In Our Time : Antigone

The BBC’s In Our Time takes up Sophocles’s Antigone in an episode that makes an excellent introduction to the play. Edith Hall, classicist: “It will not be long before there is an Antigone set in Ukraine.”

Related reading
Antigone in Ferguson (1) : Antigone in Ferguson (2) : Antigone in Haiti : Antigone as required reading : All OCA Sophocles posts (Pinboard)

Antigone in Ferguson

The PBS NewsHour ran a deeply moving story tonight about ​a production of scenes from Sophocles’s Antigone in Ferguson, Missouri. Antigone in Ferguson is the work of Outside the Wire, the theater group that has (among other efforts) staged readings of Sophocles’s Ajax and Philoctetes for military audiences.

Whatever the fate of Sophocles and other representatives of “western civ” in academia, their work remains perpetually relevant to human suffering and human endeavor. Antigone: “Grief for the whole huge disaster of us .” Creon: “Oh weep, weep for the pain of human pain!”

You can learn more about this production from Outside the Wire and Ferguson’s Center for Social Empowerment.

Related reading
All OCA Sophocles posts (Pinboard)
Modest proposals (One of which involves Antigone)

[Lines from Antigone translated by Paul Woodruff, from Sophocles’s Theban Plays (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003).]

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).]

Ownlife

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

This passage made me think immediately of Creon’s rebuke of Antigone: “Aren’t you ashamed to have a mind apart from theirs?”

Related posts
All OCA George Orwell posts : Antigone in Ferguson : Literature and reverence : Modest proposals : Susan Cain on “the New Groupthink”

[The line from Antigone is in Paul Woodruff’s translation, from Sophocles’s Theban Plays, trans. Peter Meineck and Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003). For an excellent discussion of Creon’s question and Antigone’s apartness, see Diana Senechal’s Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012).]

Antigone in Ferguson

Theater of War presents a streaming performance of Antigone in Ferguson:

Antigone in Ferguson fuses a dramatic reading by leading actors of Sophocles’s Antigone with live choral music performed by a choir of activists, police officers, youth, and concerned citizens from Ferguson and New York City. The performance is the catalyst for panel and audience-driven discussions about racialized violence, structural oppression, misogyny, gender violence, and social justice.

Free to watch, August 9, 7:30 CDT. Zoom required. Register here.

Related reading
All OCA Sophocles posts (Pinboard)

Britney Spears and Sophocles

Christie's auction house explains:

A page taken from Britney Spears' junior high school notebook containing her handwritten review of Rex Warner's translation of Sophocles' story Antigone, written in black ballpoint pen on either side of the page, Britney's review annotated by her teacher with corrections to her spelling and comments including Nice cover Organized Watch your spelling and Write more neatly and her grade: 88; and a corresponding piece of yellow card decorated with the book's title Antigone in black felt pen -- 12x9in. (30.5x20.8cm.)

This item was offered in an on-line auction to raise money for the Britney Spears Foundation.

I especially like "He get's scared to he lets her go. NO" "To where" is the horrendous idiom the writer is in search of. Note though that in addition to letting the apostrophe go, the teacher has no offered no suggestion as to how one might reconstruct this sentence. Perhaps the teacher was so tired of grading to where they just couldn't bother. (I can't believe I just wrote that sentence.)

And was it Britney or her teacher who appears to have added Rex Warner's name (not Sophocles') at the top? The ink seems to match the teacher's corrections, and the capital R looks pretty old-fashioned. We'll just have to wonder: the bidding is closed.

Britney Spears' Antigone (Christie's, via Gawker)

Theater of War via Zoom

Antigone in Ferguson :

A groundbreaking project that fuses dramatic readings by acclaimed actors of Sophocles’ Antigone with live choral music performed by a diverse choir, from St. Louis, Missouri and New York City culminating in powerful, healing discussions about racialized violence, police brutality, systemic oppression, gender-based violence, health inequality, and social justice.

October 2, 4:00 p.m.–6:30 p.m. and October 17, 5:00 p.m.–7:30 p.m. CDT

*

Theater of War for Frontline Medical Providers :

An innovative project that presents dramatic readings by acclaimed actors of scenes from ancient Greek plays to help nurses, doctors, EMS, first responders, administrators, and other heath care providers engage in healing, constructive discussions about the unique challenges and stressors of the COVID-19 pandemic. This event will use Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Women of Trachis to create a vocabulary for discussing themes such as personal risk, death/dying, grief, deviation from standards of care, abandonment, helplessness, and complex ethical decisions.

October 7, 12:00 p.m.–2:00 p.m. CDT

*

The King Lear Project :

Streamlined readings of scenes from Shakespeare’s King Lear to engage diverse audiences — including older adults, caregivers, and family members — in open, healing, constructive discussions about the challenges of aging, dementia, and caring for friends and loved ones.

October 14, 1:00 p.m.–3:00 p.m. CDT

*

Mothers of the Movement :

A conversation with Gwen Carr and Valerie Bell about their tireless work as Mothers of the Movement.

October 15, 12:00 p.m.–1:00 p.m. CDT

Follow the links to register for these free events.

“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

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, TCM, YouTube.]

From the Criterion Channel’s Noir in Color collection

Accused of Murder (dir. Joseph Kane, 1956). Whodunit: was it the hitman (Warren Stevens) hired to kill a crooked lawyer, or the nightclub singer (Vera Ralston) who rebuffed the lawyer’s advances? And can the police lieutenant (David Bryan) falling for the singer be trusted to come up with the correct answer? The funnest thing about this movie is that it’s from Republic Pictures but plays like a real movie — like Storm Over Lisbon, it’s another Republic effort with which they seem to have gone all out. In lurid Naturama, Republic’s answer to Technicolor. ★★★

Foreign Intrigue (dir. Sheldon Reynolds, 1956). Press agent Dave Bishop (Robert Mitchum) finds his wealthy employer on the floor, and it’s odd: everyone wants to know if the man said anything before dying. It’s foreign intrigue indeed — from Monte Carlo to Stockholm to Vienna, as Bishop’s effort to figure out the facts of the dead man’s life pulls him into a world of blackmail and murder. Eastmancolor (which looks more natural to my eye than Technicolor) and Paul Durand’s score (heavy on acoustic bass and percussion) make this movie feel like it’s already the 1960s. With Geneviève Page and Ingrid Thulin. ★★★★

The River’s Edge (dir. Allen Dwan, 1957). Ben Cameron (Anthony Quinn) and his city-slicker ex-con wife Meg (Debra Paget) are trying to make a go of it on Ben’s New Mexico cattle ranch, but Meg can’t get the hang of ranch life, and she and Ben argue about everything. Into their bickering world comes trouble in a sports car. The driver is Nardo Denning (Ray Milland), a man with a past, who enlists Ben and Meg to guide him and his suitcase of money across the border to Mexico. Difficult to think of this as noir, but it’s certainly suspense, with overtones of The Postman Always Rings Twice (beautiful woman, two contrasting men), The Killing, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. ★★★★

The Badlanders (dir. Delmar Daves, 1958). A loose remake of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, recasting the story in late-nineteenth-century Arizona. Alan Ladd and Ernest Borgnine play newly released prisoners with a scheme to extract gold from a abandoned mine. But complications abound. Scenes of extraordinary brutality, deep danger (underground), and romance (Borgnine and Katy Jurado), and one never stops rooting for the so-called badlanders to succeed. ★★★★

Man of the West (dir. Anthony Mann, 1958). Can noir pair well with bright wide-open western spaces? I’m still not persuaded, but I can say that this is a great movie on its own terms. As solemn-looking Link Jones, traveling by train to hire a schoolteacher for his town, Gary Cooper meets up with relatives from his criminal past, in the person of psychopathic Uncle Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb) and his gang. As the gang presses Link back into service, It’s the one against the many, with strong overtones of Key Largo. With Jack Lord, Arthur O’Connell, and Julie London as a singer who never sings. ★★★★

*

The North Star (dir. Lewis Milestone, 1943). In the summer of 1941, Ukrainian villagers make a valiant stand against Nazi forces, in what I think of as two movies. The one movie has a strong cast (Dana Andrews, Anne Baxter, Walter Huston, Erich von Stroheim), suspenseful scenes of ambush and sabotage, brilliant cinematography (James Wong Howe), and a score by Aaron Copland. The other movie has a cringeworthy screenplay by Lillian Hellman and shameless propagandizing for the joys of collective farming. The best scene: a Ukrainian doctor confronts a Nazi doctor to raise the question of legacy, with great resonance for our times. ★★★★ / ★ (TCM)

*

No Down Payment (dir. Martin Ritt, 1957). Four young mortgage-paying couples in Sunrise Hills, an LA subdivision where the houses are close, very close. Life appears good on the surface (steak every night, someone says), but the storyline brings in alcoholism, disparities in social class and education, domestic violence, racism, rape, the unending thirst for more money, and what we would now recognize as PTSD. Brutal and spectacular, with great performances from Joanne Woodward and Cameron Mitchell (the Boones), Tony Randall and Sheree North (the Flaggs), Pat Hingle and Barbara Rush (the Kreitzers), and Jeffrey Hunter and Patricia Owens (the Martins). I must cite what David Bowie wrote in his reply to a first fan letter from the States: “I was watching an old film on TV the other night called ‘No Down Payment’ a great film, but rather depressing if it is a true reflection of The American Way of Life.” ★★★★ (YT)

*

Sealed Cargo (dir. Alred Werker, 1951). “This is the story of one small victory in World War II,” says the on-screen introduction. The story concerns U-boats off the Canadian coast and a Gloucester fishing boat captained by Dana Andrews. An eerie encounter with a ghost ship prepares for greater mysteries, as Andrews tries to figure out who can be trusted: the passenger he’s taking to her remote village? the new recruit who speaks Danish with an odd accent? With Carla Balenda (Lassie’s Miss Hazlit!) and Claude Rains. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Desperate (dir. Anthony Mann, 1947). A Hitchcockian story of a newly married Chicago truckdriver (Steve Brodie) who takes on a job that threatens to doom him and his wife (Audrey Long). The flight from feral Raymond Burr and other hoods to an aunt and uncle’s Minnesota farm takes the couple through improbable semi-comic scenarios reminscent of The 39 Steps and Saboteur : riding with a sheriff, hiding behind fun-house masks, agreeing to a traditional Czech wedding. But there’s real darkness in this story, and George E. Diskamp’s cinematography — that swinging lamp — intensifies the atmosphere of danger. Our household’s annus mirabilis of movies comes through for us again. ★★★★ (TCM)

[Not a halo. Raymond Burr and the swinging lamp.]

*

The Furies (dir. Anthony Mann, 1950). The Furies is a cattle ranch, and Walter Huston is its owner, T.C. Jeffords, a man egomaniacal enough to have given his late wife a floor-to-ceiling portrait of himself. Barbara Stanwyck is T.C.’s daughter and confidante Vance, and their relationship has more than a touch of vaguely incestuous feeling about it. Wendell Corey is Rip Darrow, the man Vance wants; Gilbert Roland is Juan Herrera, a squatter on the ranch who adores Vance; and Judith Anderson — uh-oh — is Flo Burnett, T.C.’s new wife. Vance’s revolt against the patriarchy suggests to me Antigone and Electra and Cordelia, in a story that’s utterly insane — which is not a bad thing. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Grand Central Murder (dir. S. Sylvan Simon, 1942). It plays like a radio drama, with a many suspects — too many. Each has a good reason to have killed Broadway star Mida King (Patricia Dane); each tells their story in a flashback. As a private detective, Van Heflin is the nominal star, but I found Tom Conway and Virginia Grey more interesting, at least in part because they so strongly resemble George Sanders and Lucille Ball (Conway and Sanders were brothers). A last-minute deus ex machina (is there any other kind?) serves to identify the killer. But I liked the ridiculously snappy patter: “He’s ready to yodel after putting on the clam all evening.” ★★ (YT)

*

The Fearmakers (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1958). I’ve already written about and quoted from this movie, which is prescient in ways its makers did not imagine, suggesting the Facebook/Fox/Newsmax/OAN/Twitter/
YouTube disinformation diet that shapes so many people’s mistaken ideas about reality. Genial Dick Foran (cowboy star, and Ed Washburne on Lassie) is a surprising pick for the role of evil media mastermind; as his nemesis, Dana Andrews’s character carries the burden of his time as a POW and victim of brainwashing, a past that comes into the story merely as a way for the bad guys to damage his credibility. (This movie is not The Manchurian Candidate.) Mel Tormé is a dweebish underling; Veda Ann Borg and Kelly Thordsen are seedy underlings; Marilee Earle is a dutiful secretary but wooden, bad enough for me to drop a star. ★★★ (TCM)

Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)

“Fending,” &c.

Roz Chast catalogs words for opening the refrigerator and having whatever for dinner. In her household it’s called “fending.” Among the other terms she’s collected: “California plate,” “spa plate,” and “eek.”

My favorite term for such stuff (not in her catalog) comes from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. It’s “Many Wonders,” which endnote 319 glosses as “Incandenza family term for leftovers.” Avril Incandenza to her son Mario:

“Will you eat with us? I hadn’t even thought of dinner until I saw you. I don’t even know what there might be for dinner. Many Wonders. Turkey cartilage.”

I’m convinced that the Incandenzas’ source is a celebrated choral poem from Sophocles’s Antigone, known as the Ode to Man. It begins:

Many wonders, many terrors
But none more wonderful than the human race
    Or more dangerous.

In our house it’s called “parade of leftovers.”

[Translation by Peter Meineck, from Theban Plays (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003).]

Literature and reverence

Diana Senechal again:

The Chorus in Antigone says that he who honors the laws of the land and the justice of the gods will be hupsipolis, that is, he will have a great city. One could say this about literature: if students learn to enter it and honor it, they will have the makings of a rich life. They will also have an opening to true difference; by immersing themselves in the sole voice of another, they will start to hear their own voice, assenting, questioning, disputing, singing along, starting a new poem or song. Much of this literature is difficult for readers today; the ideas may seem distant, the words obscure, or the sentences long and complex. It is the teacher’s duty to help the student enter the work, and this takes time and care. It cannot be done when students in a given class are reading many different works at the same time. It requires a certain reverence — not the reverence of calling an author “great” just because everyone else does, but the reverence of treating the work, for a little while, as the most important thing in the room and mind.

Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012).

Clarence Fountain (1929–2018)

Clarence Fountain, gospel singer and leader of the Blind Boys of Alabama, has died at the age of eighty-eight. The New York Times has an obituary.

Here is one small sample of Clarence Fountain’s voice that’s dear to me: “Stop Do Not Go On,” from The Gospel at Colonus (1985), with the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, J.J. Farley and the Original Soul Stirrers, and Sam Butler. Lyrics by Lee Breuer, music by Bob Telson. Based on Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone, as translated by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. YouTube also has The Gospel at Colonus in its entirety. It’s one of the most remarkable and emotionally powerful reimaginings of ancient myth I know.

Philoctetes and Heracles, yesterday and today

I watched a Theater of War event for Zoom yesterday: readings from Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Women of Trachis by Jesse Eisenberg, Frankie Faison, Frances McDormand, and David Zayas, and commentary from frontline medical providers at Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx. Faison and McDormand were especially powerful readers as Philoctetes and Heracles, each of whom suffers unbearable, unallayed pain. Philoctetes’s physical agony, from a snake bite, is compounded by nine years of isolation after he is marooned by his fellow Greeks on their voyage to Troy. His cries of pain and the foul odor from his wound prompted Odysseus to suggest abandoning him. Heracles’s agony results from a centaur’s trick: what Heracles’s wife Deininara believes is a love potion is in truth a centaur’s fatal poison, which sucks the air from Heracles’s lungs and consumes his body. What Philoctetes and Heracles want in their suffering: not to be alone. “Stay with me,” Philoctetes pleads to Achilles’s son Neoptolemus. “You must stay by my side,” says Heracles to his son Hyllus. An event that lies beyond Sophocles’s Women of Trachis: it’s Philoctetes, earlier in his life, who lights the pyre that brings his friend’s suffering to an end.

The sound from Lincoln Medical Center as doctors and nurses spoke was often distorted. But one point that rang out clearly: the immensity of the suffering that the coronavirus may bring — suffering in isolation, suffering for which there’s no cure, suffering that might be difficult for someone on the outside of things to understand. I thought of the hospital photograph of Mark Anthony Urquiza shown on television on Monday night as Kristin Urquiza talked about her father’s life and death. And I heard the words “Stay with me” in a new way.

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

[I’ve quoted from Bryan Doerries’s translations of the plays. Theater of War is his creation.]

Modest proposals

[Exceedingly modest proposals to improve college. I regret that I did not develop them in time for fall 2016 implementation.]

~ Goodbye to Big Sports. The NBA and NFL can subsidize their own farm systems. Convert the money that supported Big Sports into increased adjunct pay, new tenure-track positions, increased academic support services, and need-based scholarships. Current players retain their scholarships.

~ Goodbye to minor administrators, who can step back into lower-paying faculty positions. Convert the money that funded those administrative positions into increased adjunct pay and new tenure-track positions.

~ Use Peter Drucker’s 20:1 salary ratio to cap salaries: the highest full-time salary on campus should be no more than twenty times greater than the lowest full-time salary. Note: there will be no basketball or football coaches to complain about drastic reductions in pay. Presidents will have to deal.

~ Goodbye to all busy work assigned by administrators to faculty. Not all elements of program review and assessment, just the busy work.

~ Establish some version of tenure or, at the least, long-term contracts for adjunct faculty of some years’ standing.

~ Reduce doctoral programs to plausible numbers of students, in proportion to the realities of the job market. Then again, creating substantial numbers of tenure-track positions may make doctoral study increasingly plausible.

~ Require all first-year students to attend a convocation about academic endeavor. No cheers, no dance-offs, no face-painting, no door prizes. The convocation should include a faculty member who says something like this: “You are not here to learn how to make a living. You are here to learn how to make a life.” Emphasis should fall on the ways in which college will differ from and be more difficult than high school.

~ Require faculty and all first-year students to read (with appropriate background material and study questions) a work of some weight and difficulty over the summer. (Not an inspiring memoir or a work with a plain and unimpeachable message.) I nominate Sophocles’s Antigone , which raises every question one might want to consider about conscience, civil disobedience, gender and power, isolation and community, morality and law, competing claims about what’s right, conflict and negotiation. Utterly relevant to our present condition. The convocation should include some consideration of the reading.

~ Require all students and faculty to participate in small-group discussions of said work. These can take place during what so many (too many) students mistakenly think of as “syllabus week”. There should be some measure by which to determine that students have in fact done their reading: a brief written quiz and participation in a discussion. The faculty-student ratio will determine the size of the groups. In a school with, say, a 20:1 ratio, each faculty member can be responsible for two groups of ten students, two hour-long meetings. Students who are unprepared will be given additional opportunities to complete this work.

~ Require writing — genuine writing — in all courses. Class sizes will be small enough to allow for careful evaluation of students’ written work.

That’s all for now. Any questions?

[“You are not here,” &c.: something I heard at my freshman orientation. I’ve never forgotten it. I haven’t forgotten the high cost of college either. My proposals here aim to improve institutions. We must also make access to institutions more affordable.]