The Reader Travels

My earliest knowledge of Richard III was watching Richard Dreyfus play a flamboyantly gay hunchback in The Goodbye Girl. I didn’t know the story, I just knew Richard was a serious dude with a bad back, and he wasn’t meant to be a joke.

When we visited the Tower of London, we walked through the Bloody Tower which wasn’t always called the Bloody Tower. It was originally called the Garden Tower, a name associated with life and greenery instead of death and blood.  The bloody deed that started the tower’s new name was the murder of two young heirs to the throne.

The most popular theory of the murder was that it was commissioned by Richard of Gloucester, King Richard III.  This is the theory portrayed in Shakespeare’s play about this foul, deformed villain.  I really liked Ian McKellen’s 1995 movie version of Richard III with its surreal 1930s setting, but I gained an all new appreciation with Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard. Of course that was the whole purpose of the documentary, to make Shakespeare more accessible to American audiences, to give them a real appreciation for the stories, the language and the art of acting.

Pacino obviously loves his craft, and he has a passion for Shakespeare. We get to learn the background history of what was going on in politics when the play starts. He breaks down every scene to make us love it the way he does.  He even gives us a better understanding of the poetic language used, the rhythm of the iambic pentameter.  Love the language, ride the wave.

I’ve been plottng this tour of Shakespeare in the Movies for over a year now, and what better time than following a trip to England?   Our literary tour of England started in October of last year with Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down. It took us through a journey into alternate reality London, and actual real-life London. 

The movie versions of Shakespeare’s plays are obvious, mostly because they have the same name as the play — movies like Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing and Othello.  But some of my favorites are modern day stories with modern day scripts that take their stories from Shakespeare, with such classic musical examples as Kiss Me Kate and West Side Story.  Some may call it stealing, but I like to think of it as paying tribute.  Then there are movies like L.A. Story and 10 Things I Hate About You that make it point to play up the tribute.

We’re about to explore some of my favorite references to Shakespeare in the movies. What are your favorites?

One of my favorite lines from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was, “So much time and so little to do. Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it.”  It’s poetry really, because when you’ve overfilled your time, you get all discombobulated like that.

I have no time for books or movies these days, just work and more work, and by gosh it’s springtime, so I have to be outside, buzzing with friends and family, which means cleaning my house so when people can come over I create the illusion of keeping a clean house. Somebody had the great idea of having a crawfish boil, at my house, and as fate would have it, we found someone who’d come by and bring his pot and a bag of bugs and do it all for us, and with my schedule these days, you know I was jumping all over that. Whew!

What I do have time for is half-hour sitcoms on DVD.  They not only keep me laughing, but they keep me on location in London.  I’m not sure that US network television would ever be ready for Coupling, but it’s exactly what I need.

No trip to London is complete without a tour of The Tower.  I’m not sure if you know this about me, but I have a disease where words and concepts trigger songs in my head, and then I can’t avoid blurting that song to all who will hear.  My friends have learned to ignore this ever-so-annoying tic. And it only embarrasses them slightly when I broadcast my disease for all to hear. 

Well, the words, “Tower of London” and “Anne Boleyn,” trigger this song, and though I was sick with a cold, and it was snowing on my head, I kept on singing, and clapping my hands to the rhythms during my entire visit.  (By the way, this was the least annoying of all the versions on YouTube, and you can actually understand the words.)

Embracing the voyage across the sea, I brought my copy of Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun, a novel about young Will Shakespeare, a glove maker’s son, bored with his party buddies in Stratford and moving on to much more exciting things. I was glad I’d read it before, because my vacation was too much of a distraction to actually focus on any of the words I was reading.

Really, it’s a beautiful work, very sexy, poetic and lyrical, but I had to keep rereading paragraphs, pondering the most minute phrases.  Like, what body part was he talking about when he referred to her “black flue”?  I think I know. I’m pretty sure he was talking about giving it to her up the old chimney if you know what I mean.

Anyhow, the first opportunity I had to read was on our flight across the ocean.  But how could I read a poetic novel when a hot young Israeli chick was flirting with me the whole time in her sexy broken English?  Burgess’s words just couldn’t compete with my trying to explain to her what the word “goo” means. 

Do I have something in my eye, she asked, leaning into me. I gently scraped her eye with the tip of my finger.  No hair, just a little goo, I told her.  I don’t know what you’re saying, she smiled and fluttered her eyelashes at me.  You know, like snot or boogers, and I made a gesture like I was picking my nose.  Sexy, right?

When our meals came, my plate held a pile of gelatinous mashed potatoes, and I didn’t think about it until later that this was the perfect way to communicate the meaning of the word “goo.” 

As I tried to sleep, I knew I could make out with her if I wanted to, start my vacation on an exciting note.  But it was enough for me to think, as I take this trip to celebrate my 40th birthday, hey, maybe I’ve still got it.

When I’m in a different country, it’s the little details I notice.  When we first arrived in England, we did three very ordinary things — we used the bathroom at the airport, got cash out of an ATM and exited the parking garage. 

One thing that I would find was pretty common about using public toilets in England was that electric hand dryers prevail.  If given a choice, I will usually dry my hands with paper, but maybe that’s because we have inferior electric hand drying mechanisms in the States.  Not so in England — man, those suckers can blow.

The ATM was not extraordinary, though the queues to get to them were pretty long, but that’s probably because we’d just gotten off an airplane at the international terminal, and everybody else had the same idea.  The parking garage wasn’t extraordinary either, but that’s where my thoughts started to wander… back to literature… and a freaky, London favorite — J.G. Ballard’s Crash.

And what is Crash about?  Why, sex and car crashes, of course.  A guy gets into a car accident and meets up with this whole underground movement of people who get off on being in car crashes, watching car crashes, reenacting famous car crashes, you get the picture.  David Cronenberg made a movie about it back in the 90s with freaky people like James Spader and Rosanna Arquette, and just so you know, it has nothing to do with the 2004 movie about racism in Los Angeles (though as movies go, I liked that one better).

So, we’re driving around the parking garage, and I remember there was a scene in a parking garage in London, it may even have been at the airport.  I’m sure there was something sexy happening because there was something sexy happening in every scene of the book. And there may have been a car accident but it may have just been a discussion about a car accident. I don’t know.  But all I could think was, that could have been right here.

I couldn’t help myself. I kept looking at the parked cars searching for heads or feet or bare bums in the windows, but to no avail.  Just an ordinary parking garage. In London.

When people ask me what I saw when I went to England, I say, “Oh, the usual – Stonehenge, Buckingham Palace, the Sistine Chapel.”  When D’s aunt told us not to make any plans for Wednesday, that she had a special surprise for us, none of us could have guessed we’d be taking a day trip to Rome.

Ever since I read Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, my thoughts of Rome have centered on one thing — Michelangelo’s Pietà — and though we saw so many things, this was the one that mattered to me. A student of philosophy, I’m more into Greece than I am Rome, but this image of a mother holding her dead son whose body has just undergone untold torture, this is something I can feel passionate about. It’s the juxtaposition of humanity and inhumanity, the universal love of a mother for her child.

For similar reasons, my favorite story from ancient Greece is that of Medea, a woman so scorned, so powerless that she takes the lives of her own children.  It’s the one thing she can do to hurt Jason, who has left her for a younger woman, and her need to hurt him surpasses her need to protect her children.  But she is cursed, for she must live with her choice and her own loss, magnified in this act of desperation.

Back in England, we caught a few scenes from Ordinary People on the television, yet another tale of a mother dealing with the death of her son.  We saw only one scene with the mother, and if you didn’t know what the story was about, you’d just think the mother was a bitch and write her off.  But knowing, as she lashes out at her remaining son, you can see her pain and know how deep her loss has cut her.

Ave Maria.

I’m all aflutter, waiting for 3pm when I go to the airport for my first flight across the ocean. The longest flight I’ve ever taken was from Dallas to Toronto.  Going from the US to Canada, there are only subtle differences that tell you you’re in another country –  signs in French and English, distances measured in kilometers, money with a queen’s head on it, over-the-counter pharmaceuticals you’d need a prescription to buy back home, and Cuban cigars. 

But England is a whole different world, even if they do sorta speak my language, and even if I have been pretending to travel there for the past six months.  I think of my cousins who grew up in Muslim countries, and how their parents protected and sheltered them in many ways. But they have the experience of living in foreign lands and speaking other languages, and I’m the one who really feels sheltered as I leave my home continent for the first time ever, in celebration of my 40th birthday.

This is my reward for all the event planning I did last year when my girlfriends were having babies and getting married.  I said, don’t worry about me this year, just do something special for my birthday next year.  I suggested a party, and then someone else suggested a trip, so I’m thinking, we should go sit on a beach somewhere and have pretty boys bring us fruity drinks with lots of rum  in them.  When D suggested we go see her aunt in England, it was like an epiphany.  Oh my god, I could actually take a trip to Europe? Really? YES.

So, as I prepare to leave, I think of my friends, leaving their young babies at home for a week to spend their time with me.  And I feel loved.  My only regret is that my man can not share this experience with me. Then again, he figures all he needs to know about foreign lands he can learn on TV.

But today, I’m turning off the tube, putting my books down and living. For real.

Out at dinner with my girlfriends last night, we spent an unusually large amount of time talking about death and funeral customs, burials, cremation, mourning, insurance policies.  It started with M, talking about her recent trip to Houston for her grandmother’s funeral. 

The phrase, “There wasn’t an open casket,” led us in.  J, who’s from China, said she’d never been to a funeral with an open casket because they always did cremation back home.  This led us to the book I’m reading now, Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, in which I have just read a scene that takes place at a crematorium.  It seems China and England have similar customs where they go and watch the loved ones enter the flames, while in the USA, we don’t really do that.  We send the body away, and it comes back as ashes in a box or a jar, all mysterious-like, where you wonder if they didn’t just empty a bunch of ash trays into a box and pass it off as your cousin Larry.

M threatened her mother with a bright pink coffin since she’s always hated the color.  Then D admitted that since she liked all things pink, she might like to have a Hello Kitty coffin as her final resting place.  And if the food hadn’t come, I might have talked about the touring exhibit of African coffins I saw many years ago at the Dallas Museum of Art, where they’d make a wooden sculpture that represented the dead man’s life and bury him in it.  An airplane for a pilot, a huge carrot for a farmer, you get the picture.  I’m just not sure why these things weren’t buried, unless they were still awaiting their owners’ demise.

See, this is a conversation I can appreciate.  One day, I’d like to visit the funeral service museum in the north side of Houston, which I read about in some Texas magazine the year after I saw the coffins on tour.  It seems they had the pleasure of hosting the same exhibit.  Call it a morbid fascination, call it research.

Anyway, as I lay down to bed last night, I opened my book and saw this phrase on the page — “the big D.”  Of course, Hornby’s not talking about Dallas, Texas. After all, he’s in London.  What he is talking about, is Death.

That’s not to say that I actually liked Neverwhere as a novel, but I am interested in seeing the BBC miniseries some time.  Although I thought parts of the book were quite trite, the actual concept was cool, and it would be fun to see it played out on the screen, even though I’ve been warned about the cheesiness of the low budget production.

We’re used to having low budgets for fantastical films, and animation in place of live action, and not always because fantasy and comics go hand in hand.  Despite the great stories and magical worlds, it doesn’t always work out, though.  One of my man’s favorite fantasy series of all time was the original Dragonlance, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.  So, of course, when we heard there was an animated movie coming out on DVD, we put it at the top of our movie list.

I think he fell asleep halfway through just to avoid the torture of watching this film.  From the cheesy seventies style animation to the bad, bad acting, and the annoyance of having to listen to Keifer Sutherland’s voice for an hour and a half, it’s simply not worth it.  Plus, we understand compromise in story line when it comes to translating from book to film, but they flattened the story and sucked it dry.

Either way, I’ve heard Neverwhere was worth the watch and that my seventeen-year-old nephew watched straight through, way past his bedtime, because he just couldn’t turn it off.  Wish me luck.