Been idly reading up on the anonymous 1592 Elizabethan play Arden of Faversham. It is on-and-off speculated to perhaps partially be the work of a young William Shakespeare, not least because of the amusing but apparently coincidental detail (taken from the real-life historical events the play is based on) that the story’s two bumbling murderers have the sublime names Black Will and Shakebag.

BLACK WILL   The devil break all your necks at four miles’ end!
Zounds, I could kill myself for very anger!
His lordship chops me in even when
My dag was levelled at his heart.
I would his crown were molten down his throat.

SHAKEBAG   Arden, thou hast wondrous holy luck.
Did ever man escape as thou has done?
Well, I’ll discharge my pistol at the sky,
For by this bullet Arden might not die.

Google Books then leads me to a 1993 play by Don Nigro entitled Ardy Fafirsin, an Arden rewrite of sorts, featuring the very same villains … sort of.

BLACK WILL   We’ll finish this tonight, my boy, and just for added measure we can slit the throat of that same dunce which pished on us at first. Christ, I smelt so bad I almost took a bath. Here, let me show ye how it’s done. (HE pulls confidently upon the gate. HE pulls again. HE yanks at it. HE clutches onto the gate, feet up, and pulls with all his might.) YEKE AND ZOUNDS, ODDS BODKIN, WHAT THE FECK THE ZORG, GOD’S TESTICLES, WELL, I BE DAMME, SWILL EAT ME HEAD, ZIKE, BLOODY, BLOODY ZOOKS.

[ … ]

SHAKEBAG   Easy, Will. There’ll be another time.

BLACK WILL   I don’t want to kill him another time, I wants to kill him LAST WEEK.

SHAKEBAG   The Lord teacheth us patience.

BLACK WILL   THE HELL HE DO. THE LORD HAS GOT NO PATIENCE WHATSOEVER. HE KILLS US ANY TIME HE PLEASETH, SO WHY OH WHY CAN’T I? WHAT HAVE I DONE? DO I ASK FOR MUCH? JUST FOR AN UNLOCKED GATE SOS I MAY DO ME HONEST WORK. OOOOOO, IT DOTH MAKE ME CRABBY. URRRRGGGGHHH. ARRRRGGHHHH.

At this point I’m distinctly put in mind of The Skinhead* Hamlet:
* That is, skinhead, not, you know, skinhead.

ACT II. SCENE I. A corridor in the castle.

[ Enter HAMLET reading. Enter POLONIUS. ]

POLONIUS   Oi! You!

HAMLET   Fuck off, grandad!

[ Exit POLONIUS. Enter ROSENCRANZ and GUILDENSTERN. ]

ROS & GUILD   Oi! Oi! Mucca!

HAMLET   Fuck off, the pair of you!

[ Exit ROS & GUILD. ]

HAMLET (Alone)    To fuck or be fucked.

[ Enter OPHELIA. ]

OPHELIA   My Lord!

HAMLET   Fuck off to a nunnery!

[ They exit in different directions. ]

Tangentially: I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that the twice-aforementioned z-word summons up an indelible memory of Bruce Willis, in Moonlighting’s homage to The Taming of the Shrew back in the eighties, admiring a passing Paduan hottie:

PETRUCHIO   Zounds! What mounds!

Erin McKeown: What is whiskey in the morning but a clear path to the door?

Not to sound callous, but: An unexpected literary side effect of Owen Wilson’s supposed suicide attempt: Elizabeth Crane’s short story “Ad” has, one might argue, magically taken on a slightly more poignant tone, at least in certain parts.

… not in search of an Owen Wilson “type,” not ISO anyone who looks, acts, sounds like, or does an impression of Owen Wilson, in search of the actual Owen Wilson …

… except imagine you’re Owen Wilson, and you’re reading the personal ads, which is admittedly unlikely to begin with but imagine that someone who knows you, Owen Wilson, reads the personal ads and bothers to read this kind of long one and then passes it on to you, and it’s maybe a little weird, still, you read past the first few pages and get to the part where it says seeks Owen Wilson and not even seeks Owen Wilson type, imagine that, because it seems possible that you might be flattered, maybe you’d even feel luckier than usual that you were Owen Wilson (in the same way that some larger group of guys might feel lucky that they were 25-45, attractive, and successful), especially if there were any possibility that there were other days when you might feel that there were drawbacks to being Owen Wilson …

… the hope is that O.W. will exhibit an inviting and exhilarating humanity but also maybe it would be good if they were sort of equal, that maybe Owen Wilson also has some tolerable habits or defects of character, almost any manner of insecurity is acceptable and almost welcome as it tends to make her feel more normal to hang around people who also let’s say have occasional afternoon-ruining relapses into self-doubt …

While we’re talking art: Noted art historian Clifford C. Clavin, Jr.:

You know, back in the Renaissance times, full-figured women were revered. It’s true. Artists would only paint big, voluptuous women. In fact, that’s how they got rid of a lot of their old paint.

I start up the first incarnation of my Dave McKean website back in March 1998, while I am still in college at UVA. At the end of this week I’m finally closing the site down. In honor of the occasion, here is what is probably my #1 favorite bit of McKean art:

It is a sequence from “Strata part one”, a 1992 volume of his serial graphic novel Cages, in which two of the main characters, Leo and Karen, having just met, spend all night in a downtown jazz bar engrossed in conversation. Before this one sequence hits, we see the two of them share an eight-page conventional dialogue scene. But then as they continue to warm up to each other, and their conversation takes off, the written dialogue disappears and McKean’s art explodes into a wild, sensuous, improvisational-jazz-inflected, increasingly abstract thirteen-page wordless montage, impressionistically nailing this sense of Leo’s and Karen’s being carried away by their conversation and the music and the wine and their surroundings and the crowds of people and each other, and their losing all track of time, floating out of the panels and off the page and beyond the reach of the grammar of comic narrative, so lost are they in talking and listening and drinking and (it turns out) falling in love brains first.

Not sure I can ever adequately convey just how much these thirteen pages absolutely floor me when I first read them several years ago. They still do floor me. (And the fourth and fifth pages I think may be my favorite single McKean art piece.) I guess for a start I could just repeat what Leo says to Karen earlier in the scene, moments after they meet: Someone should throw some cold water over me, really.

Odd: Meeting with a new accountant this afternoon (ugh), I notice that there is a small commemorative Moby-Dick desk statuette on the windowsill of the conference room we talk in — cheesy painted figurines of Ahab and the whale poised against a parchment leaf adorned with a bit of the novel’s epilogue. A good sign?

I start reading Moby-Dick last month, and it doesn’t take too many pages for it to sink in that Mr. H. Melville is 100% out of his mind. Either that or he is supernaturally skilled at writing in the voice of what sounds like a coked-up mutant Shakespeare newly landed from Neptune. I am all over it. I finish the book this week and the damn thing is probably my new favorite dead-author novel. How predictable.

The impression I have of Melville as a lunatic genius is only partly a result of the novel’s strange and rapturous writing. A large part of the impression, it must be said, is thanks to Barry Moser’s scary engraving of Melville on the title page of my edition.

This picture gets creepier the more I look at it. Melville’s face here is the stuff of nightmares. He looks taxidermied. Look at that thousand-yard stare. The unearthly lowered eyelids. The corpselike shading-lines on his skin. As stony an authorial edifice as you could ask for. Even his beard is stony. This is not the usual nineteenth-century formal solemnity of a gentleman sitting for a portrait; Melville seems not merely stony but sick, as if suppressing profound spiritual or intestinal displeasure, or adjusting to having been recently extracted from a glacier, or tuning out for a few hours to hearken to the latest eruption of voices in the Melvillian upstairs. I keep flipping back to look at this engraving as I read. Whether or not it’s an accurate likeness, just imagining this ghoulish face as the mind behind the bizarre poetry of Moby-Dick makes the book seem not so much a monumental work of inspired literary brilliance and more like graphomaniacal Outsider Art. (Which I wouldn’t mind.)

What’s worse: After a while, the engraving’s brushstroke-like forms of Melville’s uncompleted shoulder-slopes start to look to me like tiny handless arms, and the downward-pointing curve of his lower lapels becomes a little tapering genie body floating upward against a white background. Do you see it? Melville, caricatured as a tuxedoed inky-black ghost with flippers? Perhaps even a human-headed whale, sans tail flukes? Ahab: Art thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself?

Am being haunted by tigers in the text this week. Melville, Moby-Dick:

At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.

And Annie Dillard, The Maytrees, with another story in miniature:

At the Bronx Zoo years ago a lion and a tiger were milk brothers. Lions and tigers hail from Africa and Asia respectively, and would fight if they met. In the zoo these two were close. Neither had ever seen himself, only the other. Each had looked at the other for as long as he could remember. So the lion thought he was a tiger, as it were, and he feared adult lions. The tiger feared adult tigers. Only in the face of the other did each find home.

Unseasonably miserable outdoors. Grey, windy, rainy, strangely cold. Possibly Tropical Storm Erin aftereffects; possibly ordinary local summer weather hiccup. While in the pool at the Y this morning I hear a news person on the radio dramatically intone, The eye of the hurricane slammed into Mexico. Can a storm’s eye slam? From Lear, Kent and the gentleman, opening the Storm Still scenes: —Who’s there besides foul weather? —One minded like the weather, most unquietly.

We see Becoming Jane, a movie involving the young Jane Austen, her supposed paramour Tom Lefroy, and various bogs, fens, and sloughs. To our surprise, the picture fails to set us on fire with either appreciation or loathing. It is difficult to hate pretty Anne Hathaway, who plays Austen with a valiant excess of earnestness as a doe-eyed, pouty-lipped, chirpy-voiced proto-feminist waif, warbling sighs and acerbities in a convincing British accent despite her unmistakable American face. It is not at all difficult to hate the script, which defangs, de-funnies, and methodically wimpifies Austen in its attempt to knit some sort of hifalutin authorial origin myth out of a dreary yogurt of a melodrama that pales in comparison to anything Austen herself actually wrote. Of course, it has occurred to me that I am not part of the target audience for this movie (I couldn’t help noticing it was a little light on car chases and explosions), so who am I to walk all over it for doing what it’s trying to do? Someday modern science will find a way to harness Jane Austen’s spinning in her grave and thus end the world’s energy crises.

Wallace, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”: I have pointed rhythmically at the ceiling to the 2:4 beat of the exact same disco music I hated pointing at the ceiling to in 1977. Xina illustrates.

So there’s now a third cinematic ouroboros of the summer, a fairly obvious one: Bratz: The Movie, the bubblegum comedy flick based on the Bratz empire of dolls and accessories, which movie has spurred the toy company, MGA Entertainment, to release a number of new “Bratz The Movie” dolls and accessories based on the movie.

On the face of it, I’m not sure this would be enough to qualify as a true ouroboros, since the source material hasn’t changed — the movie tie-in dolls haven’t been redesigned to resemble the actresses who were cast to play the dolls. But in this case the ouroboric twist is that the movie tie-in products aren’t based on anything within the movie itself, i.e. the characters or the storyline, but rather on the movie’s very existence. If I understand this correctly, the tie-in products ask us to make a conceptual leap of sorts and imagine that the Bratz movie has been released within the world of the Bratz dolls, and that thus the Bratz dolls’ characters are themselves now movie stars. So the tie-ins are a movie star makeover, a movie star mansion, a movie star car, movie star red-carpet outfits, and a “movie making” set.

Also on the list are movie tie-in versions of the “Bratz 4 U” fashion items for girls, i.e. a movie star dress, movie star jewelry, movie star purse, and movie star shoes; the marketing line being that by wearing this stuff, you too can feel like a movie star, just like the Bratz. (Is this starting to feel like a George Saunders story to anyone else?)

(Or a David Foster Wallace piece? That would be if MGA manufactured Bratz dolls that included tiny thimble-sized Bratz mini-dolls for the dolls themselves to play with.)

Elsewhere: Ed Park has been posting about non-cinematic ourobori.

Of all divers, Melville, thou hast dived the deepest:

For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heart-woes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft-cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.

On a somewhat lighter Melvillian note:

Captain Ahab, that famed cetaphobe,
Loved desserts from all sides of the globe.
       Though it sounds a bit sick,
       He enjoyed Spotted Dick,
And he pined for some pie à la Mobe.