billybookblog

So I’m in my cabin on the sleeper train from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and I’m feeling a little more settled now the five guitars and three equipment-filled suitcases have all been lifted on board and carried down the needle-thin hallways. There are eight of us dispersed amongst three sleeper cabins, each cabin with four sleeper-beds, but the mountainous piles of cases expertly stacked by our drum technician…well…they take up almost all of the available space. The gig that evening was pure chaos, though unfortunately we couldn’t relax/party afterwards like usual; instead we had to smash it through the snow to the train station. We’re only a few days in (we played near Siberia only two nights before), and already we’re desperately craving sleep. In the morning we plan on running full pelt through the snow again, but this time to a TV station to record three live songs for Russia’s biggest morning breakfast show. Anyway, sleeper train. Cabin. Study…The rest of the crew are enjoying a wel...

*contains spoilers* The themes of Shakespeare’s plays are more often than not deeply aligned with the social and political feeling of their times, and this can very much be said of this particular play, The Tragedy of King Lear . Over the last forty-or-so years, King Lear seems to have apparently overtaken Hamlet as the undisputed king of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and not without good reason (however true or false you or I might claim this assertion to be – and it’s FALSE, yes), as it deals with a jungle of themes, such as genuine and affected madness, filial relationships, life, death, blindness, folly, responsibility, loyalty and honour; all of these themes are interchangeable and quite often converge, and that’s exactly how Shakespeare manages to both confuse and enlighten in equal measure. But that’s where the fun is, right? Around the time of its initial performance on St. Stephen’s Day, 26 th December, 1606, King James I was already making attempts at unifying the isle nations,...

*contains spoilers* The Brontë sisters are famous for their collective intelligence and creativity; their time spent together at home, fearing both the threat of tuberculosis (caught by the two eldest Brontë sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, at school, resulting in their deaths) and the inefficiency of the local sewage system in Haworth, known to pose a considerable threat to the locals’ health – the average life expectancy because of these irrigation issues was a paltry 26 – meant that their bond was unusually academic and literary. Compounding this was the overarching patriarchal social system of the time, and so, in order to be taken seriously, the sisters took pseudonyms on publishing their more than worthy material – though all texts faced backlash for their progressive and plain-speaking natures. Anne Brontë therefore published this considerable work under the name of Acton Bell in 1848, less than a year before her death at the age of 29, and it was, in typical fashion, roundly chast...

*contains spoilers* For my latest venture back into the days of Ancient Greek theatre, I decided to change it up a little and opted for the comic plays of Aristophanes. Of the supposedly forty-or-so written and performed works of his, eleven remain in textual form, and three of these were included in the Penguin Classics Edition I was lucky enough to find in Heffer’s in Cambridge. First up is ‘Wasps’, performed in 422BC, which is a combined force of politically motivated slapstick that takes aim at the prominent public figure, Cleon, during his tenure at the top. Bdelycleon (literally meaning “Cleon-loather”) is very keen to stop his father, Philocleon (literally meaning “Cleon-lover”) from attending his beloved jury service, and so he goes all out to teach his father just how manipulated he is by the state. Bdelycleon sets up his own court-case outside their house, mocking both the jury system of the time and the watching Athenian audience in their support of it, alongside the buzzing...

*contains spoilers* William Wordsworth, born and raised in the wonderfully named Cockermouth, was the obsessive author of this expansive collection of works, which comes in four different manuscripts: the 1798 MS, which, as an introductory draft, appears in a mere one book; the 1799 MS, which offers elaboration in two books; the 1805 MS, which is much more plentiful in thirteen books; and the 1850 MS, yes, written forty-five years after the previous MS, consisting of fourteen books. The edition I bought, Penguin Classics, comes with all four MSS and an introduction by Jonathon Wordsworth, a descendent of Wordsworth’s brother, Christopher, which is very handy when even just considering the layout on first approaching. Firstly, we have the first draft of 1798, titled ‘Was It For This?’, which started the whole exercise of Wordsworth’s autobiographical tome, and was inspired by Coleridge’s suggestion that Wordsworth write ‘the first great philosophical poem’. Wordsworth and Coleridge were...

*contains spoilers* Written by Dante Alighieri during his exile from Florence (to which he sadly never returned) in the middle-level style of traditional medieval rhetorical tradition (the “comedic”, hence its title), ‘The Divine Comedy’ is Dante’s life’s work and his eternal masterpiece. Dante places the events of the epic some thirty years before it was actually written, allowing himself some proper scope for supposed prophesies to be proven right, and he presents this epic text in a relaxed vernacular compared to the epics written up to that point in time. In approaching the writing of the piece this particular way, Dante allows himself the room to speak not just to the people of an Italy going through a time of political and religious turmoil but also to the swathes of people of all nations and denominations of Christianity – via his glorious terza rima; Between his legs, his guts were hanging out; His lights appeared, and that disgusting tube Which makes shit of what goes down our...

*contains spoilers* Candide begins with a real event, an earthquake that (actually took place in 1755 and) rocks the foundations of Lisbon, and continues on with the many others that set off the fictional twists and turns of the plot. Candide, our hero, is the ultimate tabula rasa, and upon this white sheet our storyteller Voltaire (born François-Marie Arouet in 1694) projects many philosophical quandaries: fate, luck, coincidence, God(s), love, innocence, practicality, harmony, work, idleness, the value of money, time… All of these notions are raised and put to the test (if not entirely answered) as the naïve Candide escapes the constant threat of death at the hands of barbarism and religious zealots in search of his beloved Cunégonde. We have the foolish but self-assured Pangloss, the doggedly loyal and pragmatic Cacambo, the wise and practical elderly woman, and the downtrodden Martin, who aptly counters Pangloss’s foolish optimism with a yet equalled foolhardy dissatisfaction. What...

*contains spoilers* Unlike ‘The Canterbury Tales’, which (granted, came later) was written in a modern-layman pleasing Middle English, ‘Beowulf’, a text written some time between the seventh and tenth centuries, appears in its original form in Old English/Anglo Saxon. Much has been made of the supposed origins of the text, but what has so far been surmised is that it is a healthy conglomerate of historical events and old tales like so many of the beloved Greek myths. The manuscript from which the story is taken was picked up early in the previous thousand years and passed from generation to generation where, eventually, it was discovered to have survived a house fire (though part of the parchment was burnt, meaning that unfortunately lines 2,226-31 are scrappily guessed at in every translation). This however only adds to the magic one feels from the piece, as the reader transcends the ages and disappears into an ancient land of Danes and dragons, where warriors swear allegiance to thei...

*contains spoilers* Geoffrey Chaucer was the lucky son of an also lucky wine merchant who found himself the beneficiary of a wealthy (and dead) relative’s fortune. The young Geoffrey was therefore not obligated to pursue the life of a merchant like his father, and instead rose to newer heights and served as a diplomat for the Crown after mastering French, Italian and Latin. After retiring from his lucrative career and settling down in Kent in the early 1390s, Chaucer then set about completing his masterpiece, and the subject of my latest blog, ‘The Canterbury Tales’. ‘The Canterbury Tales’ is told, much like Boccaccio’s, Petrarch’s, and Dante’s works were, in the vernacular, and so it is presented to us in the Middle English of its time and place instead of the traditional Latin or French. Because of this, the text can be read by the modern layman fairly well in its original form, though there are editions available that provide the text in updated translations for the modern reader ou...

*contains spoilers* It is interesting to note that both the title of this piece, ‘Jason and the Golden Fleece’, and its author, Apollonius of Rhodes, are known in a variety of forms: as a quick example, the ‘Argonautica’ and Apollonius Rhodius, respectively. It is also interesting that Apollonius spent most of his time in Egypt as scholar and librarian of the Library of Alexander under the patronage of the Ptolemies, and the nature of how he acquired the epithet of Rhodes is forever disputed – scholars suggest that he moved to Rhodes from Alexandra after a period of feeling unappreciated there, or that he was exiled for the poor reception of this particular piece, whilst others claim that it may have simply come about after Apollonius wrote of or dedicated a poem to the isle. A student (or merely appreciator, depending on how one chooses to interpret the parchments) of Callimachus, ‘Jason and the Golden Fleece’ is Apollonius’s greatest surviving text. Written around the third century B...

*contains spoilers* In the concluding line of his very short epilogue to his very long epic poem (made up of very short stories), Ovid confidently claims that his “…fame shall live to all eternity”. This, of course, is well deserved, as ‘Metamorphoses’ is a work of real genius. Imbued in this statement, however, is a continuation of the teasing irony that weaves its way through the piece, as Ovid assures the infinity of something having knowingly propounded only a few pages before ‘The Doctrines of Pythagoras’ that nothing is forever and that everything changes. Ovid is Publius Ovidius Naso, born a generation after the renowned Virgil at a time when Octavian (later Caesar Augustus) had just secured his position at the seat of power in Rome. Even at the height of his fame as Rome’s greatest living poet, Ovid was exiled by Augustus and spent the rest of his days in Tomis, though he continually pleaded his innocence in the political scandal for which he was punished. His grandest work, ‘M...

*contains spoilers* Before I say anything in this blog about John Milton’s Paradise Lost, it must be noted that John Milton was quite the writer, and that he was especially a talent in his youth – several of his essays and poems were published to rapturous acclaim whilst he was still studying at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and in his second year at Cambridge, he addressed the first years with a speech written entirely in Latin. Indeed, he’d go on to master Italian, Spanish, Greek, Hebrew, Anglo-Saxon and Aramaic – and a spot of Dutch. After graduating with a master’s degree and continuing his studies in private, Milton went on to marry Mary Powell, with whom he had a fractious relationship, and eventually Powell deserted Milton. From this incident derives Milton’s progressive Christian attitude regarding the church’s strict policies on marriage and divorce, and from this incident we can also draw the inherent patriarchy that consumes Paradise Lost. Of course, the piece should be taken...

*contains spoilers* In typical fashion, I seem to have approached this all the wrong way round: having ventured head-first into the realms of Greek tragedy without a compass, I tackled Sophocles first, Euripides second and Aeschylus third. Aeschylus is considered by some to be the inventor of the Greek tragedy as it is became popularly known, developing the previous set up of single actor performances, obviously accompanied by a Chorus, to introducing several actors and a chorus, which allows for a greater scope of theatrical possibilities. This development went on to inform the works that followed – namely those of Sophocles and Euripides. What one does see in The Oresteia, having considered this, is that Aeschylus clearly set the bar very high – too high for others to reach, in my view, and, whilst the works of Sophocles and Euripides were unique and beautiful, Aeschylus is clearly the master of the three tragedians. The Oresteia is a trilogy of plays: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers...