Gaming the classics

Since I have a maximum of about 11 readers for this blog, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I was once a contestant on Jeopardy.

I’m not proud of it; and since I didn’t win, I only had the ugliest couch in Christendom to show for it (which I ditched when I left Virginia for Washington, enough being enough). And I certainly don’t think about it, ever.

But while putting together today’s post on Ovid for National Poetry Month I was reminded of another famous Roman poet, and his masterwork, which I read for a humanities course at Scripps College. I’d already had an Ancient module—Greek—but I enjoyed that so much I went back for more with a lecture course on Roman culture. The Aeneid was part of that, of course, and that’s what brings me to that irritating experience on a game show.

(As an aside: can someone tell me why MSFT Word’s spellchecker accepts Aeneas but not Aeneid?)

I have enough of the Puritan poker up my butt to fervently believe you can’t/shouldn’t get something for nothing, and I have to say that I find all game shows cringeworthy in their appeal to contestant greed. I’d never have touched Jeopardy with a barge pole but my friend Jan (who’d tried out and been rejected) kept insisting that with my compendium of trivial knowledge, I’d be a shoo-in.

Well, reader, I did make it to the taping and I did get chosen to play. I don’t recall the category (classical lit opening lines?), but the answer was, “Arms and the man I sing”, and I buzzed first with the question, “What is the Aeneid?”

Fine. But that complete plonker Alex Trebek, whose ego is so huge I don’t know how he gets it through the door, wanted to show off. He asked if I could recite it in Latin and I said I couldn’t. I read it in translation. (And, BTW, “Arms and the man I sing” is only one translation, by John Dryden; but it’s pretty famous.)

So he smirked, “Arma virumque cano,” like he should get the Nobel Prize in literature.

So that’s why Ovid won out over Virgil for today’s poetic entry.

I suppose you’re going to ask, so I’ll go ahead and tell you: I won the final jeopardy round on the answer “The number of children in the Cunningham family on ‘Happy Days’”. The question was, “What is three?” I was the only contestant to get it right and I only knew it because a couple of weeks earlier I’d been channel surfing and came across a syndicated episode from the first year that had an older brother named Chuck. I’d bet everything on my answer, but it wasn’t enough to beat this one guy who was a complete juggernaut, thus validating my belief in not getting something for nothing.

We live in a bizarre old world when knowing the number of Cunningham children and the opening line to one of the great classics carries equal weight in any kind of contest.

The cruelest month: Femina sola superstes

For today’s National Poetry Month offering, we’ll enter the WABAC Machine and set the clock for…a long, long time ago. All the way to the cusp of the Common Era.

Give it up, folks, for Publius Ovidius Naso, one of the mainstays of the romantic poets. I met Ovid at UCLA, in my third-year Latin class. But we read Metamorphoses, not Amores or Ars Amatoria.

Metamorphoses is your basic ancient Greco-Roman mythology, writ large in dactylic hexameter. The part I’m sharing with you is about Deucalion and Pyrrha, the only two humans left on earth after Zeus floods the place in one of his periodic snits.

Redditus orbis erat; quem postquam vidit

inanem et desolatas agere alta silentia terras,

Deucalion lacrimis ita Pyrrham adfatur obortis:

  ‘o soror, o coniunx, o femina sola superstes,

  quam commune mihi genus et patruelis origo,

  deinde torus iunxit, nunc ipsa pericula iungunt,

  terrarum, quascumque vident occasus et ortus,

  nos duo turba sumus; possedit cetera pontus.

  haec quoque adhuc vitae non est fiducia nostrae

  certa satis; terrent etiamnum nubila mentem.

  quis tibi, si sine me fatis erepta fuisses,

  nunc animus, miseranda, foret? quo sola timorem

  ferre modo posses? quo consolante doleres!

  namque ego (crede mihi), si te quoque pontus haberet,

  te sequerer, coniunx, et me quoque pontus haberet.’

If you want an English translation, here you go:

When Deucalion saw that earth was empty

and observed the solemn silence over

devastated lands, with tears in his eyes

he spoke to Pyrrha:

                                 O sister, O wife,

  the only woman alive, linked to me

  by common race and family origin,

  then by marriage, and by these dangers now,

  we two are the total population

  of the entire world, every place spied out

  by the setting and rising sun. The sea

  has taken all the others. Even now,

  there is nothing secure about our lives,

  nothing to give us sufficient confidence.

  Those heavy clouds still terrify my mind.

  O you for whom I have so much compassion,

  how would you feel now, if you had been saved

  from death without me? How could you endure

  the fear all by yourself? Who would console

  your grief? For if the sea had taken you,

  dear wife, I would follow you, believe me,

  and the sea would have me, too.

And here’s my connection. I was a transfer student at UCLA, meaning I went in as a junior. And three of my four upper division courses were lectures with more than 75 students in each one of them. Latin was the exception—I think there were maybe eight of us in that class. And we were reading Metamorphoses.

One day the professor instructed us to read aloud the passage that begins with “O soror, O coniunx!” and read it with passion.

One after another of my classmates droned on like they were performing an autopsy phonetically. When my turn finally came up I gave it everything I’d have done if I were playing Tosca, which the material deserved. Last man and woman left on earth? Are you kidding me?

When I finished there was silence. The professor made some comment about that being the sort of delivery she’d been looking for. I let my fellow students off the hook by replying, “Well, my professor at my former college was Italian, so…”

Her eyes lit up. “Oh—Carmen Brunol?”

“Yep.”

Well, there you go.

Dr. Brunol had lived through the 30s and 40s in Italy. Her memories of the League of Nations’ sanctions were, uh, vivid.

Also, in comparing ancient Rome with Fascist Italy (a reference Mussolini was always making) she made a couple of points. We were discussing second person singular and plural (often thought of in various non-English languages as familiar and formal forms of address) she mentioned that all the caesars were addressed as “tu”. I asked if anyone ever called Il Duce by that form and she just howled with laughter.

She also commented on the differences between Roman and modern Italian engineering: “The allies would drop a bomb next to a Roman bridge and it would stand; ten miles away three Mussolini bridges would collapse.”

And you thought Latin was desiccated and boring? That’s just what we want you to think.

The cruelest month: Belie with false compare

Well, alrighty, then—time to haul out the big guns for National Poetry Month. I’m talking Shakespeare, baby; the one and only.

The challenge with the Bard is, of course, being spoilt for choice. Do I go for Hamlet’s soliloquy? Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”? “All the world’s a stage,” from As You Like It?

No, I do not.

And which of the sonnets? Number 18—“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Number 116—“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”?

Hmm—not so much.

No, you can get plenty of romantic hyperbole out of many of the sonnets—Shakespearean and otherwise. I happen to like number 130—the one where Will gets real about his mistress and still prefers her. You know—kind of like Charles and Camilla.

Sonnet 130

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

   As any she belied with false compare.

There’s love for you.

As for the plays—I’m picking the Saint Crispian’s Day speech from Henry V:

This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,

Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,

And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

He that shall live this day, and see old age,

Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,

And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,

And say “These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.”

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,

But he’ll remember, with advantages,

What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,

Familiar in his mouth as household words-

Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,

Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-

Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered-

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition;

And gentlemen in England now-a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

I love that speech. And squawk me no squawk about the lack of rhyme. You didn’t grouse about “The Waste Land”, did you?

Here’s the power of that speech: you can have Kenneth Branagh give it before the field of Agincourt in full regalia and that’s as it should be. But here it is in a different setting, a field exercise in a basic training camp in the 1994 film Renaissance Man.

Here’s the deal: Danny DeVito is an unemployed advertising guy who slums taking a job trying to teach some misfit recruits how to take instructions. Gregory Hines’ drill sergeant thinks teacher and students are collectively and individually a waste of space. They’re studying Hamlet in class, but a trip to Ontario to watch a production of Henry V on the hoof captures the soul of Private Benitez, as you can see in this clip:

The filmmakers cut about three lines and threw in a couple of words, but still.

I cannot watch this sequence dry-eyed, hearing Henry’s words coming out of a Brooklyn-bred mouth on a guy with the army-issued eyeglasses that everyone knows are a key birth-control device, and seeing the way it captures the universal spirit of the warrior, as the drill sergeant clearly recogizes.

And that’s why you can’t have a poetry month without Shakespeare.

The cruelest month: Richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow

So far, my poems for National Poetry Month have been by the great and the good. Or at least the well-known. My entry for today comes from a collection of poems and drawings from the children of Terezín, the “model” ghetto the Nazis built as part of their Final Solution of the Jewish Question.

Terezín was the Nazis’ Potemkin lager—a transit camp-cum-ghetto for Jews removed first from Prague, then from other areas of the Reich. Built on the old Hapsburg town of Theresienstadt (pre-war population around 5000), it housed tens of thousands in ghetto conditions, although it was considered posh enough to show to visiting Red Cross officials as an example of benign treatment of Jews. Of those who didn’t die of starvation, disease or brutality at Terezín, most were murdered at Auschwitz.

I first saw I Never Saw Another Butterfly while working at the Children’s Room of the Pasadena Public Library. There’s a newer edition on Amazon, with about 50 more pages than mine, so I’m thinking more context setting.

Anyhow, the poem that gives the collection its title is “The Butterfly”, by Pavel Friedmann:

The Butterfly

The last, the very last,

So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.

   Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing

   against a white stone...

Such, such a yellow

Is carried lightly ’way up high.

It went away I'm sure because it wished to

   kiss the world goodbye.

For seven weeks I've lived in here,

Penned up inside this ghetto

But I have found my people here.

The dandelions call to me

And the white chestnut candles in the court.

Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one.

Butterflies don't live in here,

   In the ghetto.

The poem was dated 4^th June 1942, when Friedmann was 21. He was transported to Auschwitz and murdered 29^th September 1944.

You should see the picture that faces “The Butterfly” in my edition. It’s by Eva Bu (Bulová), undated.

Bulova was born 12^th July 1930, deported to Terezín 12^th September 1942, and killed in Auschwitz 4 October 1944.

Years after my introduction to Terezín, I was reading some poems written by German soldiers who’d been caught by Russia’s greatest military leader, General Winter. I can’t remember the source, or even where they were—Stalingrad? Leningrad? Moscow? Dunno. But from their frozen hell they expressed the same kinds of longing the children of the model ghetto spoke of.

Just a butterfly. Just a flower. Just a smile from a young woman. Just a hint that life holds out something good, when in fact as far as you can see it's ugly and painful and fearsome.

That's one of the functions of poetry, to focus on that hope.

The cruelest month: 'Satiable curtiosity

I believe there must be an entry from Rudyard Kipling in National Poetry Month. You gotta have a representative of that muscular Christianity style of the late Victorians, don’t you?

For a guy who never wore the uniform, Kipling did a whole lotta evangelizing for empire and the military effort it took to support it; he’s the one who enjoined the Brits to “take up the white man’s burden”. He also wrote shedloads of wonderful stories, collected in such offerings as The Jungle Book and Just-So Stories; and every once in a while I haul out Kim to reread, just because it’s a great adventure about the Great Game.

One of my favorites of his Just-So stories is “The Elephant’s Child”, because that Elephant’s Child was just full of ‘satiable curtiosity. Which is how elephants got their long trunks. Don’t believe me? Here’s how it starts:

“IN the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side; but he couldn't pick up things with it. But there was one Elephant--a new Elephant--an Elephant's Child--who was full of 'satiable curtiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions.”

I don’t know how exactly it works out, but it turns out that I’m actually related to that Elephant’s Child, maybe second cousin once removed, because I’m always asking ever so many questions. And, like the Elephant’s Child, I’ve had my share of spankings by way of answers.

Anyhow, at the end of the story (which I do recommend highly; you can find it here), Kipling adds this poem:

I Keep six honest serving-men:

  (They taught me all I knew)

Their names are What and Where and When

  And How and Why and Who.

I send them over land and sea,

  I send them east and west;

But after they have worked for me,

  I give them all a rest.

I let them rest from nine till five.

  For I am busy then,

As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,

  For they are hungry men:

But different folk have different views:

  I know a person small--

She keeps ten million serving-men,

  Who get no rest at all!

She sends 'em abroad on her own affairs,

  From the second she opens her eyes--

One million Hows, two million Wheres,

  And seven million Whys!

Anyone ever trained as a journalist knows this six honest serving men. And anyone who’s read the story knows what a workout the Elephant’s Child gave them.

Working it out

Here’s something I’ve wondered about for going on for a couple of decades: why is it that people going to the gym always try to park as close to the doors as possible?

I’ve noticed this in Virginia, the UK, Washington and here.

There can be rows and rows of parking spaces vacant, and yet people trawl through the aisles close to the gym like mall shoppers on the 24^th of December desperate for that one spot 30 feet from the entrance. If you look like you’re going to a car parked close, they’ll hover on your heels.

I don’t get it: they’re going to the gym, for pity’s sake! To get a workout! They’re paying money for this. Why the bloody hell does it matter to them where they park—the farther away, the longer the cardio effort. It's all good.

I wonder if I could get a research grant to study this?

Questions & answers

So, regarding my conundrum reported yesterday—what to tell interviewers when they ask what you do when you’re not working, I got the best suggestion from my friend Danger Girl:

“I have hobbies that make me sound more interesting the less I reveal about them. I assure you that they are all legal. Okay, legal-ish.”

It’s either that or chirping right back at the interrogator, "And what do you do for fun?" And watch him take on the outraged expression of one who's just sat down on a sofa and discovered a poker rammed up his butt.

The cruelest month: Daughter of Elysium

Naturally, English is not the sole language of poetry. My focus is on my native tongue, but today’s entry in the National Poetry Month listing comes from Germany.

I could go with Heine, or Goethe, or Rilke; I had to read bits of them all in my German classes. But I’ll let you off easy: here’s “Ode an die Freude”, from Friedrich Schiller.

Well, I’ll give you the first stanza:

Freude schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium

wir betreten feuertrunken himmlische dein Heiligtum

Deine Zauber binden wieder was die Mode streng geteilt

alle Menschen werden Brüder wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

Here’s an English translation; frankly, I don’t find it nearly as…interesting:

Joy, bright spark of divinity,

Daughter of Elysium,

Fire-inspired we tread

Thy sanctuary.

Thy magic power re-unites

All that custom has divided,

All men become brothers

Under the sway of thy gentle wings.

Now—poetry is meant to be heard, not just read. The way the words strike the ear is almost as important as the meaning they convey; or at least it’s a key component of the meaning. (I had this, uh, discussion with a French professor once; he insisted that poems are all about the sounds and not about the meaning. But then, being a Hungarian Olympic water polo player, he might have been suffering from too much time in chlorinated water trying to beat the vodka out of the Russian team.)

But in the case of “Ode to Joy” you can hear them sung—because Ludwig van Beethoven was so entranced by Schiller’s sentiments that he built a magnificent, iconoclastic choral element to his Ninth Symphony.

Beethoven, you’ll recall, was an ardent admirer of the principles of the French Revolution and the post-enlightenment hope in the brotherhood of mankind. (He originally dedicated his Third Symphony to Napoleon, whom he viewed as a revolutionary hero. After Bonaparte crowned himself emperor in 1804, Beethoven sent it to the publishers as “Sinfonia Eroica…composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grand Uomo.” Heroic symphony composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.) “Alle Menschen werden Brüder”

Well, we still live in hope of that. So crank up the volume on your PC and drink in Schiller and Beethoven.

The cruelest month: Lone and level sands

You can’t run a National Poetry Month in an English-speaking country (okay—mostly English-speaking; in certain parts) without having at least one of the Romantic poets. So today I give you Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”.

(As an aside, why does MSFT Word’s spellchecker recognize the “Bysshe” in Shelley’s name but the title of one of his greatest poems? Philistines—they’re all Philistines.)

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear –

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

As with many of the poems I’m posting this month, “Ozymandias” has been with me since high school; Mr. Sheinkopf—probably the best English teacher I’ve ever had—did a poetry module in the tenth grade.

Here’s what we did with “Ozymandias”: we diagrammed it—you know, breaking apart the structure and laying it out in a diagram so you can see how everything hangs together. (Well, maybe those readers who aren’t clear about the differences between direct and indirect objects, or between transitive and intransitive verbs might want to skip this part.)

And the first 11 lines are incredibly complex and convoluted, building up to that ultimate self-puffery, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” We had that sucker all over the chalkboard, spiking out into all directions, doglegs of dependent clauses hanging off like Christmas tree ornaments.

And that is followed by the ultimate in stark simplicity and absolute put-down: “Nothing beside remains.” Subject, verb, preposition (with implied object—the colossal wreck).

I always thought about that colossal wreck in the boundless and bare setting whenever I saw scenes like the tearing down of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad, or collections of discarded socialist-realism statues of Soviet heroes that alternately molder and amuse.

Shelley so perfectly captured the ludicrousness of megalomania; sadly, still applicable.

(That's you, Larry Ellison.)

Questions, questions

I had an in-person interview last week, for a product marketing position with a company that’s in the Big Data space. (Yeah, I know: that’s like saying “for a company in Texas”—it covers a lot of territory. But that’s all I’m going to say.)

On the up side, when I pulled out possible outfits to wear, there were a whole lot more interview-worthy garments that I could get into than I could nine months ago, including several suits. So my exercise program is obviously having positive results.

On the other hand—you know, it’s just so hard for me to read how well I’ve done in these situations. Plus—well, if I played poker, which I do not, I wouldn’t want to be at the table with this guy.

He asked me questions like, “What’s the Cloud?” and “How do you define SaaS?” (Software as a Service allows you to use software that’s hosted by the provider, so you don’t have big up-front purchase costs; have all the tsuris of installation on your own, expensive, hardware; or have to employ an IT department to maintain and upgrade it. The Cloud is where you can keep your software and data, so it doesn’t live on your own servers or hard drive, and so you can access it from whatever device you have, from wherever you are.) So far, I was with him.

Then he asked for an example of enterprise SaaS. Well—Salesforce.com; kind of the “duh” answer, but it counts. But then…he wanted an example of consumer SaaS.

Well, blow me—no freaking idea, Jack. I kicked around a couple of possibilities, but I really just didn’t have an answer. I said I was going to go looking for it; but I have to say that I still don’t know. Maybe TurboTax; possibly something like online photo-editing software; personal healthcare record (PHR) portals, perhaps. Some sources tell me Facebook is SaaS, but I’m not seeing it, and the SaaS experts I consulted had mixed opinions on that, too.

Anyway—that’s one horror. But where I really tanked was when he asked, “What do you like to do when you’re not working?”

I hate—no, I loathe talking about myself. I am the dullest dog on the face of the earth (okay, technically, that would be dullest bitch; but that's probably another story, if not an oxymoron). No one wants to know what I do on my own, including myself. My life would put you into a coma; it certainly puts me into one. So I never have an answer prepared for that question. And so I completely screwed the pooch again.

What did I say? Oh, I travel when I can. I’m a photographer. And I’m researching and writing a novel. He waited for more. He obviously has never tried writing a novel—he must think that’s a 15-minute-a-day kind of thing. (I didn’t mention the blog. I never tell anyone who might be in a position to influence a hiring decision about the blog. I may be quirky, and dull; but I’m not actively suicidal.) I didn’t bring up gardening, or book club, or hiking local trails, or ballet, or whisky-tasting meet-ups, or anything else (you decide which would be, strictly speaking, truthful and current), because my mind just emptied like a power toilet.

So now I have to make a list of acceptable answers to that question and commit it to memory.

And I also need to come up with a definitive monologue on where “web applications” leave off and “SaaS” picks up.

It just never ends.