Revenge, the Wikipedia article.

A report that the wife of Dominique Strass-Kahn is seeking "revenge" got me thinking about the specific meaning of the word. Surely, it doesn't include merely remembering who kicked you when you were down.

My curiosity about the concept was sufficient to get me to Wikipedia, where I was, first, interested that there was an article at all, and second, interested that it was as short as it was. It wasn't super-short, like a dictionary definition. If you're going to purport to cover the history of revenge and its function in society and religion plus that famous saying, how do you keep the length to 2 screens?

Presumably: editing! Wikipedia is all about editing. People load crap in. That's the easy part. The miracle of Wikipedia is in the editing.

Oh, come on, Althouse. It's not a miracle. I mean, check it out:  "A miracle is an event attributed to divine intervention."

No, no. I'm not going there. The Daily News used "revenge" to portray a specific individual in a negative light for the titillation of readers. I used hyperbole, in a complimentary sense, to refer to the behind-the-scenes work of thousands of editors who deserve some extra praise and thanks.

Both miracles and revenge play a part in human storytelling, but revenge is a much better story. "Deus ex machina" is not the most admirable plot device, as Aristotle explained:

It is obvious that the solutions of plots too should come about as a result of the plot itself, and not from a contrivance... There should be nothing improbable in the incidents; otherwise, it should be outside the tragedy....

Revenge makes a good tragedy. See "Hamlet."  If you haven't seen it already.

Of the psychological, moral, and cultural foundation for revenge, philosopher Martha Nussbaum has written: "The primitive sense of the just—remarkably constant from several ancient cultures to modern institutions ...—starts from the notion that a human life ... is a vulnerable thing, a thing that can be invaded, wounded, violated by another's act in many ways. For this penetration, the only remedy that seems appropriate is a counter invasion, equally deliberate, equally grave. 

For this penetration.... a good image, when we're talking about rape. But what of the false accusation of rape? That too is a penetration.

"And to right the balance truly, the retribution must be exactly, strictly proportional to the original encroachment."

I think revenge asks for more.  Nussbaum explains the moral aspect of revenge, not the passionate edge that wants more than justice. There is passion, but wait...

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

That is the saying about revenge. And it doesn't suggest becoming dispassionate. You're not using your measuring spoons and cups, preparing a dish "strictly proportional to the original encroachment." The cold dish that is the best revenge is not a calibrated diet dish.

Nussbaum's Heart-Healthy Justice Salad is not revenge.

"Shakespeare would have been appalled."

Asserts Julie Taymor, who wanted to be free of the people taking shots at her show, especially via Twitter and Facebook and blogging, which Shakespeare did not have to put up with.

"It’s very hard to create, it’s incredibly difficult to be under a shot glass and a microscope like that...

"When you’re trying to create new work and you’re trying to break new ground and experiment, which seems an incredibly crazy thing to do in a Broadway environment, the immediate answers that audiences give are never going to be good...

"It’s just in the nature of things that when you’re doing something very new, audiences don’t know how necessarily to talk about it immediately..."

How does she imagine Shakespeare worked?

"Poetry, not special effects, is the engine that drives lyric theater, and 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' is as unpoetic as you can get."

"[The] book is flabby and witless. The score, by U2's Bono and The Edge, sounds like a double album of B-sides ("Don't think about tomorrow / We've only got today"). Not only are the songs forgettable, but they never succeed in generating any dramatic momentum—all they do is get louder."

Says Terry Teachout, observing that "no stage show, even a multimillion-dollar extravaganza, can offer anything remotely as believable-looking as the digitally generated magic that moviegoers have been taking for granted for the past couple of decades."

Why see a stage show, when there are movies? The makers of stage shows need to have an answer to that. And it really should be a better answer than: this combination of glitz and familiar names will trick the rubes into handing over their money.

If life were Facebook...

"Auditioning for Broadway Revival of 'Annie' Is a Hard-Knock Life."

"Wannabes Bet Their Bottom Dollar on Boot-Camp Prep With Former Orphans."

Of Mice and Men... and dogs.

"I'm looking for a broken dog..."




Get your tickets for this play and other American Players Theater productions this summer.

"James McLure Dies at 59; Wrote Garrulous Plays."

"Obituary headline to die for," emails the irrepressible RLC.

"The sheer ineptitude of this show, inspired by the Spider-Man comic books, loses its shock value early."

"After 15 or 20 minutes, the central question you keep asking yourself is likely to change from 'How can $65 million look so cheap?' to 'How long before I’m out of here?'"

"The Most Feminist Place in the World."

You know it's got to be Iceland.

[A]ctivists from Stigamot, the rape crisis center in Reykjavik, gave Knut Storberget, Norwegian justice minister, black boxer-briefs with the words I Am Responsible written down the crotch....

Feminism, or at least the notion of gender equality, has so infused politics that, a couple of years ago, women members of Parliament performed The Vagina Monologues....

There are also new feminine spaces in the economy. As the economy went into overdrive, Kristín Pétursdóttir and Halla Tomasdóttir, who had been warning of disaster from her position at the Chamber of Commerce, founded Auður Capital, a “financial service company emphasizing feminine values and social responsibility.”...

3 Madison things.

1. We're having a blizzard. Classes canceled tomorrow. Meade's watching the basketball game on TV — the Badgers are playing downtown tonight. The announcer explains the cheer from the crowd: They just saw the news that classes are canceled tomorrow.

2. Eating in Madison A to Z put up its review of the new restaurant 43 North, and Meade and I went along with JM and Nichole for that one.

There were rolls served with butter and oil in three square glass dishes. The rolls were also squarish, with a very airy crumb and a shiny, leathery crust that was especially hard on the bottom. The butter was from Wolf Ridge (if we recall correctly) and came in two forms: slightly chilled and set, or powdered with tapioca flour. The oil was also served as a powder. Ann nailed it: the lipids were the Dippin' Dots of bread toppings.

3. Larry Kaufmann lambastes that play we were talking about the other day:
The dialogue between the lefty grad students and these conservative adversaries is also about as subtle as a flying mallet. These conversations are the heart of the play and lead to the murder of four of the five grotesque conservative thugs; only a seventeen-year old girl promoting abstinence is deemed too young to kill (kind of like not imposing the death penalty on minors, I suppose)....

"[T]hink a play about a bunch of conservatives getting together each week to kill a lefty (and then maybe having second thoughts) would get such a favorable review?"

"Or get produced, by any theater company, anywhere?"

The first comment following a positive review of a play called "The Last Supper," on stage here in Madison, Wisconsin.  First line of the review: "It's almost eerie that a play about extreme political rhetoric and vitriol would open just two weeks after the terrible shootings in Tucson."

"May your bare ass always be shining" — a telegraph message from Eleanor Roosevelt...

... to Gypsy Rose Lee.

Young Ezra Klein found himself in a strange predicament.

He'd said something utterly banal. It's what everyone around him has been saying for years. He must have expected that people would either ignore him or shrug him off as a man with no original or interesting ideas. And suddenly he's getting derided, called an idiot or worse. How can that happen?!

The banal thing was that reading the text of the Constitution doesn't get you to the answers to the difficult questions that arise today. The text must be interpreted, and political preferences will tend to pull people along toward the interpretation they want.

Don Surber says (via Instapundit):

Ezra Klein made the biggest mistake that can be made by a liberal — progressive — socialist — communist — no labelist — whatever the heck they call themselves on the 31st of the month.

He was being honest.

He does not believe in the Constitution.

He is cynical about it and he projects that same cynicism onto those who disagree with him.

Now, Klein walked right into that criticism. He stated the banality with an off-handed, wise-guy flippancy. That was red meat for the kind of conservative who likes to stress the constitutional text.

And now we see the value of this notion of reading the text out loud on the House floor. It sets up a trap for people like Klein to say things that let conservatives — like Don Surber — rail against the lefties.

Does that mean that I, like Klein, think reading the Constitution on the floor of the House is a "gimmick"?

In marketing language, a gimmick is a unique or quirky special feature that makes something "stand out"... [T]he special feature is typically thought to be of little relevance or use.... [A] gimmick is a special feature for the sake of having a special feature. It began... as a slang term for something that a con artist or magician had his assistant manipulate to make appearances different from reality.

In the musical "Gypsy," the experienced strippers advise young Gypsy Rose Lee that she has to get a gimmick:



I wouldn't use the word "gimmick" for what the GOP has proposed. But, like stripping, it is theatrical. It's a performance. A performance of belief. I think of the point in the church service when everyone reads the Apostles' Creed out loud. Obviously, many people say it who don't believe it, and you could keep silent and still believe it. But don't mock the ritual unless you're good at predicting the reaction and how you'll respond to that and you have some good reason for wanting the exchange.

Back to Surber:

For 8 years, the Left’s railed against Bush shredding the Constitution, a phrase which came to mean nothing....

See how much Surber is like Klein? He's accusing the other side of saying the words, but not really believing. But Surber has done better at picking his fight. He's got he hypocrisy angle: All those times you lefties acted all aghast at what Bush was doing? You must admit that was all theater, right?

ADDED:

"By instinct and archetype, comedy is usually phallic..."

"... Chaplin has his cane, Harpo his horn, Groucho his cigar, and Dame Edna her gladioli, with which to poke, probe, and goose the world. Pee-wee, by contrast, is the comedian of non-phallic fun."

IN THE COMMENTS: Deborah said:

Unless Pee-wee himself is a phallic symbol. Of sorts:

"Now, as then, Pee-wee is a round-shouldered, knock-kneed picture of arrested development. His voice is high and strangulated, his laugh shrill and affectless, a sound that comes from the throat, not the belly. He occasionally lets out a scream of fear or a wail of loathing; when he throws himself on the floor in a tantrum, he adopts a kind of fetal position."

Yeah. Good point. The name too. Pee Wee. Wee wee. Pee pee.

"If you’ve got, so to speak, the devil inside the elevator, press the call button. Call Otis."

"You’re trying to make this fun, I can understand that. But I’ve never heard of anything like this."

"Okay, what if one of your fellow passengers bites you?"

"Smack the person across the face."

Elevator expert is questioned a propos of this movie trailer:



Oh, I see. All our ridiculous primal fears about elevators are going to be exploited. IF... and I stress if... we subject ourselves to another M. Night Shyamalan movie.

It seems silly to make big expensive wide-screen movies about a few people stuck in a small space. Such things would do better on a theater stage. Like "No Exit." Or, even better, on TV. Like "Five Characters in Search of an Exit." ("Twilight Zone" video begins here.)

I truly loathe the movie techniques used in that trailer — music, swooping shots, editing — to try to make something inherently small fill the big screen. Our fears are in our heads. Put us in touch with that. Don't hurl screenfuls of flashing lights in our face and blast us with cheeseball music. That just makes me feel bad, and then I get angry. To scare me, you must be subtle.

Just a barrel, a dark depository where are kept the counterfeit, make-believe pieces of plaster and cloth, wrought in the distorted image of human life. But this added, hopeful note: perhaps they are unloved only for the moment. In the arms of children, there can be nothing but love. A clown, a tramp, a bagpipe player, a ballet dancer, and a major. Tonight's cast of players on the odd stage known as the Twilight Zone.

Free Carrie!

Let her live again.

"See that man over there? He's a movie star, and I get to sleep with him every night."

Catherine Zeta-Jones "can't believe [she] said something as crass as that," which she did, looking gorgeous and genuinely surprised, as she accepted the Tony award she won last night.

When the audience has a laugh leader.

Mark Liberman at Language Log complains about an "inappropriate" laugh leader in an audience at a Chekhov play:

There was someone in the back of the theater with a  loud and infectious laugh,  who didn't laugh at any of the obviously funny lines, but instead laughed — maybe a hundred times — at a selection of lines that is not easy to characterize....

The laugher's interventions mostly seemed to me to be points where a character changed the subject, or said something that was unexpected in the context of the previous discourse, or said or did something awkward or socially uneasy....

But there were other theories.  One person thought that the laugher might have been a friend of a couple of the actors, who reacted whenever one of them entered the on-stage conversation. Another theory was that the laugher was reacting when the actors made certain expressive faces. These are obviously overlapping theories, and many others might be devised as well.

In the comments, Richard Bell said:

Is it possible this laugher was the one person who best understood and reacted to Chekhov's special comic gift? What you have suggested is, in fact, a pretty good description of Chekhovian comedy. His characters don't really listen to each other. Someone once said there is no dialogue in Chekhov; only interrupted monologues. They change the subject because they don't know what the subject is; they have not been listening.

Now, Liberman says the laugh leader was "loud" and goes on to describe the actors seemingly reacting negatively to the laughing. So, it seems as though the laughing was bad in some special way that makes Bell's comment an incomplete response.

But I am very interested in laugh leading. When I go to the movies or a play, I find that I myself am a laugh leader. It don't laugh loudly, but I am the first person to laugh at a lot of things, and I get other people laughing.  I'm not trying to go first. It's just that a lot of Americans — especially at high-art type movies and plays — are too polite or insecure about laughing. They'll sit there silently while all sorts of subtly funny things are happening as if they need to laugh lines and broad comedy to give them confidence. People seem to be unsure of their own perceptions or just numbed to nonobvious comedy.

A good laugh leader can lubricate the audience and intensify the pleasure of witnessing a performance with others. Of course, a bad laugh leader is a problem, especially if there are live actors on stage. But it's that fear of laughing first and laughing wrongly that holds so many people back and puts a premium on good laugh leading.

Elie Wiesel does not want to be a character in your play...

... even if you meant to use him as the embodiment of "decency, morality, the struggle for human dignity and kindness." Now, if you want to use him as the embodiment of not wanting to be turned into an abstraction and fictionalized....

Did you know they made a Broadway show out of the Green Day album "American Idiot"?

And it got a great review in the NYT? Excerpt:

Who’s the American idiot being referred to? Well, as that curtain slowly rose, we heard the familiar voice of George W. Bush break through a haze of television chatter: “Either you are with us, or with the terrorists.” That kind of talk could bring out the heedless rebel in any kid, particularly one who is already feeling itchy at the lack of prospects in his dreary suburban burg.

But while “American Idiot” is nominally a portrait of youthful malaise of a particular era — the album dates from 2004, the midpoint of the Bush years, and the show is set in “the recent past” — its depiction of the crisis of post-adolescence is essentially timeless. 

Malaise... <giggle>... see previous post.

It's an odd business to be obsessing about George Bush when he's keeping such a low profile these days. He's hoping to fade into history, perhaps, but some people really miss him — miss him in the sense that they want him there in center stage to hate on, like back in the good bad old days. And now here he is, center stage, on Broadway, where they do punk rock. If there is a "malaise of [each] particular era," then I guess that says something about the one we're in.

ADDED: Sonicfrog blogs:

Ah, yes. The ggod ol’ days. Back when it was OK to hate the President. Of course, bashing Bush was not exactly edgy or breaking new ground by the time “American Idiot” came out – Dixie Chicks, Keith Olberman, and Rosie “fire has never melted steel” O’Donnell had already blazed that trail. What make the Green Day album notable was not the music – I doubt many could name a single song from the album, or hum one of the tunes – but the fact that the anti-Bush sentiment was marketed so prominently as a feature of the album.