Posts Tagged ‘Drama’
“‘Paradise!’ he screamed. ‘The one and only indispensable Paradise'”*…
Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Phillip Whalen; Naropa, 1975.
The Naropa University Archive Project is preserving and providing access to over 5000 hours of recordings made at Naropa University since it’s founding in 1974 in Boulder, Colorado. The archive was developed under the auspices of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (the university’s Department of Writing and Poetics) started by poets Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg, and contains an extraordinary collection of material from members of the literary avant-garde, especially the Beats and their umbra.
From William S. Burroughs’ “Creative Reading” class, through Ginsberg performing William Blake, to presentations from visitors like Gregory Corso, Gregory Bateson, and Peter Warshall, it’s a treasure trove.
* Jack Kerouac, On the Road
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As we feel the Beat, we might warm the birthday tapas for Félix Lope de Vega Carpio (best known by his shortened pen name: Lope de Vega); the Spanish poet and dramatist was born on this date in 1562. A rough contemporary of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega was much more prolific; indeed, he is reckoned to have written between 1,500 and 2,500 fully-fledged plays, of which 425 have survived. One estimate puts his work at twenty million dramatic verses, earning him a position in the firmament of Spanish letters second only to that of Cervantes.
“I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks”*…
Octadrachm, reverse: jugate portrait Ptolemy I and Berenice I, Alexandria, 260–240 BCE
The Ptolemies who ruled Egypt for nearly three centuries, from about 320 to 31 BCE, had a difficult dual part to play: that of Hellenistic monarchs, in the mold of Alexander the Great, and, simultaneously, Egyptian pharaohs. The founding father of their line, Ptolemy I Soter (“Savior”), a Macedonian general in Alexander’s army of conquest, secured rule over Egypt amid the confusion following his king’s death, crowned himself monarch in 306 BCE. But he bequeathed to his heirs—the fourteen other Ptolemies who would succeed him, not to mention several Cleopatras—a difficult demographic and geopolitical position. The Ptolemies’ palace complex, staffed by a European elite, stood in Alexandria, one of the world’s original Green Zones, a Greek-style city founded on a strongly fortified isthmus facing the Mediterranean. To the south, nearly cut off by the vast marshes of Lake Mareotis, lived most of their Egyptian subjects. Some scholars have reckoned the country’s ratio of Egyptians to Greco-Macedonians at ten to one…
Find out how the Greeks did it at “When the Greeks Ruled Egypt.” (Spoiler alert: it involved respect for and tolerance of Egyptian religious and social beliefs. Genghis Khan operated in a similar fashion; more modern empires, not so much…)
* Jorge Luis Borges
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As we go native, we might spare a thought for Aristophanes; he died on this date in 386 BCE (or so many scholars deduce; the exact date has not been documented). A poet and dramatist, Aristophanes– whose works are the sole surviving examples of what is known as “Old Comedy”– is widely known as as “the Father of Comedy.” His eleven surviving plays essentially laid the foundation for satire as we know it, and have a significance that goes beyond this artistic value: Aristophanes acute observations of classical Athens are perhaps as important as historical documents as the writings of Thucydides. They had impact in their own time, as well. His powers of ridicule were feared and acknowledged by influential contemporaries; Plato singled out Aristophanes’ play The Clouds as slander that contributed to the trial and subsequent condemning to death of Socrates (although other satirical playwrights had also caricatured the philosopher). His second play, The Babylonians (now lost), was sufficiently scathing to be denounced by the demagogue Cleon as a slander against the Athenian polis. Aristophanes survived The Peloponnesian War, two oligarchic revolutions, and two democratic restorations– evidence that he was not himself actively involved in politics; rather, an objective “commentator.” In this, he agreed with Socrates (as “reported” by Plato in The Apology): “he who will fight for the right, if he would live even for a brief space, must have a private station and not a public one.”
Illustration from a bust found near Tusculum (likely altogether imaginary, as Aristophanes was reportedly bald)
“Demographics is destiny”*…
… or not. One can decide for oneself by consulting ZIP Lookup…
How much can where you live say about who you are? According to a new interactive map by geographic information firm Esri, a whole hell of a lot. Esri’s “Tapestry Segmentation” database mines socioeconomic and demographic data to create a picture of who lives in each ZIP code–i.e., what marketers assume about you based on your particular neighborhood or city. Using Tapestry‘s 67 neighborhood classifications for socioeconomic and demographic characteristics–complete with cutesy names like “American Dreamers,” “Front Porches,” “High Rise Renters,” and “Diners and Miners”–Esri has created an interactive map of the U.S. called ZIP Lookup that lets you dig deep into the stereotypical lives of residents of your ZIP code, along with their average and income, and the neighborhood’s density…
Read more at “What Your ZIP Code Says About You,” then find out what to expect as you trick-or-treat this evening.
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As we disagree with Arthur (on this, as on so many fronts), we might recall that it was on this date in 1922 that The World We Live In (The Insect Comedy) opened in New York. Written by Karel Čapek (who had two years earlier coined the word “robot” in his play R.U.R.) and his brother Josef, the play features a tramp/narrator who falls asleep in the woods and dreams of observing a range of insects whose lifestyles and morals stand in for various human characteristics– the flighty, vain butterfly; the obsequious, self-serving dung beetle; the ants, whose increasingly mechanized behavior leads to a militaristic society; et al.– an allegorical account of life in post-World War I Czechoslovakia.
“Country music has always sort of been country music”*…
The DeZurik Sisters, Mary Jane and Carolyn, began performing on St. Paul’s KSTP in 1935, when they entered and won a talent contest. The next year they moved to Chicago to appear weekly on National Barn Dance, and later, also Purina’s Checkerboard Time, at WLS-AM. The girls called their act The Cackle Sisters…
Read more about the singing siblings– and their place in the annals of yodeling– here and here. And find an remarkable collection of acetate transfers of their work at the ever-extraordinary WFMU. * Miranda Lambert
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As we marvel at Minnesota throat-singing, we might send dramatic birthday greetings to Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE FRSL; he was born on this date in 1937. A journalist and drama critic, he turned to playwriting in 1960– and has since written such prominent works for the stage as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, Jumpers, Travesties, Arcadia, and The Coast of Utopia. Sir Tom is also an accomplished screenwriter, whose many films include Brazil, The Russia House, and Shakespeare in Love. He’s won four Tony Awards and one Oscar.
How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field… Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.
– George, Jumpers, Act I
There’s (now) a word for that…
From Oxford Dictionaries, the OED Birthday Word Generator…
Do you know which words entered the English language around the same time you entered the world? Use our OED birthday word generator to find out! We’ve scoured the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to find words with a first known usage for each year from 1900 to 2004. Simply select the relevant decade and click on your birth year to discover a word which entered the English language that year.
Please note that the dates given for these words refer to the current first known usage of the word. The OED team is continuously researching the histories of words (something you may be able to help with), and it’s therefore possible that we will find an earlier sense of the words during our research…
A full exploration of the words of one’s nativity year requires a subscription; but the graphic on the intro page (pictured above; accessible here) is live, and will generate the word-of-the-year for any year selected. Your correspondent’s birthday word (or phrase, as it happens): “big bang.”
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As we marvel at how times flies, we might send dramatic birthday greetings to Jean-Baptiste Racine; he was born on this date in 1639. One of the three great dramatists in France in the 17th century (with Molière and Corneille), Racine was primarily a tragedian, producing plays like Phèdre, Andromaque, and Athalie, considered neoclassical masterpieces. Racine was a dramatic poet, writing in dodecasyllabic alexandrine; the linguisitic effects that he achieved have been considered essentially impossible to capture in translation– though many have tried: Robert Lowell and Ted Hughes into English, and Friedrich Schiller into German. (The quest continues: poet Geoffrey Argent won the American Book Award for his 2011 attempt to translate Racine’s plays into English.)
A strict observer of the dramatic unities, Racine frustrated Antonin Artaud, who wrote (in The Theater and Cruelty), “the misdeeds of the psychological theater descended from Racine have made us unaccustomed to that immediate and violent action which the theater should possess.” Conversely, Proust developed an earlier love of Racine “whom he considered a brother and someone very much like himself…” (Marcel Proust: A Life, by Jean-Yves Tadié, 1996).
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