A New Renaissance is Upon Us!

I've been out of the loop on upcoming movies, so I am indebted to the ever-delightful Carl Pyrdum for news that Beowulf (the movie!) will hit the silver screen in November. Unfortunately, it won't be directed by Mel Gibson. Which is too bad: I was so looking forward to a film with a script entirely in Old English. I had even pictured how it would absolutely have to begin: Charlton Heston, all bearded and grizzly, his face illuminated by firelight, shouting Hwaet!. (Hwaet, the first word of the poem, essentially means "pay attention, losers.")

Well, as the Anglo-Saxons would have said, wá lá wá! (to translate, insert expression of disappointment of your choice). The script is in modern English, and Charlton Heston is not in the cast. Instead we have Ray Winstone (as Beowulf), Crispin Glover (as Grendel), Angelina Jolie (as Grendel's mother), Angelina Jolie's breasts (as Angelina Jolie's breasts), and Anthony Hopkins (as Hrothgar).

I'm a little taken aback that Grendel's mom appears human in the film. I've always pictured Grendel as looking a little like Chewbacca. Since there weren't any female wookies in any of the Star Wars movies I saw, my mental image of Grendel's mother has always been much vaguer. I did, however, assume some kind of family resemblance.

But on to larger issues: in the past three years we've had a major movie based on the Trojan War, another on the Battle of Thermopylae, another on Alexander the Great, an HBO series on the civil wars that finished off the Roman Republic, and now a major movie on the only surviving Old English epic poem. Is it possible that the entertainment-industrial complex is so alarmed at what they've done to the nation's intellectual life that they are now trying to reconnect us to the wellsprings of our cultural heritage, the history and literature of the classical and medieval worlds?

What's next? I would be surprised if there weren't several movies based on Greek mythology in the works. If you've read any Greek myths, you know that people are always a) having sex and b) turning into plants. Ready-made plots with lots of nudity and opportunities for cool special effects. What studio would walk away from that?

The Song of Roland would make a great movie too: lots of violence, fighting between Westerners and Muslims. Everything an American audience could want. No sex as I recall, but I'm sure Hollywood will find a way.

The possibilities for television are endless. Every episode of the L-Word could end with a televised reading of one of Sappho's poems. Jerry Springer could invite mother-son couples onto his show to talk about what the Oedipus myth means to them.

I'm really excited. Ten years ago when I pitched my idea of a musical based on the life of the Emperor Caligula, directors acted like I was some kind of nut. But now....

What a great time to be alive. The American public will get a classical education just by watching movies. Kevin Sorbo might get regular work again. And studio executives will start returning my calls.

Camus, Melville, Beowulf and Vietnam?

It's kind of unsettling, actually, but every now and then Bush and his associates show signs of something resembling cultural literacy. Roughly a year ago, there were rumors that Bush was reading Camus' The Stranger and discussing it with Tony Snow. Then, last weekend on television, Karl Rove seemed to be groping for literary analogies to explain the Democrats' relentless pursuit of him. First he compared the Democrats and their subpoenas and hearings to crazed Ahabs pursuing Moby Dick. But then he felt the need to go back earlier in literary history: "I'm a myth...You know, I'm Beowulf, you know, I'm Grendel." But then (no doubt mentally straining to come up with the names of other characters from Medieval epics) he added, "I don't know who I am. But they're after me."

A friend of mine who used to teach literature at Western Reserve Academy was actually impressed that Rove could name both Beowulf and Grendel, even if he seemed kind of vague on other details. And I guess I should be impressed too: outing undercover intelligence agents and conducting Stalinesque purges of U.S. attorneys probably doesn't leave you a lot of time for catching up on the books you blew off in high school. On the other hand, now that Rove doesn't have a job anymore, he's got a lot more time to read. Maybe his literary analogies will get more impressive: "I'm Orestes, and the Democrats, you know, are like the Eumenidies."


But let's go back to Bush and The Stranger. I have to confess to being a little skeptical that he has actually read any Camus. I think it's much more likely that the press have (as usual) gotten their French Existentialists mixed up and the POTUS was actually reading some Sartre. Seriously--take a look at the official Presidential Advance Manual, with its instructions on how to keep demonstrators away from the press and even out of sight of the President. Clearly, this is a man for whom Hell is other people--at least people with opinions.

And there are clues that the President is branching out a bit intellectually. He might actually be reading history as well as fiction. At least, that's my inference from a speech he gave today comparing the war in Iraq to the one in Vietnam. He warned of regional chaos if U.S. troops withdraw, such as engulfed Cambodia and Laos after Vietnam. Now I'm finding this historical comparison a little weak. If you're looking for the cause of the Cambodian bloodbath, you're more likely to find it in the country being bombed for 14 months by the U.S. Air Force and then its occupation by U.S. ground troops. As for Laos, we armed a proxy army to fight the North Vietnamese and Laotian communists.

So either the President's a little shaky at drawing historical analogies, or he's got plans for Syria and Iran we don't know about yet. But cheer up: this is progress. George W. Bush is, after all, the man who supposedly told Joe Biden, "Brief me on Europe." I wonder how he started? "Well, Mr. President, it's a continent..." And now he can name individual countries--ones that aren't even in Europe. He's still rusty on more advanced reasoning, but our President mastering basic facts and showing an awareness of historical events is something to cheer. Because rarely is the question asked, is our politicians learning?

Seinfeld and the Military-Industrial Complex

I was poking around on the website of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency the other day (don't ask), and found myself reading about a project called Intestinal Fortitude. While naturally every word of a DARPA project summary is gripping, this passage in particular caught my eye:

To increase the amount of energy available to the soldier from either food rations or nontraditional foodstuffs, the program explores the use of cellulose-degrading beneficial bacteria in the gut. These novel “fibr-biotics” are able to break down non-digestible fiber (cellulose and hemicellulose) into glucose, which can be directly absorbed for energy. When added to the diet of deployed soldiers, these novel fibr-biotics will be able convert non-digestible fiber into usable energy.

Cellulose is one of the primary components of grass and leaves. In other words, when the soldier of the future runs out of field rations, he's going to be able to graze. The DARPA summary says little about the current state of this project. But then a friend suggested I search the incomparable Danger Room, Wired's military and national security blog, where I discover that I am, as usual, behind the times. Intestinal Fortitude was not the entire project, merely the name of phase one, which was wrapped up in March 2007. Under a DARPA contract, scientists at the Agricultural Research Service sorted through pig manure, isolating 'degrading bacteria' to figure out why our porcine brethren can digest things we can't. In phase 2, scientists are examining human feces, isolating potential fibr-biotics.

In other words, they want to make the human digestive tract (or at least some human digestive tracts) more like a pig's. Now this is far from full-blown hybridization, but the project inevitably brings to mind the Seinfeld episode, "The Bris," in which Kramer thinks he's seen a human-pig hybrid in a hospital:

Kramer: I'm tellin' ya! The pigman is alive. The government's been experimenting with pigmen since the fifties.

Jerry: Will you stop it. Just because a hospital gets a grant to study DNA doesn't mean they are creating a race of mutant pigmen.

Kramer: Oh, Jerry. Would you wake up to reality! It's a military thing. They're probably creating a whole army of pig warriors.

The question of the hour, ladies and gentleman: is DARPA so desperate for ideas they're stealing them from Seinfeld? While I am one of those who has long held that Seinfeld was one of the best American television shows of all time, I'm not sure that qualifies it to play an even marginal role in national security efforts. I re-read the script of the episode "The Masseuse," (which deals with Jerry's 13-year no-vomiting streak), to see if it could possibly have provided any inspiration for the Navy's vomit beam.* No dice (it was a long shot, I realize).

I won't say rest easy. But perhaps we should rest a little less uneasily with my modest evidence that military scientific research isn't solely inspired by Larry David. Still, American military and political affairs have an air of unreality, to say the least. The great war news this month was that U.S. casualties were down in July, so the 'surge' must be working. However, casualties have dropped during July since the war began--nobody wants to fight when it's 120 degrees. Back home, the Supreme Court spent its time this summer debating whether "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" is constitutionally protected speech. And currently the campaign of a half-African presidential candidate is dogged by the question "Is he black enough?"

Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld may not be the minds behind the latest military research, but somewhere along the way our national life really did get to be a show about nothing.



*Thanks to my friend KT for alerting me to the existence of the vomit beam. Or as she put it, "I'll see your grazing soldier and raise you one puke gun."

On the Cusp of Two (or more) Cultures

There's a relic on the shelves of my workplace: C. M. Bowra's Oxford Book of Greek Verse. I take it down from time to time, just to look at it fondly. I don't know when it was last checked out. I call it a relic because the title is literally true: the poetry is all in Ancient Greek--no translations. It was published in 1930, at a time when one could reasonably assume that many people (mostly men) had learned Greek and Latin in the course of their education. I wistfully imagine some old gent who walked the same sidewalks I do taking that book home to read Pindar or Hesiod in the original.

I don't know Greek or Latin--a fact I used to regret very much but no longer do. Nevertheless I still think it a little sad that a classical education has largely gone the way of the mastodon. Partly because I can identify just a little with the people who had that education, or at least with a feeling some of them must have had as they saw the generations after them growing up ignorant of learning they considered essential. In college my teacher for a course in Shakespeare's tragedies was an old Oxonian steeped in the classics. I remember him fondly because he was such a kindly man. But I also remember his visible distress on discovering I hadn't read Aeschylus. He told me to go home and read The Oresteia: "Without a working knowledge of those plays you simply aren't an educated person." A number of my friends to whom I've told that story are appalled by the bigotry of the comment, by the Dead White Male world view it expresses, but I can laugh sadly about it in some small way, because I know that feeling: I experience it with teenage library patrons all the time. A girl has to read a biography of a famous woman and when I suggest names I discover she has no idea who Susan B. Anthony or Dorothy Day are. A boy needs a "classic novel" to read for school and I tell him about The Red Badge of Courage and 1984 as if they were personal secrets of mine.

I have similar experiences with friends and co-workers as well. At work one day I sardonically quoted a passage of the King James Bible that I thought particularly apt to the situation. I got a blank look instead of a smile of recognition.

Of course, there's much more to all this besides changing conceptions of what an education is. In the case of my teenage patrons it's a result of a sharp decline in educational standards, and (probably) people who aren't readers raising their children to be non-readers. And that classical education I can feel so wistful about was part of a rigidly stratified society culturally dominated by white males. And my prized knowledge of the King James Bible is product of an oppressive cultural environment that I am still recovering from. But still....

Addendum: Critic Gail Caldwell wrote an essay that covered similar issues with much more depth (and a somewhat different take) in yesterday's Globe. Unfortunately it's only available to subscribers at the moment. Hopefully it will soon be available in its entirety elsewhere on the web.

When Is Translation a Bad Idea?

Julia Alvarez's novel about the Mirabel sisters has the mildly haunting title In the Time of the Butterflies. The title is beautiful in the Spanish edition as well: En el tiempo de las mariposas.

Someone donated a German translation to my library.

The title? Die Zeit der Schmetterlinge.

Good-bye, Harry Potter

In fewer than five hours, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will officially be available in bookstores. One of my oldest friends is actually going to his local Borders at midnight to buy his copy then. Regarding Harry Potter, I feel the same way I do during baseball season or Super Bowl weekend: like an atheist in Mexico during Semana Santa, surrounded by the devotees of a god in which I do not believe. Frankly, I have watched far too much bad television science fiction and read far too many shallow detective novels to begrudge anyone their guilty pleasures. If reading Harry Potter makes life in George Bush's America slightly more tolerable, by all means, be at your local Borders at the stroke of midnight.

But I'm tired of Harry Potter. For the past few weeks, it's been all-Harry-all-the-time. I have been unable to read The New York Times or The Boston Globe, listen to NPR, or even glance at a newsstand magazine rack without being reminded of Pottermania. And I am baffled at the invocation of the Potter phenomenon to justify our fears or ease our anxieties. It's been argued that Harry Potter has saved reading and maintained that Harry Potter is further evidence of the power of marketing and the boundless mass appetite for homogeneous crap. The Boy Who Lived has even provided an outlet for the rampant paranoia of conservative Christians, who think he's a tool of Satan. Meanwhile a bishop in the irreligious UK thinks Harry Potter can be a tool for teaching Christian values. Everyone seems to be expecting quite a lot of one little guy who doesn't even exist.

But this will all, thankfully, soon be behind us. And while everyone else is devouring their copies of the last Harry Potter this weekend, I will be finishing Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India. I've heard one of the major characters dies (Mountbatten? Churchill? Nehru?). I'm nowhere finishing it, so if you know how it ends, don't spoil it for me.

BONG HiTS 4 JESUS

I was watching Monty Python's Flying Circus on DVD last night, which led me to ponder the preference I and so many of my friends have for British comedy. The shows that get distribution on this side of the pond are clearly better than much of what passes for comedy in the U.S. But why? I was forced to conclude that with the exception of the teams behind The Daily Show and The Simpsons, the best American writers shy away from the comic because they're too daunted by the prospect of trying to compete with American reality. Come up with the best sitcom imaginable: it could not compete with the day-to-day idiocy of this nation. I thought the absurdity of American public discourse had reached its height ten years ago when some of the most prominent legal minds in the republic were struggling with the weighty question, "Is oral sex really sex?"

Clearly, I need to have more faith in our society.

This week the Supreme Court of the United States--with a list of cases pending on the future of integrated public schooling, the antitrust character of the American business climate, and a human being's life--took time to deliberate whether a banner that reads "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" [sic] is First-Amendment protected speech.

I realize anyone reading this is at least somewhat familiar with the case, but I'll recap. In January 2002, when the Olympic torch passed through his home town of Juneau, Alaska, eighteen-year-old Joseph Frederick wanted to get on TV. To maximize his chances, he held up a banner reading "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS." He happened to do this across the street from his school. Upon seeing the banner, principal Deborah Morse ran across the street, ripped it out of his hands, and suspended Frederick for ten days, on the grounds that the banner could be interpreted as promoting drug use. Frederick sued on the grounds that his right to free speech had been violated.

And this is where it really gets bizarre: conservative religious groups side with civil libertarians on this one, out of concern that this case sets a precedent for silencing expression of religious beliefs. Well, guess what, Deborah Morse? Guess what, Southern Baptist Convention? 'BONG HiTS 4 JESUS' doesn't mean anything, you f***ing morons! The phrase is nonsense--unless pot smoking becomes a sacrament, and I really can't see Benedict XVI going for that anytime soon, no matter how many lapsed Catholics would doubtless become active church members again.

Although interestingly, according to the majority opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts, if Frederick had declared himself to be advocating smoking pot as a religious practice, he would have had First Amendment protection. (And to think that Christopher Hitchens and Terry Eagleton have been bad-mouthing religion lately...) Or if his banner could have been interpreted as advocating legalization of marijuana, that too would have altered matters, Roberts indicates.

Instead, Roberts argues, the most likely interpretation of Frederick's banner is either as an imperative: "[Take] bong hits" or as a celebration of drug use: "bong hits [are a good thing]."
Therefore, Deborah Morse had the right to tear down Frederick's banner, as he was advocating conduct that was illegal and that would constitute an infraction of school rules.

"Bong hits [are a good thing]"--how often do you think that sentence has appeared in a Supreme Court opinion?

But guess what? He wasn't at school! Even though the Supreme Court describes watching the Olympic torch as a "school-sponsored/school-supervised" event, the Ninth Circuit of Appeals (which ruled in favor of Frederick) noted that he was not required to submit a permission slip (as is customary for school events), teachers did not try to detain students who left, and furthermore, Frederick was not even on school property when he was holding the banner. No reasoning, however tortured, could establish that he was under the school's jurisdiction when the event happened.

For reassurance that there is still some sanity in this country, read Justice Stevens' disdainful dissent. His disgust that the Court's time was being wasted with this idiocy is palpable. It appears that the Supreme Court, like most of the other major institutions of the Republic, has been drafted into bit performances for the Industrial-Entertainment complex.