Circular Logic

The Shakespeare Code

It is difficult for most of us to feel any connection to William Shakespeare, the person. His name has become synonymous with refined literary language, highbrow culture, and ivory tower platitudes. Like Homer -- the poet, not the hapless dad on The Simpsons -- Shakespeare is more an icon of Western Civilization than a living, breathing person.

I've got a different view after finishing Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt. The book was a birthday gift from my good friend and former college housemate (and published author himself) who has become adept at book recommendations. In fact, it was all the more relevant since Will and I share a common birthday.

A biography of Shakespeare reminds us that there is flesh and blood behind some of the most powerful and poignant literature ever created. In the book, Greenblatt traces the known facts, and speculates about the local glover's son from Straford and his likely trajectories during mysterious blank periods.

I was an English major, and I've had more exposure to Shakespeare than most, but I was struck by a fact that isn't often explored in college Shakespeare seminars. Namely: Shakespeare grew up in an extremely dangerous religious period. Protestants and Catholics were fighting a kind of insurgency of terror in the midst of everyday English life. If you're a 12-year-old boy and you see a suspected Catholic spy tortured, hung, sliced open and hacked to pieces in the town square, it is bound to make an impression. Also, if you assume that informers are everywhere, it makes sense to try to be as invisible as possible if you have some Catholic connections. Hence the absence of many "facts" about Shakespeare. Facts could get you killed.

There is, of course, extensive scholarship on the plays themselves, as well as  intriguing hypotheses about Shakespeare's real intentions and influences glimpsed obliquely throughout his body of work. Critics of the book fixate on these unprovable hypotheses -- about whether Falstaff was a recasting of Robert Greene, Macbeth a risky family horror show for King James I, Prospero the voice of the world-weary poet himself at the end of his career, etc.

Those looking only for provable facts miss the point, I think. Biography is always a story, and the more powerful stories are those that reflect some truth about the reader -- not necessarily the subject. "Truth" in biography is a slippery concept, for what is the truth of someone's life? You can see this playing out today in controversies surrounding James Frey's Oprah-shamed autobiography, A Million Little Pieces, and the ever-inflammatory story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene as imagined by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code.

In the end, Greenblatt seems to be inviting us to remember that Shakespeare was a man, "taken for all in all, [we] shall not look upon his like again."

The Circles of October

October is my favorite month. It begins with our wedding anniversary and ends with Halloween. A perfect cycle.

Actually, the entire fall season is great in my book. It is something about the weather, the crisp leading edge of winter. Fall gets your attention and makes you want to live every moment to the fullest before the darkness comes.

In the business world, Fall is the season of conferences. Here in San Francisco, the tech world is gushing over the recent Web 2.0 conference. Elsewhere you have gatherings of a less "frothy" nature -- to paraphrase Alan Greenspan. You have, for example, gatherings of teachers, quality gurus, accident investigators, collection attorneys, fluid power manufacturers, ecologists, cardiologists, and analysts, just to name a few.

The conference culture is a Brobdingnagian landscape -- something that might get some attention among those who like those kinds of words, or those who specialize in studying such vastness.

Elections in the U.S. occur in the fall, too. Here in California we've got a thick ballot bursting with initiatives. Advertising is crowding the airwaves, full of froth and fury, signifying...well, signifying that it is Fall, and the weather's getting cold, and the darkness is just around the corner so you'd better stoke the fires of moral outrage and pull up a chair.

Joyce explored this sentiment in his favorite of the Dubliner's stories: "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." As the men huddle close to the fire, drinking and complaining about the candidates for office, the only candidate on which they can all agree -- Parnell -- is the one who can never be elected.

Perhaps that is why Fall is so wonderful. It is the golden present pushing up against a sublime wall of darkness. It is a time when people congregate, as if to reassure each other that the sun will shine again once we get through the winter. It is a time of ceremony, of hotel conference rooms, of baseball stadiums, of things "political."

And to my mind, the embodiment of Fall is October, the only month starting with a circle ("O"). A beginning, and an end.

Circular. Logical.

Happy Bloomsday

Today is Bloomsday, a great day for anyone who loves literature and creativity. Named for the lead character in James Joyce's Ulysses (which takes place on June 16, 1904), Bloomsday has become a worldwide celebration of Irish literature.

The summer after college I was a bartender. I enjoyed stumping patrons of the now defunct Lighthouse Bar & Restaurant on Washington Island, Wisconsin. I'd tell them they could get a free drink if they could tell me what was celebrated on June 16. No one, not even the island's high school English teacher, ever got the drink.

I still enjoy stumping friends and business associates with the question. Every now and then I run across someone who knows -- usually someone with Irish connections.

I firmly believe that Ulysses is the greatest book in the English language -- by whatever yardstick you want to use. I realize many people don't "get" Joyce, and some actively despise him, but I've always been intrigued with the complexity and astonished by the beauty of his words and structure.

I was happy to see that the blogosphere is aware of Bloomsday as well.

So, to the uninitiated, I urge you to take a crack at Ulysses. You won't get everything (hardly anyone does, even on repeated readings), but if you stick with it you'll at least be able to bluff your way to a free drink every now and then. Very Joycean, that.

Light Sleeping

I intended to skim the book review in this week's New Yorker, but I ended up being hooked by Arthur Krystal's detailed review of At Day's Close by A. Roger Ekirch:

Ekirch believes that he’s writing “the history of nighttime in Western society,” but that would imply that someone else could do the same for the morning or for three in the afternoon. What he’s writing, of course, is a history of Western society during the nighttime, which, judging from the Notes, involves scanning every work of literature, sermon, letter, diary, newspaper, song, folktale, and instructional pamphlet, as well as every court, church, and medical record, that mentions the night.

Now, I realize it is a bit gauche to write about a book I've only experienced through a review, but it isn't the book that struck me so much as a peculiar idea about the nature of sleep.

Apparently, Ekirch has evidence that people used to have two sleep periods at night:

"...until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of wakefulness."

This all changed with the electric light. In fact, Ekirch claims there is evidence that people deprived of artificial light at night return to this two-phase sleep pattern, and there are apparently historical references to the "first sleep" and the "second sleep," sometimes called "morning sleep." Even Plutarch, Livy and Virgil invoked the terms.

This makes me wonder if anyone is thinking about the long-term effects of 24/7 communications. After all, we're living in an age when a ring tone can top the charts, when you can make money selling virtual real estate in video games, and when the sun never sets on the global economy.

AP reporter Rachel Konrad's recent piece about the rise of offshore work in the technology industry captures the angst I see building in the Bay Area:

Silicon Valley workers grumble that communicating with colleagues overseas requires midnight teleconferences, 6 a.m. video meetings and the annoying "pling" of instant messages and twittering cell phones all night long. Although many techies swapped social lives for 80-hour weeks during the ephemeral dot-com boom, the 24-hour business cycle seems even more stressful than the caffeinated '90s: Today's long hours are less likely to result in windfall bonuses or stock options, and there's no end in sight.

Perhaps the same thoughts went through people's heads when Edison's electric light suddenly opened up new vistas of productivity. It would be interesting to compare the rhetoric about rural electrification to the current hoopla about the digital divide and the mobile workforce.

Perhaps in 1,000 years, people will be amazed that there was a time in human history when people actually slept more than a few hours at a time.

An Elephant Never Forgets

Hannibal, the famous Carthaginian general, always stood out to me as an example of how a few carefully chosen details rather than a litany of facts can crystalize a story. Mention elephants and mountains to most anyone, and you'll likely elicit Hannibal's name.

Like many people, the only thing I knew about Hannibal was that he crossed the Alps with elephants and came within a hair's breath of conquering Rome during the Second Punic War.

I'm now a bit more informed, although in a historical fiction sort of way. I just finished reading Pride of Carthage: A Novel of Hannibal, by David Anthony Durham. The novel is a dramatized account of Hannibal Barca and his brothers as they take on the greatest military power of the time -- and lose, despite Hannibal's consistently superior tactical brilliance. While overcoming geography, larger opposing forces, and the unruly alliances of Gauls, Iberians and Africans that made up his army, Hannibal never figured out a way to subdue those pesky and treacherous politicians back in Carthage, jealous of his success and angry with him for making Carthage a target for Roman retribution.

It is chilling that the Romans later conquered Carthage and systematically killed all the inhabitants and wiped out the culture, including all art, literature, and historical records. As a result, all our history of Hannibal comes from non-Carthaginian sources.

Still the powerful imagery of those elephants crossing the Alps is indelible. Had Hannibal not gone that route, my guess is that very few people would remember him at all.

Today, there are apparently very few ruins to mark the spot where Carthage once stood. Like many ruined and conquered peoples, Carthage will always be a footnote to the dominant culture of their time -- the Romans. However, I think it is interesting that no amount of Roman cultural destruction could overcome the power of elephants, those great remembering beasts.