Patience!

There's something cosmically funny about spending my entire reading of Waiting for Godot frustrated by the notes of a previous reader whom I strongly disagreed with.

Well, I didn't actually disagree with her (and based on the note-taking style and handwriting I feel fairly comfortable pegging this as a late high school or early college girl/young woman) so much as I deeply wished she would get on the book's level. But not all of us are meant to be lit majors and I shouldn't be a shit about that - she was noting down the obvious things her teachers pointed out, that's not her fault. But it was distracting as fuck. Which is probably why I need to stop buying one-dollar books.

Anyway, that poor girl's professor was full of shit, as is anyone who attempts to tell you what the fuck Beckett was trying to say with Waiting for Godot.

That's not to say the play is bad, of course, or that it doesn't have something to say, just that Beckett was markedly adversarial about people trying to know the works that he as the author claimed not to understand.

So, that being said, what is Waiting for Godot about? Two men. The world. The bleakness of the sky. The audience. Tension. Dissatisfaction.

It's about a lot of things, it's almost dizzyingly up to interpretation.

It's a fine play to read, and I'm sure it's a fine play to see, but I don't properly know that it's about anything.

Maybe it's about relationships. Maybe it's about trusting other people, about the various ways we love.

Fuck if I know, I only read it because it only cost a dollar and it's on friggin everyone's "best works of the 20th century" list.

It isn't bad, not at all, it's very very good. But it's good because it moves you as a reader or a viewer even though it's working with the thinnest story, characters, setting, and purpose possible. It's a tremendous feat that might mean nothing. It's beautiful for the sake of enjoying its own beauty.

Which is fine, in fact it's lovely, but it's hard to give a shit about.

Cheers,
     - Alli

(You can buy the play here if you want to)

Men's men

Why didn't anyone tell me that A Streetcar Named Desire includes a character whose husband killed himself once his wife admitted disgust with his sexual orientation?

I really love Williams. I read Glass Menagerie my senior year in high school, and saw a production of Spring Storm in college, but I'd never been all that interested in A Streetcar Named Desire. Stanley Kowalski just seemed like such a bundle of toxic masculinity that I wasn't all that interested in his narrative.

And that's what I thought it was - Stanley and Stella's story. But it's not, not by a mile.

Blanche, broken, lost, ageing, confused, regretful, Blanche, is the star of the story and that makes it a much more interesting play. Stanley and Stella are healthy people in an unhealthy relationship - they have a vitality and rawness about them that is compelling to read, but it doesn't hold a candle to the fascination I felt as I got to know Blanche and her fragile, failing grip on the world.

Also, in spite of the issue of the bury your gays trope that's discussed so much these days, it's important that Williams has a dead queer character in this story that is such a massive part of building the masculine mythos of the 50s. Without Streetcar we don't get Brando, without Brando we don't get the masculine ideals we're living with now. I can't say for sure what masculinity would have looked like in America in 2016 if we hadn't had Brando in 1957, but stinking, sweating, tee-shirt-tearing Stanley Kowalski is a huge part of what laid the foundations for modern masculinity. And that's why it's so fascinating by the fact that he has a canonical counterweight who is only experienced by the audience through Blanche's shattered memories. Blanche's lover was beautiful, he was refined, he was gentle, he was sweet, he was poetic, and he was gay. This isn't a homosexist exploration that divides the men from the sissies, this is Williams illustrating a kind of masculinity that was deplored and countering it with the gross, abrasive, abusive, violent masculinity of the world he lived in.

Which is important as fuck when you remember that it was written by a man who was queer bashed and attacked for his own presentation of masculinity, who was institutionalized like his shattered protagonist, and who was in many ways adrift in a world that didn't have a space for him.

All of which is lit-major speculation. If you want an actual appraisal of the play I think it's stunning and full of beautiful language that sings off the page and puts hooks in your heart. I think the characters are beautifully sculpted masterpieces who are a joy to watch. I think it's wonderful, that Tennessee Williams was a brilliant playwright, and that I want to read much more of his work.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. New Directions. New York: New York.
     2004. (1947).

Of course I read it

I'm fairly sure I've made it clear that I'm not much for drama, that I prefer reading things that are meant to be read rather than watched. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has made that preference truly stark for me.

One of my major issues with drama is that what is said on stage has to be understood by everyone in the audience immediately. This leads to a lot of dialogue that sounds almost unspeakably unnatural. I'm sure it's easier to suspend disbelief if you're actually sitting in front of real people speaking on a stage than it is while you're sitting in a hot garage at four in the morning, but I don't have a stage with real people acting in front of me and so my disbelief went unsuspended. The dialogue in this play is really difficult to get behind.

I'm also pretty sure it took me less time to read this play than it would take me to watch this play (I read it in just under three hours) but even at that pace I found myself frustrated with the short-sightedness of basically every character and the frankly masturbatory conceits that peppered the plot.

***************SPOILERS*************but not major ones******just little spoilers**

Basically this felt like a piece of fanfic given the blessing of WoG. And I mean that up to and including the exploration of AUs, the needlessly complicated plot, and the closure with certain characters. It feels like it was supposed to be a feel good story.

I don't want to say much else, since it was released literally four hours ago, but I will say I'm disappointed. Of course it was never going to hold up to the originals, what the hell ever could? But even with my low expectations it felt trite and reaching. I didn't hate it, it may grow on me with time, but it is a totally unnecessary and self-indulgent addition to the Harry Potter series.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Tiffany, John. Jack Thorne, JK Rowling. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Scholastic.
     New York: New York. 2016.

Finding the light

How do people look for books to read? It's an interesting question and an interesting suite of answers have been created in response. Book clubs have been around forever, trade paperbacks usually have a few pages of recommended reading available from the same publisher and author, Goodreads has sprung up and began offering suggestions based on your previously-read and well-reviewed books.

There are just a whole bunch of books that I should have read that I haven't and it makes me sad. I read a lot of things that are related to the content I'm interested in - you hear about a lot of sci-fi authors when you're the kind of person who reads a lot of sci-fi, Amazon recommends physics books to people who read physics books, and Goodreads is always happy to tell you about new works by writers you've read. But what if you haven't read something, what if a wonderful book is wholly unconnected to your typical sphere of interests?

I've been running into that issue a lot in the last few months. It started with The Color Purple. It was an amazing book, a beautiful book, a book that told a story I needed to read, but it was a book I'd never picked up or had recommended to me until I found it at a dollar store and said "well, why not?" That got me thinking about the types of authors I read and who were recommended to me: here's a hint, they're good writers but they are part of a very specific and very privileged group. That's when I decided that I was going to read more marginalized authors. I wanted to read the stories that women and queers and people of color and disabled folks had to tell. I wanted to see what group that aren't put front and center by publishers have to say.

And it's been largely marvelous.

I'm bringing this up because once again I've read a book that I'm angry I hadn't read before.

Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun is fucking wonderful. The characters pop off the page and inhabit the spaces in your mind. It's a play, not a novel, so of course character is important but the level of consideration Hansberry wrote into the stage directions and character descriptions makes these particular images seem whole and real. They are tragic and funny and so goddamned powerful that it takes your breath away.

In the introduction there's a brief discussion about how frustrating it is that Hansberry's characters from the 50s are so relevant in the late 80s and I'll simply echo that and say that it's tremendously upsetting that this struggling black family is still such an apt portrait today. Housing discrimination, natural hair, the role of women, the availability of work, the importance of education, and the structure of the family are all major points explored in the play and what Hansberry has to say about them is still at the heart of many arguments you hear in America today. I wish this was only a story of yesteryear, a trip back into a more bigoted time, but it is unfortunately a picture of challenges that black women and families still face in the US.

It's also beautiful and triumphant. Hansberry's play is so successful because it doesn't trap her characters, it allows her to showcase their bold refusal to accept the bigotry they're faced with. They're allowed to find their light and stand proud instead of shriveling, to grow as people full of hope.

I wish that I'd read this book a long time ago. It's beautiful and I'm happy to have had the opportunity to experience it.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. Vintage Books. New York: New York. 1988. (1958).

Bard says bardy things

I read Hamlet for the first time when I was 10 years old. I'd seen the Kenneth Branagh film with my dad and I loved it so I got a set of Shakespearean tragedies from a book order (book order forms apparently used to be a fuck of a lot more hardcore than they are now). The set was a single book that had Hamlet, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet in it with no footnotes, very little consideration of appropriate formatting, and smudgy, messy print. I read Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet in that book before it disappeared forever some time in middle school. But basically what I'm getting at is that I've been reading and enjoying Shakespeare for almost 20 years now, and I didn't get around to reading Macbeth until a couple of weeks ago.

I think I just had a ships-passing-in-the-night thing going on with Macbeth. I didn't read it in high school because I was in a group of students that read Othello and Hamlet instead. I didn't read it at the community colleges I attended because both of the CC historical drama classes I took focused on Hamlet. I didn't read it in my college Shakespeare classes because one class was almost completely focused on Hamlet (fucking shocking, right?) and the other class covered Shakespeare before 1603 (but did NOT include Hamlet on the reading list, which ACTUALLY was kind of shocking) so Macbeth wasn't going to make it in to that material. The Shakespeare before 1603 professor was also a theater historian and so I guess it would have been awkward to spend a week discussing a play while explicitly avoiding saying the titular character's name. It just never came up in my classes and I just never got around to it.

Now that I've read it I'm completely fascinated by a bunch of things that probably shouldn't seem so interesting. I'm old hat at Shakespearean tragedy at this point, I've caught up and done my reading of Ovid, Homer, and Plato so I'm not missing as many of the allusions, and after Chaucer the Bard's iambic pentameter is a subtle and pleasing thing of beauty - I'm not interested in any of the literary fancy-scmancy stuff that I'd have discussed in any of my English classes. But I'm fucking FASCINATED by just how many common English phrases appear to come directly from this single odd play. I'm also really interested in its revision and production history, because those can change a lot about how a play is perceived, but I know there's just WAY too much reading to do when it comes to Macbeth for me to get into that with any sort of authority at the moment.

The play is what you've been led to expect. Witches, decapitations, damned spots, and grand high vintage Elizabethan-era dramatic tragedy. There's nothing there that should be surprising, from a dramatic or thematic perspective, to someone who has read a bunch of Shakespeare. But holy shit the language. There's a lot of the play that's unremarkable, typical stage banter. Then there's the rest of the play that is where we get phrases like "full of sound and fury" and "the milk of human kindness" and it's completely unreal to me that this play is the first recorded usage of the word "unreal." Shakespeare created the fucking setup for knock-knock jokes in this play. We would not have knock-knock jokes the way we do in the world today if not for the fact that in a pretty typical, standard, run-of-the-mill play Shakespeare made up what seems like half of colloquial English. Just because he could. (Well, that and to fit the meter. And I guess because it was just habit to him at that point.)

Sorry. It's just that every time I think about the fact that we might not have words like alligator or eyeball or dwindle (there are only three words in English that start with "dw-" and Shakespeare made up one of them - the others are dwarf and dwell) I start getting a little dizzy, and I started getting REALLY dizzy the further I got into Macbeth.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Shakespeare, William. Ed. Kenneth Muir. Macbeth. The Arden Shakespeare. London:
     England. 2005. (1606-ish).

Seriously, the gods kind of suck

I read Antigone in high school but somehow missed out on the rest of the Oedipus Trilogy until this week. I found all of the plays fascinating, and all of them were simple and arresting reads, but holy shit are the pantheon of Greek gods assholes.

I guess since the morality of the time was based around a system of fate, where sometimes you were up and sometimes you were down, the audiences of the era wouldn't be as put off by the idea that the most powerful beings in the universe were essentially saying "fuck this dude in particular, but everyone else is cool."

Oedipus Rex sets up the action - the titular character has already killed his dad and fucked his mom so the whole of the play is based on him discovering this fact. There's some great foreshadowing as he unwittingly curses his own head and it's really moving when he realizes exactly how much he's screwed himself over.

Oedipus at Colonus is the play that I knew the least about but found the most interesting - it completely revolves around the concept of the unsinning sinner, one who has done terrible things that, were they done by ANYONE else, would not be unforgivable but who never intended to do unforgivable things. Antigone is sympathetic in this play more than she is in the one that bears her name but it sets her up as a lady who gets things done and takes no shit, a theme that is later expanded upon. I am a bit perplexed by the changes in narrative - it seems like a lot of the things that happened in the first play are twisted in the second; at the end of Oedipus Rex I thought that Oedipus willingly left and beggared himself but in Oedipus at Colonus he accuses both Creon and Polynieces of banishing him and putting him in beggar's weeds. It seems like, since neither of them were the ones in the throne at the time, they couldn't have really been responsible. There are a couple of other deviations that are similar, but slighter, throughout the story.

Antigone is the story of a lady who is thoroughly sick of everyone's shit. I can't recommend it enough. Creon really shows himself to be an asshole, more so than in the other plays, and Antigone not only calls him on it but uses his own actions to destroy his life. It kicks ass and I approve.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Tans. F. Storr. Harvard University Press. Cambridge: Massachusetts. 1912.
Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus. Tans. F. Storr. Harvard University Press. Cambridge:
     Massachusetts. 1912. 
Sophocles. Antigone. Tans. F. Storr. Harvard University Press. Cambridge: Massachusetts. 1912.

I think I'll stick to the shorts

Over the years I've read a few of Chekhov's short stories so I decided to read some of his longer works when I was at a cheap bookstore and ended up picking up an old book with four of his plays in it. I maybe should have remembered my personal history with drama and decided to pick up a collection of shorts instead because, damn, do I not like reading drama. Chekhov is very competent and I'm sure he was writing about things that seemed tremendously important and simultaneously hugely overblown in his own time but there's something that's lost in the translation from the 120 year old Russian plays to a reader in the US in 2015. The plays are sometimes funny, sometimes dull, and short enough not to make me want to tear my hair out, but reading four of them in a row was just a bit too much for me to handle with grace.


The Seagull - 1895
This is a play about a dozen people who can't get what they want and so refuse to grow up. An aging actress stifles her artistic son; her younger lover leads on and torments the young woman the son loves; the son is loved by the daughter of a steward; the daughter is loved by a schoolmaster she can only sneer at. The actress's brother wishes he had done something other than public service with his life and is unsatisfied with his retirement. There are two writers (the son and the lover) who are alternately obsessed and repulsed by their own writing. I just don't have a lot of sympathy for most of these characters. The lot of them seem like terrible, self-involved hypocrites. But I do have to admire the steward's daughter, who gets shit done, and her schoolmaster husband who soldiers on in spite of his problems. Which, I think, is the point. The upper classes in the stories don't do anything and waste everybody's time while looking good while the lower classes are the ones who actually strive for what they want/need. I think. I also think this is going to be a recurring theme in the other plays in this collection.

The Cherry Orchard - 1904
I feel like there's a lot of context that I'm missing here because I'm not exactly well-versed in turn-of-the-century Russian history, but the gist of what I'm getting is that people can be just so fucking useless and Chekhov is totally sick of that shit. I'm also picking up that classism is stupid and, sadly, getting a "bitches be crazy" vibe. To be totally honest a lot of what I'm reading here is exactly the sort of thing that irritates the shit out of me whenever I read Ibsen: none of the characters are sympathetic, all of their problems are inane or incomprehensible, and there's not enough action or consideration to keep me engaged. I could chill with Firs - the old, sick, lost servant is the only one in the story who is completely disgusted by what he sees and seems to be powerless to stop it or divert it in any way. Everyone else just keeps saying "oh no, I couldn't bear it if this happened" and then exercises no effort for the outcome they want. I mean, I know there's supposed to be a sense of futility in this story but Firs is the only one for whom any action is actually futile because he's pretty much dead from the start.

Three Sisters - 1901
This play is a lot of the same but we get to see a lot of fixation on the future - the question is asked multiple times "what will the future think of us" and never really answered. The sisters are accomplished without being happy and the story does a lot of talking about how class is a construct and work is the only way to be satisfied. And, I mean, I agree with that in general but I'm a little sick of reading about it. This was also the first of the plays in this collection that I stopped bothering with names at all - the only ones I remember are Natalya, because she's really irritating, and Bobik, because it sounds funny to me. I get the feeling that this name thing wouldn't matter so much if I was actually watching a play and associating different actors with the characters, but when you're not given the visual aid it's really easy for these characters to blend into one another - mostly because a lot of them say the same sorts of things as the others.

Uncle Vanya - 1897
I think of all the plays in this book Uncle Vanya is the best constructed and has the most sympathetic characters. It's the only one in which the humor of the situation is sad and human, not grotesque, and funnily enough it's really the only play with a happy ending. I also got more of a personal resonance with this story because it wasn't about people wasting their lives out of a habit of indolence, it was about people wasting their lives out of misplaced trust and altruism. Uncle Vanya's outburst to his brother-in-law is the funniest, saddest, and most entertaining moment in the whole collection.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Chekhov, Anton. Four Great Plays by Chekhov. Bantam Classic. New York: New York. 1963.

The saga endeth

I have finished reading Ian Doescher's William Shakespeare's Star Wars and I approve. The Jedi Doth Return has a lot of charm and is brimming with wit. There are, perhaps, too many soliloquies but I suppose that's to be expected when you're wrapping up a series and getting all of the characters' houses in order.

Darth Vader is wonderful: I really like the way Doescher frames his conflict and sets him up as a sympathetic character. Doescher does a much better job of communicating Vader's motivations and Anakin's faults and strengths than Lucas ever did.

Leia and Han are adorable, 3PO and R2 are a delightful comic foil for the rest of the cast, and - shockingly - the Ewoks are charming. There's a note in the afterword about the trouble that Doesher had with their language and his exhaustion with the cuddly beasts but he did a great job of solving those problems in a way that made them admirable and cute at the same time.

Luke is something of a blank in this novel but I suppose that's the part of the hero - he doesn't have to have his own personality, he just has to be something for your personality to reflect from. I did find myself wishing that there was a little more to Luke, but there was enough substance in everyone else to make up for it.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Doescher, Ian. William Shakespeare's Star Wars: The Jedi Doth Return. Quirk Books.
     Philadelphia: Pennsylvania. 2014.

So THAT'S why they don't teach it in schools anymore

My dad and I are each putting together a list of blind spots that we have in our favored form of entertainment. He blogs about movies so he's planning to watch a bunch of classics that he hasn't seen, I blog about books so I'm going to read some of those books that make people say "how can you have a BA in English without reading this!?!?" A good example for my part is Macbeth - it was never required reading in high school, any of my community college classes, or the two Shakespeare classes that I took at Cal Poly. I've never seen a production of it or even a film interpretation. The Scottish play is a mystery to me, as is a lot of Shakespeare.

I've decided to go one step further than my pops on this blind spot challenge - I'll take the month of July and blog about a Shakespeare play a day, saving Macbeth for the first of August, the month when he and I are starting our own challenge. That sounds suitably crazy.

Either way, I do need to read more Shakespeare and I've had a couple Pelican editions that I ordered from Thriftbooks.com sitting on my shelf for a while, so tonight I sat down and read The Merchant of Venice.

The play is a fairly well crafted little comedy with some decidedly dark elements. Before reading the introduction I actually thought it was a tragedy because the only thing I remembered about it is that it's the play in which someone has to pay a debt with a pound of flesh.

Tropes abound in the comic portions of the play - gender-bending makes an appearance, clownish servants are in evidence, and so on. The tragic elements aren't built on tropes so much as they are on an incredibly negative Jewish stereotype, which does at least explain why public schools aren't exactly clamoring to ask students to read out Shylock.

Personally I find Shylock sympathetic and interesting to read and I think Antonio's a bit of an idiot - he loves his friends too well and puts himself in the power of someone who he's give every reason to despise him because of his friend's debts.

I did appreciate that the clever ladies step in to save the day, but the lottery set up to sell off Portia into marriage is just fucking grim. Like a lot of Shakespeare this play didn't age particularly well, but still manages to have some progressive ideas (for the late 16th century) pop up here and there.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Pelican Books. New York: New York. 2000. (1598).

Exit pursued by a wampa

Star Wars and Shakespeare is a combination like chocolate and peanut butter - delightful, and surprising that somebody didn't figure that out earlier.

Ian Doescher has published his follow-up to Verily, A New Hope with The Empire Striketh Back and it stands up just as well as the first book did. Probably my favorite part is a conversation between two Storm Troopers discussing the mandatory inclusion of a gaping chasm with catwalks missing handrails spanning it in all Empire-approved constructions, but the new characters we're introduced to and the budding relationship between Han and Leia are handled wonderfully by the book as well.

Doescher goes even further in this book than in the last to establish Han and Leia as Benedict and Beatrice, bringing Much Ado puns into their lines and allowing them to admire each other in asides while they sting waspishly in their exchanges. Yoda is introduced and is totally comprehensible in context while still managing to speak completely in haiku. Lando Calrissian makes his first appearance as well, and is a charming scoundrel made more accessible than the same character in the film through his numerous soliloquies and asides.

Songs are sung, the plot is thickened, and the big reveal is made and all of it is wonderful. The language is great, the characters are given lots of room to breathe, silly things happen and serious things happen. This book isn't as memorable for me as Verily, A New Hope was but that's probably due to the fact that I'd been introduced to the concept of Shakespearian Star Wars and so reading it wasn't the same new experience I had with the first book. Either way, it's hilarious and fresh and fun to read and I'm very much looking forward to The Jedi doth Return whenever it hits shelves.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Doescher, Ian. William Shakespeare's Star Wars: The Empire Striketh Back. Quirk Books.
     Philadelphia: Pennsylvania. 2014.

Dramarama

I'm not much of one for drama. I do okay with the plays of Shakespeare and Williams, but other than that I tend to get frustrated by the medium. I'm not a huge fan of live theater, and I'm really not a huge fan of reading drama, but somehow I keep finding myself in possession of plays and reading them anyway.

I think that I kidnapped my copy of Seven Plays by Bernard Shaw from a coffee shop (again, my abominable habit of stealing unwanted books) where it had been languishing and ignored in favor of Jack Ryan thrillers, romance novels, and coloring books. It apparently used to belong to Patricia Normand, according to the tag on the inside cover. Patricia, I hope you enjoyed this book at some point. I'm glad that I read the plays but I'm probably never going to read or seek them out again, and I'm certainly never going to read the hundreds of pages of commentary included in this edition. I suppose I can recommend Saint Joan and The Devil's Disciple to casual readers, but the rest of the plays were a little maddening.

Mrs. Warren's Profession
Mrs. Warren was a former whore who financed her lifestyle by running brothels in her middle age. This is offensive to her "new woman" daughter, who estranges herself from her mother. I'm pretty sure there's some huge social statement about women being made here, but the contempt for Mrs. Warren from most of the characters and the iciness of her daughter make the only women in the play the subjects of pity rather than of introspection. Vivie may have cut the mustard as a feminist heroine in the Victorian era, but she's a little too one-dimensional to stand up today.

Arms and the Man
The most charming character in all seven of these plays is the Swiss soldier, the Chocolate Cream Soldier, of Arms and the Man. It's too bad that everyone around him is intolerable because otherwise this might be a tolerably entertaining play. As it is, it's a cute little comedy of errors and ends with a couple of weddings (or at least proposals). Not too much of this is terribly offensive, and it's a quick, funny, read so I might be interested in reading it again at some point in the future.

Candida
I get that Shaw was primarily talking about Socialism and Art in this play, but the titular character says something pretty nasty about women. The fact that every woman around the Reverend Morell is draw to him by his weaknesses so that they can support him and bask in the outpouring of their own strength is pretty revolting.

The Devil's Disciple
Okay, this play is actually pretty funny. There's some good tension, the characters are compelling and have real arcs and grow and change as people in the course of the narrative. There is some wonderfully cutting commentary throughout about property rights of women and the need for female independence, though all of that is overshadowed by the drive for political independence. Probably the most amusing part of the play is its commentary on puritanism and prudishness - that they should be abandoned as hypocritical and openly laughed at is what I came away with.

Caesar and Cleopatra
Once more there's a problem with the way women are discussed and portrayed. I was continually disturbed by Cleopatra's obsession with "beautiful round arms," though Caesar comes off as sympathetic and properly doomed. But the speech by Ra at the beginning - eesh, did anyone ever actually memorize and perform that? That speech alone was probably longer than the whole of Julius Caesar and significantly less edifying.

Man and Superman
What the actual fuck. People bitch at me about liking Atlas Shrugged because it's slow-moving and has random, long, speeches tossed in here and there (also because Ayn Rand was legitimately crazy and I don't totally disagree with her on a lot of things). As long as John Galt's speech may be (78 pages in my copy) it sure as hell doesn't make up a third of the length of the book. The Don Juan scene is totally unnecessary, way too long, and what isn't nonsense is patently offensive. Which only makes sense because Shaw was writing a play bemoaning the fact that women force men to marry them and are horrible, conniving bitches. Fuck you, George Bernard Shaw. You clearly had a lot to say about women, their place in the world (all about the fucking glory of motherhood in so many of these plays), and their uses and you ended up writing what amounts to the Andrist's Manifesto. And also, fuck you for including that long-ass dream scene AND a 58 page handbook outlining exactly what's wrong in the relations between men and women and getting the problems pretty much completely reversed. And all of this came from someone who was trying to be a progressive feminist at the time.

Fuck!

Fight the patriarchy!

Ahem.

Saint Joan
Here we have a pretty okay little Joan of Arc story that spends most of its screentime as a debate over the rights of the governed versus the rights of those who govern. It is pretty significantly anachronistic in a lot of ways. Joan is not horribly written and none of the other characters makes me want to punch someone in the face for the entire time they're on stage, so this might be the most likeable play of the bunch even considering that someone gets burned to death in it.

Anyway, I think I'm going to be taking a break from drama as a while because of how grumpy this book made me. Maybe I'll break down and read one of my newly-purchased books instead of something from my to-read pile because reading one book after another after another that frustrates me is getting a little exhausting. Happy reading, and fight the patriarchy.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Shaw, George Bernard. Seven Plays by Bernard Shaw with Prefaces and Notes.
     Dodd, Mead & Company. New York: New York. 1951.