It's a magical world

An Iliad. Dir. Lisa Peterson.

I went to see this show at Berkeley Rep on Tuesday night - I splurged on season tickets this summer when I was feeling rich, but I totally forgot to go see Chinglish. D'oh.

Overall, I liked the play, and I especially liked the authorial decisions to have the play mostly be retold in modern language, and that it was a one-man show with the Poet himself as the one man (though, how else could it have been done?). The Poet stumbles in compelled to tell his story, though as he admits, "Every time I tell this story, I hope it's for the last time." It's never for the last time, and I liked that this production had clearly been updated to take the ongoing wars around the world since it was written (on the brink of the Iraq war) into account, though of course one deplores the necessity. It's not hard to make the Iliad speak to our time, and I liked that it did. I also liked that they used the Fagles translation as their base, since the Fagles translation is my favorite.

That said, why no one in the production could be bothered to ask anyone how to actually pronounce Greek - not even Homeric Greek, but classical or even modern Greek - was really annoying to me. Granted I"m over-educated, but to hear the Poet mispronounce the fourth word of the entire poem, and keep mispronouncing words and names, really grated. The other thing is that, powerful as this show was, I don't know how much that was new it really added to the Iliad, y'know? Though, I'm not sure that's the standard by which I ought to judge this play. It certainly does bring the Iliad to new audiences, and it does make the Iliad into an anti-war story, which, as I've said before, I'm not convinced that the actual Iliad actually is. (I'm happy to go on about why, if anyone wants; just ask.) And that's probably the Iliad we need right now, inasmuch as we ever need the Iliad. Maybe one day it really will be told for the last time; but not yet.

So yesterday I went up to New York City to hang out with 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.)

Doing my part for nine nines of nine.

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1. The oracle is old, but that is not what about her that astonishes you.

2. You may think of the rumor that she once forsook her power for love; after that, they say, youth was stripped from her--but was it a punishment from her god, or a reward?

3. Though she eats the leaves of the laurel, and afterward you may too (the thrill of taboo stronger than the taste of spice), this is not the source of her gift.

4. Her priests are a cage--but do they protect her from the world, you wonder, or the world from her?

5. Though you may envy her knowledge, she is jealous of your ignorance.

6. She is a sibyl, not a Cassandra, though she often wishes otherwise.

7. The secret of seven is that there is none, save belief.

8. Cowherds and queens are the same in her sight, for she sees the End: ask her your question.

9. Now the rest is up to you.

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