Taken in the summer of 2018 in Mumbai
DAILY PHOTO: Parsi Fire Temple
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Author Archives: B Gourley
BOOK REVIEW: Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
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This is one of Shakespeare’s most famous works, if not the most famous love story in the history of love stories. The central challenge of this couple’s love affair isn’t the usual fare of Shakespeare’s works – e.g. unrequited love, love triangles, or class differences. [There is an issue of unrequited love early in the play between Romeo and Rosaline, but Romeo gets over that girl in a hot minute once he meets Juliet.] The problem is that he meets Juliet by crashing her father’s party while wearing a disguise (a disguise that ultimately doesn’t fool the right people,) and the reason Romeo needs a disguise is because Romeo’s father and Juliet’s father are archenemies. Otherwise, the couple meets all requirements for wooing to commence: they each have feelings for the other, and they are of similar class status. In short, they would be a marriageable couple if their families didn’t hate each other.
[Warning: My Shakespeare reviews are far more spoiler-laden than usual because the stories are well-known to most readers and some find a detailed synopsis useful to make sense of the archaic language.] After an opening that establishes the enmity between the Montagues and Capulets, Romeo and Juliet fall for each other fast and hard, and with lightening speed have wed and consummated the marriage. However, no one other than the priest who married them, Friar Laurence, knows of the wedding. They have to keep the marriage secret because it would get back to the heads of the feuding households immediately.
Soon after the wedding, Tybalt (Juliet’s hot-headed kinsman) goes out looking for Romeo. Tybalt had recognized Romeo at the party, and wanted to fight him then, but Mr. Capulet (Juliet’s father) made him chill out because he didn’t want blood spilled during his party. But the next day Tybalt goes out intent on fighting. Tybalt finds Romeo’s friend (Mercutio) and his kinsman (Benvolio,) and Mercutio ends up crossing blades Tybalt. When Romeo comes on the scene, he steps into the middle of the fray to separate the men, and Tybalt finds an opening to thrust into Mercutio. As Mercutio dies, he famously wishes a “plague on both houses” (meaning Tybalt’s Capulets and Romeo’s Montagues.) Mercutio is but one of many who are completely fed up with the feud between these two families. The Prince of Verona has had it up to his neck with the bickering.
While Romeo is generally more a lover than a fighter, he duels and kills Tybalt immediately after Mercutio’s death. After killing Tybalt, Romeo flees the scene, later to find out he’s been banished from Verona upon threat of death. (Lady Capulet petitions the Prince for Romeo to be executed but the Prince won’t go for it, figuring Tybalt got what was coming to him for picking a fight and stabbing Mercutio. Then Lady Capulet plots to have a hit put out on Romeo, but events outpace her plot.) After meeting with Friar Laurence, Romeo flees to Mantua.
When her family informs Juliet that Tybalt has been slain by Romeo, they think she is broken up about her kinsman’s death. However, she’s really worried about her husband Romeo (who, of course, none of the family knows she’s married to.) When it seems like Juliet’s sadness for Tybalt has gone on long enough, her father sets a post-haste wedding date between Juliet and County Paris (the young man that Capulet favors for his daughter.) This is a problem for Juliet because: a.) she’s already married; and, b.) she deeply loves Romeo and finds Paris sort of Meh! She gets into a tiff with her father who thinks she’s an ungrateful whelp. [In Shakespeare’s day, the debate was whether a girl’s feelings about to whom she should be wed should be empathized with or ignored altogether. The idea that her feelings should be a major consideration was deemed laughable. Her mother comes down on the former side, but Lady Capulet accepts her husband’s conclusion of the alternative.]
Juliet goes to see Friar Laurence, who is a botanical mad scientist on the side. The Friar develops an elaborate scheme. Juliet is to go home, apologize to her father for not jumping on board the marriage train with the boy that her father so dearly loves (but to do so without sarcasm,) and then before going to sleep she will take a potion. This potion, not uncommon in Shakespearean works, will make her appear dead for a time, and then she’ll wake up perfectly fine. The family will take her to their crypt, pending the funeral. Friar Laurence sends a note to Romeo explaining the plan. Romeo is to meet Juliet when she wakes up, and they can then flee to Mantua — their families none the wiser.
Up to this point, this play could be a comedy just as easily as it is a tragedy. Sure, there have been a couple stabbing fatalities, but that’s actually pretty calm stuff compared to some of the comedies. (The dead are secondary characters.) What makes it a tragedy, is that Friar Laurence’s messenger can’t get through to deliver the memo in time because of some Black Death scare. Instead, Romeo’s (the Montague family’s) servant gets there first, and, because he’s not in on the Friar’s plot, tells Romeo the truth as he understands it – i.e. that Juliet is dead. Romeo sneaks back to the Verona cemetery with some poison he got at a shady apothecary on the way. Friar Laurence doesn’t know Romeo didn’t get the priest’s message until Romeo is already rolling up on the crypt, intent on dying with is beloved and so Laurence is late arriving to the scene.
To add to the tragedy, Paris is visiting Juliet’s grave and thinks Romeo is a villain. Romeo and Paris battle it out, and Romeo kills Paris. Romeo – knowing that Paris was betrothed to Juliet but without knowledge of Romeo and Juliet’s marriage – places Paris in the crypt near Juliet. But then he takes up position immediately beside her, and drinks the poison. As soon as Romeo dies, Juliet regains consciousness. She finds Romeo dead, and discovers that there’s not enough of the poison left for her. She tries kissing some poison off him, but when that doesn’t work, she plunges a dagger into her own chest.
After Juliet dies, authorities arrive on the scene having been summoned by a person who heard the duel between Romeo and Paris. The Prince arrives and calls for the heads of the Montague and Capulet households so that they can see what tragedy their feud has caused. The sight of the two dead star-crossed lovers (plus Paris, whom Capulet seemed to love) moves Montague and Capulet to end hostilities.
This is a must read for all readers.
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BOOK REVIEW: Sins of the Cities of the Plain by Jack Saul
Sins of the Cities of the Plain by Jack Saul
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a short work of Victorian erotica that describes the sexual adventures of a male prostitute of the variety then called a “Mary-Ann.” The “Mary-Ann” was an effeminate male who — to a large extent, but not exclusively — serviced male clients. The story is presented in an epistolary form. It opens with a chapter that’s written as if by a john of the pseudonymous author / main character. This opening sets up the rest of the work by explaining how this john, a Mr. Cambon, came to use Jack Saul’s services, and – furthermore – how he then became involved in the publication of this story.
After the details of Mr. Cambon’s interaction with Jack Saul is presented, the book proceeds as if a diary conveying the saucy bits of Saul’s sex life (both professional and personal.) While Saul explains that he prefers engaging older male clients, the book presents a mix of homosexual and heterosexual activities (both in his work and in his personal relationships.)
There is some ancillary matter in the book. After Saul concludes [what is presented as] his personal story, he offers some second-hand accounts of individuals in the same line of work. Here one learns about the worst elements of these sex workers in the form of “George,” an anti-Semitic mary-ann who engages in blackmail and other heavy-handed and sociopathic tactics that – as far as we know – Jack Saul doesn’t engage in. [Although, under the direction of a client, Saul does take part in some unsavory practices.]
There are also a couple of essays at the end, one on sodomy and another on tribadism. If you’re like I was, you have no idea what tribadism is. That brings up a point worth mentioning. If you decided to read this work, you may want to have a good dictionary near at hand. The slang and terminology of the sexual domain have not aged well, and you may find yourself needing to look up many words. (Though, admittedly, context often gives one a strong clue.)
If you’ve gotten this far, it should be clear that there is a great deal of explicit sexual content in this book. While readers of some modern-day erotica might not find it particularly racy, it’s graphic in its descriptions and does involve a wide range of practices.
This book shines a light on a domain of Victorian society that one will not learn about from Dickens or Austen. Like most pornography, it’s not particularly well-developed or artistically grand, but it’s intriguing in its own way.
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BOOK REVIEW: 30 Days of Night, Vol. 3: Run Alice Run by Steve Niles
30 Days of Night Vol. 3: Run Alice Run by Steve Niles
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This volume picks up at the end of the vampire raid on the Los Angeles FBI offices, a raid whose primary goal is to retrieve the remains of Stella Olemaun. The vampire-savvy agent, Alice Blood, seems to be the sole survivor (more properly, only one not turned into a vampire for Eben Olemaun’s army of the undead.) The balance of the book turns Eben Olemaun’s war in a new direction, toward the European old guard. In the original book, this division is introduced between the old-world vampires who want to remain myth and quietly live out their immortal days, and the hot-headed American vampires who are eager to war and watch the world burn.
I enjoyed this volume more than the previous one, but not nearly so much as the original story. Sadly, I suspect the reason that I preferred it to the last volume is that it’s so fast-paced and action-packed that I had no time to notice that it’s often not clear why characters are doing what they’re doing (or, more damningly, that they sometimes adopt behavior that seems at odds with the character as established through his or her recent behavior.) While I seem to have leap-frogged material and may have missed an answer, I continue to be perplexed by an anomaly from the original book and that’s why Eben is so easily able to defeat any other vampire. He’s vampire superman, and it’s not clear why he should be.
As I wrote in my review of Volume 2, at this point the series doesn’t really distinguish itself among the mass of modern-day vampire stories. The original book, I felt, did build a novel concept that made it more interesting and intense than usual. The book is well-written and gruesomely drawn, but so are tons of other vampire stories. Having read three volumes, I’m over this series, but it is well constructed – if a bit Hollywood.
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BOOK REVIEW: 30 Days of Night, Vol. 2 by Steve Niles
30 Days of Night Volume 2 by Steve Niles
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
[Note: this isn’t the Vol. 2 that follows immediately from the original book.]
I enjoyed the original three-issue “30 Days of Night” series. That book imagines a vampire attack on Barrow, Alaska during the winter when the sun does not rise for weeks. That concept of eliminating one of the vampires’ greatest vulnerabilities while putting the survivors in the demoralizing state of being hunted in the darkness and brutal cold makes for a visceral story.
While I thought this volume was written and drawn well (and quite similarly to the original – same writer, different artist) I have two gripes. First of all, I guess owing to the immense success of the franchise which resulted in many series and sub-series, it’s quite confusing to pick up the order of storytelling at this point. After reading the original book, I read Volumes 2 and 3 (sometimes labeled “Ongoing”,) thinking they would follow up on the Vol. 1 [the original] that I’d read. However, while I could follow the story, there was clearly a substantial gap in time and events. It seems like the Vol. 2 and Vol. 3 that I read (labeled “Ongoing”) were fitted together, but at least one series must fit between this Vol. 2 and the Vol. 1 that I read. Even scanning through a Wiki-page on the overall series didn’t really lend me clarity — though I had no desire or inclination to read through 30 summaries to figure out where this Vol. 2 and 3 belongs. [Especially as I don’t intend to read further as the series seems to have devolved from that gripping and unique Barrow, Alaska plot to being just another modern-day vampire story.]
So, the story of the Vol. 2 that I read is essentially Sheriff Eben Olemaun first feeding his way through a rebuilt [security super-maxed] Barrow before going to Los Angeles to do both more recruiting and turning, and then attacking the LA FBI offices in order to retrieve the remains of his wife, Stella. [My first clue of discontinuity was that at the end of the first [first] volume, Eben is dead and Stella was alive, and in this book those tables were inexplicably turned.] The other “half” of the story revolves around an FBI agent, Alice Blood, who is apparently the FBI’s star Vampire-slayer. We find out that she is the one who killed Stella, though she seems a bit broken up about it. Being the virtuous hero, Alice is also fed up with the bureaucratic moral ambiguity of her employer.
Getting around to my second gripe, it’s that this isn’t really a satisfying story arc as a standalone entity, it’s just carrying a story through. To clarify, I’m not saying it doesn’t stand alone because I’d missed who knows how much of the preceding story and didn’t understand. In that sense, I thought they actually did a great job of making clear what was going on without getting bound up in a lot of “as-you-know-Bob” exposition. What I’m saying is that this book gives one a chain of action without providing much understanding of motivation. I will grant that my not understanding the motivation in the first chapter is probably the result of not reading the immediately prior issue. However, I didn’t see much convincing motivation for anything in this volume. I saw that Eben wanted his wife’s head and torso back, but as he seems to have zero of the devoted husband and law enforcement professional left at this point and is just monstrous killing machine, it’s hard to know why he would care.
Long story short, I thought this book was alright, but not particularly satisfying and that the ordering is quite confusing. I picked up all three volumes I’ve read on Amazon Prime, so no great loss there. However, I mention that so no one else expects the Volume 1, 2, and 3 presented on Prime to present a contiguous story. Continuity issues aside, I don’t think the story still distinguishes itself from the massive number of modern-day vampire tales available today.
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DAILY PHOTO: Charyn Canyon
POEM: Reading Courageously
If you’ve never been incensed,
challenged, or nauseous —
your reading is too safe, puny,
and far, far too cautious.
Reading should be a courageous act
that threatens all you know.
It should shove your feet into shoes
far different from your own.
If you want your world unchanged,
T.V. is right for you.
Books will insist you be torn a-
part and rebuilt anew.
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DAILY PHOTO: The Sun Sets on Stone Mountain Lake
Taken in Stone Mountain Park in July of 2013
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POEM: Paradise Unknown
In a meadow, amid a dark forest
grows a grass so green it glows.
Never sets foot a pilgrim or tourist.
Where it lies, only an old local knows.
Plus, the grazing creatures of the forest
who wander that way when dining time comes.
It sings but silence — no insect chorus.
No sound is heard, save one’s own thin heart thrum.
Burdened is the keeper of that meadow,
with a secret for which some would murder.
But paradise is too frail to be known
to the heartless hand of human herders.
Paradise trampled is paradise lost.
So, the keeper keeps his secret at all costs.
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Tree Haiku
two live oaks
stretch toward each other —
a faux hug
eucalyptus,
silver trunks glow warm
in setting sunlight
one tree field,
its canopy echoes
floating clouds
a faint smell —
the secret message of an
arboreal cabal
in tree time,
the world must unfold in
seasons — not days
