January 14, 2016

Empire to Empire: Mary Beard’s Rome

The English classicist and historian, Mary Beard, has become a T.V. star and a bestselling author. SPQR, her new capsule history of the Roman empire, remains hard to find on bookstore and library shelves weeks after its ...

The English classicist and historian, Mary Beard, has become a T.V. star and a bestselling author. SPQR, her new capsule history of the Roman empire, remains hard to find on bookstore and library shelves weeks after its release.

Maccari-Cicero

That has a lot to do with Beard’s rising profile — the New Yorker‘s Rebecca Mead named her “the troll hunter” for taking on critics of her frazzled onscreen look. But are we also wrestling with something like an imperial anxiety? Americans, and Brits, still remember that famous final fall, and wondering whether or not we’re doing as the Romans did.

Since Edward Gibbon, people have wondered what drove the demise of the glorious Roman empire, but Beard wants us to ponder the unlikelihood of its rise. Rome began as a humble backwater in the Italian hills, self-mythologized as a haven for outsiders and asylum-seekers, founded by the Trojan exile Aeneas or maybe by the murderous twin, Romulus, raised by a she-wolf.

It wasn’t at all obvious that Rome would become the hub of the ancient universe. It’s a place where a raucous democracy sprang up, then withered. Massive inequality of wealth is written all over the ruins of the city. Its histories are full of stabbings, corrupt bargains, usurpations, and rapes. And yet, in Beard’s long view, Rome’s essential openness — to the enslaved, to the poor, to the conquered outsider — gave it the military, economic and social strength required both for world takeover and for the pax Romana to follow.

ColemanHedges

Mary Beard’s short course is in our heads. With Chris Hedges, the political critic with an interest in antiquity, and Kathleen Coleman, one of the vivid minds in the Harvard classics department, we’re wondering where we stand now in the endless parade of fragile empires, and what kind of lessons we can draw from a far-off history that still feels close at hand.

Podcast • March 31, 2011

André Aciman: “The rest is just prose…”

Art takes the ordinary, the absolutely ordinary day-to-day humdrum stuff, the stuff we ignore, and it magnifies it and keeps magnifying it until it becomes big enough for you to see finally what your day ...

Art takes the ordinary, the absolutely ordinary day-to-day humdrum stuff, the stuff we ignore, and it magnifies it and keeps magnifying it until it becomes big enough for you to see finally what your day was like… My father taught me that the most important things in life are the small ones, and it’s important to observe them with fussiness, and that’s what I devote my life to… This is why I love French literature. You don’t need an Atlantic Ocean, you don’t need Moby Dick, you don’t need whales. You need a small room — basically two individuals sitting in one room with the impossibility of going for sex. That’s not part of the formula; it will come, but not right now, says the script. … Proust is a master of this, of putting individuals together. Or remove one individual and you have one individual by himself, thinking about experience and trying to be as honest as he can with himself and therefore with the reader about the things that crossed his mind and how he dealt with them, and how he thinks experience works … The rest is just, as I like to say, “just prose”. And we have a lot of masters of “just prose” living today.

André Aciman with Chris Lydon in NYC, March 24, 2011.

 

André Aciman is best known as a devoté of Marcel Proust. He’s not well-enough known, I’d say, for a new novel, Eight White Nights, a beautifully blocked romance that begins and ends in the snow, like James Joyce’s masterpiece story, “The Dead,” and owes still more perhaps to Dostoevsky’s heart-crushing tale of another anonymous lover’s woe, “White Nights.” Eight White Nights is the interior record of an “asymptotic” affair — between lovers who, like the line on the graph, get ever closer to committed intimacy but never reach it. It could remind you also of Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle,” though it turns out that André Aciman scorns Henry James for “gutlessness” — that bogus old charge, in my view. But no matter. André Aciman sets himself where he belongs, in the classical tradition of imaginative writers about our inward and invisible lives.

He has generously, candidly admitted us into the workshop of his meticulous craft — the place where he dresses and undresses, teases and assaults his characters, and gives them better lines than people give him. His own unguarded lines in conversation run to the cantankerous and caustic. Who else out there honors the master tradition. “No one!” What gets a writer over the threshhold? “Style,” he says. “Content is over-rated.” When people ask how he could set a novel — to wit: Eight White Nights — in New York with nary a mention of 9.11, his answer is “the here-and-now, portrayed as the here-and-now, is insignificant.”

Born himself into a French-speaking Jewish family in Alexandria in 1951, Aciman is original, cosmopolitan and extravagant about the writers who have inspired or taught him: among them E. M. Forster, W. G. Sebald, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Marguerite Yourcenar and on a pinnacle strangely higher even than Proust: Thucydides. And still, fair warning, our conversation keeps returning to Proust. It was his father, a writer manqué, who told him to read Proust for “the long sentence that keeps you waiting… It took me years to realize what that meant, to understand the abeyance that is being built in, that courts the reader into holding his breath and waiting and waiting and staying under water and not feeling that you’re going to drown. That takes time.”

February 1, 2006

Groundhog Day, Again

It’s Groundhog Day…again. It could have been just another funny comedy, a Bill Murray vehicle, a good but forgettable flick. But clearly it’s much more. It’s more than a cult film, even: it’s a classic. ...

It’s Groundhog Day…again.

It could have been just another funny comedy, a Bill Murray vehicle, a good but forgettable flick. But clearly it’s much more. It’s more than a cult film, even: it’s a classic. Why?

In a story meeting a few days ago Mary said that “Groundhog Day” is for a certain generaton — mine, I guess (I’m 30) — what “High Noon” “The Searchers” was for a former one. I’m not exactly sure what this means, but I have a feeling she’s right. And also that it’s more than generational.

Screenwriters crib from it. Film theorists teach it. Orthodox Jews love it. As do Jesuit priests. And Buddhists really love it. Stanley Cavell, the Harvard philosopher who normally writes about Wittgenstein and Emerson (along with film comedies of the 30s and 40s, and a lot more) named it as the contemporary work of art that will be cherished 100 years from now.

But unlike, say, Caddyshack — another Bill Murray movie also directed by Harold Ramis — people don’t memorize lines or standout scenes. Fans may have their favorites of each, but the movie seems to be beloved more in its totality. Which seems good and right in a Buddhist sort of way.

But if Mary is right (and when isn’t she?), and “Groundhog Day” is some new touchstone for a generation or a time, what does that mean? What does Groundhog Day mean to you? Why does it hold up? (Or maybe the first question is: does it hold up, for you?) Why does it get better, this film with so much repetition and such subtle variation? What kind of religious gloss would you give it? Any at all?

Far from Pennsylvania

Most other countries don’t have groundhogs; none have Groundhog Day. How, then, to present the movie “Groundhog Day”? We dredged up a few examples.

What they called “Groundhog Day” in…
Sweden: Måndag hela veckan, “Monday All Week Long.” Translation courtesy Helena Bergenheim, Swedish Consulate, New York.

France: Un Jour Sans Fin, “A Day Without End”

Italy: E Gia Ieri, “It’s Yesterday Already” This was an Italian-language remake, with a writing credit to original writer Danny Rubin.

Germany: Und Täglich Grüßt Das Murmeltier, “And Every Day the Marmot Says Hello”