Even though I worked a full and comparatively difficult day on Saturday, the rest of the weekend was just wonderful:
First, while I was working my beautiful and ingenious wife came across an opportunity for the two of us to attend a performance that very same evening -- for free! -- of our local and quite prestigious classical orchestra, and seized it with the appropriate zeal. The performance was of two pieces: first, a suite of themes from William Walton's score to the marvelous 1944 film Henry V, directed by (and starring) the great Laurence Olivier. I saw the movie on Turner Classic Movies some few years back and really enjoyed it: it's a very lively, colorful, storybook version of Shakespeare's history play. Though of course opinions may vary: I recall that I persuaded my grandmother to watch it also and she found it overly artificial. But I remember enjoying it quite: what she called artificiality I interpreted as what I've already called that storybook quality. It was made in the darkest days of World War II as propaganda for the British war effort (or, if one wishes to be treat the motives behind the movie more gently, we can say it was made to "boost British morale." I think it was Henry James who said somewhere that "true art should uplift the heart"). I distinctly remember the TCM host at the time (Robert Osborne, I expect) telling me the viewer that, due to the shortages of wartime, Olivier had to marshal his scant resources very wisely (the chain mail seen on the soldiers was actually, I believe, all wool) and ended up using some ridiculously high percentage (80? 90?) of shot footage. (IMDb trivia confirms the wool story but says nothing about the percentage of footage, alas.) The movie is available nowadays in a DVD published as part of the Criterion Collection; it is not, however, at present in the part of that collection available on HuluPlus. Boo.
But I didn't especially recall the music. It turned out to be excellent, by turns boisterous and movingly melancholy, presented alongside "narration," which is to say an actor read passages from the film/play, along with a piece of another play that was pulled into the film: the film shows the death of Falstaff, who doesn't appear in Henry V the play but only in its prequel plays, the two parts of Henry IV. (As Falstaff dies, we hear Henry's rejection of Falstaff ["...but being awake, I do despise my dream"] from Henry IV, Part 2. Then there's a piece used in the film that isn't even from Shakespeare but from his contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, his play Tamburlaine the Great [also in two parts]. That was also read, and confused me a little because I didn't recall the borrowing, not having yet read Tamburlaine when I originally saw the movie.) The actor performed the passages with impressive and entertaining gusto. I was in heaven.
Speaking of heaven: after the Walton suite, and an intermission during which Mer had to chug some boiling-hot coffee for lack of time to properly savor it, we moved on to a piece about the heavens, Holst's The Planets, which, for those of you that don't know, purports to describe the astrological characteristics associated with seven planets of the solar system. The most famous part of the suite is the first movement, "Mars, the Bringer of War," a rhythmic, driving piece of music that's influenced much film music. (Example: many of the battle scenes in Hans Zimmer's score for Gladiator.) The other six movements ("Venus, the Bringer of Peace," "Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age", etc.; that sort of thing is what's meant by "astrological characteristics") haven't been quite as thoroughly mined for inspiration, but they have their famous passages as well. I enjoyed the evening thoroughly, though Mer stated she would have preferred if Holst had perhaps thought to end The Planets with "Mars" for a bigger finish than the suite presently contains. (It actually kind of fades away. They do say it's better to burn out; but that may just be a rock and roll frame of mind.)
(A quick digression here: though when Mer informed me that she had obtained, or could obtain, these tickets, which by the way [a digression within a digression?] turned out to admit us to an extremely expensive and desirable piece of orchestra-watching real estate, I immediately made with the happy noises, I was also prompt afterwards in scoping out the evening's program. And may I just say how glad I was that said program consisted of such melodic offerings and nothing atonal! My tolerance is not high.)
But this blog is about books and the reading of them which we do in this our life. So: where did we leave off? Oh yes: Tolstoy, Hadji Murad, "something of a departure." Earlier in the year I read Pushkin's story "Kirdjali" in the collection titled The Captain's Daughter, and though I see I didn't write anything about that book at all, "Kirdjali" is, I think, an exemplar of the tradition of bandit tales that Tolstoy was both joining and reacting to. It's about a bandit (the title of the story is his name) who has all sorts of crazy exploits, and Pushkin's narration of each is capped with the refrain, "Such is Kirdjali!" At this point I only remember the refrain; the story itself evaporated like unto the morning dew. Tolstoy's treatment of the subject in Hadji Murad seemed a little weightier. My understanding of the historical situation is entirely absent, but what I gathered from the story is that the Russian Empire is expanding into the Caucasus region, and some of the indigenous inhabitants are less than altogether thrilled. The bandit/rebel at the heart of the story, the title of which is once again his name, betrays his rebel buddies and goes over to collaborate with the Russians. Around this switcheroo in loyalties, Tolstoy builds up a picture of society on the Russian frontier (and elsewhere: there is an episode, for example, describing the Czar in St Petersburg, and how his moods and whims affect the orders he gives regarding how to deal with Hadji Murad's defection to his side). It didn't bowl me over like The Death of Ivan Ilych but I think it would repay revisiting.
While I was reading Tolstoy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez died. I've read my way through One Hundred Years of Solitude a couple of times, but to mark the sad occasion I opted instead, once I was done with Tolstoy, for the famous Garcia Marquez work that I hadn't read, Love in the Time of Cholera. The ambition of the latter novel seems just a touch more modest: it covers the passage of only fifty years instead of a century. Easy peasy. The fifty years are a half-century of unrequited love on the part of the main character, Florentino Ariza, for his first love and the love of his life, Fermina Daza, who spurned him to marry another man. While Florentino waits, with a preternatural assurance, for the other man to die off so he can get another chance to proclaim his love to Fermina, he whiles away the time with a prodigious number of love affairs, passions great and small. Unlike Solitude, nothing overtly magical happens in the book, yet it's suffused with a magical, miraculous outlook on life itself. I really enjoyed Solitude both times I read it, and after it Love was in no way a disappointment; which seems like pretty high praise to me.
Then I read Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the book he went to Walden Pond to write, a reminiscence of his journey over the titular waters with his brother. There's more digression than reminiscence, and while I enjoyed the digressions the book didn't really build to anything much. Also, I found this odd: Thoreau carried the idea for the book around for several years, years during which his brother died, but I certainly have no idea why the Week was so important to him, what it meant, and there's no sense whatsoever of the relationship between the brothers or of the brother's character and personality. Apparently Thoreau's purpose in writing the book was something altogether different from that sort of memorial. I don't want to knock Thoreau's book though, given that I clearly didn't grok the purpose behind it very much at all.
I turned to Thoreau out of a desire to whittle down my supply of library books. Being that they are almost endlessly renewable, I haven't been making much progress through them at all; but Thoreau got me started. I turned next to an omnibus volume of Ursula K. Le Guin's first three novels, set in the same universe as her more famous scifi novels The Left Hand of Darkness (which I've read) and The Dispossessed (which I haven't). The novels are Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions. The universe, made clearer in these early novels than I recall it being in Left Hand, is one in which humans have settled various worlds and evolution has worked its way with them so that the inhabitants of one planet have become a different species than the inhabitants of another. ("Different species" is meant in a strictly scientific sense: unable to interbreed so as to produce fertile offspring.) Now, preparing against the coming of an intergalactic alien foe, some worlds among this diaspora are attempting to form a League of Worlds. Their task is made difficult by the fact that they have no faster-than-light travel, at least not travel that living flesh can survive. They do, however, have instantaneous communication. (As I understand it, the novel The Dispossessed is in part about the development of this device, called the ansible.)
Le Guin is what hard SF fans have classified as a writer of "soft" SF: she deals more with matters of characterization than, say, Arthur C. Clarke would, and the basis of her futuristic extrapolations are frequently the social sciences like anthropology and sociology. (I believe it's "the done thing" to mention at this point that her father was a famous anthropologist.) It was amusing therefore to find the following passage a few pages past the prologue of Rocannon's World, which in light of the above I couldn't help but see as something of a mission statement for Le Guin as much as for the protagonist of the novel:
But what if lightspeed and even FTL bombers were very much like bronze swords, compared to the weapons of the Enemy? What if the weapons of the Enemy were things of the mind? Would it not be well to learn a little of the different shapes minds come in, and their powers?Yes, let us learn of the mind!
Also while I was at work on Saturday, Mer discovered that one of the branches of the county library was having a book sale. I hope, Gentle Reader, that you have the pleasure of knowing the kind: 50 cents for a paperback, one dollar for a hardcover: cheap bliss. She bought 25 books! Today, in turn, as the book sale waned, was half-price day: even cheaper, even blissier, and so it was my turn to go. I hit the artsy-fartsy classics section hard and then browsed around for serendipitous finds, coming away with 13 books for under four dollars. So I guess the library books will have to get renewed a few more times. One of the books I bought was also by Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest, so I figured to start in on that as soon as I finished with the omnibus.
Which I've now done; but this entry is already sufficiently lengthy. Until next time, Gentle Reader --
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