Alas, Poor Twitter–I Knew Him, Ho-Ratio

By Robin Bates | Published: October 30, 2022
Branagh as Hamlet

Monday

Ever since rightwing billionaire Elon Musk purchased Twitter, the social media site has been abuzz—or a-twitter—about the possible end of the posting service as we know it. Chaucer Doth Tweet, which I wrote about Thursday, reposted some of its bests tweets, as though that they were headed for oblivion. Twitter savvy Tobias Wilson-Bates, meanwhile, riffed on Hamlet’s eulogy to court jester Yorick:

Toby’s tweet is positively Joycean. To appreciate it, here’s the original passage:

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times. And now how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss’d I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?

And now to the tweet, which alludes to David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest:

Alas, poor Twitter! I knew it well, Ho-Ratio: some fellows reading infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those bits that I have RT’ed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now?

For those not versed in twitter language, a tweet is ratioed if the number of negative responses it gets far outweigh the positive responses. RT, meanwhile, stands for retweet, which one often does if one likes it and looks forward to encourage witty gibes in return.

Another Twitter lament, along with a great thread, comes to us courtesy of “Jane Austen First Drafts” (JAFD), who informs us in her bio that “If Lady Catherine had ever learnt to tweet, she would have been a great proficient.”  Her initial response to Musk’s takeover referenced Mansfield Park:

Let’s enjoy the last few moments we have on here before it’s totally ruined, like we’re rehearsing Lovers’ Vows before Sir Thomas crashes the party.

A reader responded, “It’s like knowing Mr. Collins will inherit Longbourn and we’re the unmarried ladies looking for any other eligible man,” to which JAFD answered,

We aren’t laughing at Mrs. Bennet anymore!

Someone else tweeted, It’s like General Tilney’s carriage suddenly rolling up to Northanger at 11pm.

But the winner came from a reader who referenced Sense and Sensibility. JAFD observed, “This is so accurate it hurts”:

Fanny Dashwood is on her way to take possession

Let’s see, who is more hateful—Fanny Dashwood, who selfishly talks her husband out of money for his stepmother and half-sisters (per his father’s dying request), or Elon Musk, who flirts with Putin and Trump? Oof, that’s a hard one.

And there’s more: Shakepeare, meanwhile, showed up in another tweet:

“First thing we do is kill all the lawyers” Henry VI [Part 2] – Elon Musk’s first firings: top legal executive & general counsel – remember the real meaning of those lines is that in order to sow chaos – you first get rid of the lawyers.

To explain the chaos Shakespeare feared, here’s Judge Tom Thrash explaining the context for the statement in a guest essay he contributed to this site:

Henry VI, Part 2, is set in England in the late 15th century at the beginning of the Wars of the Roses. Henry VI is a weak and ineffectual king, and the nobles and great lords rule the country. England is in turmoil, with a charlatan named Jack Cade leading an armed mob of angry tenant farmers and tradesmen in a march on London with the aim of overthrowing the ruling elites and all of England’s legal and governmental institutions.

The statement about killing all the lawyers is made by Dick the Butcher, one of the leaders of the mob of anarchists. He wants to get rid of the lawyers because they are the defenders of the rule of law. Lawyers are defenders of a system of justice that curtails the arbitrary use of force. To me, recognizing our special role as defenders of the rule of law is an important aspect of professionalism.

In other words, get rid of Twitter lawyers–include the one who banned Donald Trump from the site–and it will be overrun by fascists and racists.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has also weighed in, this time from a tweeter who goes by the twitter handle “Nemanja”:

VLADIMIR: “Well? Shall we leave Twitter?”
ESTRAGON: “Yes, let’s go.”
(They do not move.)

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Your Shadow Makes This Book Glow

By Robin Bates | Published: October 28, 2022
Ivan Kramskoi, Reading Woman

Spiritual Sunday

I’m traveling this weekend–Julia and I are headed to Slovenia–so you’re getting my Sunday post early. This Rilke poem may be about God or it may be about the the special spirit that lights up the universe (actually both are the same thing). God is the still small voice, the glow we experience when we are reading poetry, a herd of luminous deer running through a dark forest.

Rilke also says that, when he is caught up in the spokes of God’s ever-turning wheel, he is drawn inward toward the center. Meanwhile, “all the work I put my hand to widens from turn to turn.” This, I suppose, would make God simultaneously a centrifugal and centripetal force.

Which sounds about right.

You Come and Go
By Rainer Maria Rilke

You come and go. The doors swing closed
ever more gently, almost without a shudder
Of all who move through the quiet houses,
you are the quietest.

We become so accustomed to you,
we no longer look up
when your shadow falls over the book we are reading
and makes it glow. For all things
sing you: at times
we just hear them more clearly.

Often when I imagine you
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer
and I am dark. I am a forest.

You are a wheel at which I stand,
whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up,
revolve me nearer to the centre.
Then all the work I put my hand to
widens from turn to turn.

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A Dickinson Poem for Halloween

By Robin Bates | Published: October 27, 2022
Goya, Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

Friday

For my Friday essays I’ve taken to examining the poem I post weekly in the Sewanee Mountain Messenger, which means that you’re getting my Halloween essay early. I’ll still write something for All Souls Day next week, however.

Anticipating Freud, Emily Dickinson finds horror’s true source to be the mind. Of Dickinson’s many poems about the darkness within, I particularly appreciate “One need not be a chamber to be haunted” because of its gothic trappings.

In it she contrasts internal haunting with Gothic stories about haunted houses, ghosts, midnight pursuers, and lurking assassins. Perhaps she has in mind such stories as Charles Brockden Brown’s Weiland, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” and Washington Irving’s “Headless Horseman.” Gothic stories were all the rage when Dickinson was writing, including those of Louise May Alcott.

I love the way Dickinson uses a short two syllables in each stanza’s final line to punctuate her point. “Whiter host,” “in lonesome place,” and “more near” each strike a more ominous chord than the contrasting gothic image. The exception makes the point: “Be horror’s least,” which appears in conjunction with a physical horror, is less powerful than “should startle most.” There’s nothing so frightening as when it’s our own self, “behind ourself concealed,” jumping out and shouting, “Boo!”

This is horror stripped down to its basics. Poetry, Dickinson show, can get closer to the true nature of horror than prose:

One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.

Far safer, of a midnight meeting
External ghost,
Than an interior confronting
That whiter host.

Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones achase,
Than, moonless, one’s own self encounter
In lonesome place.

Ourself, behind ourself concealed,
Should startle most;
Assassin, hid in our apartment,
Be horror’s least.

The prudent carries a revolver,
He bolts the door,
O’erlooking a superior spectre
More near.

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Chaucer Doth Tweet

By Robin Bates | Published: October 26, 2022

Thursday

This is to alert you to a delightful Chaucer parody account entitled Chaucer Doth Tweet. In addition to its wit, I love how it’s very much in the spirit of Chaucer, one of England’s great humorists. It takes me back to the day when I would have my students read, and sometimes recite, the opening lines of Canterbury Tales in the original.

It also serves the serious purpose to reminding us that the English literature of the Middle Ages is worth reading and returning to. In fact, it introduces itself to us with a mission statement along these lines:

Studyinge the literatures of the past ys not antiquarian distractioun, nor ys it implicit praise of what ys studied; ynstead, critical studye of past literatures ys vital for seekinge more just, equitable, capacious, and hopeful futures. The presente ys just one part of progress.

Now for the fun stuff. Since Halloween is coming up, this tweet has been circulating:

Thei did the Mash! Thei did the Monstere Mash.
The Monstere Mash: beholde, sepulchral smasshe!
Thei did the Mash, and it kaughte on moost fast –
Hark, heare the Mash! Forsooth, the Monstere Mash!

Many kids will be dressed up as this superhero:

Spydere Man, Spydere Man
Doth al things a spydere kan
Sondry webbes he kan weaven
Thieves lyke flyes he kan cacchen
Lo! anon cometh Spydere Man

And then there’s this tweet in praise of Friday:

Ich thynke but litel of a Mondaye bleake
Tuesdaye grey and
Wednesdaye eke
Thursdaye Ich care nat for thee
Yet Fridaye Ich am yn love
 
Mondaye thou mayst fall awaye
Tuesdaye, Wednesdaye,
myne herte breake
No mirthe ys founde upon Thursdaye
Yet Fridaye Ich am yn love

There’s a wonderful summation of Homeric epics:

What thei do nat telle yow about Homeric epic ys that lyke thirtye to fortye percent of the texte ys just about various people makinge grilled meat dishes and setting out appetizers.

I conclude with the account’s parody of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides, Now”:

Rowes and flowes of seraph hair
And sugarid castles yn the ayre
And feathir valleyes everichwher
Ich thoughte on cloudes that waye

Yet now thei do but block the sonne
Thei rayne and snowe on everichon
So manye things Ich wolde have done
But cloudes did block the waye

Chyk it oute. Thou wilte thanke mae.

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My Upcoming Ljubljana Lectures

By Robin Bates | Published: October 25, 2022
Hogarth, The Lecture

Wednesday

For the month of November, Julia and I will be in Slovenia, where we have spent some of our happiest years. I received a teaching Fulbright to the University of Ljubljana in 1987-88 (when Slovenia was still part of Yugoslavia) and another in 1994-95, not long after Slovenia had broken away. I will be connecting with former colleagues and students and contributing multiple lectures to a Shakespeare class and a post-colonial literature class. I will also give single lectures in an early British Literature class, a Canadian literature class, a literary theory class and perhaps others.

In other words, I will be in my comfort zone.

I’ll report in future posts on how things are going, but I use today’s essay to set forth the texts I plan to teach.

For Shakespeare, I’ve been told I can pick from seven plays for three classes, those being King Lear, Merchant of Venice, Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Winter’s Tale, and Taming of the Shrew. Which would you choose?

I can squeeze some extra plays in there if I teach two in a class, so I’m considering that—although not for King Lear as that deserves an entire class to itself (if not more). Merchant of Venice and Taming of the Shrew are an intriguing pairing since both pose such challenges for modern audiences, what with the anti-Semitism expressed in the one and the sexism expressed in the other (but not, I would argue, by Shakespeare). Romeo and Juliet is a real temptation because of the seething sex and violence at its core, multiplied by adolescence. And then I’d love to give over a full class to The Tempest, which touches on issues of colonialism, alchemy, magic, and art.

In short, I still haven’t made up my mind.

I’m clearer about the seven classes I will teach in the Anglophone/ Post-Colonial Literature class. Here are the topics and works:

British Colonialism – Ryder Haggard’s She, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books and Kim, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Post-Colonialist Literary Theory – Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth

Nigerian Literature – Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

Indian Literature I – Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; Three Years, Eight Months, and 28 Nights

Indian Literature II – Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

South African Literature – J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians; short story by Nadine Gordimer

Jamaican Literature – Marlon James, Red Wolf, Black Leopard

In other words, I’ll start with how Britains saw both the romance and the horror of empire; move on to Fanon’s famous call for the colonized to fight back—and to write back; examine Achebe’s attack on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, how he validates Fanon, and how members of the Nigerian disaspora (Adichie is Nigerian-American) are rediscovering their roots; look at how two Indian authors negotiate their colonial past (and also their own Muslim/Hindu/Syrian Christian pasts); survey how two white South African authors negotiate apartheid; and conclude with how a Jamaican author uses fantasy to explore his violent society.  

I’m sure the class will evolve once I start my series of lectures. But this is what I’m envisioning so far.

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Manskinner Boris & Putin’s Terror Tactics

By Robin Bates | Published: October 24, 2022
Vladimir Putin

Tuesday

As Ukrainian forces liberate more villages and cities from the Russians, they continue to encounter mass graves and reports of torture, which takes my mind to Boris the Manskinner, from Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. A Stalinist agent battling the Japanese during World War II and after, Boris is one of the most frightening literary villains I have ever encountered. Like Putin, he uses terror as a weapon to ensure submission.

Before you read further, however, a warning: today’s post is not for the faint of heart.

We hear about Boris from Lieutenant Mamiya, who first witnesses the Russian’s brutality while on a scouting mission in Russia-controlled Mongolia during the war. Later, he encounters Boris again when interned in a Russian prison camp. During the first encounter, he watches Boris order one of his fellow Japanese comrades to be slowly skinned alive. He himself is thrown down a dry well and barely manages to escape alive.

Boris works for Lavrentiy Beria, an actual person who headed Stalin’s secret police and was a serial rapist and killer. For a while, all goes well for Beria and Boris, although they have to scramble after the war is over:

Stalin and Beria had to cook up their internal-conspiracy theory, covering up their own responsibility for having failed to predict the Nazi invasion in order their positions of leadership. A lot of people died for nothing while being cruelly tortured. Boris and his man were said to have skinned at least five people, then, and rumor had it that he proudly displayed the skiins on the walls of his office.

Ultimately, Boris is himself imprisoned for having tortured and killed the nephew of a high ranking Communist official. We learn that he “killed the man with torture, poking hot irons into every opening—ears, nostrils, rectum, penis, whatever.” Thanks to Beria, Boris is not hanged but rather sent to the same prison camp holding Mamiya. Given his fearsome reputation, Boris manages to seize control, after which he conducts a reign of strategic terror. One of Mamiya’s friends fills him in on Boris:

According to Nikolai (who was becoming increasingly reluctant to talk about anything), several Russians he knew had simply disappeared in the night. Officially, they were listed as missing or having been involved in accidents, but there was no doubt they had been “taken care of” by Boris’s henchmen. People’s lives were now in danger if they failed to follow Boris’s orders or if they merely failed to please him. A few men tried to complain directly to Party Central about the abuses going on in camp, but that was the last anyone ever saw of them. “I heard they even killed a little kid—a seven-year-old—to keep his parents in line. Beat him to death while they watched,” Nikolai whispered to me, pale-faced.

Speaking of kids, UNICEF estimated in August that close to 1000 Ukrainian children have died or been injured since the February invasion. And while shelling is probably responsible for most of these deaths, there are documented instances of children being raped and killed by Russian forces.

I don’t want to typecast all Russians here, and they are far from alone in committing war crimes. Murakami has a scene of a Japanese war crime (a Chinese prisoner is beaten to death with a baseball bat), and the United States has its own share of stories. The difference with Putin’s forces, however, is that barbaric cruelty appears to be a deliberate strategy, as opposed to an aberration. At the very least, we try and sentence American war criminals in the U.S. Armed Forces (including the man that Donald Trump praised and pardoned), whereas it appears that Russia encourages its soldiers to commit atrocities.

Boris the Manskinner, in other words, would feel right at home in the current conflict.

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The Bard Cited in DeSantis Smackdown

By Robin Bates | Published: October 23, 2022
Branaugh as Henry V delivering Agincourt speech

Monday

A Florida judge has quoted Shakespeare while throwing out a case reminiscent of the Jim Crow South. In case you haven’t been paying attention, GOP governor Ron DeSantis has been trying to set himself up as Donald Trump’s successor with a series of authoritarian stunts. One of these involved arresting various African American ex-convicts for fraudulently voting, even after the state of Florida had told them it was okay to vote.

In videos taken of the arrests, both the police and the arrestees are confused by the charges. As in the days of segregation, however, the actual goal of the arrests is to frighten other African Americans from voting. Oh, and to garner DeSantis points with white supremacists, who don’t believe that Blacks should be voting in the first place.

The judge reasoned that DeSantis’s prosecutor had overstepped his jurisdictional bounds. Or, as he put it at one point, “His arms spread wider than a dragon’s wings.”

DeSantis explained that his prosecutor had to step in, despite jurisdictional boundaries, because local prosecutors were “loath” to make the arrests. Once the prosecutor did so, however, he opened himself up to a judicial slap down. And, as it turned out, to a comparison with Shakespeare’s Henry V.

A eulogy to Henry V opens the first of the three Henry VI plays. Henry V, victor of Agincourt, has just died, leading Gloucester, Lord Protector of the young successor, to deliver these words:

England ne’er had a king until his time.
Virtue he had, deserving to command:
His brandish’d sword did blind men with his beams:
His arms spread wider than a dragon’s wings;
His sparking eyes, replete with wrathful fire,
More dazzled and drove back his enemies
Than mid-day sun fierce bent against their faces.
What should I say? his deeds exceed all speech:
He ne’er lift up his hand but conquered.

Given that Gloucester is praising Henry V, the Florida judge’s use of the passage seems misapplied. After all, he is criticizing the state prosecutor for spreading his arms, not praising him. Indeed, I suspect that DeSantis would love for these words to be applied to him, especially “His sparking eyes, replete with wrathful fire,/ More dazzled and drove back his enemies” and “his deeds exceed all speech:/ He ne’er lift up his hand but conquered.”

In the judge’s defense, however, Goucester’s words can be read as a critique if looked at from an historical perspective: Henry V spread his arms too wide in his attempt to take over France, and his son and successor Henry VI—thanks in part to Joan of Arc—would lose everything his father gained. Shakespeare was well aware of this.

So think of it this way: Gov. DeSantis and his minions are charging into areas where they have no business, whether by setting up a sketchy anti-election fraud unit (when there’s virtually no election fraud in Florida), imposing a prominent GOP politician as the University of Florida’s president, duping and then flying Venezuelan asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard, and other semi-fascist moves. One wonders whether, like Henry V, he’ll win temporary victories, only to lose the war. Or as Shakespeare himself puts it at the conclusion of Henry V, although Henry arranged to get his son “crown’d King of France and England,” subsequent mismanagement made it so that “they lost France and made his England bleed.”

Instead of spreading dragon wings, how about just working on being a good governor?

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Thinned Back to Bare Wood

By Robin Bates | Published: October 22, 2022
Andrew Wyeth, Pennsylvania Landscape

Spiritual Sunday

A few weeks ago my friend Sue Schmidt alerted me to this exquisite “Autumn” poem by Jane Hirshfield. In it, she compares trees stripped of their leaves to a beloved icon that has been kissed so many times that it has darkened. In this case, however, the kiss is delivered by the wind and the gold flakes that once covered the icon are the falling leaves:

Autumn
By Jane Hirshfield

Again the wind
flakes gold-leaf from the trees
and the painting darkens—
as if a thousand penitents
kissed an icon
till it thinned
back to bare wood,
without diminishment.

I love the idea that the icon is not diminished, even though it is “thinned back to bare wood.” The reverence of those delivering the kisses render the picture even more holy. The sentiment reminds me of the central theme of Margery Williams Bianco’s The Velveteen Rabbit. In it, a stuffed toy learns what it means to become “Real”:

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

And:

Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.

As Hirshfield sees it, the trees are not so much stripped as taken down to their essence. Two Sundays ago I quoted Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” but what he sees as tragedy, Hirshfield regards as spiritual growth.

As I grow old (I’m 71), I see the wind as the march of time, which strips us down to our fundamentals. Though much is lost, at this age I am better able to distinguish between what is important and what is peripheral.

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Trees Don Their Fall Finery

By Robin Bates | Published: October 20, 2022
Fall foliage in Tennessee’s Cumberland Mountains

Friday

Fall colors continue to explode in Appalachian Tennessee, leading me to this understated poem by Emily Dickinson. Given that Dickinson was famous for not following fashion—she wore only white dresses and was known locally as “the nun of Amherst”—one figures she must be deeply moved indeed by autumn foliage to “put a trinket on”:

The morns are meeker than they were – 
The nuts are getting brown –
The berry’s cheek is plumper –
The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf –
The field a scarlet gown –
Lest I sh’d be old-fashioned 
I’ll put a trinket on. 

Actually, the view of Dickinson as a dainty old maid has long been exploded, at least when it comes to her internal life. After all, she wrote such poems as “My life stood like a loaded gun” and “Wild nights!” Still, externally she maintained an ascetic appearance, meaning that jewelry would have represented a passionate response.

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