the humans, due to the fact that they were the first to feel the radiation and that they had, evolutionarily speaking, much further to go. Sylvia and Eller are returned to their normal states by the advanced hamsters, who have no interest in the human race, whose potential for advancement, not to mention ethical behavior, is considerably less than their own.
A young patrolman from Asteroid Y-3 believes he is a plant. He sits in the sun all day and sleeps when it is dark, refusing to do any of his duties. The syndrome spreads and Dr. Harris investigates. He interrogates these “plants” with the shock box and learns that they were taught to be plants by “the Pipers.” Harris goes to Asteroid Y-3 to find these Pipers. He sees a native who says she will lead him to these Pipers. She has the same supple movements as the plants. Harris returns to the base commander and says he has solved the problem but not cured it. He sees the Pipers as a psychological projection, allowing the plants to refuse work and to lounge about as primitives would have before the speed and duties of modern society changed us all. Harris says he will start them all on therapy in the morning. Then he covers the floor of his room with nice warm dirt and settles down to sleep. He too is now a plant.
In order to defeat an enemy whose living, intelligent mines seem impossible to fight effectively,Terra implants a spaceship with the brain of an old professor. They think that the disembodied brain will have no consciousness; they are wrong. The professor thinks and consequently retains his human identity despite his inanimate embodiment. His hatred of war causes him to try an experiment. He will be like the god of a new world, peopled by Phil Kramer and his wife (separated) Delores and then their offspring. They will be divorced from the Terran customs and traditions that the professor so strongly feels are the root causes of conflict. The question is, is war a learned habit or an ingrained human instinct.
It has been eight years since war broke out between the Americans and the Soviets. The surface world is radioactive and unlivable. “Leadies” conduct the war up above while all the humans live deep underground, producing war materials nonstop and following news of the progress of the war. They subsist on artificial light and food. The humans must rely on the leadies for information on surface conditions since they themselves cannot visit the surface because of the high levels of radioactivity. Then a non-radioactive leady visits some officials below and they become suspicious. On surfacing, they find the beautiful old world still intact, with all the old animals, plants, etc. The leadies had analyzed the war they had been created to fight by proxy and found it pointless and stopped it. They are caretakers of the world until the Americans and Soviets can transcend war and form a global society based on cooperation and mutual understanding. The Americans immediately try to restart the war but are stopped by the leadies. Ultimately, they join a few Russians in living together in a village, and the story ends on an optimistic note with a glance forward toward all mankind will be able to achieve when they work together instead of against one another.
Conger is a hunter serving a prison term for some sort of illegal trading. The authorities need his special skills. They want him to go into the past and kill the “founder” of a non-violent sect of quasi-Christians. They show him the skull for identification. He takes the skull and a gun into the past. First he goes to just after when the founder died and researches the papers. Then he travels further back to kill him before he can deliver his message. Ultimately, he holds the skull next to his own face and realizes that he is the founder. He gives the assembled crowd a brief paradox, then waits to die, knowing he will be seen to have risen from the dead in “the near future.” By a neat accident, the authorities of his own time have brought about the very thing they had hoped to prevent.
