Back to Cymbeline: it has always been one of my favorite Pink Floyd songs, featuring in Barbet Schroeder's 1969 film 'more'. The first lines of the song are Gloucesteresque: "The path you tread is narrow / And the drop is sheer and very high"--and it's "high time, Cymbeline"... Halloween tries to haunt but relegates itself to Costco costumes; Cymbeline, via Shakespeare and Pink Floyd, haunts more veritable.
Joey is having a full scouting weekend, so he's miles away from the internet right now, but he wanted to post this idea for the Symposium (I forward not to steal any fire, but to encourage him to give it more articulation and others--Uncle Josh?--to develop the idea): while driving through Slovakia last week, we contemplated the various reasons music makes an effect. A live album of Canadian legend Rush was our impetus, extending more or less the value of:
- composition
- musicianship
- performance
- message-making
- atmospheric background
I travel to Kiev this week for Cross-Country, glad to revisit this venue now that 'Babi Leto, Babi Yar' is finished. As we're running to defend the girls' championship and rectify the boys' one-point loss of the championship last year, I will have that business strictly in mind. But also the plot of 'Tipping Point', the story I'm setting in Veliko Turnova, Bulgaria, with a newly retired geologist worried about his granddaughter playing too closely to the cliff that defines that town. This story will be un-autobiographical, as distinct from 'Twilight and Dusk'. The final story I hope to compose before 2014 will be set in northeast Slovakia, drawing also from central Slovakian partisan history during WWII. But the story will be contemporary, involving a young Roma woman (maybe named Cymbeline?) visiting the Catholic prayer site Litmanova, and tenderly trying to ameliorate the quite ingrained prejudice that comes with her heritage.
Finally, can anyone out there help me develop a sonnet about the Madison Mallards? I've just seen a couple games and loved every minute; like Jon, I can't claim much knowledge of this vibrant capital city, even if I enjoyed a week-long course at UW in the early 2000s (and could have taken a Peace Corps recruiting job there in 1996). I'll be happy to craft 14 lines on the Mallards if any of you can supply me more details...
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ReplyDeleteAs unseemly (or as Act 1 of Macbeth might have it, 'unseamly') as it is to reply to one's own post, I feel a need to contextualize an invite.
ReplyDeleteCymbaline (Pink Floyd's iteration, spelling difference and all) and Cymbeline (Shakespeare's late romance) are different enough, and how I might infuse either on a pastoral short story based in 21st century Slovakia remains to be seen.
A couple facts: a) Shakespeare was more known/esteemed for his comedies in his day than his tragedies or histories, which critics tended to render with more facility in ensuing centuries; b) I know far less of these comedies/romances/problem plays than the tragedies we have all studied and hold dear; c) there is no published attempt that I know of that would deem Slovakian history predominantly tragic, comic, pastoral, or any other subgenre. The 'fact' is, not much has been delivered on this front beyond what Slovaks know and render within their own province.
But here is the crux, and I want to amplify: Jon's annotations of T.S.Eliot's Wasteland (http://annotatedwasteland.blogspot.cz/) is truly remarkable, and worth study for the isogesis within that poem or the exogesis of what I'm after, namely, Shakespeare's greater sense of 'a game of chess' and the nexus of what we may deem, rightly or wrongly, tragedy or comedy.
If I embark on a story, with all due integrity, about a Roma young woman (and logically her name cannot by Cymbaline/Cymbeline, as those are male ascriptions) who tries in the 21st century to cut a path beyond her race/gender/local hampers, I'd love a few more family readers to guide me in the navigation. Dear Dr Lell was probably more in it for Shakespeare's tragedies than comedies; Dr Price (DePaul) and Dr Hillsky (Prague's Charles University) are likewise in this strain. I need to delve more into the swain that is the heart of all pastorals, inspired by Milton or whomever.
My design is not to supply grist for ethnic stereotypes, not easy slides into what may be deem 'tragic' or 'comic' (and Shakespeare prepossesses as much with the intriguing genre 'problem play'). I hope to put even half the academic elbow grease that Jon has put into T.S. Eliot, drawing not only on what we my elicit, but what we may evoke. How can any of us decide what describes a Roma young woman's stake in early 21st century Slovakia? I hope/trust William Shakespeare without the keystrokes of internet had similar strains of inquiry. I was ready to spill out a story this weekend, but... in deference to Cymbaline/Cymbeline and the Stillwater Symposium that guides in groans we may not know how to transcribe, I will give this endeavor due rest.
A year ago, Dan, you and Tom Eliot finally got me to sit down and read Hamlet again. You’d been referring to this play repeatedly for years, each time making me realize how hazy my college memory was getting, but when I started trying to make sense of The Waste Land it became a more pressing necessity to give myself a refresher course. So I bought and immersed myself into the Arden Shakespeare’s annotations of Hamlet, which in turn sparked an even great eagerness to try to do something similar with Eliot’s masterwork. And I did the same thing with The Tempest, which is also heavily alluded to in The Waste Land. I haven’t reread any other of Tom’s Bard references yet, although there are a couple on the list: Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and, yes, Cymbeline. I guess I’d better get started reading again.
ReplyDeleteSo far, my knowledge of Cymbeline is limited to this: In the second section of TWL called “A Game of Chess,” Cleopatra’s chambers are described in detail, and some of the description follows terms used by Iachimo in describing Imogene’s bedroom to her husband —“Where I confess I slept not,” he says, but he seems to know a lot about what the ceilings look like. He describes two tapestries in particular, one of Cleopatra meeting Antony and the other of Acteon watching Diana bathing. I learned of this Cymbeline tie primarily by a hint from Eliot’s own notes, but I confess I have no idea why Iachimo would be compelled to tell the husband all this. Again, time to get reading.
The tapestry allusions are big in TWL, and indeed the whole poem is an extended tapestry itself, but there is one in particular that you will find interesting: an oblique reference to the tapestry behind which Ferdinand and Miranda are playing chess.
I’m not sure how this will relate to your Roma heroine or Pink Floyd’s More song, or for that matter what it has to do with Joey’s idea about musical effectiveness (isn’t that where this all started?), but I’ll read the play and report back. I do know so far that Cymbeline is a king - maybe your Roma girl could be named after his daughter Imogene?