What am I doing here?

I started this blog the other day when my friend Paul asked me if I ever write about things we were talking about. Here is a brief of the topics:
Him:

Evan Parker's (sax) Conic Sections
Yoshikazu Iwamoto, the shakuhachi flute--L'Esprit du Silence & L'Esprit du Vent on Musique du Monde
The Long March, 2-cd set by Archie Shepp and Max Roach.
John Cage, Music for Marcel Duchamp, the Freeman Etudes, & the Etudes Australes
Charles Ives' Second Piano Sonata: Concord, Mass. 1840-1860

Me:

Lester Young's tenor solo on When You're Smiling with the Teddy Wilson group, vocal by Billie Holiday
Charlie Parker's alto solo on Embraceable You
Coleman Hawkins tenor solo on Body and Soul, 1939
Ben Webster solo on Cottontail, with the Ellington orchestra
Sidney Bechet soprano solo on Shag
Johnny Dodds clarinet solo on Wolverine Blues with Jelly Roll Morton & Baby Dodds
The Armstrong-Hines duet on Weather Bird
The Bix-Tram duet on You Took Advantage of Me, with the Whiteman orchestra

And the ensemble work of the following:
Jelly Roll Morton et al on Black Bottom Stomp
The Eddie Condon gang on Love is Just Around the Corner, in particular the cl solo by Pee Wee Russell,
The Lang-Venuti group on Someday Sweetheart, Beale Street Blues, Farewell Blues, & After You've Gone with Bennie Goodman and Jack Teagarden

To which, Paul: Have you ever written about any of these?

Me: This blog. But I start with Aeschylus since I am just now addressing him in a class. The blog is what it is, a little writing about stuff. So, what do I know...? Not much, as they say, but I do have a fair number of handout texts I have prepared for classes, and some art I can bring up, andits likely to be both a disorganized and an unorganized look at things I am now teaching, have taught, might teach, and that I happen to be looking at when I post to the blog.

So, why did I start out with Aeschylus? Simply because I am thinking about it now.
Here, for example:

Aeschylus' use of language in the Oresteia can be described only as extraordinary. Dense, ambiguous, and experimental, especially in the choral odes, it poses exceptional difficulties for audience and translator alike. His style is rich with striking and often mixed metaphors, vivid imagery, and complex periphrases that sometimes make ordinary events strange and almost inaccessible. The poet invents new words (especially compound adjectives), borrows obscure ones, and fractures ordinary syntax. Long sentences of loosly linked clauses alternate with occasional pithy nuggets of traditional wisdom. Sentence fragments or sentences that shift construction midway abound in the choral odes. (Helene P. Foley, Introduction to Peter Meineck's 1998 translation of the Oresteia from Hackett Publishing Co.)

Foley continues by quoting Anne Lebeck's The Oresteia: A Study in Language and Structure (Harvard U Press, 1971):

It should be a basic principle in interpreting Aeschylus that when language and syntax are most difficult, the poet has compressed the greatest number of meanings into the smallest possible space. Pursuing the customary methods of classical scholarship one is sometimes tempted to treat ambiguity as if the author were at fault, as if the clarity of normal diction were beyond his grasp. Yet that ambiguity characteristic of Aeschylus is not easy to achieve: it comes about neither by accident or inability, but by design.
Commentaries on the Oresteia sometimes degenerate into arguments about the "right" meaning of passages where wording is enigmatic and meaning multiple. The following approach is here pursued: when argument arises over meaning, the statement that claims to be exclusively right is categorically wrong. The philologist should not restrict himself to a single interpretation of such passages but should give free rein to all possibilities and associations, ultimately selecting as many as form part of a larger pattern and contribute to the meaning of the total work. The linguistic devices by which ambiguity is effected should be analyzed and the significance of the passage then interpreted in light of its obscurity (p. 3).

Ambiguity, I tell my students, is where interpretation begins. If you don't understand something, that's a good place to start--especially if you want to learn more. I would never have them start with Aeschylus--some of what I have been writing about here addresses my decision to teach it or not to teach it. It is just too terrific, too terrible, for most of them in an introductory course. Stick to Homer, the lyric poets, Oedipus Rex, Antigone, that sort of thing.

Which somehow brings me back to why this blog. Those last two sentences of Lebeck's are inspiring.

More on the Oresteia

When I teach the "long, boring stuff with all those funny names," from Homer to Ovid, my students ask me if there is a movie they can watch to help them through. Regrettably, my answer is generally, "No, sorry." And I am sorry. I wish, for example, that Troy had been a better movie, which I could then recommend as an introduction to the Trojan War. Of course, if students substitute the film for the reading, they are likely to be surprised, and disappointed.
I am sorry that the Oresteia has not been filmed--I always find it easier to teach drama with a film so that we can get some sense of how the words and actions are embodied. However, I do not think my students would enjoy it, and I might not even enjoy it myself, as much as I thrill when I read. The imagery itself is so rich and dense, so deep and penetrating, and so vivid, that in this case the language must substitute for most of the visual qualities which might enhance a film of the trilogy. You really do have to listen, or read substantively, for that strange interplay of sense and nonsense to, er, make sense.
If we can imagine the trilogy's first audience, they would have been stunned to locate the watchman on top of the scene building (which itself may have made its dramatic debut with this play). As with da Ponte's Don Giovanni, we open with the impatience of someone waiting through the night--only in this case it has been much longer. Anticipation is built into the scene. The audience would have arrived before the sun, which would be rising as the story commences. I expect the signal fire--lit by a far-off stagehand on one of the Athenian hills in the distance--would have appeared before the sunlight to make best use of the dramatic qualities of light and dark.

Where did that light come from? In pitch darkness
That point--that's new.
Down there, near what must be the skyline,
In the right place! It just appeared!
A flickering point. And getting bigger. A fire! (Hughes)

That might work in a movie, but it is hard to see how much else would be very cinematic. For the most part, the cinematic parts of this trilogy really take place in our minds.

More on Aeschylus in class

Just finished reading again the Agamemnon and the Libation Bearers (Choephori)I used Meineck's version since it is the one my students have, and took a few notes in the pages, but will consult the Hughes before I meet class. Boy! These plays fairly shimmer with a deeply resonant elegance. The metaphors--the famous metaphors, celebrated, ubiquitous, commanding--tie it together, drench it in blood, so that each one of them seems to emerge from the depths into a bright sunshine and then drift back to the ooze.
Standard assignments: Describe how the imagery of light and dark functions in the play. Although I think I would know where to begin, finding a way to conclude would tax my energies. Another: Describe how the animal imagery functions in the play. Uhh. I am not sure I like these sorts of study questions, though I might well ask them anyway if I was teaching the whole play, since they do help assure student compliance in the reading assignment. The problem is that you can make the findings, mark them in your text, link them up so that the pattern becomes more visible, but then what do you have? Imagery is likely to be, first, an exciting, thrilling component of our experience in the theater. We aren't (necessarily) searching them out, but rather being shown these vivid glimpses of things that reach deep down--Then the blood belched from him with a strange barking sound (Hughes)--so that they become something like the opposite of decoration.
How can I not teach this next year? Well, I gotta remember, my students will find it pretty challenging, and I may have to spend too much time on the plot itself.

Aeschylus in class

The Oresteia is a tough one. I've assigned it to some of my humanities classes, but after taking the students through two Homers, now that it's time for the Aeschylus I am having second thoughts. I think they may have had enough Greek myth. Instead of having them read the whole thing, I plan to skim gingerly with them over some of the work and then turn to art to finish out the semester.
I chose the Meineck translation, because I like Hackett publishing and because I've enjoyed listening to some of his lectures on Greek myth and Greek drama in the car. But its a tough one, like I 'splain above. I would prefer to teach from the Ted Hughes translation--a poet I am getting to know better and enjoy more after his death. It is, like the Tales from Ovid, done in short lines with good, expressive clarity and poetic power. The Helene Foley introduction to the Meineck translation, though, is good--for my purposes; most of my students look askance at such things; there are no helps or notes with the Hughes work. Here is how Meineck's watchman opens the play:

Gods! Free me from these labors!
I've spent a whole year up here, watching,
propped up on my elbows, on the roof
of this house of Atreus, like some dog.
How well I've come to know night's congregation of stars,
the blazing monarchs of the sky, those that bring winter
and those that bring summer to us mortals.
I know just when they rise and when they set.
So I watch, watch for the signal pyre,
the burning flame that will tell us, Troy is taken.

Meineck always has the theater directly and importantly in mind; he is artistic director of the Aquila Theater, and I am grateful for that. Here is the Hughes version:

You Gods in heaven--
You have watched me here on this tower
All night, every night for twelve months,
Thirteen moons--
Tethered on the roof of this palace
Like a dog.
It is time to release me.
I've stared long enough into this darkness
For what never emerges.
I'm tired of the constellations--
That glittering parade of lofty rulers
Night after night a little bit earlier
withholding the thing I wait for--
Slow as torture.
And the moon, coming and going--
Wearisome, like watching the sea
From a deathbed. Like watching the tide
In its prison yard, and its two turns
In and out.
I'm sick of the heavens, sick of the darkness.
The one light I wait for never comes.
Maybe it never will come--
A beacon-flare that leaps from peak to peak
Bringing the news from Troy--
Victory! After ten years, Victory!

I prefer Hughes' version, with its sharp beacon flare that leaps from peak to peak, and the cries of victory after ten years waiting. Maybe if I was using that text I would be assigning more of reading this time. Doesn't matter. They will get a good introduction to this powerful, astringent work and I am not sorry I added it to the list. Though I will remove it next year. I think students prefer the Gilgamesh, particularly in Stephen Mitchell's translation.

I wonder about how each version opens, with Meinek's having the watchman speak of his own watching--which is, after all, what he does--while Hughes seems to take that for granted and has him turn to indicate that he himself is being watched by the gods.