Why did the bird cross the road? For dark and unknowable reasons?

Yesterday, we were talking about Arthur Miller's aphorism: "Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another."

My reaction: "Birds don't have dark reasons." You might have read that as if I were saying, birds are, in fact, thoroughly virtuous. I should have allowed for darkness, at least, in some birds. What about Poe's "Raven" or the albatross in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"? But it was more a matter of choosing to talk only about the possible dark side of birds, because that's all Miller brought up.

If the Glamour bird's motivations are unknowable, how does Miller know they are dark? Maybe Miller thought of that question and threw "largely" into the sentence as a quick fix. I don't know much about the mind of Miller, but I read it to think: I don't know much about the mind of the bird, but I do know this: The one called Glamour has dark reasons.

In the comments tcrosse said, "Why did the chicken cross the road? For some dark reason?"

We thought that was a very funny line and laughed about it before we went out for the sunrise. Driving home in the sun, we saw an odd bird standing in the road, then 2 birds. The light side of birds was demanding attention. Baby sandhill cranes just had to cross the road.

Why? No reasons at all. Never any reason. 

"Arthur Miller described the voluptuous yet fragile woman he wed as 'a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.'"

"When Miller left out his journal open to a page saying that she had embarrassed him in front of his intellectual peers and Marilyn read it, she wrote, 'I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.' Like everyone else, Miller was mesmerized by his wife’s power of enchantment. 'Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another,' he once wrote...."

From Maureen Dowd's new column, "Norma Jeane’s Still Got It!" (NYT).

You know what's embarrassing? 1. Writing down that your wife is embarrassing — can't you just remember it and squirm silently in your dark and unknowable mind? — and leaving your journal open to the page where she'll see it, 2. Writing "Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another." Birds don't have dark reasons.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bob Boyd provides this:

"A friggin' bird will swoop down from a bough and peck your eyes out as you lie helpless and half frozen in the snow without ever having felt sorry for you." 

— Thought to be an early, rough draft of 'Self-Pity' scribbled in the margin of A Field Guide to the Dark Thoughts of North American Birds found in D.H. Lawrence's library after his death.

BY THE WAY: When I was writing this post, I wanted an illustration and asked Grok to give me an image of "a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch." I didn't say Arthur Miller wrote those words.

Grok gave me an image that was too dull to use, but it also added this ridiculous caption: "A solitary bird, wings half-folded in that decisive instant of landing, perches on a gnarled, ancient branch silhouetted against a brooding twilight sky. The air feels heavy with unspoken intent—shadows pool beneath the feathers like secrets, and the bird’s eye catches a glint of something ancient and unknowable. Dark pines loom in the distance, mist curls low, and the branch itself seems to have been waiting for this exact, inscrutable visitor."

So I was all: "Yeah it's purple prose isn't it? I got it from Arthur Miller."

"I think that since it’s told in this first-person perspective, it works somehow for the film to be a traumatic experience."

"Because you’re inside of her – her journey and her longings and her isolation – amidst all of this adulation... [W]hether it’s an extreme depiction or not – it’s honoring the extreme chasm between the public’s perception of the fame and the glory of Hollywood’s most famous, iconic actor, and the reality of that individual – the loneliness and emptiness and mental turmoil and abuse of that individual."

Said Adrien Brody, who plays Arthur Miller in the new Netflix movie about Marilyn Monroe.

Quoted in "Adrien Brody says ‘Blonde’ is ‘fearless filmmaking,’ meant to be a ‘traumatic experience’" (NY Post).

I wonder how Arthur Miller is depicted. 

"My father is a farmer who raises grass-fed beef, but when I told him the story of 'The Crucible,' I said, 'John Proctor is the villain,' and that phrase stuck with me."

Isn't that a strange sentence? See if you can figure out the context, the reason to begin "My father is a farmer who raises grass-fed beef, but...."

The sentence is from "Studio Theatre’s ‘John Proctor Is the Villain’ rethinks ‘The Crucible’/A new play imagines contemporary high school students considering the classic work through the lens of the #MeToo movement" (in The Washington Post). 

Here's your final clue:

CORRECTION 

An earlier version of this story misquoted playwright Kimberly Belflower. Recounting a conversation she had with her father about “The Crucible,” Belflower recalled that it was she, not he, who said that “John Proctor is the villain.” The article has been corrected.

I have an idea for a play about a woman whose desire for credit is her downfall. A theater critic in a big newspaper makes much of her new play because he loves what he sees as a charming scene in which the father — a beef farmer — says the line that has become the title of her play....

"Pointing is a gesture specifying a direction from a person's body, usually indicating a location, person, event, thing or idea...."

"Types of pointing may be subdivided according to the intention of the person, as well as by the linguistic function it serves. Pointing typically develops within the first two years of life in humans, and plays an important role in language development and reading in children..... The nature of pointing may differ for children who have autism or who are deaf, and may also vary by gender... Types of pointing are traditionally further divided by purpose, between imperative and declarative pointing. Imperative pointing is pointing to make a request for an object, while declarative pointing is pointing to declare, to comment on an object.... Types of communicative pointing may be divided by linguistic function into three main groups: Objective pointing - pointing to an object within the visual field of both the pointer and the receiver, such as pointing to a chair which is physically present; Syntactic or anaphoric pointing - pointing to linguistic entities or expressions previously identified, such as pointing to the chair which is not physically present; Imaginative pointing - pointing to things that exist in the imagination, such as pointing to a fictional or remembered chair...."

I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Pointing" a propos of Nancy Pelosi's pointing at Trump (as seen in my post "Political theater" earlier this morning).

Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article did not have what I'd hoped for, something that's often in a Wikipedia article, a history section. I had a feeling that there were famous examples of pointing, perhaps in painting. Googling didn't help. The first thing that came up was Michelangelo's painting of God creating Adam, and that's not really pointing, is it?!



I do have in my memory the final moments of Act I of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," as performed here in Madison many years ago. The drama spiraled up until many girls were suddenly all pointing at the character accused of witchcraft and then the lights blacked out. Chills! Intermission. I don't have video of that, but from the text:

ABIGAIL: I want to open myself!... I want the light of God, I want the sweet love of Jesus! I danced for the Devil; I saw him; I wrote in his book; I go back to Jesus; I kiss His hand. I saw Sarah Good with the Devil! I saw Goody Osburn with the Devil! I saw Bridget Bishop with the Devil!...

Before the play: A view from the second row.

Meade and I drove out to Spring Green last night to see the American Players Theater production of "A View From the Bridge." Here's what the Wall Street Journal theater critic, Terry Teachout, wrote about it a few days ago. Teachout called APT "America's finest classical theater festival, unrivaled for the unfailing excellence of its productions." Teachout hated a 2015 Broadway production of "A View From the Bridge." He called it a "flatulent exercise in Eurotrashy gimmickry." He called this APT production "a masterpiece of sustained tension" and "of the two best Miller revivals I've ever seen."*

Every aspect of [Tim] Ocel's production is distinguished, not least Takeshi Kata's set, a near-abstract assemblage of wooden warehouse pallets that is appropriately stark and austere. But it is [Jim DeVita, a 23-year company veteran,] who catapults it into the stratosphere. Unless you frequent Spring Green, you probably aren't aware that he is one of America's leading classical actors. Until now, though, I'd never seen him in a purely naturalistic role, and I confess to being just a bit surprised to discover that he can change hats with complete ease. His performance as Eddie Carbone, the hardworking, easy-to-anger Brooklyn longshoreman who harbors an illicit passion for his innocent young niece (Melisa Pereyra), is replete with the same force and focus that he brings to Shakespeare. Had Robert DeNiro chosen to be a classical stage actor instead of a movie star, he might well have given a performance as good as this one.

My picture shows the set before the audience was completely seated. The resonance between the stacks of pallets and the woman's dress is serendipity. We loved the whole cast. I wish APT would put out video clips. I wish I could show you a few random delightful things so you could see that it's not the great fall of the ordinary man Eddie Carbone. If there were clips available, I'd show you Will Mobley (as Rodolpho, one of the 2 newly arrived illegal immigrants who stir the plot) singing "Paper Doll" and entrancing the young niece while giving Eddie the "heebie-jeebies." The play isn't just about Eddie's sexual attraction to his niece (Catherine). It's also about Eddie's intense homophobia toward Rodolpho. As Eddie puts it, "he ain't right."

And I'd like a clip of the discussion of sardines (which the immigrants, Rodolpho and Marco had fished for, back in Italy (the year is 1955)):

"I’m thinking, Oh, God! I’m cast in one of my least favorite plays of all time, ‘The Crucible,’ by Arthur Miller!"

The laugh-out-loud line (for me) in "Letter from Oberlin/The Big Uneasy/What’s roiling the liberal-arts campus?" a great New Yorker article by Nathan Heller. The line is spoken by Roger Copeland, a professor of theater and dance who's been teaching at Oberlin since the 70s.

In the late fall of 2014, during rehearsals for a play he was coördinating, he spoke sharply to a student: a misfire not of language, he says, but of tone. The student ran out of the room. Copeland says that he wanted to smooth ruffled feathers and keep the production on track, so he agreed to meet with the student and his department chair. At the meeting, the student asked that he leave the room, and she and the department head spoke alone for about half an hour.

Later, the dean of arts and sciences asked to meet with him. He reported complaints that Copeland had created “a hostile and unsafe learning environment,” and that he had “verbally berated” a student—but said that it must be kept confidential which student or incidents were concerned. Then the dean asked Copeland to sign a document acknowledging that a complaint had been lodged against him.

“I’m thinking, Oh, God! I’m cast in one of my least favorite plays of all time, ‘The Crucible,’ by Arthur Miller!” he told me. He gave the dean a list of students he thought could confirm that he hadn’t “berated” anyone. He says the list was brushed aside: “They said, ‘What matters is that the student felt unsafe.’ ” Then he was told that, because gender could have been a factor, the issue was being investigated as a possible Title IX violation. That inquiry was later dropped; by then, Copeland had hired a lawyer. In September, 2015, the original inquiry was still going on, and Copeland said that the dean told him that if he wouldn’t meet without his lawyer he would be brought before the Professional Conduct Review Committee. Copeland and his lawyer welcomed that idea: the committee process would bring some daylight. They never heard back.

Much, much more in the article. Highly recommended. You should be able to read it without a subscription.

Wisconsin outdoes Broadway.

Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal reviewing the current production of "All My Sons" (in Spring Green, Wisconsin:

Do it naturalistically and straightforwardly and you can't miss. Add a pinch of understated imagination and the results will be even better. William Brown's American Players Theatre production scores big on both counts....

The last revival of "All My Sons" that I saw was Simon McBurney's 2008 Broadway production, a criminally excessive exercise in postmodern stage prestidigitation in which Katie Holmes, John Lithgow and Dianne Wiest all sank beneath the roiling waves of Mr. McBurney's trickery. 

I've been thinking a lot today about about the verb "to like."

First, I was struck by the Democratic pollster who said, about Romney, "Ultimately, people don’t like this guy. If they don’t like someone, it’s hard to get people to vote for him — particularly to fire someone they do like."

And then later today, I overheard a professor — I won't say who — telling students they will be meeting representatives of 2 groups, one conservative and one liberal, and that they "would like" the liberals. These particular conservatives, he said, were more effective pursuing their aims — some field of policy that I won't identify — but the liberals, you will like.