Antigone in Ferguson

I watched a Theater of War event for Zoom last night: Antigone in Ferguson, an adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone with music by Philip Woodmore. Cori Bush, just elected to Congress, introduced the event. The actors included Tracie Thoms (Antigone) and Oscar Isaac (Creon). De-Rance Blaylock and Duane Martin Foster, choir soloists, were teachers of Michael Brown, who was killed by a police offer six years ago yesterday in Ferguson, Missouri. Relatives of other men killed by police spoke after the performance: Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner; Valerie Bell, mother of Sean Bell; Marion Gray-Hopkins, mother of Gary Hopkins Jr.; and Uncle Bobby X, uncle of Oscar Grant. They spoke of the devastation of losing a loved one to police violence, of pain that never goes away, something Sophocles would understand.

I found many overtones of Lee Breuer’s The Gospel at Colonus, with a message of healing and redemption added to Sophoclean tragedy, most notably in a final song, “I’m Covered.” In Sophocles’s play, Antigone covers her brother Polynices’s body with dust, giving him a symbolic burial and thereby defying Creon’s order against burial rites for an enemy of the state. In the final song, there’s a different kind of covering, as the members of the choir proclaim that they are covered in the blood of Jesus. The most striking visual element in the performance: Willie Woodmore (the composer’s father), with enormous headphones and sunglasses, as the blind seer Tiresias.

I was one of forty (or more) people who raised a hand but had no chance to speak in the discussion that followed the performance. I wanted to say something about Creon. He is accusatory, paranoid, misogynist, intent upon demeaning and destroying anyone who challenges his authority, resistant to any plea that he should take a different course of action. He also identifies the state with himself: “So I should rule this country for someone other than myself?” he asks his son. Sound like anyone you know?

Related reading
All OCA Sophocles posts (Pinboard) : Ajax and EMTs

[I’ve quoted from Paul Woodruff’s translation, in Theban Plays (Hackett, 2003).]

She and her

The caption for a photograph in The New York Times:

Ms. Hill’s closet in Washington. Like many people’s, it is filled with officewear she may not need for a while. At top right, a framed photo of she and her Congressional colleagues.

“A framed photo of she”: yeesh. A simple fix: “A framed photo of Hill,” &c.

The other problem: the unintended suggestion that Hill’s unneeded officewear is hanging in closets hither and yon.

“Art is fierce”

Toni Morrison:

I want to describe to you an event a young gifted writer reported:

During the years of dictatorship in Haiti, the government gangs, known as the Tonton Macoutes, roamed about the island killing dissenters, and ordinary and innocent people, at their leisure. Not content with the slaughter of one person for whatever reason, they instituted an especially cruel follow-through: no one was allowed to retrieve the dead lying in the streets or parks or in doorways. If a brother or parent or child, even a neighbor ventured out to do so, to bury the dead, honor him or her, they were themselves shot and killed. The bodies lay where they fell until a government garbage truck arrived to dispose of the corpses — emphasizing that relationship between a disposed-of human and trash. You can imagine the horror, the devastation, the trauma this practice had on the citizens. Then, one day, a local teacher gathered some people in a neighborhood to join him in a garage and put on a play. Each night they repeated the same performance. When they were observed by a gang member, the killer only saw some harmless people engaged in some harmless theatrics. But the play they were performing was Antigone, that ancient Greek tragedy about the moral and fatal consequences of dishonoring the unburied dead.

Make no mistake, this young writer said: art is fierce.

From “The Habit of Art.” 2010. In The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019).

All of which is a preface to this reminder that Theater of War presents a streaming performance of Antigone in Ferguson, tonight, 7:30 CDT. Zoom required. Register here.

A great sadness of my teaching life is that the teaching of “backgrounds” in my English department appears to have disappeared with my retirement. “Backgrounds” as I understood the word meant beginnings, of epic, lyric, tragedy, and comedy. Say, Homer, Virgil, and Ovid; Sappho and Catullus; Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes.

Anyone who thinks that “the classics” no longer have anything to teach us isn’t paying attention.

Related reading
All OCA Sophocles posts (Pinboard): Modest proposals

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Greg Johnson, made for a challenging half hour of solving. The puzzle looks daunting, with eleven-, thirteen-, and fifteen-letter answers across the top and bottom. I started with 16-A, four letters, “They’re easy to take,” and my incorrect answer was still good enough to get me started. When I put in my final answer, for 21-D, four letters, “Guy from Charlottesville,” I had no idea why the answer made sense and thought it couldn’t be right. Maybe it didn’t make sense. But it was correct. Done and baffled, that was me.

Oh, wait — I typed those sentences, and now the answer makes sense. My love/hate relationship with that kind of clue continues. These fingers, dear hearts, is always a-warrin’ and a-tuggin’, one agin t’other.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

7-D, four letters, “ER’s critical supply.” Clever, especially as the answer could be clued in a more straightforward way.

9-D, seven letters, “Window box favorite.” I don’t know why I was confident about the answer, but I was. Dowdy intuition, maybe.

12-A, thirteen letters, “Qualifier for a silly statement.” Fresh, lively, and surprisingly easy to see with a couple of crosses.

20-A, three letters, “Qtr.’s baker's dozen.” A good way to make a mundane answer Stumpery.

28-A, six letters, “Cultural center?” Well done.

30-A, four letters, “Fictional Autobiography subject (1847).” Yes, 1847!

32-A, four letters, “To-go pieces.” As above: a good way to, &c.

33-D, eight letters, “Important decade in analysis.” I don’t know whether to admire or lament the effort probably required to make this clue tricky.

41-D, six letters, “‘The ___ of the moth for the star’: Shelley.” Seeing Shelley in a puzzle always makes me think of my friend Rob Zseleczky, the consummate Shelley reader.

One quarrel: 5-D, five letters, “Numbers on angels.” This clue feels awfully forced in the interest of Stumping. On? No, about.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

“Defend Our Post Office”

[A video from People for the American Way. Music: Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, “Present Joys.”]

Whose toes?

[“Tourist Posing With 200-Year-Old Sculpture Breaks Her Toes.” The New York Times, August 7, 2020.]

Granted, the referent must be sculpture. And granted, the text that follows clears things up. But I’d rewrite this headline: “Tourist Accidentally Breaks Toes of 200-Year-Old Sculpture.” “Sculpture’s toes” sounds too awkward to me, or a little too much like (so-called) language-poetry.

Here’s the article. Step carefully.

A secret message, of course

Elaine and I chose a film out of the blue last night, Terence Davies’s Of Time and the City (2008), a meditation (for lack of a better word) on the Liverpool of the director’s early life, made of archival footage with commentary. In 2016 we watched and loved Davies’s The Long Day Closes (1992). Of Time and the City is the only other movie of his available from the Criterion Channel, and it vanishes on August 31. So — we watched.

How strange, late in the film, to hear Peggy Lee’s 1957 recording of Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern’s “The Folks Who Live on the Hill.” That was one of my dad’s favorite songs, and we played Mel Tormé’s 1956 recording five years ago at his memorial. My dad died five years ago yesterday.

I couldn’t place Peggy Lee’s voice last night, even though I have the recording (on one of my dad’s CDs). I thought I was hearing Lee Wiley. As Elaine pointed out, I got it half right.

[Joking aside, Lee Wiley was indeed a major influence on Peggy Lee.]

Eric Bentley’s desk

Look at the late Eric Bentley’s desk. Five photos down — you can’t miss it. See the inbox? Order!

A related post
Desk organizers

A joke in the traditional manner

What’s the worst thing about owning nine houses?

The punchline is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
The Autobahn : Did you hear about the cow coloratura? : Did you hear about the shape-shifting car? : Did you hear about the thieving produce clerk? : Elementary school : A Golden Retriever : How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect? : How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling? : How do amoebas communicate? : How do ghosts hide their wrinkles? : How do worms get to the supermarket? : Of all the songs in the Great American Songbook, which is the favorite of pirates? : What did the doctor tell his forgetful patient to do? : What did the plumber do when embarrassed? : What happens when a senior citizen visits a podiatrist? : What is the favorite toy of philosophers’ children? : What’s the name of the Illinois town where dentists want to live? : What was the shepherd doing in the garden? : Where do amoebas golf? : Where does Paul Drake keep his hot tips? : Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money? : Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels? : Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies? : Why did the ophthalmologist and his wife split up? : Why does Marie Kondo never win at poker? : Why is the Fonz so cool? : Why sharpen your pencil to write a Dad joke? : Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. He gets credit for the Autobahn, the elementary school, the Golden Retriever, Bela Lugosi, Samuel Clemens, the doctor, the plumber, the senior citizen, Oliver Hardy, and the ophthalmologist. Elaine gets credit for the Illinois town. My dad was making such jokes long before anyone called them “dad jokes.” I continue in the traditional manner.]

Dad, i.m.

My dad, James Leddy, died five years ago today. He’d have been ninety-two this year.

He’s shown up in two dreams recently, sounding and looking like himself, only younger, first asking me to order a CD for him from Amazon and then walking down a brick-paved street to a hotel. That second dream cast me as both a father to my son and a son to my father. Which I am.

Here’s what I wrote after my dad died.