Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/21/21

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Vivat Academia!

Movie: Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, 2000) (Cinemax).

Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, edited by Kenneth Palmer.

TV: Holiday Baking Championship: Behind the Buttercream (Food Network); The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC); Landscapers: Episode Three (HBO Max); The Witcher: Kaer Morhen (Netflix).

I've been having flashbacks to my days in academia lately. I mentioned a couple of days ago that some of them had been triggered by reading Anthony Trollope's The Warden, with its somewhat snarky allusions to the Pre-Raphaelites and mild satire on Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens. I might have missed those if I hadn't spent so many years long ago trying to become a specialist in Victorian literature and culture. But I really think the nostalgia for the old university scene was touched off a few months ago by the Netflix series The Chair, which had fun with the tempest-in-a-teapot quarrels of a college English department. It brought to mind what's known as "Sayre's law," that academic politics are especially bitter because the stakes are so low.

My latest surge of academic memories comes from having finished The Warden and turned my attention to re-reading Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. I had a heavy dose of that story in graduate school not only from a course in Renaissance literature, but also from the earlier version I read in my Chaucer course. But what tugs at my memory is what happened at my Ph.D. orals: One of my inquisitors was the professor from that Renaissance course, for who I wrote a paper about Shakespeare's Troilus. I don't remember much about the paper except that it was something about the self-consciousness of the title characters of the play. But then, a couple of years later, as I stumbled my way through my orals, the professor (who had given me an A, or maybe an A-, on the paper), thought he was doing me a favor by asking me questions about the play. At least I think he did it out of kindness -- I hadn't slept for two nights before the exam, and it must have shown -- but I couldn't remember a thing about Troilus and Cressida. It was agonizing, but somehow I passed anyway.

Granted, T&C is one of Shakespeare's stranger plays, often rhetorically difficult, with ambiguous, dislikable characters and lots of classical allusions that go over the heads of contemporary readers or viewers of the play's comparatively infrequent performances. But I feel it my duty to bone up on the play once again, which means reading the academic prose of the Arden edition's introduction. I haven't gotten to the play itself yet; I'm still plodding through Prof. Kenneth Palmer's discussion of its parallel structure and other features of interest mainly to scholars -- of which I am no longer one.

My other dip into academia lately was watching Curtis Hanson's Wonder Boys last night. It's set in a college in Pittsburgh, where Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas), a novelist teaching in the English department's creative writing program, goes through a variety of improbable but funny trials and tribulations, some of which pivot on his affair with the college's chancellor, who happens to be the wife of the English department chairman. The movie was well-received by the critics, especially Douglas's performance, but it bombed at the box office. I had seen it before and remembered being amused by it, but I have to say it feels a little dated. For one thing, the sexually predatory edge to the gay editor played by Robert Downey Jr. looms a bit larger than it might have 21 years, and our ability to respond with laughter to his "transvestite" girlfriend has shifted a bit toward discomfort. Still, it features some good performances by Douglas, Downey, Frances McDormand, and Tobey Maguire, as well as Bob Dylan's Oscar-winning song "Things Have Changed." They have indeed.

Tobey Maguire and Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys (Michael Chabon, 2000)

I also watched the latest installment of HBO's beautifully performed "true crime" drama, Landscapers, which is being eked out slowly with a new installment every Monday. I don't understand why it's being released this way, as it's not a particularly suspenseful drama. Maybe HBO is just counting on our waiting eagerly for another chance to watch Olivia Colman and David Thewlis create fascinatingly complicated characters.

On The Witcher, Geralt (Henry Cavill) and Ciri (Freya Allan) make their way to his home, which is full of other witchers who wind up fighting this week's monster, which has possessed one of their own. Great special effects, but I haven't quite figured out what's going on in the other plot of the series that involves Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), who falls in with a bunch of elves.