In English Hamlet is a series of well-known quotations, in Chinese it is a new play’
Last weekend I spent a pretty cultured couple of days in London. On the Friday I went to the Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands exhibition in the British Library. It ‘examines how writers of our greatest works of literature have been inspired by, and even redefined, the British Isles’, and contains such treasures as Thomas Hardy’s prepublication proof copy of Far From the Madding Crowd and the ‘newspaper’ Virginia Woolf wrote as a child. On the Saturday I went to see Henry VI Part 2 in Albanian at the Globe, which was being performed as part of the Globe to Globe festival.
Both experiences got me thinking about the arts in a way that I hadn’t done for months. I got a bit swept up in all the things London had to offer and started imagining how great it would be if I lived there, rushing about from venue to venue taking it all in. In reality, if I lived in London I’m sure I’d be as bad at going to see things as I am now. When you live somewhere you don’t necessarily fully appreciate the opportunities presented to you daily.
In the programme for the Globe to Globe festival Dennis Kennedy writes ‘In English Hamlet is a series of well-known quotations, in Chinese it is a new play’. In a similar vein I guess you could say that in your hometown a show is just something that’s happening, whereas in a city you’re passing through it’s a one-off opportunity to see something in a new context and a different light, an opportunity you want to seize. I want to take this way of looking and turn it on my own city.
I love Cardiff and we’ve got tonnes of brilliant venues (Chapter, The Gate, The Coal Exchange and The Old Library to name just a handful), and a seriously diverse range of cultural activities to choose from. Yet somehow I don’t end up going to see half the things I say I want to. I haven’t even been to the Sherman Theatre since it reopened, for starters. From now on I’m going to push it to the limit in terms of appreciating the city’s cultural scene whilst thanking my lucky stars that I’ve got all this and don’t even have to pay for it in hours spent on the tube wedged underneath someone’s armpit.
Of course, I’ll need buddies for this, so if ever there’s a show you fancy seeing or an exhibition you’d like to go to, let me know. Maybe even if you’re a total stranger and you found this blog by a freak accident (/Twitter).
Online Extremism
The internet is a funny place. On days like today even some of the most secular amongst us are so full of festive joys that we take to social media to wish happy holidays to hundreds of people we don’t know. Then on other days we use it to viciously attack strangers like Samantha Brick who are just unpleasant at worst and foolish at best.
No one wants to be seen as boring and we all know tweeting about your daily routine won’t up your followers, but once we’ve self-filtered for all the mundane and the median what we’re left with is a bunch of very intense human beings shouting ferociously over each other and begging to be liked all at the same time.
Incidentally, if you want to hate Samantha Brick because she seems rather silly and a bit of a bore, go ahead. Just don’t do it because her idea of sexy doesn’t match up with what we’ve been conditioned to think sexy is. Comments about how she’s not actually all that symmetrical (but obviously more crudely phrased than that), prove why unfortunately in this day and age we still needed someone to sacrifice their credibility (whether knowingly and willingly or otherwise) with such an extreme testimonial - there are obviously still a lot of people out there who think that you have to look a certain way before you’re allowed to feel desirable, and that really needs to change.
The most revolutionary thing you can do is love your body. How many days of our lives do we spend convincing our averagely symmetrical friends that they are attractive? Then when an averagely symmetrical woman comes along and says she believes it’s true we either want to attack her or point and snigger. The internet’s giving us all dissociative identity disorder, and our mean streaks really are unattractive.
The image rules
My job requires me to read three or four newspapers a day which means that I’ll be seeing an awful lot of photos of the Royal Family this year. If I was pressed to give an opinion I think I’d have to say that I’m opposed to the Royal Family, just because I can’t see any real arguments in favour of them. Despite knowing this, when I see photos of them looking so shiny and kind, accepting bouquets of flowers from small children, dancing gaily in the street with social workers in Kingston or smiling through a student fashion show which can’t be of much interest to a woman in her 80s, my brain goes all mushy and I can’t stop thinking about how sweet they are.
Just being kind really isn’t enough to justify someone living in a palace, but images are so powerful that whilst I’m looking at these photos my brain decides it is. We appear not to have come far from the days of the first Elizabeth and the iconic Rainbow Portrait with its skirts decorated with human eyes and ears. Images of Elizabeth I were designed to awe and intimidate whereas images of Elizabeth II are designed to make us coo, but although the message may be different the method is the same.
I went to see the portrait exhibition in the National Museum Cardiff on Sunday and the progression from the reverential, ceremonial images recording Elizabeth II’s accession in ’52 to recent press shots was very revealing of the changing ways in which we relate to the Royals.
The Queen’s brother-in-law, Anthony Armstrong Jones started taking informal photographs of the Queen with her husband and children in the ‘60s. These images of domesticity were appealing at the time because they drew upon the similarities between the Royal Family and regular families, but I think nowadays we want even more. We want to know that they suffer and feel unhappiness in the same banal ways that we do. For example, the national papers seem to currently be quite taken by the idea of Kate Middleton feeling lost and lonely whilst William is away on a tour of duty. One of the photos that caught my attention the most and I believe the attention of the public at the time was of a visibly distressed and slightly scruffy-looking Queen alongside a fire fighter in the immediate aftermath of the fire at Windsor Castle in ’92.
What was particularly interesting about the exhibition was that it also contained several modern and quite subversive works. These included Kim Dong-Yoo’s portrait made from a collage of images of Princess Diana’s face, Justin Mortimer’s painting in which the Queen’s head appears to be severed by 2D shapes, and a photograph from Hiroshi Sugimoto which is not actually of the Queen but of a cold, wax mannequin from Madame Tussauds.
Although some of these works could be interpreted as insulting and even borderline treasonous, HRH didn’t react negatively to them and even went on to commission further work from some of the artists. I think it’s this that’s key to the continued success of her image – we see her looking regal, kind, vulnerable, distressed and hurt, but never angry. She’s never cross with us and that’s something that’s very appealing to human nature. We’re simple creatures, really, and we’ll happily give away most things to anyone as long as they’ll always be nice to us in exchange.
Entitlement - we’ve all got it, we just don’t all know it
Baroness Deech, chairwoman of the Bar Standards Board, made the papers yesterday by calling for the abolition of the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) which was set up to increase the number of state schooled students in higher education. She’s talking perfect sense. It’s the same as the women in boardrooms issue – a quota addresses the effect rather than the cause.
The number of public school students in Britain’s leading universities is disproportionate but the root of the problem lies further down the chain. Although the wealth factor is bound to still have some residual influence in certain colleges of certain universities, I’d like to think that in general the students who are offered places at Oxbridge (because that’s obviously what we’re talking about) are those who perform best at interview. Introducing quotas for where students have to come from risks not taking the best minds forward.
What needs addressing is not the university admissions process but the approach of secondary schools. From what I can see, state school pupils don’t perform as well as public school pupils at interview because they don’t have this same sense of it being almost a birth right. It’s not really an option to tell public schools that they mustn’t make their pupils feel so confident and great about themselves, so what we need is for state school teachers to foster in their charges the belief that every single one of them may well have something totally original to contribute to the world one day. That needs to be made known and repeatedly regularly for their pupils to be able to compete with the sense of entitlement that seems to come with a public school education.
Lady Deech is right - it’s pointless getting angry at the universities because the flaw in the system isn’t theirs to fix. We need to start a lot earlier if we want to get this balance right, and one of the ways it can be addressed is by encouraging a positive self image from an early age regardless of where you’re from.
Ryanair - there’s a time and a place
Advertising is unlikely to be a significant factor when choosing an airline to fly with. In general, people go with the company that will take them where they want when they want for the least amount of money. But despite Ryanair’s ‘hot cabin crew’ campaign probably being a publicity stunt and despite kicking up a fuss about it giving its bosses exactly what they wanted, I think I’m glad it’s been banned.
To be clear about it, I don’t wholly object to bodies, male or female, being put on display. I don’t object to sculptures or paintings of them in museums or galleries where they’ve been chosen as subjects because each one is unique and a mystery. I don’t object to them in the pages of fashion magazines where beauty is celebrated with wild abandon just for the joy of it and slender forms are needed to show off designers’ creations. I don’t object to them in pornography (provided everyone involved is there through their own free will), because sex is healthy and normal.
Neither do I necessarily disagree with selling sex. The problem around prostitution is one of class, not something that arises from the exchange itself. Belle de Jour brought this to the fore. Most people, rather than being repulsed or outraged, were intrigued and captivated by her story. Why? Because it was exciting and a trip into the unknown but at the end of the day it was safe. Belle de Jour’s clients were wealthy, middle class and generally decent. Most prostitutes aren’t lucky enough to be able to set themselves up in this kind of situation. Most prostitution is extremely frightening and dangerous and born of true desperation.
Despite this, if you forbid a woman to sell sex you’re still claiming to know what’s best for her and ignoring her voice in the process. Although it might be rare, there are women who choose to go into prostitution because they enjoy it and feel that it’s their calling. The criminalisation of prostitution denies these women the right to an opinion.
So I’m not being a prude or an innocent when I say I don’t like the Ryanair ads. I object to them because they are (ostensibly, at least, which is really just as bad as in actuality) using sex to sell something which should be completely unrelated to sex. Sex is so massive and confusing that I think most of us come to the ends of our lives without fully coming to understand how we feel about it, so if there are times or places where it can be left out of things it should be. I for one can’t cope with having to go through this entire thought process every time I turn the page of a newspaper.
Humans in boardrooms
Not that I think it’s a good idea, but if we’re setting a quota for the number of women in boardrooms shouldn’t we be aiming for a 50/50 rather than a 60/40 split? 60/40 is like Man saying “Well, yeah, you can probably do the job just as well as me, but equality? Lol” and like Woman saying “Oh golly, 60/40 is JUST GREAT. I know we’ve still got a way to go but gosh I’m just so glad that you’re beginning to see that I might be able to function at the same level as you”, which really isn’t good enough.
I’m not naive enough to think we can do away with feminism now, but I was still surprised at a networking event I went to recently to find that in a room full of suits there were only maybe two women at each table of eight or nine. I know there are plenty of factors to take into account, and there’s nothing we can do about that fact that it’s the woman’s body that has to grow the baby for nine months and then give birth to it, but that doesn’t make this imbalance okay by me.
Setting a quota, though, is fighting the effect rather than the cause. Setting a quota might give us a better chance of getting the top jobs, but it doesn’t address the misconception that put us at a disadvantage in the first place. Bringing in a quota without weeding out the misconception will only lead to thinking like this – ‘Soandso was given the job because she’s a woman’, rather than thinking like this – ‘Soandso was given the job because she’s more highly qualified and well suited to the role and she’ll do it better than Thatotherone’, which is what we want to be happening.
David Cameron saying: “The evidence is that there is a positive link between women in leadership and business performance” is ABSURD, because we all know that there’s a positive link between good leadership and business performance. The gender of the leader is irrelevant.
Caius Martius
I’d been looking forward to Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus for ages and wasn’t disappointed when I saw it in the cinema this week. I know next to nothing about film, but I thought it was slick and that the bonds between the characters were pretty much spot on. Virgilia awkwardly walking in on Volumnia dressing Coriolanus’ wounds in the family bathroom and later on Aufidius shaving Coriolanus’ head in particular were great translations of the weird relationships Shakey wrote around his singular lead.
Unfortunately it’s also the modern parallels that sometimes detract from the depth of the main character. Its wheels must have already been set in motion before the Arab spring so this isn’t a criticism of the film, but the parallels with modern protest kind of place Coriolanus alongside Gaddafi, Mubarak, et al., making him unavoidably too wholly a baddie right from the outset for us as an audience at this exact moment in time. Shakespeare’s Coriolanus isn’t an evil, self-imposed dictator; he’s a proud, elitist snob. I think. But instead of coming away from the cinema wondering to what extent it’s possible to self define in perfect isolation from other human beings I came away wondering if it’s terrible for me to like a character that can be put on a level with evil dictators. Are they equally valid things to wonder about? Probably, but the real life people get in the way of the objective questions about identity that make Coriolanus great art.
This too probably makes me some kind of denier of the atrocities of modern warfare, but I can’t help thinking that the guns mean that Fiennes’ Coriolanus has less dignity about him. It could be argued that they’re necessary for the continuity of the modern day setting, but I can’t see that as being overly important. Shakespeare never bothered about it. He was the king of anachronisms. And it’s more important for an adaptation to translate conceptually than factually. Look at Julie Taymor’s Titus - it’s a hallucinated historical mess, but it’s blindingly good.
And now we come to it, why is distance such a bad thing anyway? Shakespeare was writing plays for Elizabethan England set in ancient Rome, so why do we insist that the things we’re making now are set today? Is it a bad thing to want to keep my politics separate from my art, and is it even possible to do that anyway?
Oh Carol Ann
The other day I was talking to a friend about what it means to be in a relationship. Her con turned out to be my pro. She said that when you’re with someone you always have to think about them – how they’ll feel about what you do, how your actions impact on them. I’m sure this is essentially the reason I’m so keen to find the one for me. I need someone on whom I can fob off some of my thoughts.
One person on their own spends too much time spiralling down into themselves, so that eventually they wear themselves thin and risk glimpsing that there’s nothing at the centre. Two people together prevent each other from disappearing inside themselves. (I hope). The abstract worries about where exactly you exist won’t happen because there’s someone who wants you in the present moment, right here and now. (I hope). The distraction of trying to make someone else happy is enough to ensure your own happiness, because it stops you from going round in circles with yourself. (I hope.)
In my last post I wrote that ‘I have enough people who love me’ and afterwards I wondered why I wrote ‘enough’. Isn’t just one enough? Nuh uh. There are lots of different kinds of love and in a perfect world we’d have them all. We love our friends and family and want them to have happy lives, but there isn’t that all-consuming urge to make their every moment delirious bliss like there is with a romantic love. That’s the kind I’m missing.
Sometimes I feel wretched about being on my own, but then I read Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Elegy’ and then I am content to wait because oh my god when they do arrive it’s going to be wonderful.
I’m pulling an Antonio.
New Year makes me genuinely miserable. Always. This year I even had a little cry on January 1st, despite the fact that there was no one around to see me doing it. (I usually only ever cry if someone’s watching. Doing it on your own seems utterly futile.) The thing is, I can’t seem to work out why. By anyone’s standards I am immeasurably fortunate. I have a dreamy home, a job I enjoy and enough people who love me. I wasn’t born into poverty or a war zone or an abusive family. I am healthy and I wasn’t run over by a bus last Tuesday. So why can’t I get rid of these blues and muster up some January cheer?
Is it really as simple as saying that I’m sad because I’m not happy and ‘twere as easy for me to laugh and leap and say I am merry because I am not sad?
In fairness to myself, I’m usually pretty good at being cheerful. I do give this ‘we make our own happiness’ thing my all, and like Pynchon so much for his long-winded ways of telling us that although life is random and ultimately without a point the search for one can still be a lot of fun.
I guess it must only be that by the time January rolls around my reserve wells of cheer are all dried up. Give me one more day on my own watching TV and eating chocolate hobnobs and then I solemnly swear to go back into appreciation overdrive.
‘the single assumption which makes our existence viable – that somebody is watching…’
I’ve just been reading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard. As I’m sure plenty of you (my dear, imaginary readers) know, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters in Hamlet and Stoppard’s play is a postmodern reimagining of Shakespeare’s with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as the central characters. Stoppard takes as his starting point the fact that outside of a performance characters don’t exist. They only exist when an actor is fleshing them out on stage. The two protagonists only know about themselves what can be learnt from Shakespeare’s play, and they only learn it as that play unravels somewhere off stage. They are constantly questioning how they got to where they are and where they should go next.
This notion that a character only exists whilst the play is taking place is best worded by the Players, who scold Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for leaving mid way through their performance unannounced , tricking them out of ‘the single assumption which makes our existence viable – that somebody is watching…’
I wonder if this applies outside of theatres. I mean, I know I’m still breathing and my heart’s still pumping blood around my body when I’m alone in my apartment, but is the person that the outside world is presented with still there, or does it get lost amongst all the other bits of myself that float around when I’m not worrying about what someone else is thinking of me?
I’m also currently reading a book called Thinkertoys, a textbook on how to become more imaginative based on the theory that we are all ‘self-creating’. It’s easy to get lost in all these layers of self. I know that I (usually unconsciously) present different versions of myself to different groups of people, but are there different parts of me capable of hoodwinking other bits of me into thinking I’m things which I currently think I’m not?
Example: There is one layer of me that suspects I’m no good at small talk and this suspicion has been around for so long that is has become a fact, in that I’m so scared of it being true that I paralyse myself into being awkward in some social situations, whereas in others (e.g. work situations where I need to chat to a client) I’m fine.
But where do all these selves stop? When it comes right down to the core of it are we all just standing alone on the stage in an empty theatre, scared, knowing nothing for certain and waiting for a prompt?
Of course, it’s dead easy to get away from these alarming thoughts – by filling your time with work and hobbies and shopping and alcohol and just simply not letting them in. But then you’ll have to accept that postmodernists think you’re a big old chicken. Cluck cluck cluck.
