Quotulatiousness

July 10, 2021

History-Makers: Aristophanes

Filed under: Europe, History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 9 Jul 2021

He told the Athenians they were a disaster and they gave him a prize. Aristophanes wrote in the new Theatrical genre of Comedy during the golden age of Athens, and used his plays to viciously satirize Athenian society. They create a fabulously clear portrait of ancient Athenian life, and they have the corollary benefit of being funny as hell.

SOURCES & Further Reading: The 11 plays of Aristophanes, with particular focus on Clouds and Women at the Thesmophoria, Britannica’s “Aristophanes”, Crash Course Theater #2 & 4.

Partial Tracklist: “Sneaky Snitch”, “Marty Gots A Plan” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
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From the comments:

Overly Sarcastic Productions
2 hours ago
While we’re here, one subject I cut for time is the relationship between “The Clouds” and the trial of Socrates.

It’s commonly assumed that Aristophanes’ satire played a part in Athens’ decision to charge and ultimately kill Socrates, but that interpretation doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny.

The Clouds was performed over 20 years before Socrates’ trial. If the play had that strong an effect on Athens, we can assume Socrates would have been charged far sooner. And Plato’s own writings paint Aristophanes rather favorably — if Plato blamed Aristophanes for the trial, he does not make that obvious.

There IS one snide line in Socrates’ Apology that seems to a modern reader like it’s referring to The Clouds, but really we can’t be sure. Aristophanes was not the only comic playwright in Athens, and certainly not the only person who disliked Socrates. Did The Clouds contribute to a negative public perception of Socrates? Sure, in part, at least when it was performed in 423. But it’s faaar more likely that Socrates’ trial and death in 399 owe more to his persistent habit of being a Colossal Pain In The Ass to whomever he was speaking with.

Reading The Apology makes it clear that nobody had the power to make Athens hate Socrates more than Socrates.
-B

June 13, 2021

Fundamentally unserious nation – “… for Canada’s leaders, all the world’s a ‘gram”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Friday wrap-up edition of The Line, a consideration of how shallow, insincere posturing, and performing became the hallmarks of Canadian government leadership:

Typical image search results for “Justin Trudeau socks”

Look, we at The Line are as tired as you are about the more, shall we say, theatrical aspects of Justin Trudeau’s approach to being prime minister. Whether it was his Day One “because it’s 2015!” smirk, his obsession with showing off his socks to foreign dignitaries, his fashion sense while vacationing in India, and countless other Trudeauvian trips of the light fantastic, the man has always seemed more interested in performance than in the substance of governing.

But that’s not quite right. Because if there is one thing we’ve come to realize over the past five years and a bit, it is that for the Trudeau Liberals, the performance is the governing. For example, we used to wonder at the amount of time and energy that Cabinet ministers spent working on their Instagram accounts, since it went far beyond what would seem to be necessary for promoting and communicating policy. But once we understood that it was the job of policy to promote the Instagram account, and not the other way around, all of this proudly vacuous behaviour started to make a lot more sense.

But while we’ve gotten more or less used to it here in Canada (or maybe the right word is “numb”), we’ve always wondered how it looks through foreign eyes. Those abstract wonderings became a little more concrete over the past few weeks. Countries are opening up, people are starting to travel, politicians are going back to their old habits of holding regular meetings to make sure the world is still ticking along. And for Canada’s leaders, all the world’s a ‘gram.

So it was that at the G7 summit in Cornwall England this week, Prime-Minister-In-All-But-Name Chrystia Freeland was the only finance minster to wear a mask in a group photo taken outdoors. Ok, we thought, maybe she’s not fully vaxxed, maybe she has reason to be extra cautious. Except in a string of photos taken just before the official photo, Freeland was captured scrambling to put on her mask, not for safety, but for show.

Freeland was just getting the crowd warmed up for her nominal boss, Justin Trudeau. At his official G7 welcome on Friday, Trudeau was the only leader to put a mask on to give Boris Johnson the chummy elbow, only to remove it a few seconds later. We get it. It’s a version of the old “what lie did I tell?” problem, but for acting. Which audience am I playing to at this exact moment? It’s hard for even an old luvvie like Trudeau to keep track.

Once he’s back in Canada, Trudeau is going to hole up in a hotel for a few days, which the Globe‘s Cam Clark aptly referred to as “symbolic penance for a symbolic policy.” We agree with Clark that there’s some good fun in seeing someone get tied up in their own moral posturing. But while Clark is unhappy at the prospect of the prime minister cooling his heels for three days, we’re less fussed about Trudeau’s prospective stay in Hotel Q. Because while Clark thinks “there are real things” for the prime minister to be doing, we doubt that very much.

June 3, 2021

The Supernatural Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle | B2W:ZEITGEIST! I E.19 Spring – 1923

Filed under: Books, Britain, Germany, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 2 Jun 2021

Being the creator of the legendary Sherlock Holmes has made Arthur Conan Doyle famous for his scientific rationality. But Doyle also has a deeply held belief in the existence of the spirit universe. In a world still reeling from the shock of the Great War, he is not alone.
(more…)

April 16, 2021

“Students will find in Shakespeare absolutely no moral compass”

Filed under: Britain, Education, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sky Gilbert responds more than adequately to a demand to “Cancel Shakespeare” that also appeared in The Line recently:

This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.

Allan thinks that Shakespeare’s language is difficult and old fashioned, and that students today find analyzing the complexities of his old-fashioned rhetoric boring and irrelevant. Yes, Shakespeare essentially writes in another language (early modern English). And reading or even viewing his work can be a tough slog. Not only did he invent at least 1,700 words (some of which are now forgotten today), he favoured a befuddling periodic syntax in which the subject does not appear until the end of a sentence.

But a study of Shakespeare’s rhetoric is important in 2021. There is one — and only one — exceedingly relevant idea that can be lifted from Shakespeare’s congested imagery, his complex, sometimes confusing metaphors — one jewel that can be dragged out of his ubiquitous references to OVID and Greek myth (references which were obviously effortless for him, but for most of us, only confound). And this idea is very relevant today. Especially in the era of “alternate facts” and “fake news.”

This idea is the only one Shakespeare undoubtedly believed. I say this because he returns to it over and over. Trevor McNeely articulated this notion clearly and succinctly when he said that Shakespeare was constantly warning us the human mind “can build a perfectly satisfactory reality on thin air, and never think to question it.” Shakespeare is always speaking — in one way or another — about his suspicion that the bewitching power of rhetoric — indeed the very beauty of poetry itself — is both enchanting and dangerous.

Shakespeare lived at the nexus of a culture war. The Western world was gradually rejecting the ancient rhetorical notion that “truth is anything I can persuade you to believe in poetry” for “truth is whatever can be proved best by logic and science.” Shakespeare was fully capable of persuading us of anything (he often does). But his habit is to subsequently go back and undo what he has just said. He does this so that we might learn to fundamentally question the manipulations of philosophy and rhetoric — to question what were his very own manipulations. Shakespeare loved the beautiful hypnotizing language of poetry, but was also painfully aware that it could be dangerous as hell.

In fact, Shakespeare’s work is very dangerous for all of us. That’s why students should — and must — read it. Undergraduates today hotly debate whether The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic, or whether Prospero’s Caliban is a victim of colonial oppression. Education Week reported that “in 2016, students at Yale University petitioned the school to ‘decolonize’ its reading lists, including by removing its Shakespeare requirement.”

It’s true that Shakespeare is perhaps one of the oldest and whitest writers we know. (And sometimes he’s pretty sexist too — Taming of the Shrew, anyone?). But after digging systematically into Shakespeare’s work even the dullest student will discover that for every Kate bowing in obedience to her husband, there is a fierce Lucrece — not only standing up to a man, but permanently and eloquently dressing him down. (And too, the “colonialist” Prospero will prove to be just as flawed as the “indigenous” Caliban.) William Hazlitt said: Shakespeare’s mind “has no particular bias about anything” and Harold Bloom said: “his politics, like his religion, evades me, but I think he was too wary to have any.”

Shakespeare Summarized: King Lear

Filed under: History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 22 Jul 2014

Sorry it’s been a while. Summer vacation plays merry hell with both my work ethic and my voice. *discreetly hacks up a lung*

King Lear! He’s not a very good king, and he’s not a very good father! Good thing that, by the end, he’s neither of those things.

February 14, 2021

Shakespeare Summarized: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 27 Feb 2014

Finally, a summarized comedic romance! And it was almost out in time for Valentine’s Day, when it would have been legitimately appropriate to release!

…I’m making progress, guys. Cut me some slack. 😛

Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s best plays. And nobody died this time! What a twist!

January 31, 2021

Adapting Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit for the screen – “The ensuring film has all the light charm and witty élan of a documentary about slaughterhouses”

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Critic, Alexander Larman is not happy with the latest attempt to translate a Coward play to the big or small screen:

Original theatrical release poster.
Wikimedia Commons.

Recently, the new film of Noël Coward’s masterly play Blithe Spirit was released on various streaming services, after its cinematic release was cancelled due to the irritating absence of open cinemas to show it. I had been looking forward to it for some time. It had a fine cast of hugely talented comic actors, led by Dan Stevens and including Isla Fisher, Leslie Mann, Julian Rhind-Tutt, and, in the great role of the fraudulent medium Madame Arcati, none other than Judi Dench. It was directed by Peter Hall’s talented son Edward, and its inspiration remains one of the most uproariously entertaining plays of the twentieth century, complete with some of Coward’s finest dialogue. It would be hard to mess it up.

Alas, “messed up” is an understatement when it comes to describe what has happened to the film. A clue comes in the credit: “adapted by Piers Ashworth, Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft”. The three of them were previously responsible for the mediocre sea-shanty comedy (not words one often writes) Fishermen’s Friends, and Ashworth and Moorcroft should be prosecuted at the cinematic equivalent of the Hague for their shameful bastardisation of Ronald Searle’s St Trinian’s series into two terrible films that bear as much relation to Searle’s illustrations as they do to Noël Coward. So it is little surprise that they have decided to “improve” on the original play. The writers throw out most of the original dialogue, retain only the bare bones of the storyline, introduce an irrelevant and mawkish subplot for Madame Arcati (who is now bewilderingly played mostly straight) and generally commit artistic vandalism.

The ensuring film has all the light charm and witty élan of a documentary about slaughterhouses. The cast do their best with the terrible material, but as Stevens manfully tries to make lines about erectile dysfunction amusing – “Mr Peasbody’s got stage fright” – the look of deep shame that occasionally comes over their faces cannot be disguised by the over-bright lighting and incongruously jaunty music. Had it been given a cinematic release, there may well have been indignant walkouts and outraged complaints at the box office. As is, I doubt that many disappointed viewers, expecting a more enjoyable film, will bother watching this travesty to the end.

January 28, 2021

Blade Runner 1921?! – Robot Apocalypse Now | B2W: ZEITGEIST! | E.10 – Winter 1921

Filed under: Books, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published 27 Jan 20201

Modern technology promises a lot, but it can also bring unprecedented horror. This season, the people of Czechoslovakia get to see that for themselves.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel
Edited by: Michał Zbojna
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations:
Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…
Mikołaj Uchman
Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
Mikołaj Cackowski
Klimbim

Sources:
Some images from the Library of Congress
Bibliotheque nationale de France

Icons from The Noun Project:
– noun_Sound_3530255
– Microphone by Agung Cahyo s

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
“Epic Adventure Theme 3” – Håkan Eriksson
“I Am Unbreakable” – Niklas Johansson
“Waiting like the Storm” – Rand Aldo
“Le Chat Noir 1” – Martin Landh
“A Single Grain Of Rice” – Yi Nantiro
“Alleys of Buenos Aires” – Tiki Tiki
“Age Of Men” – Jo Wandrini

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
1 day ago (edited)
Episode 10 of the series and for the first time we’re looking at a decidedly negative outcome that people imagined might come with further technological progress. Over 100 years later and it’s still something people are fearful of, and it often feels like Artificial Intelligence providing a real threat to humanity’s existence is just around the corner.

We’d be interested to know what you guys all think. Is there a chance that something along the lines of what Čapek imagined actually happening? Let us know in the comments.

NOTE: Unfortunately an error has snuck into this week’s episode. The portrait that is supposed to show Herbert Hoover is in fact of his son, Herbert Hoover Jr. We are working on getting this fixed as fast as possible, and we apologize for the inconvenience in the meantime.

January 17, 2021

Las Vegas marks a significant loss

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Saturday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh notes the death of Siegfried Fischbacher, better known as half of the stage magic team Siegfried & Roy:

… Las Vegas, as we all know, is a special place in which ordinary moral writ and aesthetic judgment have greatly diminished force. Vegas is honouring Siegfried & Roy this week, and will recognize them forever, as city fathers. Even Penn Jillette, a fellow magician whose career has been a crusade against old-school schmaltz and glitz and other Teutonic concepts that Siegfried & Roy embraced, inscribed a small tribute to his colleague.

Siegfried & Roy were true pioneers in transforming Vegas into a full-spectrum entertainment capital. Their basic function was not to parade oppressed animals, or to do conjuring tricks. Considered as “magicians,” did they have a signature effect? Or is the truth that prop-heavy, mechanistic stage magic is just relatively easy to combine with a wildlife act that also travels poorly?

No, their mission was to extract money from the family members of degenerate gamblers and, gosh, were they good at it. When they started out at the New Frontier hotel in 1981, Las Vegas was still its postwar self — an anarchic watering hole and sybaritic paradise mostly for adult men, associated with a boozy, jocular style of entertainment that was rapidly receding in the rear-view mirror of the culture. (Siegfried & Roy were never trendy, exactly, but being unique was enough.)

Almost no one can have consciously envisioned a world in which gambling in various forms regained wide, post-Protestant social acceptance. That gambling would one day become legal everywhere at an astonishing pace would have been seen as a nuclear-grade threat to the literal existence of the city. The nightmare has arrived, but Vegas is bigger and more economically sound than ever. Siegfried & Roy helped reshape the industrial nucleus of a city you don’t even have to like gambling — or showgirls — to enjoy.

January 6, 2021

QotD: George Bernard Shaw’s views on eugenics

Filed under: Britain, Education, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the most articulate eugenicists of the era was a man who survived until 1950, and remains one of the world’s most famous and respected dramatists. George Bernard Shaw, literary giant, author of more than sixty plays, and winner of the Nobel Prize.

The Irishman’s opinions are, however, coming back to mangle and even smash his reputation. A group of students at RADA have called for Shaw’s name to be removed from the drama school’s theatre as part of an anti-racism action plan. This matters, because Shaw provided for the school in his will, and last year the royalties from his work contributed more than £78,000 to RADA. Yet the accusation that the renowned theatre college “celebrates historical figures who embraced racist ideologies” does have a certain merit. Problem is, as has been debated myriad times: do, can, and should we separate an artist’s work from their period, character and ideas? If the ghosts of anachronism and historical assumptions are never to be exorcised, there are an awful lot of people who will fail and fall to the wide-awake litmus test.

Shaw did indeed write, that, “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man” and, chillingly, “A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.” He lectured for the Eugenic Education Society, praised Stalin (naturally) the early Mussolini, and even Hitler as late as 1935. He abandoned most of all this in his old age but never made any formal apology.

He was also an incisive critic of imperialism, mercilessly exposed establishment hypocrisy, opposed war and oppression throughout his career, and cared passionately about actors and writers – the very people at RADA trying to expunge his name from their place of learning. And here’s another challenge and even embarrassment for those who would remove the social engineers from the litany of the great and the good: many of their harshest opponents were not others on the left but, in Edwardian Britain and in the 20s and 30s, conservative Roman Catholic writers led by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

Michael Coren, “Eugenics and the intellectual left”, The Critic, 2020-09-16.

December 22, 2020

Shakespeare Summarized: Twelfth Night

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 13 May 2014

It’s a comedy! It’s got errors! It’s a comedy of errors!

This is Shakespeare’s comedy of crossdressing. I thought it was hilarious. This movie version is the 1996 one, and it’s really good.

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September 9, 2020

QotD: Drama critics

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Drama critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they see the tricks done every night, they know how it’s done, but they can’t do it themselves.

Brendan Behan, quoted in “Notes by Sage of Nonsense”, Globe and Mail 1961-03-18.

July 25, 2020

Shakespeare Summarized: The Tempest

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 5 May 2014

At last! It’s not a tragedy!

It may have been Shakespeare’s final play, but that doesn’t mean it’s my final summary! Hopefully, you lucky folks will get to hear my melodious rambling for a while yet.

PATREON: www.patreon.com/user?u=4664797

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July 13, 2020

“The Richard of Richard III is often regarded as a caricature, a cardboard-cutout villain rather like the Sweeney Todd of Victorian melodrama”

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Theodore Dalrymple discusses two Shakespeare characters, the protagonists of Richard II and Richard III:

This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.

… if we cannot know Shakespeare’s positive thoughts about any major question, as Nutall puts it, we can at least surmise some of the things that he did not believe. No one, I think, could imagine that Shakespeare romanticized the common man or was impressed by a crowd’s capacity for deep reflection. If there is one thing that he was not, it is a utopian.

Apart from the absence of direct evidence, one reason that it is so difficult to know what Shakespeare thought is that he seemed uniquely able to imagine himself into the minds of an almost infinite number of characters, so that he actually became them. He was, in a sense, like an actor who has played so many parts that he no longer has a personality of his own. A chameleon has many colors, but no color. What is perhaps even more remarkable is that, by some verbal alchemy, Shakespeare turns us into a pale version of himself. Through the great speeches or dialogues, we, too, enter a character’s world, or even become that character in our minds. I know of no other writer able to do this so often and across so wide a spectrum of humanity.

Included in this spectrum are the two King Richards, the Second and the Third. Shakespeare wrote the two plays in reverse historical order, about four years apart. The usurpation of Richard II’s throne in 1399 by Henry Bolingbroke, Henry IV, led to political instability and civil war in England that lasted until the death of Richard III in battle in 1485. Because everyone loves an unmitigated villain, Richard III is said to be the most frequently performed of all Shakespeare’s plays, but its historical verisimilitude is much disputed. It is clearly an apologia for the Tudor dynasty, for if Richard III were not the absolute villain he is portrayed as having been (and such is the power of Shakespeare’s play that everyone’s image of the king, except for those specially interested, derives from it), then Henry VII, whose dynastic claims to the throne were meager, to say the least, was not legitimately king — in which case neither was Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth’s father, nor, therefore, was Queen Elizabeth legitimately queen: a dangerous proposition at the time Shakespeare wrote. So reminiscent of sycophantic Soviet historical apologetics does a Soviet emigré friend of mine find the play that he detests it. In 1924, a surgeon in Liverpool, Samuel Saxon Barton, founded what became the Richard III Society, which now has several thousand members globally, to rescue the reputation of the king from the Bard’s calumnies.

If Richard III were merely a propaganda play on behalf of the Tudors, however, it would hardly have held its place in the repertoire. It does so because it tackles the perennially fascinating, and vitally important, question of evil in the most dramatic manner imaginable; its historical inaccuracy does not matter. Richard III may not have been the dark figure Shakespeare portrays, but who would dare to say that no such figure could ever have existed?

The two plays offer a contrast between different political pathologies: that of ambitious malignity and that of arrogant entitlement, both with disastrous results, and neither completely unknown in our time. They share one rather surprising thing in common, however: before reaching the throne, both usurpers — Richard III, when still Duke of Gloucester; and Henry IV, when still Duke of Hereford — felt obliged to solicit the good opinion of the common people. This is perhaps surprising, in view of the extremely hierarchical nature of society in both the age depicted in the plays and the age in which they were written, and suggests a nascent populism, if not real democracy. However powerful the king or nobility, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, early in the reign of Richard II (as much a revolt of merchants as of peasants), must have alerted them to the need to keep the populace at least minimally satisfied.

Update: Fixed broken link and mis-placed image.

June 4, 2020

Performance, Plague, and Politics in Shakespeare’s London

Filed under: Britain, Health, History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 27 Mar 2020

Help us make the first feature film ever made (that we know of) spoken entirely in Original Pronunciation, the accent of Shakespeare: https://igg.me/at/sudburydevil/x/1502…

Did William Shakespeare write King Lear under quarantine? That is the question. In this video I introduce you to the actor’s process in Elizabethan theater; dive deep into first-hand accounts of the bubonic plague epidemics that Shakespeare lived through; explore the politics of late 16th and early 17th century England, onstage and off; and discuss OP, Original Early Modern English Pronunciation, the accent and dialect in which the Bard’s plays were originally performed.

The rest is silence.

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From the comments:

Atun-Shei Films
1 month ago
CORRECTION: The Great Vowel Shift was a SEPARATE linguistic trend to the R-dropping in 18th century English. My mistake, sorry!

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