Reviews: Guerilla Blues & Beowulf

Guerrilla Blues
Alessandra Bava


People tend to think writers give their friends good reviews because they're pals; the truth is you become friends with people who write stories or poems that inspire you to be better, to do more, to aim for dizzying heights. My jester -- the poet of Rome -- Alessandra's new collection offers wonderful evidence of that. Inspired by poets and revolutionaries the poems converse with everyone from Che Guevara and Simone Weil to Artaud, the Beats, Akhmatova and Pasolini. All are people who burned with inspiration and a revolutionary zeal.

That's the fire that burns through these verses. This dual language edition shows how Bava shines with incendiary passion in both Italian and English. Setting aside the incredible skill that speaks to (composing poetry in one's childhood tongue proves challenging enough, but to practise the art in another tongue --) the inherent desire to find as wide an audience as possible. In Bava's hand poetry is not a detached art of the drawing room, but a call to the barriers and a shout in the streets.

Burn writing to the stake &
immolate yourself in the form of
Poetry. Then, like Phoenixes,
rise in the form of Action.

Every line forms a potential molotov, from the titular poem's description of "Tattered books / of flesh as bomb / shrapnel / bleeding truth" and the ringing lines of "Sons of Disobedience" with its lines of fury, flesh and teeth. "This is No Chimera" speaks to the forces of acquiescence and conformity that press upon us all, maintaining that "The only requirement / is to believe in / hazardous deeds" lest we turn into Gregor Samsa-like bugs as "Wake Up!" warns, too.

It's all part of her "Rules of Poetry" (which also gives the name to her blog) which include "be fearless" as well as "demand respect" but most of all "kill indifference" because in the end

demand attention:
the poet is You.

Beowulf
adapted by Joshua Gray
illustrated by Sean Yates

As a medievalist, I always despair of people's dismissal of the time especially early works like this epic poem. Most people -- if they're exposed to it at all -- get it in school, taught very badly by someone who likewise knows nothing about the poem and its context. I wish I had a dime for every student who expressed surprise at the poem being nothing like they encountered in high school (hmmm, maybe I do...). So I'm always pleased to see attempts to introduce readers to the poem in new ways. Gray and Yates' volume attempts to bring the old story to new, young readers with bold illustrations and a simplified story.

The illustrations capture a dark mood of adventure; they're sufficiently gruesome though only suggestively so -- safe for parents, inviting for younger readers. Gray's text reduces the story to a speedy series of adventures in the conquering of the three monsters with efficiency and some flair. Hrothgar's "sermon" gets boiled down to its essentials: don't let pride rule, when you're king you're responsible for more than just your fame. The publicity materials refer to this as a "verse adaptation" but it reads like prose, but the language is lively enough to be engaging.

There are some contextual errors that made me give very Biggs-ian head snaps: wet suit?! Surely even a child completely ignorant of the time period would know that a wet suit is a very modern invention. A sword does not go into a "holster" and Heorot is not a "castle" in any way. None of these anomalies are quite as egregious as the mistakes in Cigale's introduction conflating time periods, clearly unfamiliar with the difference between a scop and a bard, and missing the cadence of half-lines. But he highlights one lynchpin of this adaptation: the eternal bond between fathers and sons and "all men", which is apparently the aim of all storytelling.

Because there are, of course, no women in this telling of the story (monsters excepting).

I feel like banging my head against the wall again. Why is it the 11th century monks who wrote this story down in England can have more regard for the importance of women than 21st century (seemingly) secular men? It's not as insulting as the Zemeckis film, where women are reduced to powerless concubines, but I'm mystified by this need to completely remove women from the story in order to glorify men. Is that really the message to give your sons? That they somehow exist outside the world of women and girls? I hope not.

Friday's Forgotten Books: Beowulf

I was thinking, "oh dear, I haven't had any time at all to read lately and there's nothing I've gotten far enough into [i.e. the Avram Davidson books, thanks Todd :-)] to write up" and then it hit me: Beowulf.

Forgotten, you say with the questioning look in your eye. Don't you teach it every semester? Don't high schools still require it as reading? My argument here -- and what I face every semester -- is that Beowulf is the most misread book I think there is. Okay, the bible probably tops it. Second most misread book, then.

If you Google Beowulf in search of an image of it you'll come up mostly with pictures from the Zemeckis' film, which I have already mentioned is utter pants. What that tells us is that most people when looking for something called "Beowulf" are looking for a crap film full of modern "twists" on the tale, cynicism about heroics and gross misunderstandings of the poem. Apparently the writers read the Heaney-Wulf, not the original. Heaney is a great poet, but his poem is not Beowulf.

Sadly, for many years I was one of those folks who dreaded the book. I took to heart Woody Allen's character's advice to Diane Keaton's Annie Hall on going back to college, "Just don't take any class where they make you read Beowulf!" I was all too willing to believe that it was something for laying down and avoiding.

Then my Swedish teacher at Harvard (where I was assiduously making use of my employee benefits, something a minuscule percentage of employees do) suggested I take the course "The Heroic Tradition in Northern Europe" with Stephen Mitchell. That course was the one-two punch that changed my life and made me a medievalist. We read Beowulf, Njal's Saga and The Völsunga Saga and my head exploded (in the good way). My first reaction was fury -- why did people keep me away from Beowulf  all these years?! It was amazing! And why did no one tell me that books like the Icelandic sagas existed? They belong up there with Shakespeare and Austen. Flabbergasted, genuinely so. I am forever grateful to Mitchell (and have had the chance to tell him so :-).

Yet there's something to be said for being prepared to read Beowulf. Most of my students who "read" the book in high school seem to have had it taught by someone who hated it as much as they end up doing. I like to think I rescue a few of them from the errors of their ways. The key is understanding the culture from which it arises: a Christian culture that nonetheless not only looks back at a heroic past, but embraces much of it while trying to convince themselves it can jibe with orthodoxy.

The Anglo-Saxons, after all, had to imagine that Christ climbed up on the cross, because they had to see that hero acting the way they expected their leaders to act. The poem is written down in a time when the tensions between the English (descendants of the Angle, Saxon and Jute Germanic tribes who invaded the Celtic Britons after the Romans left) and the Viking kings who had ruled parts of the country off and on for some time.

Consider how odd it is to have a poem written in English and copied down by monks at a time when a Danish king might be ruling England -- a poem that valorizes the ancient pagan past of Danes and Geats and Swedes and Frisians.  I could go on and on (and do, regularly) but consider also, its narrative voice, which is consistently Christian and yet admiring of these often brutal kings of the past. The opening lines which set up the poem tell us Scyld Scefing, who intimidates his enemies and steals their wealth, is "a good king." This isn't modern American Christianity, which the medieval world would mostly find appalling and wrong-headed, it's their own brand of heroicism, largely situated in the stories of the old testament, not the new.

It's a story about heroes and monsters, first and foremost. Like all good stories, however, it touches on many themes: the mysteriousness of the vast world, the difficulties of ruling, the pride of the warrior, the use of public performance (we don't hear anyone's thoughts, everyone is conscious of speaking before a crowd), the treacherousness that can grow in those closest to your heart and the brutality of life. While Anglo-Saxon poetry concerns itself seldom with women or romantic love, the two central women, Wealtheow and Grendel's unnamed mother, show the respect that women held in the Anglo-Saxon world. Wealtheow's wise words, when her husband goes overboard thanking the champion, seem to echo in Beowulf's mind years later when the people urge him to take the crown, but he defers to his king's young son as tradition dictates. The Danish queen would be proud.

I urge you to learn Anglo-Saxon and read it in the original: there's no comparison. Translation, however, is going to be the way most people encounter it. So I recommend these two as the best: Liuzza's as the most accurate, Crossley-Holland's as the most engaging with nonetheless good accuracy.

Publication: Heofen rece swealg

My essay about the Grendel opera, "Heofen rece swealg: Neomedievalism and Spectacle in Grendel: Transcendence of the Great Big Bad" appears in the latest issue of This Year's Work in Medievalism.

This was the paper I gave at the conference in London, Ontario in October 2007, where Terry Jones of the Pythons was the keynote speaker and all around bon vivant. Great conference and hey, a publication *and* a Python out of it. Who could ask for more?

Publications

I always forget about so many of the things I've written until I have something jog my memory. This week my faulty memory was jogged by reminders about revisions. I had completely forgotten about one of the essays (yeah, that's just how absent-minded I am) and that I was supposed to be revising it. Hee hee -- I have a book review due at the end of the month, too, that I have not forgotten about (I swear, John).

The first is "Heofen rece swealg: Neomedievalism and Spectacle in Grendel: Transcendence of The Great Big Bad" which will appear in an upcoming issue of Studies in Medievalism. It's developed from the paper I gave at the conference in London last November -- the one that also featured Terry Jones. It's about the Grendel opera directed by the fabulous Julie Taymor.

The other essay is "Medieval Community: Lessons from The Black Knight" which will appear in the inaugural issue of LATCH: A journal for the study of the Literary Artifact in Theory, Culture, or History, which I believe will come out in November. I originally presented that as conference paper, too, at Kalamazoo.

Yes, folks -- that's the way to accumulate academic publications less painfully. Commit to a conference (a fairly innocuous thing to do, usually only requires a one page abstract of what you might write); once you've been accepted, think about that ten page conference paper and finally write it (depending on your working habits and Powerpoint needs) a month before the conference (or a week, or on the plane, or -- if you're the really edgy [Miss Wendy*] type, in the bathroom of the hotel the night before you give it while your suite-mates slumber). Once you have the conference paper, someone will possibly ask you to submit it for publication, which you agree to do, then panic once the deadline looms. So you mash it out haphazardly and send it, apologetically reminding the editor that it's just "a draft" of course. Disparaging reader comments help you fix it into something less embarrassing. Then, just when you've forgotten you ever wrote the thing, you find out it's about to be in print.

*in the interest of fairness, I think I ought to mention that she was just finishing her paper, not writing the whole thing...

MST3K Beowulf

Tip o' the keyboard to my theoretical co-editor Scott for linking to this at the Got Medieval blog, which highlights the following comments:

* "Oh, please, sarcastic slow claps went out in the 200's."
* "Gee, in my translation, Grendel wasn't an effeminate mincing puss."
* "I am Beowulf, if that helps. Just throwing it out there."
* "She has Barbie's rack and Ken's genitals."
* "You know, Old English sounds about as pleasant as Olde English tastes."

Click here to go to the Rifftrax site and the Nelson, Murphy, Corbett downloads. Or if you want to MSTy it old school, check out Cinematic Titanic, home of Joel, Tom Servo, Crow, Pearl and Frank.

Update: Human Cuisine

Well, I haven't got a physical copy yet, but the editors of Human Cuisine have sent along electronic copies of the book. This means I got to re-read what I wrote at least three (?) years ago and see whether I was embarrassed by it. It's not too bad, so I can live with it. The bio, of course, has me at UHD, but I can live with that, too (particularly since I'm no longer there!).

Co-editor Ken Albala took the book and a giant poster to the big conference for the Association for the Study of Food and Society in New Orleans last week and "there was phenomenal interest" in it. He also said the book has sold something like 23K copies on Amazon (pity I don't get any royalties).

Publication: Human Cuisine

Now available, apparently -- I have yet to see it, but surely you want to buy a copy anyway! My essay is on Grendel in Beowulf, a meditation on what it takes to frighten the intimidating warriors of that Anglo-Saxon epic. Only the horror of burial denied... no body, no funeral.

Teaser

More information in about a week, but here's the cover from a book collection that I'll be in. My contribution is an essay on Grendel in Beowulf. You can guess the theme, right?

I wrote this piece so long ago and the project has had such a tortured history, that I had quite forgotten about it (although its ghost still lingered on my CV). Out of the blue an email came from the editor today, saying, "Guess what?!"

Soon you'll have something to chew on. ;-)

One final down, two to go and grading in between: our year end tenure reports are due today, too. Nonetheless, I hope to do the Nick Lowe review this afternoon if I can squeeze it in. Can I say again, what a great show?

Thursday Already?

My, how time flies!

Tuesday night went well -- we had a nice chat over an early dinner at the Pearl, then rushed over to the library amid a sudden downpour and an amazing rainbow (okay, the picture to the left is *not* the rainbow from that day, but one of myriad lovely images from Missouri Skies). There was a small crowd, but we were out-numbered which is good enough. Jan, Pam, Kelly (who needs a webpage!) and I had a good time chatting about Tolkien, the books and the films, and more importantly (for me anyway), about his sources, cool stuff like Njal's Saga and Beowulf. Yes, I did manage to declaim some Old English verses (you're not surprised are you?).

Tonight, of course, I'm excited to be going to see Jonathan Miller at Skidmore (thanks again, Crispinus, for the tip off). An original member of Beyond the Fringe, polymath, raconteur and director (including perhaps my favorite film version of Alice in Wonderland -- and no, not just because it has Peter Cook), Miller will no doubt be a lively and illuminating speaker.

I can't decide whether to have any interest in Forbidden Kingdom -- on the one hand, Jet Li and Jackie Chan! and a lot of nods to great wǔxiá films like The Bride with White Hair, but -- it's also got some bland American twenty-something actor, clearly for Hollywood reasoning ("Ya gotta have an Amurrican in it! That's what audiences want to see!"). Bleh.

Princeton Scholar Unused to Literature

You're not surprised are you that Sophie Gee seems unfamiliar with both Beowulf and John Gardner's Grendel? She's only an English professor, after all. What's that -- she never read anything before Shakespeare? or after Eliot? She has seen the Beowulf movie though!

Wow

No -- really? Richard Corliss, I salute you.

Review: Beowulf

Two word review:

utter pants

Why have a movie about heroics where there is not a single person who embodies the supposed ideal? It may have been meant as a critique of the concept, but if so it failed miserably. The script was a mishmash of half-articulated ideas. A barely developed theme of the effects of storytelling on the truth ought to have been heeded. The poem has kept its resonance over the years because it deals with timeless topics like heroism, mentoring, honor and ambition. This one has Beowulf roar the ultimately meaningless words, "I...am...BEOWULF!" What does that name mean? By the end it seems that his life's supposed to be a legend, but we know it's all lies, so what can we have but contempt for those who believe it?

What was the point of all the pneumatic breasts other than adolescent wank? In case we had any doubt, we know now for sure that modern Hollywood film makers have even less regard for women than Anglo-Saxon monks, because at least the latter actually thought women had a purpose beyond sexual titillation. Not so this team. Women are only of interest as sexual prizes. We even have the suggestion that wives and mistresses would get along if they just had a chance to chat heart-to-heart (naturally with the suggestion that perhaps this will lead to a guilt-free three-way for the husband). Wealtheow in the poem sets standards of behavior, commands the men and reins Hrothgar in when he steps beyond propriety, deftly balancing both his honor and Beowulf's. With all the digital breasts on display, it is likewise ironic that the other subtext is all about impotence. This script robs the father figure Hrothgar of most of his offspring and all of his glory. He's a buffoon from start to finish. Jolie as Grendel's mother (as designed by John Bolton) is an adolescent dream of sexless Barbie doll sexuality: smooth, hairless, flawless and dipped in gold with stiletto heels actually part of her body (heel spurs gone wild?). Robin Wright-Penn's lovely face is turned into a bland approximation of Hollywood "beauty" and loses any sense of attractiveness.

The effects: yawn. They worked on the eyes, but motion capture still looks like a video game. While playing a video game at least you actively insert yourself into the action, but it's harder to do with the passive movie viewing experience. Sure, the dragon episode looked cool enough (about like the dragon sequence in Goblet of Fire), but the people look like pudgy wax work balloons bouncing along, hands never quite touching what they pick up. The ridiculousness of the naked fight scene (mistakenly believed to be "in the text") required exposing Grendel's lack of genitalia (which they tried to "explain") and, as Variety's review put it, resorting to Austin-Powers-esque techniques to hide Beowulf's alleged genitalia. He probably has none -- the movie was rated PG-13 despite outlandish violence. It's the American way: violence good, sex bad (although endless teasing of a sexual nature is okay, thus endless balloony bosoms on parade).

Minor quibble of interest to few but me: really, they couldn't make the harp look like a Saxon harp?

Anachronistically they inserted Christianity into the narrative (in the poem, the narrator is a Christian looking back on his ancestors) only to identify it as the killer of the age of heroes. Far be it from me to defend Christianity, but that's pointless as well as reductively simplistic. But really, the less said about the violence to the source story or the era the better (a ginormous stone castle..in Denmark...in the 6th century? not a wooden mead hall?). You'd have thought they would at least replace the original with another story -- not just 3D arrows and swords. Ironic then that the whole exercise seemed entirely pointless. I thought it would at least be fun. Nope.

I'm curious to see what my students think: they're probably going to the big mall tonight. Maybe they will find it more fun -- they have said that their friends seem to think it looks like a kick ass movie. We shall see. The film is clearly meant to capitalize on the popularity of 300, a trifle I did enjoy because 1) it had a much smaller amount of adolescent male-oriented sexual titillation [and a great deal more adult female sexual titillation!] and 2) it gave us characters who were real actors if digitally enhanced (e.g. David Wenham's six pack abs) and had character! It wasn't all bombast and cool fight scenes.

The nadir of Beowulf adaptations still remains Lambert's Beowulf, only because it lacks even technical competence. This one nearly challenges it on most other points.

Beowulf: PG-13

Money talks! Violence is okay after all, but no sex! That would be bad. Prehensile hair, computer enhanced breasts and stiletto heels: the lure of sex without the actual act, apparently. They paid a lot of money for Jolie: gotta get their dollar's worth!

Beowulf: Now it's Educational!

In my continuing efforts to flog the Beowulf film as an official webmaster, I think it important to keep up with the latest goings-on. That includes a new handout for teachers to use the film as a kind of educational tie-in. This handy guide helps students look at how heroism has been identified in Beowulf's time and our own, presumably leading to lively discussions of gender, ethics and the importance of movie tie-ins. No doubt the "Monsters: A Case Study" assignment will allow students to identify other favorite movie monsters and to think about renting those favorite DVDs again. There are also two tie-in books: a script book and a mass market paperback novelization. I faxed Harper Collins to see whether I might get promo copies. Fingers crossed!

While this seems at times to be pointless silliness, let me remind you that anything that popularizes the Middle Ages is good for medievalists (even if it requires endless patient explanation of why it wasn't like that) and I am writing a book on masculinities and medievalisms, so this fits perfectly. And don't forget: it's educational!

Beowulf Rated: PG-13

The teevee spots have started. My students were suitably scornful of the look of it (and the sound of it -- right, Mildred?). But flog it, I do! Hee hee -- it will be fun.

Flogging Beowulf Again

I have been remiss in my duties as webmaster, so it behooves me to link to my friend Scott's medieval blog where he points us to close-ups of the Beowulf action figures. Well -- hmmmm.

They are indeed interesting in the fullest possible sense of the word. We looked at them in the Medieval Texts on Film class and discussed how they provided context for the film makers' decisions about the text. They have made quite a few decisions: centurion Beo, zombie Grendel, snaky/dragon Mom. It looks to be a very free translation. November will be magic.

(Yes, I have finished the first part of my grading.)

Beowulf Bait-n-Switch?

In my continuing duties as web-flogging-master for the forthcoming Beowulf film, I have obtained new information. This did not come from the official website, but by way of Previews, the monthly bible of forthcoming comics and, increasingly, all the other things that get flogged with comics. A two page spread introduced us to the action figures (mach 1) from the film. Huh -- they offer a very different picture than the trailer.


As you can see, rather than a gold bikini-clad Angelina Jolie, we have Grendel's mother looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon as a unidexter. Grendel, too, looks far less Gollum-esque than in the preview (rather more like Frank in Hellraiser). Ray Winstone's titular character looks much the same, and there is a dragon, so that's streets ahead of most adaptations of the poem (identified in the ad copy as "written by an unknown author in the seventh or eighth century" -- take that Colin Chase!) which end with the first monster fight about a third of the way through the poem.

Curioser and curiosier!

Flogging Beowulf

Using my new powers as a Beowulf webmaster, I inflicted the trailer on my students in both the freshman course and the (junior-level) film class. It's odd enough to be teaching the text to two different classes with two different translations (let me gripe once more about the Crossley-Holland version being replaced in the Longman Anthology with a far inferior one). But upon being presented with the trailer, they all responded with "That's Grendel's mother?!" Referring of course to the golden bikini-clad Angelina Jolie with the prehensile hair, which you can see for yourself by going to the official website and clicking on the "Video" link (you don't have to watch the video, she's the image on that page, but if you click on that link I get webmaster points!).

The clip goes by really fast with a lot of quick cuts, so you might miss Grendel's mother telling Beowulf she could give him a son -- say what?! Are they suggesting that Grendel is Beowulf's son? Or that she's going to give Grendel a brother?

I would say the trailer was met with stunned silence, but that so quickly turned to laughter it's hard to make an argument for that. In the film class, I tagged the images as we saw them ("um...frozen ship, uh...bridge of fire...") which only made us laugh more. One student argued in favor of the success of computer enhancement using 300 as an example, but it's not the creepy motion-capture that Beowulf is. Perhaps we should rely on superior special effects of a true master:



I'll have to carve out a few minutes to listen to the podcasts available only to us webmasters (I think?) and see what the story is on the, er, story.