a dog's heart

went to a curious opera today, A Dog's Heart, based on a satirical Soviet novel and portrayed with grating music, creepy puppets and three different singers for the dog/man at the center of the show.

William and I debated it afterward, both of us handicapped by a lack of deep knowledge about soviet history in the 20s, I'm afraid, but even if we couldn't quite map all the political arguments, there was a fundamental question accessible to the least russophilic:

What's so great about being human?

I thought the production was pretty straight-forward: it would be an act of cruelty to turn an animal into a human, because what creature, however miserable and doomed, would want to know the darkness in a human soul?

But William noted the ambiguous final lines of the opera, after the dog has been transformed back into his original, happy state as a food-eating, warmth-loving creature of mean appearance - after an interlude as a crude, cruel and vicious man.

"I was lucky," he sings, "We must remember that I was lucky."

Was he lucky to be transformed back into a dog?  Or lucky to have gotten the chance to be human?


It was a Complicite production, like A Disappearing Number, which you might have heard me rave about, and therefore visually stunning.  Never before has a graphic surgical operation made me simultaneously so disgusted and so fascinated.  The entire set was comically immense, making the human characters seem like dolls in a too-large dollhouse.  The dog was skeletal in its hunger, and only slightly more solid after weeks of being fattened; with a human face and suit jacket, it became monstrous indeed.  Projections transformed the same wall into an exterior, the terrifying face of tyranny, the mental landscape of a dying animal or an emerging human, a prison or a religious choir of atheist scientists.  Absolutely engrossing.  And the swirling snowstorm at the beginning was one of those fabulous bits of stagecraft where the strings were visible - as it were - but the illusion completely convincing.

Stay warm, be kind to stray dogs, and don't think too highly of yourself just because you can call yourself human - not terrible lessons to take away -

dull would he be of soul

dull would he be of soul who could pass by
a sight so touching in its majesty -
the City now doth wear, like a garment,
the beauty of the morni-

well, sorry, Wordsworth, it was evening, actually.  We did go up in the Eye at sunset and the views were pretty spectacular, although the spectacle of the tourist trap was uninspiring.  but hey!  the views!  you'd have to be dull of soul indeed to complain about a tourist trap with a sight like that!

Before that lovely sight, we also went to the Tower - yep, we're touristing it up, before we quite run out of time (and before the finals crunch starts!)  It was extra fun because I'm reading Wolf Hall - which is AMAZING and I don't even LIKE historical novels much these days, but SERIOUSLY ya'll tackle it over winter break or something.  Cromwell is the action star of the 15th century and Hilary Mantel is talking to his ghost, I swear.  Anyway, I'm reading Wolf Hall so right now Anne Boleyn and Crazy Henry VIII and all their friends and victims feel like my bffs.  And I went and hung out at one of their favorite spots to get beheaded!  It was cold!


In other news, Wordsworth reminded me of something.   As I think I mentioned a few weeks ago, I've been memorizing poetry lately - a few apps on my ipod, a few emails-to-self, and I've got a portable library that I've been transplanting into my brain.  I learn a new, short one every day, and I'm working, stanza by stanza, through The Raven - quite appropriate, and not just because of the Tower's ravens:

Ah, distinctly I remember!  It was in the bleak december/
when each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor

And it is about to be a bleak december here, too - except we have radiators now, of course, which are less ghostlike although they, too, tend to die.

So the question is, why now?  why here?  I've thought about memorizing poetry before - Emily and I had a little contest for a while (by the by, i'm now kicking your butt so hard, you wouldn't believe...).  But I've never before tackled it with nearly this much vigor.  Is it the timing, or is it the place?  Is there something about London that has turned my mind to literature in a way it's never turned before?

Hmm.  I'll tackle that more later.

Got a problem with Americanisms? Let's duke it out.

"I regard the use of the term 'authorities' as an dreadfully ugly American import from the land without style"


Ouch!!


(We have style, thanks very much!  AMERICAN-STYLE that's what's what.)

music

so last week we went, back to back, to two very different musical events, the kind of variety that makes me sigh happily and say "oh the joys of big, culturally rich cities!"

well, I didn't actually say that, but you get the point.

Thursday night we went to the opera and saw La Boheme, the first opera we've seen in London that put me on the edge of my seat.  As a musical performance, par excellence - for its type, of course - a few small figures on the stage, feigning shivers and raising their voices to compete with the full orchestra, the massive coliseum filled with carefully constructed, finely polished sounds.

And then Friday, down to the Blues Kitchen for their array of bourbon and the band on their tiny stage, the long narrow room - what fraction of the coliseum's space, a thousandth? - filled with the fashionably dressed young people of Camden town.  And the reward for our wait was blues like I've never seen it before - four people flooding our ears with sound, a drummer in the shadows, a dorky keyboardist lost in his own world, an aloof guitarist and at the heart of it, the lead singer, alternating shots and gulps of ale between songs, then leaning towards us with his arms embracing his double bass, growling and screaming into the mic.  dirty, raw, pulsating, overwhelming, that amplified bass making the whole building throb.  we were lost.

And then we caught a few hours sleep - then a train - then a plane - a pleasant day in aberdeen, another train, a few more hours sleep, then up to the highlands for the silence and the wind and a wide-open sky, instead.

visions of

I passed an apocalyptic landscape this afternoon.  It was a startling sight, one that made me stutter to a stop and step backwards to stare again.  Mountains of rubble, cold steel, concrete, wire, stormy sky - my warm and idle thoughts, of dinner and hot chocolate and cryptic crosswords, fell out of my head and landed in a heap on the cold pavement.

It's all quite easily explained.  They are building a biomedical research facility across from St. Pancras train station, and I know, because we've had the fliers slipped under our door urging us to stand up and protest before our children die from deadly viruses leaked into the air.  But to be precise, they aren't "building" it yet - the site is a messy, barren brownfield with some tentative jabs made towards flattening and cleaning.  Yellow backhoes and graders sit frozen in the of heaps of rocks and concrete chunks and dirt and metal.  2011 they think they'll start the foundations.

For now the field sits empty, except for the detritus and the unused machines, surrounded by a high fence of narrow bars with a few optimistic signs depicting a clean and glowing building.  But where I walked I didn't pass those pretty pictures - just the sharp steel fencing.  And behind this ugly scar, in the distance, a few squat, rectangular office buildings, dull gray in color, no warm lights twinkling from their windows at this moment, so that floor after distant floor looked absolutely empty.  And behind those blocks BT tower loomed: an alien, an unsettling shape.  It was hard to imagine humans building such a structure, surreal, cylindrical, studded with satellites and antenna - it seemed unfathomable to picture a human inside the windowless, neon-glowing tower.

And behind it all the sky.  I woke up this morning to a London full of fog, low and white and almost as thick as in the old paintings.  By this afternoon the fog was gone, but it left behind a slate-dark sky, swirling - no, frozen mid-swirl - with bilious clouds.

There were no people in this landscape, no warmth, no brightness of color, no sign of cheerful survival.  And as it happened, my personal soundtrack - that is, my ipod on shuffle - had through its dumb mechanical insight landed upon the Decemberists "When the War Came."  So as I was struck dumb by this stark vision, Colin Meloy was whining in my ear: "and the war came with all the poise of a cannonball," and I was shivering in the cold.

And war came to this city more than once, Boadicia burnt it down and the peasants tore it up and the bombers blew it up down and sideways.  And this could be a bomb site, here or anywhere. And even when wars the wars have been kept firmly abroad an infinite iniquities have passed along these streets, and this is a problem with living in a city too full of history - the charming cobbled alleys and noble monuments live beside a multitude of darker ghosts.  And how much does it help to remember these shades of horror, and how much more does it hurt?  Plague and conscription and executions and the gin-soaked destitute, and what can all our words do for you now?

And it's all quite easily explainable, because in my classes, this cold week in November, we are discussing death and brutality - trying and failing to remember how many millions died in the first world war, arguing with careful words around how and why and whether one should teach the Holocaust, debating whether evil ever arrives in the form of Black Dogs and what a single murder means and whether graveyard conversations with the dead fit former characterizations, watching on-stage cannibalisms and reading about failed revolutions, reading memoirs of massacre and rape and reciting the war poems and just this morning on the tube I idly memorized Dickinson, I learned by heart that

success is counted sweetest
by those who ne'er succeed.
to comprehend a nectar
requires greatest need

not one of all that purple host
who won the flag today
can tell a definition
so clear of victory

as he, defeated - dying
on whose forbidden ear
the distant strains of victory
burst agonized and clear!  (a cruel exclamation point, I think)

Ah, it's took the flag, not won -  but I was close, and defeated, dying was on my brain.

(And sometimes I long for the clarity of chemistry classes, where debating the nature of grief and death and the immutable logic of genocide never arises as an academic responsibility - but it's not quite that simple, I know, froth-corrupted lungs could tell us as much.  But for political science classes, then, sociology, or philosophy!  it might be quite as fruitless - discuss the historical causes of atrocities, why they happen, how we can prevent them, sure, as unanswerable as asking how we express them and how words can cope with the strains of our moral demands - but at least it might feel more productive.  because I still can't believe the right words will fix the world.)

So yes, perfectly explainable, quite easy.  With these broken worlds in all the words I've been feeding to my brain, and the discordant murmurs of warfare in my ears, and the cold, nasty weather and brutishly short day, so short at 4 pm the sun was already setting in a colorless haze; with the hulking machines in the midst of detritus, the squat buildings as empty as corpses' faces, the communications tower a gleaming robot outlasting all the rest - no wonder that I was arrested by a vision of destruction.

and I stopped and stared and shivered for a moment, lost and empty.  And then a mother and child passed, this kid in a stroller and a Gap jacket staring in exactly the same direction as I was, out at the broken field and foul sky.  And I wondered, does he see what I see, is he gaping in shared wordless horror? Or does he see three big-treaded yellow caterpillars with diggers lifted to the sky?


And I burrowed deeper into my coat and walked past leafless trees up to our flat.  And here I've sat, for whatever my words are worth.  And now it's time for dinner, and hot chocolate, and a cryptic crossword, and some scraps of happier poetry.

proposed definitions: a good book...

... is one where you struggle to suppress the urge to read out extracts - paragraphs or pages - to anyone in hearing distance.  and of course, with a great book you can't hold back any more, and bug all your friends with "no listen to this--"

and literature? how do you define literature? one of my current professors likes to say "thoughtful writing," which seems inadequate.  "whatever's in the canon" is certainly inadequate.  "inaccessible" is worse than inadequate.  definitions based on style or content are shallow...

so far the best i've got - inadequate, of course, of course - is "words that are trying to do many things as once."  maybe??  putting aside "making money for their author" or "get read," words often try to be informative, inflammatory, titillating, fun to read, insightful, original... but it seems to me that the texts that are considered, or that I consider, "literature," are all shooting to do many things simultaneously.  I have heard people talk about literature as texts that make us think about the human condition, but many non-fiction books on religion or philosophy do the same - but if that's all the words are trying to do, and not delight the eye and ear, surprise, be consistently interesting, inspire an emotional response, whatever - then it's hardly literature.  but I do think that non-fiction writing can be literature- just that most isn't. books that are only fun aren't literature.  books that are only complicated aren't literature.  books that are only trying to "be literary" generally aren't.  and many books try to do two or three things - have a moral, be funny, and be interesting; be informative and be allegorical; be easy to read and suspenseful; but "literature," for whatever the designation is worth, shoots for so many meanings and effects at once that one cannot easily list them all.

oh, but it's problematic.  "words" or "authors" trying to do many things as once?  and what is this "trying?" but if not "trying," how does one define success?  but for that matter, how does one define "trying?"  and what marks the division between the different things words can do - and does the intended audience matter? can things be literature without trying to be?  how many is "many?"  i think at some point we have to agree that some words pretty well defy concrete definition.

but even if a thing is undefinable, we can't just leave it at that, can we?

can we?

western wind when wilt thou blow

the small rain down can rain
christ, that my love were in my arms
and i in my bed again

anon., 16th century, reading anthropology texts in bed totally doesn't count

Winter has arrived in London, suddenly and surprisingly.  Just last weekend, the streets were friendly -- cool breezes swirled bronze-colored leaves along the pavement, the occasional mild drizzle passed briefly by, all was autumnal and with a bit of mulled wine, rather cheery.  But we rolled out of bed on Monday to face a dreary land.   The thermometers resided ten degrees colder (20 for us heathen fahrenheitists).   The evening's dismally early darkening was made far worse by soaked streets and sad leaves in the gutter, rotting rather than scattering along.   Days later, the cold and damp continues unabated, and glancing out the window makes me shudder

Cold in the morning, cold in the night, and even in midday, a wind that puts the lie to the weather reports (how can they call this 10 C, when I need a hat and two scarves? and at night, how can they say it's as high as 5, when I'm so painfully huddled in my winter coat and two sweaters? )

I think we are now witnessing the London that inspired generations of imperialists to leave this great city for warmer climes... I am growing more convinced that not only was the "white man's burden" pure bull, but so were all the other claimed excuses - money, scientific knowledge, proselytizing, political power, bull, bull, bull.  The Brits just wanted some sun to thaw their bones - or failing that, some snow to justify the cold - anything but this soul-numbing, ear-biting, shoe-soaking gloom and gray!

strikes!

So, good news: the firefighters decided, at the last minute, that they would NOT be striking today - so the good people of London can light fires, wave sparklers and set off fireworks with no more worries than usual.

Next in line to take off work in protest: BBC journalists and announcers!  Apparently tonight and tomorrow will be all reruns on TV and radio, and the strikes might go on until Christmas!  Hey, at least it's not the doctors...

on dealing with mountains of data

Sorry, can't talk now, PIVOT TABLES ARE TRANSFORMING MY LIFE

also, blowing my mind.  I thought I was pretty good at Excel but I am just drowning here.  Ack I'm going to miss dinner

and some british politics!

Brothers David and Edward Miliband
For Labour's sake fought hand-to-hand.
"Well then, I"ll just leave" huffed loser Dave,
Making Mother England sigh, "Boys, behave!"

another clerihew

Inspired by the recurring theme in my contemp. novel class:

These bloody English novel writers
seem to be lovers, rather than fighters;
instead of depicting wars - world one, two, or others,
they write about sisters getting it on with their brothers.

A clerihew!

So I learned about clerihews in my stylistics class the other day, where we contrasted a clerihew with a biographical entry in an encyclopedia as an example off text conventions in different genres. I've been amusing myself with them since, and so, in honor of yesterdays elections:

Barack Hussein Obama
despite begging for "no drama"
is now the villain in a play
written by Beck and his Tea Partay.

London Strikes (Not Once, But Twice!)

yeah, i know, the song's about New York, whatevs.

So, here's the deal:  the British government is kinda broke.  How broke?  Roundabouts £960 billion national debt.  That works out to somewhere near $1.5 trillion.  For comparison's sake, the US has a national debt of $13 trillion plus... but we also make a lot more money than the British do (and don't they know it).  So to make the comparison more fair, we can look at debt as percent of GDP, in which case it's about 65% for the Brits, and... 93% for us.  um, yay? we're winning?

The current US position is that this is not exactly our preferred situation, but that in our extended economic slump continued borrowing is necessary - and at any rate, sharply increasing taxes or decreasing spending will really just make everything worse.  Cue heavy sigh.

The current UK position, on the other hand, is WE ARE ALL GOING TO PERISH IF WE DON'T CUT SPENDING.  There's a lot of complicated stuff about coalition governments (somehow one party with "conservative" in the name, and another with "liberal" in the name, have joined forces and are trying to get along.  How that worked out I'm still not clear on) but at any rate, they're cutting spending like... like... like a man trapped under a giant rock might cut his arm off, I suppose.  Messily, painfully, and with much protestation.

[Interesting side note: the British are primarily worried, it seems, that the debt could work its way up to 100% of GDP.  Did you know that after WWII, their national debt was almost 250% of GDP???  250%!  I mean, I remember learning that Britain was suffering after the war, but I really never appreciated just how insanely in debt they were - or how much it impacted them.  Especially compared to the US' post-war boom - crazy stuff].

Anyway, as the UK welfare state is rather well-entrenched and beloved (and hated, simultaneously, by the same people - it's all very complicated) cutting spending is quite difficult indeed.  Nobody likes it, but the cuts are being branded - rather skillfully, really - as "austerity measures" which are "tough but fair," and generally sold with a heavy sigh and a "we'll get through this together, chaps" spirit that seems to hearken back to the post-war bootstrap-pulling bonanza.  And aside from some student protests, which everyone mostly ignores (disruptive drum-banging aside), most people are shrugging and tolerating it all.

This is all background.   The main point is that there is a fair amount of "time to put up with being broke again" happening right now. But when the City of London tries to cut some superfluous transport jobs, the transport workers are having NONE of this "austerity measure" nonsense and are, instead, marching out of their jobs to protest - over and over again.  So the tube lines stop running, and the buses fill up, and people walk to work - anecdotally, I've heard they'll walk for hours.  

Side note: British people = crazy?  Maybe so.  I think they want to prove they could still have the stubborn resolution necessary to handle another Blitz, if necessary, and in the absence of a Blitz, they survive these strikes.  So the surprisingly unhostile public response to this massive inconvenience might, in fact, be gratitude for the fact that the tube workers are giving everybody a chance to prove their quiet endurance.  Too much?  I dunno, what I've learned so far is that everything in the modern British psyche is due to WWII.  Either "losing the empire," as they put it, or being broke for ages.  But back on-topic.

Tonight and all of tomorrow, there pretty much isn't a tube system.  The funny thing is, though, they're mostly arguing over cutting the jobs of ticket agents... and, true story, nobody buys tickets from ticket agents any more.  I mean, I do, but that's just because the machines won't take my 20th-century American credit card (the British are very proud of the fact that their credit cards have a "chip and pen" system that's cooler than ours or something, whatever).  But aside from helping the occasional cash-strapped, very annoyed American like me, basically they aren't doing much.  

Now, I'm not saying the tube workers are all in the wrong here.  I think the city should keep the same number of workers total, but move those 800 jobs to signal-workers. because the signals fail all the freaking time, I swear.  "Signal failure" this, "signal failure" that, and whaddaya know, no central line today.  But I digress.

The point: EVERY MONTH there is a day when London is just in shambles because the union and the management can't agree on these freaking station agent jobs.  Just GET IT OVER WITH ALREADY FOR THE LOVE OF MERCY.

And this weekend, on "bonfire night," full of - you guessed it! - bonfires, as well as loads of fireworks, the firefighters are on strike.  This one doesn't even make sense.  They're striking because management wants them to change their shift schedule so they can check more fire alarms during the day or something.  Seriously, that's one of the reasons.  And they don't want to, because they wouldn't be able to put their kids to bed.   They aren't talking about firing anybody, or cutting wages, or cutting hours or increasing hours - just changing the shift schedule!

Now, I'm not saying that neither side has a point.  I'm sure they both have points.  And I'm sure they could both find SOME way to compromise.  Instead, management has threatened to sack EVERYBODY (yeah, fire every firefighter in London, GREAT PLAN GUYS) and the firefighters have responded by deciding to just sit out the night with the most fires each year.

all I have to say to that is:  PEOPLE DIE IN FIRES.  can you really not find any other day to strike?  really?  none at all?

This week in London, London's public services are on strike.  Up next:  NHS doctors refuse to do surgery, will stand back with their arms crossed and shout insults at the 3rd-year med students who are trying to take their places.

I wouldn't be much surprised. 

ghooooooooosts!

Last night, in honor of Halloween, William and I went on a "Ghost of the West End" walk, subtitled "Apparations, Alleyways and Ale."  It was a rather pleasant evening, not too chilly and no rain at all (downright paradisiacal for London this time of year!), and we wandered all around the theater district and into St. James' Park.  Our guide was an enthusiastic woman who was very fond of "atmosphere" - every little street we went down, it seemed, was "the most atmospheric in all of London!"

The spookiest ghost we heard about, by far, was the ghost of Sellis, the Duke of Cumberland's manservant, who died a grisly death in St. James' Palace.  As luck (or strategic vandalism by the walk guides, who knows?) would have it, the two streetlamps across the street from the palace weren't working, so we were standing in nearly pitch-black darkness, staring at the silhouette of the palace, as this woman told the story... the Duke of Cumberland called for help late one night, screaming that he was murdered, and guards rushed in to find him covered in blood.  After a good deal of panic they discovered that his wounds were only superficial, and he said he had woken up to find a blade stabbing him repeatedly, and as he raised his hands to ward it off, the attack suddenly stopped.  After his wounds were treated, he said, "But where's my manservant, Sellis?"

The guards rushed in to Sellis' room, and as they approached the door they heard a strange gurgling noise.  (Now you have to imagine William going "oooooOOOOoooOOOO!" in your ear to get the full effect.  He did this at every remotely spooky moment.  And sometimes just crossing the street.)

They came in to find him on his bed, throat slit - nearly decapitated, in fact - blood gurgling up from his throat.  Dramatic pause.

The official story was that Sellis had tried to kill the Duke, but halfway through his conscience kicked in and instead he went back to his room and committed suicide.

The unofficial story was that the Duke had impregnated Sellis' teenage daughter, and that the poor girl had committed suicide.  When Sellis confronted the Duke, the Duke killed his servant, and then stabbed himself a few times to make it look like it was the other way around.  Or did the Duke sleep with Sellis' wife?  Or did Sellis catch the Duke in flagrante delict delicto of the homosexual variety?  Those are all rather different explanations, but at any rate,  most people supposed there had been some sort of a coverup.

And now - so they say - the ghost of Sellis walks the corridors of St. James' Palace after dark, his arrival always signaled by a gurgling noise and the sickly sweet smell of fresh human blood...

oooooOOOooooOOOOoooOOO!

William's favorite ghost was the ghost of William Terriss, a hugely popular actor who was brutally killed by a jealous competitor.  While there's supposedly an always-cold spot where he was stabbed (40 times! seems excessive), his actual ghost is spotted standing on the platform at Covent Garden tube stop, but never boarding a train.  The tube stop wasn't there in his life, but the story has it that his favorite bakery stood on the spot where the platform is now, and his ghost is actually just waiting for some buns before rehearsal.

My favorite ghost lives in the basement of Samuel Pepys' house, No 14 Buckingham St.  Pepys is supposed to haunt there, too, but that's pretty boring.  But a few painters also lived there in later years, and supposedly there's a pretty young woman in a blue dressing gown who runs laughing down the hallway and vanishes into the drawing room - ready to pose as a nude model for a painting.

Happy Halloweeen!