Back in this October post I blogged about my new wallpaper.

So it is now a real delight to listen to Laurence Llewelyn Bowen’s Radio 4 programme (Thursday 24th March 2011)

House Beautiful

As my Granddad never tired of saying in his Lady Windermere – “A Handbag!” – voice:

“Be careful of being too Modern. You are likely to become old fashioned quite suddenly.”

 

 

Timothy Morton’s lateset post is titled Drama as Ecological Form. I’m glad he is now considering drama as an ecological form and look forward to his thoughts on the subject. I’m also delighted to discover Una Chaudhuri’s work, given that my own impulse to transition from a geology PhD to further studies in literary ecology was initiated by a three week international voice workshop on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

In the course of the last seven years, I’ve searched out authors that have recognized drama as a “quintessentially ecological art form”. Part of my motivation being to write an “ecological play” about carbon capture storage. (I now plan to complete a second draft of my manuscript by this summer).

Here are some quotes from two references that I’ve found particularly useful:

In How Plays Work David Edgar writes that  “The playwright David Hare sees theatre as essentially meteorological – like the weather, it happens when two fronts meet: what the actors are doing and what the audience is thinking.”

Edgar also makes a very useful comment on “The liminal zone”… where lies are exposed, disguises tested and the truths of individuals are revealed (p 73):

“In exploring the relationship of location to genre, there are two special cases, one a tragedy, one usually seen as a comedy… Indeed, you might define Shakespeare’s two principal genres in starkly simple terms: in the comedies people are driven into the countryside where they dress up as other people, come in again, and get married; in the tragedies, they strip off stay outside, and die.” (p. 74-75).

Joseph Meeker in his “Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic” (1997) suggests that in comedies people get back inside through a “strategic and clever” reconciliation (p. 16): “When the usual patterns of life are disrupted, the comic spirit strives for a return to normalcy… (It) is a strategy for survival. (p. 14 -15).” Meeker reckons that “a rhapsody extolling human conquests over nature appears at a crucial point in Greek tragic drama, for the human elevation over natural environments is an essentially tragic assertion.”

Personally, I also find it timely to rethink ecological theatre. This weekend I attended the “Literature and Altered States” conference at Lausanne University.

The first item on the program was “Mania in The Bacchae”. It was observed that in Euripides’s play each character has a different reading of the following terms: Sophia (Wisdom) ; Phrônesis (Perception/judgement); Sôphrôn (Knowledge of limits).

Are these idiosyncratic readings informed by each character’s place in society? …. The more I think of it, the more I want to devote time to an ecological reading of this play!

My last attempt to write about ecological theatre was for Geneva University’s English Department Student Newspaper. See:

Nisbet Eco-theatre

…Having completed my reading of Finnegans Wake, I remain intrigued by the many instances, not only part II- chapter II of the book, where I’m persuaded that I’m witness to a shadow play located within Joyce’s mind. J.L. Styan insists that “the play is not on the stage but in the mind” (Edgar 2009, p.7). In Finnegans Wake the play is not on the page, but in the mind…

Images from the 2007 Theatre du Mouvement workshop, “At the juncture of Body and Object”. International Puppetry Institute, Charleville-Mézières.

previous post on this blog was my last audio entry. I’ve reeled my way around Finnegans Wake.

I wanted to finish my audio project in time for James Joyce’s birthday (yesterday), as Joyce had a tradition of timing the end of artistic projects with his birthday.

In the coming months, as I listen closely to the audio files I’ve made, I’ll post occasional comments here. So please click back from time to time.

Meanwhile, here is the song “Finnegan’s Wake”.

Thanks for visiting.

Slange to you!

(1.4.75.1-1.4.83.5)

Burial of HCE in Lough Neagh

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A good jibe at the “phallusaphist” in this reading (72.14).

See this link to Derrida and Nietzsche.

(1.3.48.1-1.3.64.29)

In this chapter I’ve:

Vibed with the “Eyrawygla saga” and his “exceedingly nice ear” (48.16-21).

Met Padre Don Bruno (50.19).

Lost the identity of “the body” in the fog of night stories “this scherzarade of one’s thousand one nightiness” (51.4-6)

Met a native of the “sisterisle” (Scotland?)

Been presented flat scenes like “a landscape from Wildu Picturescu… or some seem on some dimb Arras dumb as Mum’s mutyness” (53.1-3). A silent semblance of appearance that introduces the arras in Gertrude’s chamber in Hamlet. And perhaps the echo of Polonius (who fatally stood behind it) in the shadowy cry of “letate!” (Laertes) as a midnight hour is struck (53.20).

There is a shift to the waxy world of “Madam’s Toshowus” and our “notional gullery” (57.20-21)-  We are in London. “Longtong’s breach is fallen down” (58.10). There is a woman “callit by a noted stagey elecutioner in “a waistend pewty parlour” (58.34-36).

Yet there is still talk on the street of the “Irewaker” (59.26). And this tips into bad egg cracks (homelette, hegg).

This would make sense as an evening newscast is being related: “Earwicker’s version of the story filmed, televised and broadcast” (lii). Typically a newscast moves from international, to national, regional and then local news…

There is mention of  “the park” (60.24) and Caligula (Camus?). Before a switch to Sydney…

Then later on there is a wedding to the “lottuse land” (Ulysses ref?), “Emerald-illuim” and first pharoah, “Humpheres Cheops Exarchas” judge of the “common or ere-in-garden” (62.19-21).

There’s an attack. And a pub crawl around biblical symbols Blazes, Hell, Sun, Lamb (63.23-24) finishing in the “Ramitdown’s ship hotel” (63.25). Very funny.

In addition to Hamlet /Homelette, perhaps the song “This old man, he played one” is rolls around underneath this chapter?:

He played knick-knack on my thumb. (on a drum, on my tongue)
With a knick-knack,

paddy whack, (64.24)…

Scottish Elevator Voice Recognition – ELEVEN!

Joyce would have LOVED this.

Watching Tim Minchin after reading Deleuze was fun time-out… until his song “Not Perfect” turned my thoughts to Tim Ingold’s figure comparing Lévi-Strauss’s and Bateson’s views on mind and ecology. Sounds like Tim Minchin stands with Levi-Straus here.

But Minchin is also singing through spheres. Like centrifugal man!

“When you feel like you’re the smallest doll in a babushka doll”.

As Ingold observes, “the perception of the spheres was imagined in terms of listening rather than looking” (210; see Ingold’s figure 12.2 The Fourteen Spheres of the World). Ingold observes that visual perception involves light reflecting off the surface of things. Sound perception on the other hand place us at the experiential centre of a lifeworld, listening out. Tim Minchin starts “this is my earth, and I live in it”. He sings inwards Geosphere -> Bio-sphere -> Noosphere (213). And is bloody funny!!!

Thanks Tim and Tim!

Here. He makes the connection to Dujardin’s oeuvre. I need to find out more about this…

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Appreciate the joy of me on the Casio SA-8 keyboard, and singing the tune of “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly”!