Carol

"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings upon themselves, not us."

-- Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol"

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The original short story is well worth reading (naturally). Many breathtaking passages are neglected in stage and film adaptations, including some very dramatic scenes--the Ghost of Christmas Present, for instance, is eaten away from the hem up by two ghoulish children, Ignorance and Want. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come does not merely show Scrooge the tombstone; before it does this, Scrooge is placed in his cold bedroom with his cold, deceased corpse, hidden only by shroud and shadow. He considers lifting the blanket to see the dead man's visage, but cowers, asking instead to see "tenderness connected with Death." He is then shown the Cratchit house, wherein a child has died. (Dickens at work and at ease: the juxtaposition of refusing to see one's old self dead and with the realization of an innocent child's death.)

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On, now, to rehearsals and leisure reading. From the top of the stack come William Golding's The Spire, and Philip Yancey's Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church. I'm especially excited about the Yancey book. I haven't read him in years, not really. I just return to his theological texts (a journalist's honest perspective on the Gospels) as often as I return to The Cloud of Unknowing or the Good Book itself; now I embark upon a new journey, into a book I'd not known of until recently. Among the thirteen mentors are Dostoevski, Drs. Robert Coles and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Annie Dillard. Yancey made me okay with Christianity at a point in my life when I was ready to give it the itchy asshole. I would not say he has made me a believer (as trite a phrase as the sentiment it expresses), but I will say that he made me wish to believe again.

If anyone's asking, Yancey favorites of mine are I Was Just Wondering, The Jesus I Never Knew, and What's So Amazing About Grace?

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Cincy Shakes' production of Hamlet was poorly done. A flat cast (excepting a virtuoso Claudius/Ghost performance), puzzling and pitiful homages to Asian theatrical convention, and disappointing cuttings reduced the Bard's master work to a three-hour goof fest. I appreciate such textually-supported iconoclasms as a chubby Hamlet and a witty one, too, but a Gertrude as saucy as a straw wrapper and a tragedy as lame as fallen trees... It's enough to make you pick up the old verses, plucking the play once more, thumbing the worthy volume and noting--with sadness and flinching--all those underlined and boxed passages which were shoved aside on stage. Magnificent words, casually tossed, are like death on the air, remembrances from the pure dropped glibly at your feet, azure gems shining and forlorn in the mud and murk of a dredged lake's bottom.

What I mean is this:

If you toss up enough text and flatten it with the air-pressurized fist of modern times, so roughly squeezing and wrenching truth from tradition, if you flatter with backhanded slyness of eye and slippery fingers lazy with intellect, if you cast from lofty towers the very meat and mettle of poetry into the rank stew of the moat's stale waters, as you would with ill-wrought and inedible dinners, buckets of curdled fecundity, and half-evaporated bathwater; if you do this, and then seek to reinflate it all "with bated breath," empty raspings and loathsome chuckles--the last resort of the gutless goof--or to knead it back into shape, if words could work such industries while actors spew these melodies of logic and passion with as much thought or care as the babblings of hungry babes, the feint of the poor, or the recklessness of the insane; with all this "pith and moment," the holes injure your effort and release your breath to the air you sucked it from, the shoddy bricks fall from your walls of badly-planned architecture, the tones whistle like jeers from the stops unstopped, sounding your aesthetic failure with the trumpetlike toot of a flaccid balloon drooping to the ground, and your currents turn awry, lose the name of actual action (that theatrical-magical reality), and the talking heads bobble and swivel with the seeming of the play, but it is deadly, deadly, deadly,--as fatal to the very air as the smoke of burning cars, or the stench of volcanic rage, and the listening ears shut within the uncomprehending heads (the unseeing eyes, too, bored by your harsh white lights) which also bobble and swivel without knowledge or reason, and in your space, a great play is here o'erthrown.

Well done.