Josef this week delivered a decent presentation, by adumbrated accounts, on St Petersburg the city and how it necessarily factors into Russian history--the perennial unit designated to Czech 8th graders, perchance. I didn't over-coach him (believe it or not!) but did push by fingertips a volume by Marshall Berman entitled All That's Solid Melts Into Air.
Berman's title comes from Shakespeare's final, second-most-personal play, The Tempest. Maybe it is his most personal, being the only one without a precursor plot, but we'd be remiss to discount the ineffable relation of the fictional dead father (Hamlet Sr) speaking to his living son (Hamlet Jr) when we have extant non-fictional evidence of the living father (William) speaking to his dead son (Hamnet). If it's not too hyperbolic to suggest here on Stillwater Symposium, I think that very relational crossroads is at the core of what we are on earth to do.
Simorgh Press is set to publish the need for modern annotations of Eliot's work, and I hope we'll all read and advise with that in mind. For those of us who play chess, for instance, we should bear in mind the deep tradition of those exponential squares. Most of us haven't been in "rat's alley", but all the more reason to put ourselves there, even for the mental exercise. Shakespeare did. He lost his son Hamnet due to the Bubonic Plague.
I wanted to write a poem as an interstice in Jon's 5-part installment about what Eliot coined as 'objective correlative'. This should have been easy: I teach literature very much out of what University of Chicago influenced in the 1920's as 'New Criticism', considering the text first-and-foremost as artifact and objective reality. I thought of what a kindergarten teacher might think as pupils performed their 'show-and-tell' and became predictably distracted by Dr Suess's 'bloogs blowing by'... I don't know what kindergarteners or their teachers think. I don't really know what the objective correlative means in layman's terms....
Which leads me to the title of this post, and my paltry effort to reify anything in this effervescent week. Lyuba Krasna was buried yesterday, in a beautiful funeral fitting all things we hold fast to. Her husband Libor crossed himself meaningfully as he said one of his innumerable good-byes. My own poem on the event is not suitable as an elegy; it objectively records what I (why I?) was thinking in the minutes of another runner's fateful passage. You can view it through a couple filters at my school blog One student, by chance, took up the theme and waxed poetical about Ophelia, even though he'd studied her last year and hasn't any practical need to resurrect her theme for any possible exam, college-entrance or otherwise.
It's October, my indisputably favorite month, and the Cardinals are still playing strong. I'm looking forward to holidays: in Venice to greet the new year, in Prague's spring to enjoy Kirsten's music, in Hatton this July to reify the bedrock of Vold reunions. God bless the solid earth that allows us to "rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn" (Romans 12:15).
Dan
Hello brother. I just posted part 3 of my annotations remotely, relying on notes I had stored in the cloud and my laptop portal. That much is modern, maybe not more than this, though I appreciate the flattery. I am in St Louis this weekend, attending another fencing tournament with Andrew. Yes, we were in town to witness last night's 5-0 loss to the Giants, though we did this via television a dozen miles west of the stadium.
ReplyDeleteWhen my reading material for the weekend is Dante's Inferno, it is hard to consider my annotations as a new take, especially as I am barely through the first Canto. I am inspired to read this now, not just for understanding Eliot's poem but also at Kirsten's encouragement to read Joyce's Portrait.
I am also going back to Hamlet, and I want to reread the Tempest and discover that more obscure play, what was it's name, that Eliot called better, more objectively correlative.
And maybe all this will lead to another Simorgh Press publication, but so far I feel like my efforts are still more take than give.