Notes on "King Lear"

My wife and I saw the production of King Lear at Cal Shakes this afternoon. The weather cooperated wonderfully. The play started at 4:00. It had been a warm, brilliantly clear fall day. The storm scene was a little more than an hour in. Just at the moment the storm scene began a cold evening wind came down the valley. They reinforced one another. Throughout the amphitheater you could see audience members reaching for blankets and bundling close in their jackets. It would be impossible to say whether they were influenced to do so more from the breeze or the imaginary storm being created on the stage. Just as the storm scene ended, the breeze stopped and the sun came out again.

This was a truly moving performance. I found myself in tears towards the end. The roles of Lear and the Fool were each brilliantly played by Jeffery DeMunn and Anthony Fusco, respectively. Lear was played at a more human scale than in other productions I have seen and that made the tragedy the greater. The fool was made to convey one who could see the tragedy as it was about to unfold and was trying to teach Lear by any and every device he could how to avoid it. Often the fool is played with greater detachment.

- J

A Tuft of Flowers

I have been thinking about this poem:

A Tuft of Flowers
Robert Frost - A Boy's Will (1913)

I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the leveled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,—alone,

‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’

But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a ’wildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’

I think this is a good deal of what gives work meaning; shared purpose and shared values. I think this is a lot of what has been missing from my work. My company was gobbled up by a larger company this year and my new company is a wholly owned subsidiary of a multinational corporation of very dubious reputation. The new company is based elsewhere and they appear to have a paternalistic patronizing attitude towards employees. We know them, so far, mostly through the policies that come down or the marketing campaigns that are tried out on employees first. I have always worked mostly alone, staring at a screen all day, but I have not always felt alone.

On the other hand, seen from the perspective of the mower: some nut disturbing my lunch with crazy talk about flowers and butterflies. What was he smoking?

- J

(The poem is in the public domain. The scythe image is by Chmee2, is in the public domain, and was found here.

Podcasts I tune into

Unremittingly blue skies and warm temperatures today.

I rely on podcasts these days. I have stopped listening to the radio, almost entirely. I have nothing against radio, it is just that podcasts are a timeshift tool. I can listen to the radio I am most interested in when I want to listen. In spite of the popularity of the term, I understand from what I read that I am still unusual in this new habit.

Here are podcasts I listen to regularly these days. You will note a tendency towards public radio:

• Writer's Almanac: Garrison Keiller in a five minute daily list of birthdays and anniversaries followed by a poem. Nothing earthshattering, but often there is a little nugget of information or insight.
• Le Show: An hour a week of Harry Shearer. Very, very dry satire and current affairs information you won't hear anywhere else, especially continued reporting on the aftermath of Katrina.
• Fresh Air: Interviews and reviews. Fifty minutes a day every weekday.
• Onion Radio News: A minute, weekdays. The radio arm of the humor publishing empire.
• This American Life: An hour a week of mostly real life stories.
• The Sound of Young America: A Southern California interview program by Jesse Thorne. Often guests are up and coming artists, comics, or musicians.
• On the Media: In depth and engaging media criticism.
  

Aloe

More blue skies.

Over the weekend I repotted several of our aloe plants. These are the offshoots of a single plant my wife brought into our lives probably more than twenty years ago. The various plants live in a collection of pots on the front porch. Every time I tend these aloes I am reminded of the play A Lesson from Aloes by the South African playwright Athol Fugard that we saw in the Eighties at the Berkeley Rep. This was in the old days when the theater company had a much smaller budget for set design than it does today. The set was a bare stage with potted aloes around the edges. It was a powerful play, beautifully and simply performed about a white couple and a black friend in apartheid South Africa. It is funny how memory works. Most of the plays we saw then, a quarter century ago, are lost to me, but this little collection of mostly neglected potted plants holds close a thin thread of memory of long ago.

The amazing recent movie Tsotsi was based on another of his plays.

J

Update: I found that an image from the production referred to can be seen here. It is an extract from the book The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard, by Albert Wertheim.

Notes on "Notes on a Scandal"

It was clear and bright this Monday morning with not a cloud in the sky.

My wife and I watched Notes on a Scandal over the weekend. The movie, starring Judi Dench as a elderly repressed authoritarian teacher in a lower class London school and Cate Blanchett as a new idealistic art teacher, was well acted, but somewhat empty. The movie is structured as a psychological thriller, but seems embarrassed about it. It is constantly explaining itself. A thriller of this sort is supported by the audiences fascination with the outrageousness of the villain. Think Silence of the Lambs. But, this movie didn't want to really be a thriller and have the audience leering at the elderly teacher. Neither would it dare explore some of the darker themes to any depth.

J

"Maybe the smartweed knows why."

Rainclouds cleared a bit today, but it remained overcast.

Some time ago, when the topic of Intelligent Design was often in the news I realized that, although I had read about and felt I had a good understanding of evolution, I had never read Darwin. I have finally gotten around to remedying that deficiency. I am currently listening to the Librivox audio book The Origin of the Species. Here are some early impressions.

The main surprise, so far has been what a remarkable writer Darwin was. Although The Origin of Species is a closely argued scientific work that displays an incredibly broad and detailed knowledge of the natural world, its argument is made yet stronger by its rhetorical force. The voice projected from the page is direct and precise, but also personal and unassuming, like in a letter. He uses simile and metaphor. He uses words with precision: not the false precision of scientific jargon, but the precision of plain words carefully selected. Phrases like "the conditions of life" or "the polity of nature" have a plainness of speech and impart to the work a tone of honest inquiry. He quotes his scientific colleagues, of course, but also classical writers when these will help convey his ideas. His economy of expression is all the more remarkable when compared to florid style that was fashionable then.

- J

(Post title from Walking the Beans by Greg Brown. Image is from WikiCommons and is in the public domain.)

Rain

Today saw the first serious rain of the season and the garden drank it in.

Spoon River Anthology

I finished listening to the Libri Vox audio book of Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters today. This is a collection of poems each the "true" epitaph of an inhabitant of a graveyard in the town of Spoon River, Indiana. It was written around the turn of the last century. There is no town of Spoon River, but there is a river of that name, and many of the names appearing in the book were those of residents of that region. I expected a meditation on small town life in America, like a cross between "Our Town" and "Main Street". Its not either of those, though I don't know as I understand much of what I heard. It was not at all sentimental. To me it did not have a very specific sense of place. Masters did not seem interested in the people in there relation to the place. Some of the poems were interesting character sketches. Some were truely shocking. Some poems had a very modern feeling, and I would find myself wondering, "did people really think like that back then."

J

Some Bay Area Blogs

Here are some local or bay area based blogs that I read and enjoy.

• Chickens in the Garden: A nice, but irregularly updated, Niles blog on food and gardening.
  
• Blogging from Berkeley: A Berkeley based blog on technology, travel, and family life and a wealth of other topics.
  
• Walking Berkeley: Began to document a project of walking all the streets and paths in Berkeley. Interesting reflections on walking and the problems and joys of being on foot in the modern world.
• Z is for Zlatnik: a newish Niles blog.

- J

Flow

I listened to "This American Life" today. David Rakoff had a wonderful piece on the psychological concept of "flow". This is an idea articulated by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi that describes a human state of concentration where time falls away. David Rakoff, it turns out loves doing crafts as an avocation because he can lose himself in the flow experience. So, he visits the craft department at Martha Stuart's Living, the center of all things crafts. The people who work there recognize the state of concentration he describes, but, it turns out, it is a bit harder to achieve when it is scheduled; when it is work.

I was trying to remember the last time I felt that sense of flow in my work. Certainly I have felt it, though, only irregularly, at best. The thing is that the work of programming, all the mythology of the software field, is all built around flow. Deep in the mythology of every important programming language, operating system, or paradigm shifting applications are stories of working programs emerging from the smallest seed of an idea after a night of concentrated coding. These are programs that changed not only my profession, but defined our time.

It is impossible for me to imagine myself so lost in concentration on some software problem that I would lose track of time, that the lines would pour out from my fingers, beautiful and perfect. It happened only rarely before. It will never happen again. Am I too old? Is it this damned repetitive stress pain? Is it because of the corrupting influence of the paycheck?

Alternatively, does it need to flow? Does it have to be a zen experience? Can it be hard, slow, and painful and still mean something? Does it mean more as work that it is written as if a spirit has a hold of your keyboard or does it mean more that you can predict the weather from the pain in your joints?

(Image, by Abangmanuk, is a canghul, an Indonesian hoe. It is from wikicommons. Image is in the public domain.)

-- J

About the Blogger

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I live with my wife, cats, a dog, and assorted chickens in Niles, California. Our two grown children come and go, which is as it should be. I labor in the digital fields of Silicon Valley as a Software Engineer.

- J

A Beginning

Here is a beginning.

Been walking the beans
Been walking the beans
Been bending low, down low,
Been ripping my jeans

Been walking the beans
In the burning sun
And it looks like I ain't ever ever gonna get done.

-- Greg Brown, "Walking the Beans" from the album Iowa Waltz

This is a blog about life, love, and work, in no particular order. It seeks no particular audience.

The title of the blog is taken from a lively song of the same name by Greg Brown., about the frustrations of hoeing. The song is honest about backbreaking farm work. It romanticizes it not a bit. It treats it with humor, yes, but it is a gallows humor.

Having stolen the title, though, it is obvious that I don't have the same scruples. I am going to shamelessly romanticize hoeing. Hoeing, you see, is not just backbreaking, futile, and repetitive work, it is a metaphor! Hoeing is tending and caring for living things. Hoeing is slow and incremental work from which things of beauty and value are nurtured and born. Hoeing is after all a synonym for cultivating, and cultivating is a root for culture.

I am hoping that this blog to be a form of hoeing (probably in its more romantic formulation). By tending my row in small daily increments I hope to grow something of worth to a few people.

- J