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Fun in New Amsterdam.
So yesterday I went up to New York City to hang out with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
naraht, who is as awesome in person as online. I daresay we had a grand time--nothing fancy, just wandering around to bookstores and libraries and coffee shops and cafe-type places and talking about history (Ph.D.s) and writing and fandom and DW and slash and academia and music, especially music. (Air pollution! Boarding schools and home schooling! Various travel guides past and present, including Baedeker's!)
We started out at Pret A Manger, which has been one of my favorite sandwich places for ten years now, ever since I first discovered them in London. Luckily they jumped across the pond to New York, since I still haven't been back to London other than to change planes in Heathrow and Gatwick since. (Side note: Book-Off is moving to 45th between 5th & 6th! Yes--bigger, better! No--the perfect Book-Off/Kinokuniya synchrony will be disturbed! Again.)
We then headed across the street to the central branch of the New York Public Library, which is situated in Bryant Park, and which is as grand inside as it looks on the outside. At this point I should digress slightly and mention that Diane Duane's The Book of Night with Moon has had a huge influence on the way I experience Manhattan--every single time I go through Grand Central I look up at the ceiling and think of Rhiow doing the same thing and thinking it was a pity that the humans had covered over the constellations, and am devoutly grateful that we (the humans, that is) saw the error of that decision. And every time I walk past the central branch of the New York Public Library I look at the lions to either side of the entrance and think of Urruah telling Arhu that one is the past and the other is the present and that the invisible lion, the future, prowls between them. Needless to say, the NYPL is pretty cool, and unlike other central libraries I can think of (cough! the Library of Congress! cough!) it is still a functioning library; the reading room has free wireless internet and computers at which you can use the internet, as well as reference books. The interior is very much that Gilded Age grand wood carving tradition that we just don't do anymore. Sonaraht and I strolled through the Henry Hudson: Mapping New York exhibition, pointing out our hometowns on maps of the Eastern Seaboard and considering Manhattan's vanished past, and then headed into the "Candide at 250" exhibition, which actually used the term "fan fiction" to describe all the unauthorized sequels and alternate versions of Voltaire's novel, which amused us greatly, though the exhibition insisted multiple times that "changing the contents of the work inevitably changed the work". That is a feature, not a bug, NYPL!
After that we headed downtown and hung out at Joe the art of coffee, which is one of the best coffee shops of my acquaintance before strolling down to McNally Jackson, which has to be one of the best indie general-interest bookstores I've been to in a while. Rough Guide then led us to Hampton Chutney Co. down the block, which was amazingly delicious; I will dream of that cardamom coffee until I can have it again, I know. And since the staff accidentally made the wrong entree, they were nice enough to give us the mistake for free! And, OMG, the chutney itself (to say nothing of the food) was amazing (I had pumpkin. Yum).
Seriously, it was a great time, and after we said our farewells I kept thinking of things I wanted to proselytize atnaraht about. (Joanna Newsom! The Decemberists! The Philadelphia Orchestra!) Next year in Britain?
Also, on the way home (since we'd been going on about Greece, briefly) I had a random thought about ancient tragedy in cross-cultural comparison. I said when I saw Mibu-kyogen in April 2008 that I found a lot of parallels between ancient tragedy/satyr plays::nou/kyogen, and I stand by that, and I was thinking about the masks again on the way home. This isn't something I'd want to push too far, but I can never forget that the English word "idiot" comes from the Greek ὀ ἰδίος, "individual." Both ancient Greece and ancient Japan were cultures in which the individual did not make sense outside of the group (this has crucial effects in tragedy actually; I'm thinking of Oedipus, but there are many other examples). And I wonder whether the masks facilitated the identification of the audience with the actor because of their lack of differentiation? Hmm… (Also I think my accentuation is wrong above.)
naraht, who is as awesome in person as online. I daresay we had a grand time--nothing fancy, just wandering around to bookstores and libraries and coffee shops and cafe-type places and talking about history (Ph.D.s) and writing and fandom and DW and slash and academia and music, especially music. (Air pollution! Boarding schools and home schooling! Various travel guides past and present, including Baedeker's!)We started out at Pret A Manger, which has been one of my favorite sandwich places for ten years now, ever since I first discovered them in London. Luckily they jumped across the pond to New York, since I still haven't been back to London other than to change planes in Heathrow and Gatwick since. (Side note: Book-Off is moving to 45th between 5th & 6th! Yes--bigger, better! No--the perfect Book-Off/Kinokuniya synchrony will be disturbed! Again.)
We then headed across the street to the central branch of the New York Public Library, which is situated in Bryant Park, and which is as grand inside as it looks on the outside. At this point I should digress slightly and mention that Diane Duane's The Book of Night with Moon has had a huge influence on the way I experience Manhattan--every single time I go through Grand Central I look up at the ceiling and think of Rhiow doing the same thing and thinking it was a pity that the humans had covered over the constellations, and am devoutly grateful that we (the humans, that is) saw the error of that decision. And every time I walk past the central branch of the New York Public Library I look at the lions to either side of the entrance and think of Urruah telling Arhu that one is the past and the other is the present and that the invisible lion, the future, prowls between them. Needless to say, the NYPL is pretty cool, and unlike other central libraries I can think of (cough! the Library of Congress! cough!) it is still a functioning library; the reading room has free wireless internet and computers at which you can use the internet, as well as reference books. The interior is very much that Gilded Age grand wood carving tradition that we just don't do anymore. So
naraht and I strolled through the Henry Hudson: Mapping New York exhibition, pointing out our hometowns on maps of the Eastern Seaboard and considering Manhattan's vanished past, and then headed into the "Candide at 250" exhibition, which actually used the term "fan fiction" to describe all the unauthorized sequels and alternate versions of Voltaire's novel, which amused us greatly, though the exhibition insisted multiple times that "changing the contents of the work inevitably changed the work". That is a feature, not a bug, NYPL! After that we headed downtown and hung out at Joe the art of coffee, which is one of the best coffee shops of my acquaintance before strolling down to McNally Jackson, which has to be one of the best indie general-interest bookstores I've been to in a while. Rough Guide then led us to Hampton Chutney Co. down the block, which was amazingly delicious; I will dream of that cardamom coffee until I can have it again, I know. And since the staff accidentally made the wrong entree, they were nice enough to give us the mistake for free! And, OMG, the chutney itself (to say nothing of the food) was amazing (I had pumpkin. Yum).
Seriously, it was a great time, and after we said our farewells I kept thinking of things I wanted to proselytize at
naraht about. (Joanna Newsom! The Decemberists! The Philadelphia Orchestra!) Next year in Britain? Also, on the way home (since we'd been going on about Greece, briefly) I had a random thought about ancient tragedy in cross-cultural comparison. I said when I saw Mibu-kyogen in April 2008 that I found a lot of parallels between ancient tragedy/satyr plays::nou/kyogen, and I stand by that, and I was thinking about the masks again on the way home. This isn't something I'd want to push too far, but I can never forget that the English word "idiot" comes from the Greek ὀ ἰδίος, "individual." Both ancient Greece and ancient Japan were cultures in which the individual did not make sense outside of the group (this has crucial effects in tragedy actually; I'm thinking of Oedipus, but there are many other examples). And I wonder whether the masks facilitated the identification of the audience with the actor because of their lack of differentiation? Hmm… (Also I think my accentuation is wrong above.)
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The noun is ιδιωτης; adjective ιδιος is accented on the antepenult (as you probably suspected).
I'm with you on the individual versus society, though I don't know enough (which is to say nothing) about Japanese performance to comment on that particular comparision. But I think ancient masks actually were fairly differentiated, at least as far as distinguishing a generic Ajax from a generic Agamemnon. I've had similar narratological thoughts regarding the messenger, though; I don't know that his mask would have been very distinctive, and he's not usually very thoroughly characterized in tragedy (with a few exceptions like Talthybius), so that gives him a chance to focalize more vividly the individual characters he talks about. But I guess that's kind of a different issue.
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Yeah, I did suspect that about ιδιος. But then I was distracted by trying to find the breathmark on my keyboard for the article (at which I failed).
No, I agree that the masks were differentiated--that's not quite the right word, I changed it a few times and should probably just have expanded the sentence. But the masks simply don't have the variation that human features do. Of course partly I think it's connected to the dynamics of playing in an open-air ampitheatre for an audience of thousands, too.
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I think I'm tracking you on the masks. Even if Ajax can be distinguished from Agamemnon, they're still both something on the order of 'stock characters' (in spite of the fact that Euripides' Agamemnon is not the same as Aeschylus'). Masks in New Comedy will just be specific to a type, rather than an individual (e.g. the adolescens), leaving all the characterization, if there is any, to be done via text/dialogue. Performance was apparently rather stylized, too, which might have the effect of simultaneously making the characters less individualized and more distanced from the audience. Not sure what to think about that.
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The stylization makes sense, too--I think both the Greek drama and nou arose out of sacral impulses/traditions, yes? And in nou it's as much about embodying or instantiating an aesthetic/experience as it is about telling a story
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I think nou evolved out of shrine dances in Japan. It's still most frequently performed at temples.
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Mostly we notice that Greek drama was performed at religious festivals and think that therefore it must have been religious; I think it's kind of funny that by the same reasoning, tragedy must have been political.
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(For more fun congruences, sumo in Japan grew out of religion too.)
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