Mercutio's Curse

Wondering about those final lines of Mercutio...

Help me into some house, Benvolio,

Or I shall faint. A plague o' both your houses!

They have made worms' meat of me: I have it,

And soundly too: your houses!

What is it about each household exactly that Mercutio's character takes issue with - aside from the fact that their feud got him killed? (Yes, I know I should mention that.) If, for example, the Capulets are demonstrably the more violent, honor-conscious clan (consider Gregory and Sampson at the beginning of the play, the fights that Tybalt starts or brings down upon himself, Papa Capulet's mercurial wrath and rash threats of "disowning" his daughter ("Out, baggage!"), Juliet's willful defiance of  her parents' wishes and fierce denunciation of Paris, the fact that Juliet stabs herself at the end) then the Montagues, their foil, could be described, by contrast, as the dreamy pleasure-seekers,  flighty, fickle, restless, impulsive, intense but not bellicose, hedonists extraordinaire - except for the fateful moment when Romeo is forced, one could say, out of guilt, out of loyalty, to avenge Mercutio's death. (Interesting that he should feel this imperative on a par with his own love for Juliet...) But with Romeo and Juliet paired off so problematically - even from the outset!- (despite our sympathies for their them), is it not Mercutio's role in the play, even if he be ignorant of R&J as a couple, to show Romeo some third-option of comportment, that he himself embodies beyond what is offered by the Capulets and the Montagues,  (mindless honor-seeking/languorous pleasure-seeking) and if so, would not such a path prove somewhat incompatible with these two options?  Mercutio - passionate as he is - seems at odds with where these passions lead. His remedy is humor, ridicule and games,  yet these are not necessarily intended to help him stay out of danger. On the contrary, he relishes his role as gadfly and antagonist. He ends up dueling with Tybalt! And perhaps he IS in love with someone... But, no doubt, he views these involvements as partial and problematic while holding out for something "other" - more thoughtful, more philosophical. This may seem like quite a stretch, but I see Mercutio as the forerunner to Lear's fool - standing apart from the enthusiasms that surround him, but  not entirely free of their influence. His mind remains invulnerable, but alas, not his body.

Emily Bronte - Prose Artist

Emily Bronte

One family - three great prose artists - and one brother. How does that happen?

The Bronte Myth by Lucasta Miller

Georg Lukacs' Theory of the Novel

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"The contingent world and the problematic individual are realities which mutually determine one another. If the individual is unproblematic, then his aims are given to him with immediate obviousness, and the realization of the world constructed by these given aims may involve hindrances and difficulties, but never any serious threat to his interior life. Such a threat arises only when the outside world is no longer adapted to the individual's ideas and the ideas become subjective facts - ideals - in his soul. The positing of ideas as unrealizable and, in the empirical sense, as unreal, i.e. their transformation into ideals, destroys the immediate, problem-free organic nature of the individual. Individuality then becomes an aim unto itself because it finds within itself everything that is essential to it and that makes its life autonomous - even if what it finds can never be a firm possession of as the basis of its life, but is [only] the object of a search." - Georg Lukacs - Theory of the Novel

Soothsayer says....

Soothsayer: "Beware the ides of March." 

Caesar: "He is a dreamer. Let us leave him. Pass." (1.2)

               

Portia: "Thou hast some suit to Caesar, hast thou not?"

Soothsayer: "That I have, lady. If it will please Caesar/To be so good to Caesar as to hear me, I shall beseech him to befriend himself."

Portia: "Why know'st thou any harms intended toward him?"

Soothsayer: "None that I know will be, much that I fear may chance. Good morrow to you." (2. 2)

Caesar: "The ides of March are come."

Soothsayer: "Ay, Caesar, but not gone." (3.1.)

Jonathan Franzen Hates Facebook

Admitted [Jonathan Franzen]: "Very probably, you're sick to death of hearing social media [such as Twitter] disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds." But last year he also criticized Facebook where, he said, "we star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery. And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don't have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It's all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors." [from feature article in The Guardian] - Thanks J.F. I'm certainly guilty of this, but I'll take it under advisement.

Reaping the Whirlwind

I commiserate with writers and novelists these days who are frustrated, confused, annoyed - if also preoccupied - with the problem of how to describe what is happening in the world today, right now, in this pop-cultural milieu given the relentless, unending stream of headlines, tweets, updates, announcements, news feeds, hot topics, gaffes, quarrels, fights, publicity stunts, weather stats, sports highlights, best-sellers, musical top 10s, celebrity -marriages -divorces, -arrests, ups and downs, oddities, freaks, flash-in-pans, flavor-of-months. These "vanishing moments" - one on top of the other - year after year - are enough to make my head spin... So what gives....what dwells... what resonates ...what survives...what endures that is worth writing about? How is it possible to provide the salient details, when those same details keep morphing, shifting, changing, transmigrating into more of the same (only different) forms of detritus for the mind?