Speak up or don’t speak up: that is the question.
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The tweets and texts of the woman beside me
Through Acts I, II, III and IV of Hamlet,
Or to remind her of the no-texting rule
Announced at the commencement of the play.
The bright illumination of the screen
Distracts me. What has she to say which is greater
Than one hundred and twenty five dollars,
My ticket’s price; or the words of the Bard?
I should have gone to London to see this
Surely the West End crowd is more polite.
At last, I speak: “Could you please not do that?”
Receiving a mutinous glare, I add:
“It’s distracting!” Lo, cooperation!
In the final act, the drama exists
Only on the stage. The rest is silence.

Labels: Hamlet, rudeness in theaters, Shakespeare

posted by Elizabeth at 3:21 PM   2 Comments

In a screenwriting class I took lo these many years ago, the importance of a film’s opening image was brought up. The instructor was male, most of the class was male, and the example he used was male iconography: “A gun in your face.” It was from a Clint Eastwood movie, one of those interchangeable Dirty Harry movies. An opening image, intoned the teacher, should immediately establish the themes and concerns of the movie. I’d have thought the words “Clint Eastwood” and “Dirty Harry” would suffice, but apparently, “a gun in your face” drives it home.

The opening image of Jane Campion’s film “Bright Star” about the love between John Keats and his neighbor Fanny Brawne, is an extreme close-up of a needle piercing a cloth, a close image, very close, so close that you can see the fibers of the cloth furring its surface. This, then, will be a film about intimacy and domesticity, about creativity and limitations. We see half of just one stitch, after all, not a dramatic sweep of a draped skirt, so we know we are in different territory than a typical costume drama, or “frock flick.”

“My stitching has more merit and admirers than both of your two scribblings put together,” Fanny tells John Keats and Charles Brown, as they rudely shoo her from the room so they can work on their poetry. “And I can make money from it.”

That one small scene encapsulates all the conflicting forces of the film: her utilitarian talent and his ethereal one, a woman’s “craft” versus a man’s “high art,” the rivalry among the poets Keats and Brown and the interloper Fanny; the lovers Fanny and Keats and the jealous, carping Brown, who yearns for fulfillment from poetry, Fanny, and Keats all and finds it in none, and all three of them against the fate of fortune. None of them has one.

The nip of poverty is a real wolf at the door in this film: if Keats were to marry Fanny, he would have to get a job and give up his poetry, if he were to marry Fanny as a poet, her family, already scraping by to maintain a respectable bourgeois façade, would have to support him. So instead of making love they yearn and make do. “Making do” is another theme of the film – not only does Fanny design and sew all of her own clothes, but nearly every character in the film is seen creating something, whether something as basic as a meal or as elaborate as an orchestra composed solely of human voices.

Not for the action junkie or even the impatient, “Bright Star” is an exquisite film. Characters leave a kitchen worthy of Vermeer to step into a meadow worthy of Renoir, and all this visual splendor is accompanied by a blessedly muted soundtrack. We don’t need a swell of string section to emphasize that a thing of beauty is a joy forever. Jane Campion has always been a filmmaker sure of her own eye; it’s nice to know she has faith in ours as well.

Labels: Bright Star, Jane Campion, poetry

posted by Elizabeth at 10:46 AM   0 Comments

I had dinner tonight with a friend, who I'll call Lola, which is so not even close to her name. She is highly educated (Ivy League law school, Ivy League college, and a "prep" so exclusive I never actually thought, growing up in Kirkwood, Missouri and reading short stories in The New Yorker, that I would ever actually meet one of that school's graduates). I asked after her son, who has just begun school in what would be called, in the U.S. (they live abroad), the third grade.


"Oh, that's when you learn cursive!" I pointed out happily, remembering the squat, wide, green signs of the alphabet displayed above the chalkboards in grades three and up and my yearning, when I was mere first-grader, to be in a "big kid" class where those swoops and swirls were mandated homework.


"Cursive is so unnecessary," she grumbled, "so obsolete!"


But --

"The whole point of cursive is that it was faster than printing," she went on. "Why, if everyone types now, do kids have to learn it at all?"


Was the whole point of cursive, I wondered, was that it was faster than printing? I hadn't realized that. But - but -- when they had to sharpen quills and dip them in ink -- did they not have to give more thoughtful consideration and craft, to their words, to their compositions? Was there not keener eloquence in their expression? Was there not a specific identity revealed in handwriting? If not, then why do we study original manuscripts? Why do we have handwriting experts to identify various lunatics? Why, in Twelfth Night , does Malvolio, coming across a forged letter, insist that it is the handwriting of his beloved mistress:


By my life, this is my lady's hand: these be her
very C's, her U's and her T's
and thus she makes her great P's.
It is in contempt of question her hand.

Now, I am not suggesting that Lola's young son be compelled to embrace, just now, this bit of dialogue. It is far too raunchy. The innuendo that Malvolio's lady's C, U (fill in the blank) T --makes great a P -- has not changed since Shakespeare's time. But the thought that a "hand" (handwriting) so exciting a lover should be lost? Replaced by texting? Too sad to contemplate. One of the most erotic things ever uttered to me was a boyfriend (a concert pianist) praising a letter I'd written to him, longhand, not even a love letter, but one "so beautifully expressed, so natural, so perfect, flawless! Like Mozart!" He mainly meant that I had crossed nothing out and that perhaps he was enchanted by the flow of my handwriting. Which, sigh. And ... awwww. Anyway, not something you get from an iPhone's XOXO.

"Well, why learn math, when there are calculators?" I countered to Lola. "Why learn anything at all, when there is Wikipedia?"

"I never write cursive," she grumbled, "I print. And my son hates his handwriting homework."


I hated my handwriting homework, too, but that was primarily because I wanted to be writing SOMETHING -- "My dog is white, except where his neck is grey" was my most pressing communication -- and not just making shapes, which shapes -- that is to say, which j's, k's and h's (which in my hand resemble each other) would come back with little red check marks and suggestions -- "make rounder," "close up." (My disinclination to hear criticism of my writing came early, as you can see.)

"And when I write, I like to edit," she continued. "I can't write a sentence without changing it five times. How can you just write?"

I thought of Alice Walker: "The poem that travels down the arm." I believe I even mimed it to her, the brain, the shoulder, the elbow, the hand.

"I just don't see the point," she shrugged. "And his report cards come back with all these comments."


And he could, I agreed, probably understand the concept of an apple from a single-serving container of applesauce from the grocery store, without ever having to venture into an orchard.

posted by Elizabeth at 10:30 PM   1 Comments