As You Like It

The new Branaugh "As You Like It" adaptation Utterly Owned. It's set in Japan and features some of the most pristine camerawork of any movie I've ever watched. Also sumo wrestling, which is, I believe, new territory for Shakespeare.

Horror and the Greeks

Had a thought today in my Greek Literature class-

Might Japanese horror films be in some way the bastard offspring of the Greek dramatic tradition, esp. the "Agamemnon" of Aeschylus? Both the genre and the play have at their center parents who mistreat their children and set off a vicious cycle of bloodletting that shows no sign of abatement at the end of their narratives. Similarly, the idea of positive alternatives of action does not appear in either; Agamemnon must either sacrifice his daughter or betray his oath to join the Achaians against Troy, and in "The Ring" Naomi Watts has to arrange the death of people around her to save herself and her son. Coincidence? Thoughts?

Some Quasi-Wordsworthian Doggerel I Knocked out in Greek Civ.

Such faithful trees as Benedict would bless,
Their pious arms the very props of heav'n;
Come morn, low orison do these confess,
Sooth vesper in the even.

At end of day, this rustic hermitage
Lets rise its voice in the breeze's chosen key;
An Ave lifts above the foliage
In easeful harmony.

And a passing traveller, by chance intruding here,
And staring up amidst the warbling throng,
Pauses, a moment idling, so to hear
The arbor's holy song.

-Thomas Banks-

No Second Troy

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have tought to ignorant men most vile ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

-William Butler Yeats-

Occasional Pop Music Post

"Can't Believe a Single Word" by VHS or Beta (sadly a terrible name) is the best Brit pop song this side of Definitely Maybe. Although I'm told the band's actually Kentuckian.

Telos

-"EK TON DIAPHTHERONTON KALLISTEN HARMONIAN GIGNESTHAI"-
-Heraclitus-



The world's last song at last outsung,
The singer stands in silent pride
To hear his final note upglide
The sounding mountaintops among.

The loom's expance of scene fulfilled,
The weaver stands him back aways
To admire his web with awful gaze,
By his hands' crafting overthrilled.

A voice sounds forth, and drowns the ryhme
And cadence of the singer's hymn,
And in his muteness sings to him
The tonic of the Song of Time.

A hand outstreches, and it tears
The product of the weaver's pains,
And in its place there now remains
The many colored Loom of Years.

-Thomas Banks-

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was a great novelist and poet who had the odd chance to be a native pessimist in an era not known for its pessimism. He was born in 1844, an Englishman who lived to see a large part of the world made British, and all manner of apparent progress in politics, industry and science, and he was disconcerted over most of it.

The following, written in 1912, is his thought on one of the great symbols of the end of that period.

"The Convergence of the Twain"

In the solitude of the Sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rythmic tidal lyres.

Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls- grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"

Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

Prepared a sinister mate
For her- so gaily great
A Shape of Ice- for the time fat and dissociate.

Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate wielding of their later history.

Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,

Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" and each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

-Thomas Hardy-