Name by Name, Face by Face...

Last week we observed the 10th anniversary of the attacks on September 11.

As someone who was living in New York City on that day, who stood on Fifth Avenue with countless other Midtown cubicle dwellers and messengers and deli workers, wondering at the burning towers, who bore witness to mass murder with the rest of her city...

From the background, these people are right by St. Patrick's Cathedral, on  Fifth Avenue at 50th Street.  
They would've been half a block away from where I was standing.  
All of us, filling the sidewalks and even the street itself, staring up at the sky downtown, unable to look away.

...the anniversary stirred up an unexpected well of emotions in me.  I thought I had moved past most of that sadness but it hit me harder than I thought.  And I didn’t even lose anyone—I reacted as a New Yorker, an American, and a human being.

There are so many approaches to history—political theory,  social theory, et cetera.  But as I told one of my classmates at Columbia, I’m an actor and to me, history is first an aggregate of people's lives.  The collective narrative of all of us. 

There were these flyers that sprang up almost immediately all over the city.  "Have you seen...?"  "Missing..."  You had to stop to read them. But carefully.  You didn't want to start crying again on the streets.  Which we were all doing anyway, on the streets, walking to church, at your cubicle.  But I would read these flyers when I could.  I felt I had to, to bear witness.  The least I could do was learn these peoples' stories.

 Visit Pompeii and see the graffiti scratched into the wall by a bored centurion millennia ago, 

now carefully notated and photographed by archaeologists.  Every cathedral, every bridge, every pyramid, every Book of Kells and Bayeux Tapestry, all the opera magna we take for granted were put together with the collective hands of millions of men and women exactly like us, who each had their own story to tell, to question, to live.  They cared about their children and worried about the future and struggled with the larger stones and swore when they made mistakes etching calligraphy onto the vellum.

I still remember some of the faces on the flyers--one was an Asian man, a businessman, "last seen at Windows on the World.*"  I remember thinking, what a beautiful, hopeful name...Windows on the World.  Who wouldn't want to be there on such a gorgeous morning?

"It is a story," said Sara.  "Everything is a story.  You are a story--I am a story.  Miss Minchin is a story."

There was a young black woman, whose relatives implored anyone with information to call the number below, "We're very worried about her!!!"  Oh, God.  That last... 
It just breaks your heart.

Our lives become the stories that we weave...

I remember reading about a young woman, 20s, dark blonde hair with an unusual name that jumped out at me...Giovanna.

History's deconstructed essence, its atom, is one person’s story.  StoryCorps is an oral history project, dedicated to capturing Americans' lives on tape.  They have interviewed several relatives of 9/11 victims and animated the results.







When you think you can bear it, go to the StoryCorps site and watch some of the videos.  Past the sadness and grief, there is just so much love.

To Giovanna--

I remember seeing your pretty face in the flyers posted all over Midtown after that day.  
Your name stuck with me--such a beautiful, old country name.
It's obvious your family loved you very much, I saw your flyer everywhere.
Bless you, dear one.

Buried Treasure in Lower Manhattan!

Last summer, as excavators dug up what had been the base for the World Trade Center before its collapse in 2001, they came across an unexpected discovery--a ship buried in the landfill!

This, along with another section of the ship uncovered last week, PLUS an excavated seawall

The red mark is where the ship was uncovered--the greyish blurry areas west of the
purple line are reclaimed shoreline, added to make the island bigger.

added up to an embarrassment of riches for students of New York City maritime history.

I was able to see the uncovered seawall last summer, and even get some pictures.

Walking through Lower Manhattan is like an andante journey through time--as you cross 14th Street and all the streets start going haywire, it becomes easier to envision what the city used to be before the grid was laid down in 1811.

And as the island narrows, you start to hear the sound of gulls and feel the whip of the breeze. You appreciate more and more that yes, Manhattan IS an island--a patch of land forming part of the Hudson archipelago and laid down “like a smelt in a pan,” as one New York writer put it, surrounded by its life’s breath, the Hudson River. What do the river and the grid have in come? One word--trade. The river brought trade, and the grid facilitated it, with its many cross-streets that lead directly from the waterfront to the center of town, thus making the offloading of merchandise that much quicker. Washington DC’s elegant constellation of wide state-inspired avenues was designed by a Parisian specifically to highlight its new status as the seat of the new federal government,

but New York City‘s brutally efficient grid is much less high-minded!

And how poetic that this ship was uncovered under the World Trade Center? Like a huge beast come to earth, two hundred years ago an aged vessel was laid to rest, helping to build Manhattan one last time, a literal layer of the past serving as a foundation for future trade.

Harry Potter and the Historical Allegory

So, the final movie adaptation of the final book in the Harry Potter series opened recently—and yes, your favorite historical blogstress was there, revisiting J.K Rowling’s brilliantly conceived and executed shadow world [whilst sobbing out her eyes]. But what ultimately makes the series so compelling is that these witches and wizards are recognizably (even painfully) human—and their dynamics, the issues that move and challenge and destroy them, mirror those in “real” history. Harry and Ron’s adolescent romantic foibles, Lily’s ultimate sacrifice for her son, Snape’s inability to forgive the slights of his teenage years—these are recognizable human beings. We know them. And in the story of Voldemort and his Death Eaters, we hear echoes of the 20th century's most iconic narrative of evil.

I got to these books rather late—my older brother gave me the series two years ago and I promptly devoured them, reading the first three in a day apiece and then forcing myself to slow down on the subsequent volumes. As I progressed, I started suspecting something--a malevolent, charismatic leader who espouses a "racial" ideology, complete with gradations of “blood purity”?

Toujours Pur

They thought Voldemort had the right idea, they were all for the purification of the Wizarding race, 
getting rid of Muggle-borns and having purebloods in charge.

Two horrific wars? “Muggle” registration?

Hmm, ya think…?

The parallels become more apparent as the series progresses, in part because Rowling’s storyline becomes darker and more adult in sensibility. Voldemort’s puppet regime, with its murderously efficient Snatchers*...

"They're everywhere--gangs trying to earn gold by rounding up Muggle-borns and blood traitors, 
there's a reward from the Ministry for every one captured."

and its anti-Muggle propaganda...

Harry looked more closely and realized that what he had thought were decoratively carved thrones were actually mounds of carved humans...
men, women and children, all with rather stupid, ugly faces, 
twisted and pressed together to support the weight of the handsomely robed wizards.

"Muggles," whispered Hermione. "In their rightful place."

evokes the Third Reich, with Voldemort as Adolph Hitler, Death Eaters like the Carrows and Yaxley as Hitler’s ministers, and the Snatchers as the SS/Brownshirts. Interestingly Voldemort, like Hitler, is a living rebuke of his own separatist ideology—much as the dark-eyed and -complected, stocky Hitler idolized the Aryans, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is himself a half-blood, sired by the Muggle Tom Riddle.

Other parallels:

• Bellatrix, Andromeda and Narcissa Black = the Mitford sisters.
  
  There were actually six Mitford sisters, but like the Blacks, they were an aristocratic family encompassing quite divergent political views. Unity Mitford is the clear inspiration for Bellatrix--Unity became part of Hitler’s inner circle and was quite infatuated with him. Andromeda, who rejects her family’s ideology of blood purity in order to marry a Muggle-born, is probably a counterpart to Jessica Mitford, who similarly rejected her privileged background and embraced Communism. [Fun fact--J.K. Rowling actually named her daughter after Jessica Mitford.]

• Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge (whose increasingly desperate attempts to convince the wizarding world that everything is FINE, You-Know-Who is NOT coming back) = Winston Churchill’s hapless predecessor, Neville Chamberlain.  Like Chamberlain, Fudge served as minister during an interim period between two devastating wars; Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix reflect something of how England’s mood must have been in that eerie waiting period in the mid-to-late ‘30s.

"I see no evidence to the contrary!" shouted Fudge, his face purpling. "It seems to me that you are all determined to start a panic that will destabilize everything we have worked for these last thirteen years!"

Another children’s classic that hints at World War II is the movie version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang [the book, written by James Bond creator Ian Fleming, has a very different storyline]. Anyone who’s seen this movie remembers the terrifying Child Catcher** who tempts Jemima and Jeremy out of hiding with visions of cream puffs, ice cream and treacle tarts “…all freeee to-day!” and then claps them into a caged vehicle and carries them off. Their father later discovers that all of Vulgaria’s children are in hiding, living in the sewers, to avoid the same fate. As creepily effective a plot device as this is [and “Hushabye Mountain,” sung by the father to the children underground, is perhaps the most haunting moment in the movie], it’s even more interesting when you consider that Teutonic Vulgaria is a metaphor for Nazi Germany--which would make the children the Jews in hiding.

*The Snatchers are reminiscent of the Greifers, Jews who managed to survive openly in Germany during the Holocaust by informing on other Jews in hiding. [The word greifer even means the same thing; it translates to grabber or catcher.] I highly recommend Stella, a fascinating, terribly depressing book about a well-known Berlin Griefer, Stella Goldschlag, also known as the Blonde Poison.

**If you can believe it, the stage version of Chitty actually makes the Child Catcher even creepier, with a song called “Kiddy-Widdy-Winkies,” which includes such nightmare-inducing lyrics as:

I can't see or hear you—
But smell that I'm near you—
My dear sweet—
Kiddy-Widdy-Winkies....

Prince Albert got married last weekend!

Ah, the principality--such a delightfully European invention, toy countries like Lichtenstein and Andorra, tiny fiefdoms and dukedoms. Monaco is my favorite, a beautiful bauble of a city-state, nestled against the seacliffs and redolent of Mediterranean glamour and mystery. Monaco is ruled by what has to be the most ridiculously good-looking royal* family in existence, all lustrous dark hair and long legs and full lips. The Grimaldis are less inbred than most royal families (and how! See The Prince and The Laundress, below) and their efforts to improve the princely gene pool has certainly borne impressive results.

Princess Caroline

Princess Stéphanie Even my autograph is sexy.

Charlotte Casiraghi, Caroline’s daughter, who somehow manages to be even MORE gorgeous than her mother.

The newest addition, Her Serene Highness Charlene, The Princess Consort of Monaco. Yep, another hideously unattractive Monagesque princess! You have to admire Prince Albert for taking one for the dynastic team with such a hag ;)

The men are more of a mixed bunch—Albert has lost some of his hairline but strongly resembles his beautiful mother, Princess Grace. (And is a multiple Olympic athlete to boot, which by definition makes him completely hot.)  Albert's father, the late Prince Rainier, was not exactly an Adonis, but oozed suavity and Mediterranean charm. Luckily his grandsons are there to pick up any aesthetic slack.

Andrea and Pierre Casiraghi, the sons of Princess Caroline

And the romance! The marital history of the Grimaldis reads like an unpublished Anthony Hope novel by way of Harold Robbins.  Rainier claimed the throne of Monaco through his mother, Princess Charlotte, the daughter of Prince Louis II. The Princess had actually been born illegitimate, however and the sleight of hand required to give her a title was borne of a succession crisis involving Monaco and its German cousins—no one wanted the throne to fall into German hands. Why, you may ask, didn't Prince Louis ever marry Charlotte's mother? Because his mistress was a laundress—a laundress! It’s all so deliciously 19th century.


Now any student of history recognizes that it is fairly common--encouraged, even--for princes to sow their wild oats and sire a few royal bastards**. It is, however, decidedly less common for their sisters to do likewise, but Princess Stéphanie*** has done her best to challenge this double-standard. Not only were all three of her children born out of wedlock, but she refused even to identify the father of her youngest! You have to admire that kind of cool indifference to propriety—“nice customs curtsy to great kings,” indeed.


Félicitations à Prince Albert II et son belle mariée, la Princesse Charlene!


*I'm using the term royal in the colloquial sense--correctly, the Grimaldis are not royal, they are princely (as the sovereign of Monaco is not a king, he is a prince).

**Prince Albert has two ( that we know of!)—Alexandre and Jazmin Grace, who is currently a student right here in New York City.

***I have a strong affection for Stéphanie and her complete lack of pretension. Running away to wait tables? Stooping to conquer with her bodyguards? And why does she get away with it? Because she’s a rock star. (Literally.)

Plays on History (PART ONE)

A dear friend of mine, knowing of my obsession fascination with the Black Death, offered an intriguing suggestion—she said that I should write a play about it. I’ve been turning this idea over in my head ever since.  There are several possible narrative structures:

•  A straightforward narrative drama, probably the easiest to conceive and execute.

This format was more popular in the post-World War II era (examples include The Lion in Winter, A Man for All Seasons and Anne of the Thousand Days).

 



Genevieve Bujold looking adorbs as Anne Boleyn.
You can tell this is early on in the film, because
of her gabled headdress (indicating Anne is still
lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon).
  



Later on Anne introduced the French hood, which EVERYBODY immediately adopted.  Thin and fashionable, brunette, French-speaking--Anne was kind of the Jackie Kennedy of her day.

• A dualistic structure, where past and present are both presented and held up to each other.
  
  

Examples include perhaps my favorite modern play, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a fantastic tour de force exploring issues of determinism, eschatology, physics, poetry, sex as chaos theory, thermodynamics, and emerging Romanticism.  This all makes it sound deadly but it is actually a lovely poem of a play, a valentine to the  intellectual mind.  Thomasina’s tearful reaction when she contemplates the burning of the Library of Alexandria--all those books, that knowledge lost, perhaps forever—breaks my heart.

THOMASINA: Oh Septimus!--can you bear it?  All the lost plays of the Athenians!  Two hundred at least by Aeschylus--thousands of poems--Aristotle's own library brought to Egypt by [Cleopatra's]* ancestors!  How can we sleep for grief?

• A play that explicitly uses the past to make a point about the present.  

Examples include: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible which of course uses the Salem Witch Trials as a metaphor for the anti-Communist hysteria in the early ‘50s. Crucible's plot works on its own terms as well, as a look into a society we can hardly imagine now in this country, a theocracy shaped by terror—terror of Indian attacks, crop failure, public shaming, damnation.  Miller’s somewhat contrived recreation of 17th-century barely-American vernacular is criticized, but the language is actually one of my favorite aspects of the play, by turns sturdily plain-spoken and unexpectedly poetic.

ABIGAIL: As bare as some December tree, I saw them all--walking like saints to church, running to feed the sick, and hypocrites in their hearts! And God gave me strength to call them liars, and God made men to listen to me, and by God I will scrub the world clean for the love of Him! Oh John, I will make you such a wife when the world is white again!**

I guess for me to decide how I want to write the play, I’d need to think about what I want to say about the Black Death, which is certainly a fertile ground for dramatic treatment.  The worst human disaster in recorded history and yet (fascinatingly!) for such a catastrophe, relatively little has been written about it....

*Thomasina dates the Library's burning to Julius Caesar's OH-so-eventful visit in 48 BC, based on Plutarch, but this is somewhat suspect--classical sources mention several other specific incidents when the Library was fired.

**I have no problem with Miller's twisting history to make Abigail older (in real life she was 11, and John Proctor was well into his 60s), or even his invention of their illicit relationship.  What I dislike though is his characterization of (the character) Abigail as The Teenage Temptress.  As the play establishes, she was a servant in Proctor's home, within a highly misogynistic society--she really had no meaningful agency.  Proctor held all the cards.  Miller even tries to cover his ass later on by claiming "The legend has it that Abigail turned up later as a prostitute in Boston"--uh, no.  There is no such legend except in Miller's fevered imagination.  Down, boy.

Of Man and Media

Another day, another powerful man caught with his pants down.  Political sex scandals—such an irresistible cocktail with so many possible variations on Quiller-Couch's seven basic narrative conflicts.  


Man vs. Woman:

President Bill Clinton

Man vs. Man:

Senator Larry "Wide Stance" Craig

Man vs. Machine:

Congressman Mark Foley

 And yet as mesmerizing as I find Congressman Weiner’s slo-mo tumble into political purgatory, I must confess I prefer the sly elegance of a much earlier scandale that was likewise generated in the media currency of its
time—the famous Woodrow Wilson Misprint.


In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson was a widower who took a shine to Edith Galt, and started sparkin' with her within a year of his wife's death--in these post-Victorian times with much more restrictive mourning customs, this might be considered inappropriate and so his advisors tried to keep the relationship under wraps.  All was for naught when word got out that they were seen together and, as the Washington Post framed the story, 


The President spent the evening entering Mrs. Galt.


For want of four little letters...T-A-I-N...a Presidency was nearly lost!  But the Post, in marked contrast to Congressman Weiner, understand how replicable media could be and immediately recalled the edition.  Undoubtedly Weiner wishes he could do the same...

The Sport of War

Even though the semester has ended, I’m still pondering Laws of War—and not just in the Middle Ages.  There’s a Matrix-like quality to this—once you become aware of these patterns, you see them everywhere!  Not surprising, since man has been at war pretty much constantly throughout the course of recorded history. Heck, the very first work of literature is about a war!  

Then Ares roared like a trumpet, as loud as nine thousand men could shout, aye, ten thousand men in the turmoil of battle! Trojans and Achaians alike trembled to hear the roar of the insatiate God of War!

 And of course the Bible is chock-FULL of warfare—David and Goliath, Judah Maccabee the Rock Star...

…even the endgame, Armageddon, is a battle scenario. (Interestingly Armageddon is a placename—Megiddo is the name of an ancient city.)  We tend to see war as this random, chaotic force of obliteration but there are recognizable, distinct patterns which emerge again and again, and not just in history.  

These patterns are perhaps most apparent in our sports culture—most forms of organized sports tend to be team vs. team, facing each other on opposing fields, much like the classic pitched battle.  You can see this in basketball, soccer, even tennis, but the classic sports metaphor for war is football, which shares the:

• terminology (blitzes, bombs)
• strategy           (front lines, flanking maneuvers)
• tactics (artillery vs. infantry) 

as well as protective armor.  What is a running game but an updated version of medieval jousting, with the players functioning as both destrier and knight?  Football fans are even referred to as weekend warriors!  And their latter-day woadwood would do any Celtic warrior proud.  

William Wallace, Woad Warrior…

I’ve found that reading Froissart’s Chronicles has brought a whole new appreciation to the playoffs.

And—cheerleaders, that peculiarly American contribution to team sports.  We love them, we fear them, we live vicariously through grrrlpower Kristen Dunst movies. (Full disclosure—I was never a cheerleader (3-sport varsity athlete here!) but I always thought it would be fun.) But, you ask,  how do cheerleaders fit into the football-as-war scenario?  Well, although women couldn’t actually fight in medieval battles* they did have a military function in chivalry—as an audience for the knight, to spur him to greater deeds, literally to see him off as he marched off to war.  Interestingly the first cheerleaders were actually men, so this possible parallel with medieval women has actually developed over time.  Of course nowadays cheerleaders are not content to merely watch and applaud--they take the field in their own right.

They even have a castle!

*Joan of Arc was clearly the ass-kicking and name-taking exception.