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Journal of a Sabbatical

February 20, 2000

rime

Today's Reading: Winter: from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau edited by H.G.O Blake

You know you've outgrown your high school English teacher when you realize there's a lot more to albatrosses and a lot less to Coleridge than you thought. Since I've been reading William Jameson's natural history of the wandering albatross, Nancy got inspired to search her bookshelves for her battered complete works of Coleridge so we could read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in its entirety. We didn't get to it last night because the movie we went to was so long, so I read it this morning. It has an unfortunate meter for today's ear, and the choice of words really doesn't give you a feel for the might of the southern ocean. It was disappointing as a poem. It is certainly not a great work of literature.

Now that I've reread The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I can't really blame Coleridge as the one who made a beautiful bird into a popular culture symbol of guilt. The blame really belongs to those aforementioned high school English teachers who drilled that into our heads. What's even weirder, is that there's not much evidence that the albatross was really considered good luck by seafarers to begin with. Apparently Coleridge made that up. Jameson pretty much deconstructs that whole thing in one of his chapters of The Wandering Albatross, which I finished reading yesterday. There have been some myths and superstitions around various seabirds, so Coleridge just basically took some poetic license. That's fine. That's what poets do. But those English teachers should get to know some albatrosses before they teach that poem again.

Besides deconstructing Coleridge today, we spent much time over breakfast discussing what should have been cut from Topsy Turvy to make it a reasonable length movie. That said, we both liked it. It's basically the story of how Gilbert and Sullivan wrote The Mikado. The guy who played Gilbert was so convincing that I can't remember his name! I can only think of him as William Gilbert. The whole thing was lavish with costumes, music, characters, and subplots ... oh my. One whole sequence involving some of the actors eating oysters right before they go to Doyly Cart to ask for raises has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the movie, should have been cut, but is exceedingly well done nonetheless. The most dramatic turnabout in the story doesn't even get a scene. Suddenly the central conflict has already been resolved. Somehow that didn't bother me that much either. One scene at the end, between Gilbert and his wife, is straight out of a Bergman movie. I was thinking that when Nancy leaned over and whispered in my ear "Scenes from a Marriage". This must have been one fun movie to make.

And y'know I don't mind crying babies in the theater half so much as I mind people carrying on cell phone conversations. Couldn't the guy have taken his ****ing cell phone out into the lobby?

Not satisfied with deconstructing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Topsy Turvy all in one day, we went down to South County and took a long walk on Scarborough Beach. It's such a beautiful day that many people and dogs were out walking and red breasted mergansers besported themselves just offshore in the shining water. Gorgeous. Just gorgeous. The winter beach at its finest. A great cormorant perched on a rock looking picturesque long enough that an artist could have painted its portrait at leisure. No artists with easels were in evidence and my camera was 1) in the car, and 2) not adequate to the task, so we had to settle for memorizing the image.

Any trip to South County means an opportunity to dine at The Indian Club in East Greenwich on the way back to Providence. We took advantage of it.