A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
Let us see if I can get to the ones that interest me:
Tartuffe
By Jean-Baptiste Molière, adapted by Richard Wilbur
Directed by Karen Kessler and Kathy Logelin
February 12-13 and 17-20 at 7:30 p.m. | February 14 and 20-21 at 2:30 p.m. | Performing Arts Center - Proscenium Theatre
Sharp, witty, and bitingly relevant, Tartuffe is a masterclass in
comedic satire. When the wealthy Orgon falls under the spell of
Tartuffe—a sanctimonious fraud posing as a man of great piety—his entire
household is thrown into chaos.
As Tartuffe schemes to marry Orgon’s daughter, seduce his wife, and
seize control of the family fortune, the rest of the household races to
expose the truth. What follows is a fast-moving comedy of deception,
hypocrisy, and willful blindness. With razor-sharp language and enduring
insight, Tartuffe reveals the dangers of believing what we want to
believe—even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
TARTUFFE (WILBUR) is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Dramatists Play Service. www.concordtheatricals.com
Holmes is Where the Heart Is
By David Taylor Little
Directed by Veronica Santoyo
October 1-4 and 6-8 at 7:30 p.m. | October 3 at 2:30 p.m. | Arts and Journalism Building, Room 225
In postwar London, a sharp-witted private investigator finds herself
haunted by voices from her favorite Sherlock Holmes radio
broadcasts—clues that may be guiding her toward the truth… or pulling
her further from it. As she and her sister race to solve a high-stakes
mystery, they must navigate a world that doubts women detectives at
every turn. But when instinct, intellect, and imagination collide, the
line between inspiration and obsession begins to blur. Suspenseful,
witty, and full of intrigue, Holmes Is Where the Heart Is is a clever
homage to classic detective stories—reimagined through a fresh and
fiercely determined lens.
Fall Short Play Series The Fall Short Play Series features multiple short plays performed in repertory directed by junior-level students.
Apocalypse Road Trip By Wren Aubrey Latham
Directed by Mason Luellen October 20-25 at 7:30 p.m. | Art and Journalism Building, Room 225
When the world ends, Mitchy and Quinn hit the road in a battered
2011 Jeep Wrangler they call ‘The Big Lebowski.’ With humor, heart, and
plenty of detours, their journey through a ruined landscape becomes a
search for meaning, connection, and a reason to keep going—even at the
end of everything.
The Proposal
By Anton Chekhov, Julius West
Directed by Tyler Bennett
October 20-25 at 7:30 p.m. | Art and Journalism Building, Room 225
A marriage proposal goes wildly off the rails when a nervous young
farmer and his intended bride spiral into a series of ridiculous
arguments over land, pride, and family honor. Tempers flare, nerves
fray, and the engagement teeters—yet somehow, love (or stubbornness)
wins out. Fast, sharp, and delightfully absurd, The Proposal is a comic
classic about how romance and conflict often arrive hand in hand.
I have a beein in my bonnet about Hollywood remaking movies - instead of recycling well-done material into second-rate reboots, why not plunder older IP?
Other than Warren Williams, Barbara Stanwyck & Joan Blondell being dead?
Bruce Dern ruined Robert Redford's The Great Gatsby for when I read someone saying Bern should have played Gatsby. Yes, that would've been so much more interesting.
When I Give You My Silence was published in Spanish in 2023 its author, the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, rightly predicted that it would be his final novel. He died last year at the age of 89. I Give You My Silence may have been completed with the spectre of death approaching, but there is nothing morbid about this book, which is an eccentric love letter to Vargas Llosa’s native country and, in particular, its music.
Irvine Welsh’s 16th novel Can Nothing Save Us? comes as something of a
surprise. An epic American family saga, it explores a collective
emotional malaise at the heart of a great power in decline. This is a
bold and ambitious work, in which Welsh deftly shifts point of view with
confidence and conviction: his ability to jump generations and to
capture the voices and feelings of his disparate cast of characters is
at times quite astonishing.
In his opening paragraph, Philip Hensher declares that a novel not only “tells a good story” but is a good story in itself. We could extend that neat formula to include this book, which is not only a masterful account of fiction since 1719, when Daniel Defoe set Robinson Crusoe down on his desert island, but is itself a wonderful read. There is nothing dreary here; no sense of being back in the seminar room taking notes. Instead it is 600 pages of deep pleasure, an excuse to revisit old literary loves and be reminded of ones that have slipped from view.
***
Hensher never falls into crankiness, but he is unafraid to point out
home truths. Such as the fact that so much of the pleased-with-itself
“experimentalism” of the 1960 to 1980 period was merely a retread of
things that had been done better before. Tickled by the clever wheeze of
having central characters with no name? Fanny Burney was already doing
that in 1814. Keen on using fragmentary collage to signal modernity?
That blustery old fogey Evelyn Waugh got there first with Vile Bodies
(1930). As for self-reflexivity, that device by which the novelist
comments on the process of writing a novel, you should go back to
Fielding.
From Marquis de Sade to Grand Theft Auto, a Brief History of Depravity (Literary Hub). I have understood the French fascination with Sade. It seems to fall in line with their admiration of Jerry Lewis. The essay is in good company, Camus started with Sade in The Rebel. I think he was faker, living in his head, but that might be the point of the essay. He let out all the demons.
Interview with Stephen Greenblatt on the Death of Christopher Marlowe in 1593:
The idea didn’t appear overnight. It took the input of hundreds of individuals, hours and hours of research and planning, and applications for funding. All of the feedback, suggestions, and big visions came straight from the community.
In 2024, The Community Foundation of Muncie and Delaware County brought together artists, organizations, developers, and residents to ask a simple question: What would it take to make our arts community stronger, more accessible, and more connected?
More than 300 voices helped shape the answer.
That work became the Creative Space Action Plan—a roadmap grounded in community input and focused on expanding access, elevating what we have, supporting artists, and building a more unified creative ecosystem.
Since then, progress has been steady.
Partnerships have formed. Infrastructure improvements have begun. A shared vision has taken hold: a Creative Corridor that links downtown Muncie with Ball State University and Minnetrista, creating a more seamless and welcoming experience for residents and visitors. Phases 1 and 2 focused on foundational supports, including the creation of a partner network and leadership group, reimagination of MuncieArts as an arts service organization, and investment in downtown infrastructure to serve as a backdrop for a vibrant arts hub in Muncie.
In preparation for Mother’s Day, Heidi Hale, Founder of HeidiJHale Designs, would typically face online challenges, including not getting enough orders in early enough.
“We are living in an Amazon Prime world, but what we have to remind them is we’re either taking a loved one’s handwriting, thumbprint, [or] picture, and we’re creating something from scratch,” Hale said. “Nothing is mass produced.”
I have been in this place, and was impressed. One year when KH came down from Toronto, I took him to the place, and he was also impressed.
Downtown Muncie’s most-anticipated spring evening returns on Thursday, June 4, 2026 — the Brink of Summer ArtsWalk + Flower Hour.
Presented by the Community Foundation of Muncie & Delaware County, the Brink of Summer ArtsWalk + Flower Hour runs from 5–8 p.m.
A special edition of the monthly First Thursday series, Brink of Summer ArtsWalk is a community-wide celebration of the arts, local makers, and the vibrant culture of Downtown Muncie. This year’s event features an expanded lineup of programming for attendees of all ages.
Flower Hour, presented by Wise Country Market with flowers provided by Normandy Flower Shop, invites participants to explore Downtown Muncie and collect blooms from 10 different locations to build their own one-of-a-kind bouquet.
You can purchase Flower Hour tickets in advance online or day-of at the event. Physical, printed tickets allow you to start your Flower Hour journey, and they can be picked up, if you purchased them online, or purchased in-person at the DWNTWN tent at the corner of Walnut and Charles Street.
Another highlight of this year’s event is the Steamroller Printmaking Experience, produced by Tribune Showprint with a roller provided by MacAllister Rentals. Local and regional printmakers will create oversized prints using a steamroller as a press, and community members are invited to participate using pre-made blocks.
Yesterday started off both as a mess and something good. I missed my ride - got the time he was coming completely screwed up in my head. However, I felt well enough to go to church, so I started walking. Just to prove that I could.
The problems erupted in the evening. After a nap and a light dinner. I did not get to sleep until around 4 AM. I got some reading done. The email attended, but mostly it was a lot of hot baths. All I can say of that is that I got started on the introduction to Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.
The best thing was a long chat on the telephone with J. I like to think I amuse her.
Trump's trip to the correspondent's dinner got interrupted; he seems to have never been in danger. He is reaping what he sowed - hatred breeds violence. Can we survive his ugliness?
Up at nine this morning, a trip to the convenience store, and finishing off this blog post. I also did one for the new writing blog.
History is full of powerful actors who believed the world’s complexity could be overcome by will and might. Hoja has been subverting confident authorities for at least seven centuries, while refusing to be pinned down, even as a hero. If his tales can be said to have an overall lesson, it is against the comfort of easy answers.
Declaring hard power as all that matters, as Miller has done, doesn’t just mean ignoring others’ humanity – it also means ignoring our own human capacity for curiosity and intellectual humility.
There are several important drivers of political violence at work in the U.S. today, according to my own research and research by other scholars. The United States is currently very politically polarized, meaning that Americans are sharply divided against one another along partisan lines. They are suspicious and hostile toward one another, and this produces a tense and volatile environment for politics and public life. This has produced a “zero-sum” environment in which every election and political contest is a “do or die” moment.
What stands out to me is the moral dimension of polarization in the U.S. Each side views members of the other party not as merely having a different view on politics but rather as evil or immoral. The polarized environment has made political violence more normalized. It has also dampened public backlash against political violence when it occurs. This makes political violence more likely.
Political rhetoric has become much more divisive and violent in nature. This works hand in hand with polarization and helps to further normalize political violence. In particular, when politicians use demonizing or dehumanizing rhetoric to attack their opponents – for example, using words that depict their opponents as subhuman – this fosters extremism and helps motivate extremists to hurt their opponents physically.
Disinformation is also an important driver of political violence. A number of people who have engaged in recent acts of political violence seem to have been motivated by conspiracy theories and other forms of disinformation, often gleaned from social media. Disinformation plays a particularly important role in the context of social media communities, where people are exposed to large amounts of disinformation and are hermetically sealed off from other sources that might challenge their worldview. This facilitates radicalization and has been shown to fuel political violence in some cases.
Finally, I think an important factor is also the current assault on democratic norms and democratic institutions in the United States. U.S. democracy is experiencing pressures that are unprecedented in the modern era. This has had a very damaging effect on Americans’ trust in government, confidence in democratic institutions and value for democratic rule itself.
My work shows that individuals who are skeptical about democracy are much more likely to express support or tolerance for political violence.
Chuck Todd posted a video this morning with an indictment of the health of our political life and a plea for a better America. I agree with him, but I doubt if either of us will get the result we want.
And we should be proud to be part of a movement that will not be cowed by attempts at intimidation. The pro-democracy movement will resist efforts by this administration and its MAGA minions to use Saturday night as an excuse to criminalize political dissent, silence legitimate criticism, and curtail our civil liberties.
Such efforts got underway within hours of the shooting at the Washington Hilton.
On Sunday morning, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said, “I don’t think this should be lost on anyone . . . that we have a third assassination attempt on President Trump—in that same week we learn that the Southern Poverty Law Center has been paying and generating hate.”
I’d say in response that I don’t think it should be lost on anyone that this is mere demagoguery in defense of the baseless indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and in defense of using Congress’s investigative powers, as Jordan intends to do, to abet DOJ. Of course Jordan doesn’t quite say that there is any connection between the shooter and the SPLC. But he implies one that should not “be lost on anyone.” This is pretty classic McCarthyism—or, for that matter, Trumpism.
Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) tried to use Saturday night’s incident as an excuse not just to get new funding for the Department of Homeland Security but to increase the power of the Senate Republican majority: “At a moment of national danger, if Democrats refuse to fund DHS, I would say this would be the time to nuke the filibuster for good.”
In fact, Democrats are refusing to provide new funds not for the whole of DHS but merely for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, neither of which has anything to do with Saturday’s shooting, but which have a lot to do with the administration intimidating opponents. But Trump wants more money for those agencies, and he wants to get rid of the filibuster. This fake “moment of national emergency” is the excuse.
And Speaker Mike Johnson intends to try once again this week to move legislation in the House reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act without any real civil liberties safeguards.1 Expect to see him and his lieutenants use this “moment of national danger” to try to overcome opposition to the bill, even though there’s no connection between Section 702 and the events of Saturday night.
More broadly, we should expect a sustained effort in the days and weeks to come to intimidate and silence critics of the Trump administration in the same vein as the notorious National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” issued after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. There will be attempts to justify further investigation, chilling, and criminalizing of speech as part of a crackdown on “domestic terrorism.” According to NSPM-7, one of the “common threads animating this violent conduct” is “anti-Christianity.” So President Trump has already called Cole Tomas Allen “anti-Christian”—though as it happens he was active in a Christian group at college, and spends considerable time in his manifesto trying to justify his actions by appealing to scripture.
The plan is that I am going to the grocery and then to a movie. Trying to break things up today. I want to work ont he blogs today and tomorrow.
It was possible to find out about Jude’s friends, but
Lilian refrained. Her own best friend from middle school, upon learning
of Jude’s death, six years after Oscar’s, had e-mailed, reminiscing
about their school days in Beijing. In the hot months, they would buy
ice pops from the dining hall for three fen each. The ice pops, colored
with yellow food dye, were, in reality, more gray than yellow, offering
only a hint of sweetness, and a few times they’d found remnants of
vegetable leaves frozen inside. Once, they pooled their money and bought
an ice-cream bar in the shape of a snowman, but before they could take a
bite the snowman loosened itself from the stick and fell. It had cost
sixty fen—twenty ice pops to while away many lunch breaks! They squatted
in the sun and watched the snowman melt. Soon, ants congregated.
Lilian’s
friend had made a fortune in real estate; still, nothing would take the
astonishing sting off that loss. Lilian was touched and replied that
she, too, remembered the snowman. Of her children’s deaths, she could
say nothing, so she quoted a few lines of a third-century poem from the
Jin dynasty: “Those who have accompanied the funeral procession / Are
now ready to return home / The sorrow remains for the family / Others
have begun to sing / What’s so exceptional about dying / But to entrust
your body to the mountain?”
The lack of energy, the weariness brought about by health issues, extended to reading much online (and even less offline). The following comes (mostly) from the past few days.
They make the minds behind Vietnam the best and brightest. Cheney and Rumsfield look like geniuses. I can blame the guys for Vietnam for their arrogance - that was born of ignorance. Bush's team thought they were no longer bound by history. Trump thinks he makes reality even more than the Bushies did.
A thought that has recently occurred to me is that we have been repeating Vietnam - Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran. Maybe it is an open sore in the psyche of Republicans.
They know no history. We started the Iranian problem in 1953. Apparently, they do not understand geography. I feel drained and achy, so my mind is not in its best state. We may be American rarities - we know a little history, we know a little geography; we know what did not work, we know one size does not fit all.
An extraordinary social video came out of the White House last week, a
mix of actual “strike footage” from Iran, illustrating the promised
“death and destruction all day long”, alongside clips from Top Gun, Spiderman and (perhaps a nod at Trump’s Scottish ancestry) Braveheart. Entitled Justice the American Way,
its moral depravity is striking. Just as Archbishop Blaise Cupich of
Chicago wrote in response, it depicted a “real war with real death and
real suffering being treated like it’s a video game”: an “American way”
which ignores the very existence of international law and the values it
attempts to preserve. Pete Hegseth, self-styled US Secretary of State
for War, a man responsible for the largest military force in the world,
both approved it and appeared in it. Archbishop Cupich’s is a
refreshingly clear voice of condemnation, with his focus on the victims
of war.
How can a 79-year-old have the morality of a seven-year old? More importantly, what does such moral bankruptcy say about this country?
Perhaps it's not our leaders who fool us but ourselves?
In
Hamlet’s soliloquy, he is considering whether the wise choice is to
stop caring about bad things you probably can’t change, as the widely
beloved Serenity Prayer recommends. The alternative to such acceptance,
Hamlet says, is “to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by
opposing end them.” That doesn’t sound like suicide, which would be more
like surrendering.
The
other crucially misunderstood word in the soliloquy is “quietus.”
Hamlet says: “For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, […] When
he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin?” People
generally assume that when Hamlet considers making “his quietus […] with
a bare bodkin,” he is envisioning stabbing himself with a dagger,
because they think “quietus” refers to the silence of the grave—“resting
in peace,” as the familiar funeral language puts it, and as Hamlet’s
dying line “The rest is silence” might seem to confirm. But “quietus”
didn’t necessarily indicate quiet; it was a legal term for a debt paid
off (“quietus est,” which translates to “he is quit,” would then be
written on the loan document). It meant getting even (as when we lament
“unrequited love,” love that’s not repaid in kind).
Shakespeare’s only other use of the word is in the last line of Sonnet
126, where “quietus” signals a settling of accounts.
THE
BEST HISTORICAL analogue for Donald Trump probably isn’t an American.
It also isn’t one of the great villains of 20th-century Europe, despite a
long and tired debate about his relationship to fascism. Rather,
Trump’s most obvious predecessor comes from one of the “shithole
countries” in Africa he disdains: General Idi Amin, the autocrat who
ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979. “It is not only the braggadocio, the
self-regard, the love for military ceremony,” historian Derek R.
Peterson writes in A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda (2025);
it’s also the cruelly funny rhetoric, the demonization of immigrants
and outsiders, and the political chaos that comes from constantly
hounding your rivals and betraying your friends. Amin and Trump carry
themselves alike, and they give the same belligerent speeches. They
share a catty kind of charisma. Like Amin, Trump tells his supporters
he’s fighting for their freedom, all while turning the screws.
Let us hope Trump does not start feeding us to crocodiles.
...David
Fitzpatrick, has acutely pointed out that the excision of World War I
from the national memory was not a case of “amnesia.” The memory of
Ireland’s involvement was all around us. Rather than amnesia, the proper
diagnosis was aphasia, an inability or refusal to speak because the
sound and meaning of words are disassociated.
Do we not speak of some parts of our history because we have consciously forgotten them, or is it because we cannot associate words like lynching with ourselves? I do not want to excuse MAGA its efforts to literally whitewash American history, but their inability to speak on the cruelties Americans and their governments have imposed on the powerless does not seem like they have forgotten history as much as they can speak about it and maintain their charmless pursuit of an imaginary America.
Consequently, within such a civilization, it is not surprising that
even its most educated and prominent elites can live in ways detached
from the societies they inhabit, often operating at unrestrained
extremes without perceiving any wrongdoing until their actions are
exposed. In such a setting, the value of other people’s lives can
effectively be put up for sale. In this hierarchy of worth, the lives of
Muslims in particular are often subject to devaluation and distortion.
As a result, every attempt to reconcile their proclaimed moral discourse
with their actual political practices ends in failure. In truth,
consistency does not seem to concern them greatly; what ultimately
prevails are their own interests and advantages. Yet the world, taken as
a whole, is increasingly growing weary of these contradictions and is
gradually becoming less willing to tolerate them.
For this reason, the crisis we are experiencing today is not merely a
political or military one. It is a deeper crisis of legitimacy.
Humanity has always struggled to establish institutions capable of
limiting power and making it accountable. Yet, the point reached today
at the global level under modern Western civilization shows that this
problem has become – or has been made into – not merely an issue for
individual states, but a fundamental problem of the entire international
order. The growing unrest in many parts of the world today is not
merely a reaction to specific wars or political crises.
In fact, people are witnessing the visible emergence of a sense of
injustice that they have long felt deep inside. If the global order
continues to treat human life differently depending on geography,
religion or political interests, the legitimacy of that order will
increasingly erode. History has shown us again and again that no system
of power can endure for long once it loses its moral legitimacy.
Therefore, the real question that must now be answered is this: can the
world establish a new moral order in which the human being, as a
valuable and dignified entity, stands at the center rather than power?
Perhaps what humanity needs most today is not a new technology, but a
moral horizon that enables us to value the life of another as much as
our own. For when the life of the other is devalued, even the systems
that appear strongest begin to collapse precisely at this weakest point.
Does culture make emotion? (Aeon) got me thinking I still have not caught up with my notes of my group sessions; we are back talking about cognitive disorders caused by emotions. But I think this applies as much to my fiction (and makes this probably the last post containing the "On Writing" tag; I have taken baby steps regarding my new blog).
This is an example of how cultural givens become cognitive and
emotive ‘habits’ that underlie shared emotions but also produce
categories, prejudices and ideologies. They are built into our mental
makeup and thus may seem inherent in the self. But they are in fact
dynamic, cultural ‘patterned practices’. Language itself is one such
instance of a patterned practice. What I hear is culturally conditioned.
This is the process involved in how I internalise and then voice what
seem to be collectively and normatively acceptable, authentic emotional
responses to the voices of the world, such as outrage, pride or disgust.
They may feel authentic, but they are precisely what can blind me to
the complexity of felt experience, and to the lenses through which I
inevitably look at others, or even in the mirror – because top-down goes
all the way down.
Our eyes wouldn’t adjust to seeing without the lenses. But we have
the metacognitive ability to become aware of their shape and understand
the conditions of our own apperception, as Boas did and entreated us to
do too. ‘I’ can, to an extent, stand beside the ‘we’ of which each of us
is such an intricate part. In this way, we may retrieve its hidden or
forgotten elements, perhaps overcome prejudices and neuroses, as Freud
helped us do, and so help cultivate a healthy, plural, attentive and
democratic collectivity.
The Point published Moral Mysteries: Reading Iris Murdoch on her own terms by Parker Henry. Which reminded me I have not even tried to crack her Golden Notebook, and that time is not on my side. Coming to me during this tortuous Lent and having acquired an idea for a play on philosophical issues, this passage gave me several things:
The fantasies we project are personal. Our stories are necessarily
idiosyncratic. I think this is precisely the difference that scares us.
But if we have a moral philosophy that moves us away from some abstract
capacity to make logical sense of the world and toward imagining the
other through personal narrative, are we not saved—at least a little
bit—from our loneliness? Perhaps my intuition of loneliness was itself a
projection of my ego, which sought to protect me from that fear of
getting closer to others. Murdoch recognizes that we may not come to a
full understanding of the other, but through loving attention, we can at
least glimpse them. “The tragic freedom implied by love is this,” she
writes in “The Sublime and the Good”:
that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to
imagine the being of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated
harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering,
different from ourselves. Nor is there any social totality within which
we can come to comprehend differences as placed and reconciled. We only
have a segment of the circle. Freedom is exercised in the confrontation
by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of
imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals.
Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this
otherness.
Maybe glimpsing the segment of the circle is just enough to keep us sane.
Orthodox Christianity teaches that we are to see others as an icon of Christ and to love them; the Other is not an enemy. The Other brings out our selves. As for the play, it gave me the basis for an argument against moral nihilism: monsters lack power of imagination; they are stuck in the stink of their own hatred.
I also decided that the play needed a little bit of David Hume, and to refresh my memory, I resorted to Hume’s Moral Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). I find myself in agreement with Hume about revolutions, albeit my route is more Locke; I do not find them incompatible in their results.
Hume’s predecessors famously took opposing positions on whether human
nature was essentially selfish or benevolent, some arguing that man
was so dominated by self-interested motives that for moral
requirements to govern us at all they must serve our interests in some
way, and others arguing that uncorrupted human beings naturally care
about the weal and woe of others and here morality gets its hold. Hume
roundly criticizes Hobbes for his insistence on psychological egoism
or something close to it, and for his dismal, violent picture of a
state of nature. Yet Hume resists the view of Hutcheson that all moral
principles can be reduced to our benevolence, in part because he
doubts that benevolence can sufficiently overcome our perfectly normal
acquisitiveness. According to Hume’s observation, we are both selfish
and humane. We possess greed, and also “limited
generosity” — dispositions to kindness and liberality
which are more powerfully directed toward kin and friends and less
aroused by strangers. While for Hume the condition of humankind in the
absence of organized society is not a war of all against all, neither
is it the law-governed and highly cooperative domain imagined by
Locke. It is a hypothetical condition in which we would care for our
friends and cooperate with them, but in which self-interest and
preference for friends over strangers would make any wider cooperation
impossible. Hume’s empirically-based thesis that we are fundamentally
loving, parochial, and also selfish creatures underlies his political
philosophy.
In the realm of politics, Hume again takes up an intermediate
position. He objects both to the doctrine that a subject must
passively obey his government no matter how tyrannical it is and to
the Lockean thesis that citizens have a natural right to revolution
whenever their rulers violate their contractual commitments to the
people. He famously criticizes the notion that all political duties
arise from an implicit contract that binds later generations who were
not party to the original explicit agreement. Hume maintains that the
duty to obey one’s government has an independent origin that parallels
that of promissory obligation: both are invented to enable people to
live together successfully. On his view, human beings can create a
society without government, ordered by conventional rules of
ownership, transfer of property by consent, and promise-keeping. We
superimpose government on such a pre-civil society when it grows large
and prosperous; only then do we need to use political power to enforce
these rules of justice in order to preserve social cooperation. So the
duty of allegiance to government, far from depending on the duty to
fulfill promises, provides needed assurance that promises of all sorts
will be kept. The duty to submit to our rulers comes into being
because reliable submission is necessary to preserve order. Particular
governments are legitimate because of their usefulness in preserving
society, not because those who wield power were chosen by God or
received promises of obedience from the people. In a long-established
civil society, whatever ruler or type of government happens to be in
place and successfully maintaining order and justice is legitimate,
and is owed allegiance. However, there is some legitimate recourse for
victims of tyranny: the people may rightly overthrow any government
that is so oppressive as not to provide the benefits (peace and
security from injustice) for which governments are formed. In his
political essays Hume certainly advocates the sort of constitution
that protects the people’s liberties, but he justifies it not based on
individual natural rights or contractual obligations but based on the
greater long-range good of society.
3/11:
I think I found where people like my sister get their ideas about sharia law: moronic Republicans.
I spent most of yesterday working on my novella and blowing deadlines.
Today was just about recuperating.
Odds and sods
2/15
Thank you
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Thanks again for submitting, Samuel, and we wish you the best in finding a home for this elsewhere.
Sincerely,
The Editors
Pithead Chapel
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To read Morrison herself with the seriousness that she deserves requires
that we account for the knot – or bind – of gender and race she shared
with them. It is not an easy one to untangle. As Morrison wrote
in a 1971 New York Times op-ed about feminism, “one must look very
closely at the black woman herself – a difficult, inevitably doomed
proposition, for if anything is true of black women, it is how
consistently they have (deliberately, I suspect) defied classification”.
***
Morrison temperamentally disliked being
pigeonholed. She was willing to accept “the labels” of race and gender
only because, as she put it in a profile in the New Yorker, “being a
black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write
from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it.” She often
complained that literary criticism was unequipped to read black writing,
which gets read as merely representative, in both the
tokenistic and identitarian senses: “Black literature is taught as
sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form,” she said.
Indeed,
the ultimate source of Morrison’s renowned difficulty was not, I would
submit, her prickly personality, her intersectional identity, or even
her sometimes contrarian politics. It was her commitment to reflecting
the range and depth of black aesthetics – as epitomised by jazz, which
she called “very complicated, very sophisticated, and very difficult” –
in her own writing.
Her close friend, the
writer Fran Lebowitz, said upon Morrison’s passing in 2019: “I know it
sounds like a crazy thing to say, but I always thought Toni’s writing
was underappreciated. Because people always looked at it through the
prism of her being black and being a woman. But Toni was a very
experimental writer. There were a lot of things Toni did through her
writing that just went unremarked upon.”
Even without reading The Song of Solomon, I found her amazing. I wonder if those who think she was some sort of charity case have read her on her terms.
There is this play I wrote in prison with Christopher Marlowe. It has been an irritant to me for maybe a decade. The execution never gets the idea right.
What has been at the core of my idea is that Marlowe is a rebel, a rock star, who lived fast and died young.
Out of that idea came a comparison of Elizabethan playwrights to English rockers of the mid-Sixties (it could be as easily Memphis, Chicago, or LA - and probably a few more that are not coming to mind right now. Akron, Ohio? Athens, GA?). Scraped to its essence, the participants are both collaborators and competitors; cross-pollination is the process overall.
There are some ideas that circulate and go forward. I would like to get at the ideas. If Marlowe had lived, would he have gotten fat and balding like Byron? Would he have become a fixture of the Establishment like Wordsworth?
Which is a bit like asking what would have become of Buddy Holly (pop star like Del Shannon, a producer?) or Jimi Hendrix (the one what-if I can recall of Hendrix is that he might have followed Jeff Beck into jazz; I wonder if he would not have gone into funk like Eddie Hazel - Hendrix collaborating with Sly Stone?)
Realism is out - there is too little reliable information for a realistic play (for all that Marlowe's life is far more interesting than Shakespeare's); about all I could say is just adapt Anthony Burgess' novel.
Nor do I have the time left to write a text that hews closely to Elizabethan prose or poetry.
Another approach came to me last week. It starts with a bed. The second act is still fuzzy.
I had an idea today - an analogy of Marlowe to Shakespeare being like Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters. Not a perfect analogy, but a working concept. After reading Marlowe's plays, I thought his forms were a bit crude when compared with Shakespeare. What I have not found is anyone writing about subplots in Marlowe. The poetry is grand, but Marlowe's plays work on only one line, where Shakespeare plays on more than one. Hamlet has Laertes. Romeo has Tybalt/Mercutio. Those are the ones that come to mind. It may be due to the textual problems of the texts, but what is the mirror image to Tamerlane? Wagner is a farcical reflection of Faustus. Prince Hal has Hotspur, where is the counter to Edward II? I suppose in the latter, one might say Mortimer, but that character is also corrupt.
Meanwhile, I have an image of two men in a bed, collaborating, the devil visiting.
Though Marlowe had chosen not to pursue a safe, respectable career in the church and had opted instead for a marginal life, the cachet conferred by his university degrees was important to him. That cachet— being known as a scholar and a gentleman—was compatible, if just barely, with writing plays, but it would certainly have been threatened by any more complete involvement in the public theater, even had he possessed the talent and the inclination for such involvement. Putting on greasepaint and getting up on stage to entertain a crowd that included servants, apprentices, porters, prostitutes, and assorted riffraff would have left a social stain that could not be scrubbed away.
Sher: As an actor, you get to taste the language of different playwrights—taste it, literally, in the mouth. Shakespeare is full of subtle, complex, delicate flavours; Marlowe is rougher, more raw. And then there’s their use of the iambic pentameter. Marlowe’s mighty lines have a thumping regularity to them. Shakespeare is like a master jazz musician, both keeping to the beat and jamming round it.
So to those people who suggest that Marlowe wasn’t killed, but went on to write all of Shakespeare, I believe it’s simply impossible. Shakespeare couldn’t be Marlowe—or anyone else.
The little we know of Shakespeare’s life calls most of this into question. The man wrote two plays a year for much of his career, worked as an actor, and probably helped manage the theater company in which he was a major shareholder. His work was more conservative when it came to violence and sex than that of his peers. He did not invent any of the major components of his dramaturgy, and he almost always adapted existing source material. He invested wisely, worked hard to attain the rank of gentleman, and retired in his beloved hometown. If Shakespeare was, as Ben Jonson wrote, the “soul of the age,” that may be in part because his life was nearly as conventional as any actor’s or writer’s in his time.
Shakespeare was shaped as much by that time as he was a shaper of it, and despite being the English language’s greatest writer, he defies the common vision of a genius at the cultural vanguard. Luckily, another brilliant Elizabethan playwright better suits the Romantic model: Christopher Marlowe.
***
Greenblatt’s myth of a Romantic Marlowe almost singlehandedly pushing England into the Renaissance betrays the principles of New Historicism by shortchanging the roles of so many other key players. There’s Shakespeare, of course—but not only him. As Daniel Swift reveals in his new book, The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare, another important kind of brilliance is necessary for the flourishing of the arts: business acumen.
Swift’s story is really about the invention of capitalism—and the mad chancers, con artists, and prestidigitators on whom it relies. Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s plays owe their existence in part to a man named James Burbage. With his partners, Burbage built an outdoor amphitheater, called the Theatre, on which many others, including the Globe, were based. As Swift makes clear, the Theatre endured only because Burbage was good at improvising and snookering his business partners. His shady dealings were also responsible for much of the knowledge we have about this institution. We might not have Marlowe’s day planner, but the legal records of the staggering number of lawsuits in which Burbage was involved as either plaintiff or defendant, thankfully, survive.
***
Looming over both of these books is Shakespeare, whose achievements so eclipse those of his contemporaries that they can become difficult to see. Dark Renaissance and The Dream Factory both serve as timely reminders that no single artist can create a golden age. Periods of brilliance such as the one that flourished during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I require many different forms of genius. Without Burbage, there would have been no Theatre in which Marlowe’s early plays could premiere. Without Marlowe, there might have been no iambic pentameter, and no soliloquies. Without the invention of the joint-stock company, Shakespeare would not have had his greatest asset, a regular group of actors for whom he could write. And we would not be reading about any of these men if Shakespeare had not written plays that would endure for hundreds of years. Dark Renaissance boldly argues that transgressive innovators, far from going out of style, have always been necessary for artistic advancement. But as a scholar who has staked his career on the effect that history has on art, Greenblatt should know that the times are not made by one person alone.
Oh, and the use of more realistic blank verse instead of rhyming lines in drama? That was a Marlovian innovation too. The only genre where Shakespeare excelled and Marlowe didn’t, was comedy.
We at the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society propose a different view: the work of Marlowe and Shakespeare is so much alike because they were written by the same person. This would eliminate speculation about how Shakespeare managed to equal Marlowe's facility with language and his vast erudition, which Marlowe had been developing since childhood. It would solve many of the problems of the Stratford claim, and supply a rational solution. No other candidate can offer what Marlowe offers.
Read this selection of opinion from scholars to see why:
Please do not believe the muttering in this previous paragraph. It would astonish me even more to discover that Shakespeare's art had been produced by committee. Have you ever done art by committee? I myself stand in awe at the volumes produced by authors like Shakespeare who with no keyboard, no word processors, no typewriters moved the world.
sch 11/22
Does the Authorship Question Matter?
Discoveries Change The Future:
Shake-peare's TREASON (okay, this one is a bit off my theme here, but it is an interesting performance):
[I am back working through my pretrial detention journal. It is out of order. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. You can find everything from my pretrial detention journal that is published under the “Pretrial Detention” link under topics on the right hand of your screen.
This particular journal entry has three problems: 1) I cannot find the last page, which is where I put the date it was written; 2) it is therefore incomplete, and 3) it is rather long. It reads as if I wrote it before I gave up the idea of suicide altogether; it is a sort of intellectual history written as an elegy. It follows a piece dated to 5/10/2010. So, sometime in early May 2010 seems right.
As for length, I am doing as I do with all my very long piece, breaking up over several posts.
The links are, of course, now. No internet access while in pretrial detention.
What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.sch 11/12/2025.]
I know Tom Stoppard for Shakespeare in Love; I do not think I have read him. Maybe a short play while in prison? I know he was respected, and very, very good at writing plays. The Paris Review interviewed him in 1988: Tom Stoppard, The Art of Theater No. 7
Speaking of playwrights, I finally got a chance to read Sam Shepard in prison. I saw a film version of one of his plays - excuse me, but all I recall is Kim Basinger being it, and I am it is too late to be looking it up - more than 30 years ago. Literary Hub published a link to How Sam Shepard Became the Star Playwright of New York’s Counterculture. It was a little hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that he got his start in the mid-Sixties. In my mind, he belongs to the Seventies.
Now to something wholly different: The Legacy of Nicaea; Why orthodoxy is more challenging than heresy (Hedgehog Review). I recognized while reading this why Orthodox Christianity appeals to me - it is a wilder version of Christianity. Doctrine is established, but the real thing is how to live the doctrine. I disagree about the comment about logic. No, I quibble with it. The Creed is not born of logic. How it is lived follows logically - regardless of where that logic takes it.
I read the Brontes in high school. My mother had Jane Eyre on our bookshelf, and we had both seen the movie with Orson Welles (decades apart). I cannot recall how I came across Wuthering Heights - except I liked Heathcliff when I was a teenager, and I think I liked Jane Eyre more (I was never impressed with the Olivier version of the movie - he never seems mad enough to be Heathcliff). Sorry, both books seem better for teenagers. This did not keep me from read The Guardian's Margot Robbie in red latex, Kate Bush impersonators and a pint of Emily ale: my crash course in Brontëmania.
I have a few more pages about the group sessions. That was all I was out for today - and a quick run into Payless for groceries.
I have a long-standing relation with Ibsen. The first playwright I remember reading in school was Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, of course); then came Ibsen (Enemy of the People). My mother's sister married a second-generation Norwegian. When he died, I inherited his collection of Ibsen's plays. That collection got lost back in 2010, when I was arrested. When I came home when my first year at Ball State, I got sick. Ibsen is not a person to read when one is ill. In prison, I got back to reading Ibsen. I will be the first one to admit he is grim. Until recently, I thought he had never left Norway - which in his plays seems a place of narrow minds, syphilis, and little warmth - and I could understand the grimness - chilly weather, most people living in fjords, a diet of herring. No, he left Norway for decades. What happened is that Norway never left him. And if I understand the Adler essay I quote from below, it is the middle class that never left him.
My third playwright that I got attached to was George Bernard Shaw. Shaw brought Ibsen to England is how I understand the history. He replaced Norwegian grimness with Irish wit, that has its own darkness.
My regret is never having seen Ibsen or Shaw on the stage. Time and style says it is unlikely I will ever see them performed, and performance is the thing.
I know of Adler. Reading her essay puts much of Ibsen into sharper focus for me. She also pounds on a problem that is lately troubling me - cultural stagnation. See my To The Boondocks of Hendricks County - Cultural Stagnation - And Back, for a start. What Adler adds to my thinking is that Ibsen attacked his own particularized cultural stagnation.
In the plays that preceded Ibsen, one always knew who the hero was and could identify with him. It was difficult to do tragedy without the hero and the villain. But Ibsen did something different. Contemporary theater started with Ibsen.
Ibsen changed the world of literature. He opened up drama, which was the most forceful way of making a statement that had to be made. It was time to find a more powerful way, and Ibsen was the one who found it.
You have to understand what he accomplished. There is no important writer after Ibsen who does not use his sense of craft and his ability to analyze the human character. The human character is what you find in Ibsen’s plays.
***
Henrik Ibsen is Greece for you. Ibsen’s world might as well be Greece, for all you know. It is the world in which the modern theater was born. It produced a form that has lasted longer than the Elizabethan or Restoration or any other form of theater. The Elizabethan style lasted forty to fifty years, no longer. Other styles changed or died out even faster. Ibsen’s formula is the only one that has lasted more than a century.
The creation of the modern theater took a genius like Ibsen. His formulation goes on and on, stated and restated in creative ways that are profoundly startling. You will be aghast at what is revealed in Ibsen. Every play after him is influenced by him. Miller and Odets and Inge and O’Neill and Williams and Shaw swallowed the whole of him. You cannot escape the influence. Whenever you start a class on a modern playwright, you have to begin with Ibsen because he is the seed. The fertilizer of the egg Like Mozart in music, and the long line of composers who have taken what Mozart the seminal genius did and creatively restated it in a thousand ways.
Ibsen was the pioneer. To our ears, “pioneer” sounds like somebody who climbed in a covered wagon and went West. I think it may be the wrong word, so I will change it: Ibsen was a revolutionary, an anarchist, a nihilist. He broke apart everything in order to get at what he wanted to say. What did he want to say? He wanted to say the truth of what he saw. The truth was difficult to find because until Ibsen came along the forms were romanticized, melodramatized. Too many things “happened” to the truth along the way.
***
In Ibsen, the hero is in conflict with the social and moral system that he lives under. In the theater of the Greeks and the Elizabethans, man deals with God and society is ordered. If a person broke a law, it was a sin. The aim was always to restore order. Ibsen felt that contemporary writers must see through things and that their insights must be viewed through the characters in a contemporary human situation.
Ibsen wrote for and about the middle class; he did not speak about the upper class, the aristocracy, or royalty. A playwright writes in his own time, and Ibsen’s was from 1860 on. Do not always think in terms of you and the end of the twentieth century. The middle class came along long before you did. You must know whether it is the middle class of 1860 or 1990. There are many changes. It’s the largest class in the Western world and the one we are always in connection with.
Ibsen had two strong impulses. The first was to escape from his conventional, stuffy, unproductive middle-class surroundings (nevertheless, the environment he wrote about). The second impulse was for freedom—a great desire to exist under his own self-control, not the government, the church, and other institutions. His idea of liberty was the freedom not to be imposed on by other people’s ideas. To understand him, we must sketch his life and how it lent itself to modern theater.
***
You must honor your father and mother. You must love your brother. You must love your husband. You must love your wife. Ibsen says all this is nonsense. You do not have to love your husband or your mother, and your mother does not have to love you. It is not your own idea; it was handed down. He attacks all institutions that are handed down—and built up.
***
People do one thing at work and another thing at home, and they are not necessarily the things they think or say they do. Ibsen makes you see that you are a function not of what you say but of what you do—and of what society, in many ways, makes you do.
***
The discussion concerns an issue about which the audience has already formulated an opinion, so they leave the theater arguing their opinions and perhaps continue to do so at home. A playwright who knows how to touch that in an audience is a powerful, successful playwright. These playwrights know that if they can involve you in that way, they have the power to teach you something.
***
The discussion concerns an issue about which the audience has already formulated an opinion, so they leave the theater arguing their opinions and perhaps continue to do so at home. A playwright who knows how to touch that in an audience is a powerful, successful playwright. These playwrights know that if they can involve you in that way, they have the power to teach you something.
***
The villainous character, for example, is just as conscientious as the
heroic one, or—if anything—more so. He is just as “true” and as firm in
the belief that he is right. Ibsen says, “In the good there is bad, and
in the bad there is good.” There lies a more profound characterization:
How can a character be wrong if there is so much right about him? More
important (and more interesting) is who the hero and the villain are. Ibsen aims to trap
you. He introduces you to a man who is good and you side with him. But
in the second act you recognize that he isn’t as good as you thought he
was. Ibsen catches you up by making the character both right and wrong.
He makes you like or respect something that the discussion may reveal to
be hateful and dishonorable. He misleads you so much that, in the end,
you are truly uncertain where your opinion lies. Perhaps, then, you go
home with some other or ambiguous idea that belongs exclusively to you,
to solve it for yourself. Ibsen seldom solves it for you.
The one thing you can hang on to is that an Ibsen play deals with ideas
and that they are discussed in front of you. Ibsen changed theater by
including this “discussive element” within the play. Discussion was a
new concept in drama—something that makes the play both modern and
intellectual. It does not necessarily lead anywhere.
***
Ibsen always has two points of view on the stage in his characters.
One says, “I believe this,” and the other says, “I believe that.” The
audience partakes of and listens to both sides, but there is usually no
way to resolve an Ibsen idea.
If you have two opposite opinions and both contain some truth and the
audience listens to both, then the one thing you are not going to get
anymore is a hero. That is finished. There are no “pure” heroes in
literature after Ibsen. Before Ibsen, everybody knew who was good and
who was bad, who was right and wrong. We didn’t have to think about it.
From Ibsen on, you have to make up your mind as you leave the theater.
Ibsen never says which character is wrong or right. That is
absolutely new. Before, everybody could recognize the hero was and the
villain. You always knew, right from the beginning: lago is the villain.
But Ibsen never says anyone is wrong. The characters all have a right
to live, a right to their own way. And if nobody is right, you have no
hero.
***
In fashioning and infusing his plays with this argumentative element,
Ibsen created not just a whole new form of drama but—arguably—a new way
of life. Something more real or at least more realistic: realism.
I like trying to write plays, It is a form I am still trying to understand, and I see a thing here that I never saw clearly before - the argumentative element. Well, I never put a name to it, for all I tried to make a play where characters engage in dialog over an idea.
Adler writing about the persistence of Ibsen's influence made me consider the other playwrights I grew up with, the ones making a sensation when I came of age: Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet. Yes, I can see his influence - the lack of heroes, the criticism of the middle class, the cry for freedom.
Now, to get to work - or is is back to the work Ibsen started?
