“Except for a certain saving humor, I should indeed have been a full monster.”  One definition of a friend is someone with whom you can share any joke or other comic effort without fear of offending him. It may not be funny – the only pertinent criterion for judging humorousness – but it’s not hateful (a word thrown around promiscuously these days). Friends understand us. They don’t necessarily approve but neither do they throw a tantrum, get uppity and admonish us.   The line at the top is by the poet Louise Bogan, writing a letter on January 28, 1954, to another poet, May Sarton. Bogan struggled with severe depression for more than forty years and was hospitalized for it several times. Bogan is one of our finest American poets, and that she was able to write so well under such conditions is heroic. The book to read is Elizabeth Frank’s biography Louise Bogan: A Portrait (1986).   What most interests me about Bogan’s sentence is “a certain saving humor.” Never known as a humorist, Bogan was highly intelligent, thoughtful and witty. With close friends she could be herself. Bogan seems to be confirming a theory I’ve pondered for most of my life – that a well-exercised sense of humor is often symptomatic of mental health, if not always sanity.   I’ve been reading X.J. Kennedy again, including “More Foolish Things Remind Me of You,” published in the July/August 2006 “Humor Issue” of Poetry. It’s a laugh-out-loud poem (This is a test!), especially these lines: “Lines sliced to little bits by deconstruction, / Loose gobs of fat removed by liposuction.”   You may have noticed the subtitle: “With apologies to Eric Maschwitz.” He was the lyricist for the 1935 standard “These Foolish Things” under the pseudonym “Holt Marvell.” I suggest listening to at least one of these recordings of the song before reading Kenney’s parody, so you get the melody in your head: Nat “King” Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra.

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The teens living in the garden in the YA romantasy The Story of the Stone spend a lot of time reading forbidden books, much older YA romantasys.  These books are all famous classical Chinese plays.  Cao Xueqin gives a couple of chapters early on to their reading, including a list of titles.  I figured I’d better try one of them. How about The Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu, written in 1598, an exciting time in English and Spanish drama, too.  The play is really an opera, partly sung and partly spoken, a monster, eighteen hours long in a complete performance, a wild mix of stories and tones. An attempt at the story: beautiful young Bridal Du begins her education with a tutor.  The explication of four lines of 2,500 year-old Chinese poetry, the limit of her education, are enough to make her curious about the outside world.  She goes for a walk in an artificial garden where, in the title’s Peony Pavilion, she falls into a dream where she meets and has sex with a stranger, an experience so powerful that after waking she soon dies.  This is one-third of the way in. Luckily the lover is real and stumbles across the garden.  After an idyllic period of ghost sex, he figures out how to resurrect Bridal Du, launching the final third of the play which is full of bandits, severed heads, mistaken identities, and heroic test-taking.  There is a scene I have never encountered in dramatic form before, Scene 41, where the test examiners grades essays: Every kind of error: what a bunch of blockheads grinding their ink for nothing, not one brush “bursts into flower.” (230) What could be more dramatic than watching a teacher grade papers? The Peony Pavilion also has comic scenes in Hell, songs about manure, comics scenes with a couple of slapstick servants, and a comic scene with a pompous government inspector.  I thought this scene must be one of the most cut – the entire opera has been performed rarely, or perhaps never before 1999 (!) – but no, it is one of the most performed, historically, often performed on its own at village festivals. The text is full of quotations and lines and entire poems from two thousand years of Chinese poetry, all identified, as above, by quotation marks and occasionally by footnote identification, but there is so much quotation that the editor gives up on identifying the authors by page 5.  The quotations are sometimes turned into dirty jokes or elaborate poetry games much like the kids play in The Story of the Stone. It is all the most amazing thing, is what I am saying, one piece of craziness after another.  Someday I will have to read more of these things, and maybe a book or two about how to read them.  Cao Xueqin clearly learned more about writing his novel from these plays than from earlier Chinese novels.  “It’s very pretty in the garden” but “[t]hat garden is a vast and lonely place” (Sc. 11, 54). Oh, why are classical plays forbidden to the 18th century youth?  One, kids are not supposed to be wasting their time with romantasys but instead reading the Five Classics and practicing calligraphy; second, the plays will give young ladies corrupting ideas about falling in love and marrying who they want rather than the dud or monster chosen by their parents. Cyril Birch is the translator.  Page references are to the Indiana University Press 2nd edition. The image is from the 1998 Peter Sellars production of The Peony Pavilion.  How I wish I had seen it. Tan Dun’s music for that production (the album is titled Bitter Love) is worth hearing.

When the first hot air balloonists ascended into the skies of the eighteenth century, they saw rivers crossing borders and clouds passing peacefully over battlefields. They saw the planet not as a patchwork of plots and kingdoms but as a vast living organism veined with valleys and furred with forests. They had to leave the Earth to see it whole, torchbearers of that rude paradox of the human condition: often, we have to lose our footing to find perspective; often, it is only from a distance that we come to feel the pull of the precious most intimately and most… read article

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