Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:45 PM

Not much going on around here. Thursday night, second seder. Friday, Ian and I went to the zoo. Naturally enough, I was most enthralled by the big cats, but a cute fox also caught my eye.

Last night after Doctor Who I finished the Park Honan Christopher Marlowe. Since I slagged it a bit earlier in the week, I will note that it improves a great deal once it gets to the plays, after Marlowe leaves Cambridge. I was particularly impressed by the section on Marlowe and Shakespeare. It seemed to give short shrift to details of the murder itself, but on the whole the latter half of the book quite redeemed itself.

Today, besides the foolishness of signing up for McTabby's Cat's Birthday Drabblethon and taking a few futile stabs at organizing our nonfiction library, I've done some work on updating the website.

I've created a couple aggregated pages for categories of posts I frequently point people towards.

• RibaRambles.org/fsd.htm concatenates all my entries on female sexual dysfunction onto one page for easier printing.
• RibaRambles.org/reviews.htm concatenates all my theater reviews (though not book reviews, even though I have posted some of those under the title "Rambles Reviews")

I have not edited these posts from the original, so there may be some repetition (particularly in FSD, where I've often referred people to previous posts, which are now all on this same page).

I have finally gotten my Books Read pages current. And I've revamped the Marlowe in Modern Fiction to make the table sortable. Let me know what you think and whether that works -- if so, I may use the script in other pages...

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:30 PM

Okay, our Seder has just ended. Ian is driving people to the train station and home, while I'm alone with the cat to decompress slightly.

Things started late; things ran late; we rushed the after-meal portion of the prayers, but it was great. Great food, great company, great conversation... A perfect combination.

And I remembered one thing I intended to blog this morning.

I wanted to remind folks of the existence of the (H)Omer Calendar

It may be too late for the observant who won't see this post until Sunday, but for the rest of you, it's a really handy memory aid...

So now, I should clean up and throw another load in the dishwasher, but I'm exhausted and think I'm going to bed soon. Besides, I hid the afikomen (and then helped Ian find it with hot-cold directions) so need to figure out exactly what I'm asking of him...

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:00 PM

So, we're hosting a seder tonight. There will be ten people total and we have service for eight. Should be interesting... Ian's been cooking the last several days.

Monday night, I dreamed that I blogged the history of the Maxwell House haggadah and what a stroke of marketing genius that was. Maybe later.

For those in a hurry, Slate.com has created the Two-Minute Haggadah, which looks like it should be an outline for a PowerPoint presentation.

Of course, last week I blogged this Flash version, which is even shorter.

Finally, New York Magazine reveals:

Security has been tight this week at the Central Park Zoo, with ticket takers, staff, and guards on the lookout for suspicious packages of cookies, pretzels, hot-dog buns, and pound cake. Observant Jews have till Wednesday to clear their houses of hametz (leavened products) before Passover, and every year many of them take their castoffs to the zoo. Baffled zoo staff note that the snow monkeys are the main beneficiaries of the pre-holiday pig-out, apparently because the polar bear's glass wall is too high and the sea lions would only be interested if offered gefilte fish. "If a big group comes in carrying bags, admission is going to notice," says zoo spokesperson Kate McIntyre.

That's a new one to me, though it makes certain logical sense. Don't want to waste food, even if it's in opened packages and/or not suitable for tzedakah to feed hungry people...

Speaking of food, my lunch is over (an avocado and soda from the local greengrocer) and time to get back to work.

Chag Sameach, everybody!

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:40 PM

One more example of textual biography in Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy:

Another aspect of Tamburlaine, especially in its opening scenes, may suggest features of [Marlowe's] secret life. Nothing is more bizarre in a drama about the victories of a Scythian warrior than its focus upon personal appearances -- that is, upon looks, textures, plumes, crests, colours, and above all, on vestments or clothes.

Honan goes on for a page about the obsession with fashion in Tamburlaine, reading into it the notion that Marlowe must've been a clotheshorse. [This is his lead-in for attributing the Corpus Christi portrait, by making Marlowe appear fed up with the sumptuary restrictions.]

Of course, an alternate and possibly more obvious explanation is that we're talking about Queen Elizabeth's reign, and dress was that important as a sign of power.

Honan on Tamburlaine:

Was anything more vital for battle, on Asia's steppes, in the Near East and in Africa one wonders, than the equivalent of a catwalk? Did an army's dress-designers achieve more than swords or horses? Or is it that the hero and his opponents never tired of mirrors?

I've heard the Elizabethan court described as a perpetual fashion show, that fancy dress was a means of acheiving political success (including many gallants who used that as a springboard to military rank), and that Elizabeth herself exercised tremendous control over her appearance and image.

And yet these traits are supposed to reflect Marlowe's personal vanity?

Seems to me like the kind of display the audience would expect and recognize.

Anyway, I'm trying to reserve judgment until I finish the book, but I remember Riggs' World of Christopher Marlowe grabbing me more and feeling more vivid...

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:30 PM

The Dev groups had a small ship party this afternoon in honor of our successful recent release. Theme ingredient: Dale and Thomas gourmet popcorn.

As a reward, and to save on post-party cleanup, the CIO (who threw this shindig) gave away the popcorn afterwards.

So, now, one day before the first seder, I have a 3.5 gallon tin in a convenient drawstring sack. I made everybody else on the floor very happy by putting the remaining popcorn up for grabs in the kitchenette...

But I've got a very nice 3.5 gallon resealable tin, useful for storage or maybe an ice bucket for sodas...

Suggestions?

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:28 PM

So, I'm finally getting around to reading Park Honan's acclaimed biography, Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy.

And I'm beginning to worry that Rodney Bolt's History Play may have ruined me for historical biographies.

For those who've forgotten my comments on the book (from February; reviewed here), History Play is a work of fiction written in the style of historical biographies. A pastiche intended to point up how much fictionalizing and interpretation "serious biographers" do.

I am enjoying Honan, and he's uncovered a few details I haven't seen in other biographies I've read -- such as the possible early Timon, and Marlowe's undergraduate class rank ["In the Cambridge Ordo Senioritatis of bachelors, Marlowe ranks 199th among 231. But he had succeeded, whereas a few had dropped out of the course."]. And, of course, Honan made news for his documentation of the history of the Corpus Christi portrait.

But I just can't gush as much as other Marlowe fans have been about this work.

Even with a few months respite between this and the Bolt, I'm still seeing far too much conjecture about what his early family life must've been like, too much biography by textual analysis. For example: "Marlowe, in his known work, never uses words such as shoe, shoemaker, sew, or sole (as for a shoe), but distances himself from his father's concerns."

Oh, come on! We have seven plays and two poems (plus a lot of translations). That's not a heck of a lot for such an assertion by omission. Sure, Shakespeare may have alluded to glovemaking more in his works, but he also wrote five times as many surviving plays and lived nearly twice as long...

And then, because there is so little documentary evidence, Honan (like most biographers of the period) takes other accounts from people who might've been near Marlowe and uses them authoritatively. This is a particular problem when discussing childhood and early education. So here are some legal requirements from a few years earlier; there's the memories of someone at school the same time but in a different county; here's the school budget and library inventory from his school a decade later... Put it all together, and, well, it feels like throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks.

Imagine the same techniques applied to a modern biography:

Educational theories were in flux during Elisabeth's public school years. New Math was introduced in the 1960s; the 1970s saw attempts to apply television production standards to create "edutainment." Computers first entered the schools in the 1980s, while by the 1990s, public schools began to schism between increasingly-focused magnet schools and a back-to-basics movement with an increased focus on phonics and standardized testing. We can't know which specific practices Elisabeth might've experienced.

Professional basketball player Matt Geiger attended the same high school as Elisabeth, although it's purely speculative whether they actually knew one another or travelled in the same circles. Popular portrayals of high school in the period show a very stratified culture consisting of interest-based cliques. Although fictional, John Hughes' The Breakfast Club portrays geeks as social outcasts who undergo enormous pressure to succeed academically.

It may be easier to describe the typical undergraduate Brandeis curriculum by looking at the requirements among neighboring schools, such as Harvard, Tufts and Boston University.

Frustrating, isn't it?

Maybe I'm being overly harsh; the problems tend to lessen as Marlowe gets older, because we have more documentary evidence about him and his accomplishments, rather than having to judge him on the company he (might've) kept.

Still, I increasingly want to get my hands on the Christopher Marlowe Chronology, for its just-the-facts non-narrative approach. [Exerpts (PDF)]

Oh yeah, and a brief installment of "Truth is stupider than fiction," courtesy of Honan. Following a discussion of bookshops and libraries around Corpus Christi:

[Archbishop Parker] had bequeathed a priceless collection of volumes -- but this nearly ruined the college. Corpus's Master, Robert Norgate, had planned to build a new chapel with an attic library for these treasures, and as a result a good deal of slate, lime, and sand, with 700 tons of stone, 500,000 bricks, and much timber, had piled up south of the court, but when Marlowe arrived the new chapel was a mere shell. Even when he had his Master's degree, he may have lacked access to Parker's books, and, at the moment, the price of Norgate's attic had exceeded £200 on hand for the project, the donor of that sum was dead, and Norgate stupidly had forgotten to allow for the cost of nails, scaffolding, ramming of foundations, or even the labourers' wages. This must have been a topic when Marlowe arrived -- since the Master's folly ran the college into debt, and their financial troubles were to worsen.

Norgate was a bemused martinet, a man of unreckoning fervour, and so fearful of Romanists that he imagined a papist takeover of the quad. He was a Calvinist without common sense, and with no sane notion of money he left the college and, in fact, his own household bankrupt

Master Blandings builds his dream library?

PS: For those who missed it the first time, I compared parallel passages by Honan and Bolt, leaving it up to you to guess which is real and which is hoax. I still think it's a fun game and interesting exercise...