This morning, in looking at the Fall
Arts Preview (Part II) in the SF Chronicle this morning, I noticed that
Uncle Vanya is being staged at SF
State from Nov 20 - Dec 6. Wow, yet another performance. I've been surprised
by the number of times that Uncle Vanya been been staged. Is the play
being performed disproportionately often in the U.S. and Canada? Maybe it's
because my obsession with the play makes me look out for it, making it only
seem more popular than other plays.

I ponder this question as I wonder whether I'm the only one who is so into
this play. Clearly there are people with a much more serious investment in the
play, such as anyone who has participated in any production of Uncle Vanya.
I'm thinking of folks like myself who come at the play as an amateur.

Today, I got the sense that no, I'm not the only person out there who has heard
the play speak to them, when I found a new translation by Curt
Columbus that was commissioned for the (apparently famous) Steppenwolf
Theatre Company in Chicago. Eureka was my reaction to the prefatory essay
by Columbus. Let me quote a bit of it (p. 4):

Of what are considered to be Chekhov's "four major plays," Uncle
Vanya is unique -- a lyrical, claustrophobic character study that takes place
over a short period of months on the Serebryakov estate. Gone is the sweep
of years that moves the plots of Seagull and Three Sisters.
The issues of class and wealth that pervade the other plays have no importance
in this drama. There are no grande dames of the stage here, no general's daughters,
no wealthy landowners. This is a petty squabble over an inheritance, an issue
of a few hundred rubles a month. These are a handful of little people--a country
doctor, a simple farmer and his niece, a retired professor and his too-young
wife--who are trying to find some meaning and some romance in their little
lives. Strangely, it is these very qualities of ordinariness that give the
play such enormous resonance with modern American audiences.

"Uncle Vanya is an American play," a Russian director once told
me. "Family members come for a visit, they fight, they scream, someone
fires a gun, and then everyone makes up and says, 'See you next Christmas.'"
This overly simplistic assessment gets at the core of why the play engenders
such interest, such passion in America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. After one has experienced the claustrophobic poetry of Tennesse
Williams' fire escapes and tiny rooms, Chekhov's estate seems all the more
vivid. After one has witnessed the works of Sam Shepherd, a handful of little
people squabbling over an inheritance seems overly familiar. After one has
watched the films of Woody Allen, Uncle Vanya feels like an old, amusing family
friend, appearing both funny and tragic at the same time. Today's American
audience feels finally what Chekhov spoke so succintly a hundred years ago.

I don't know much about Tennesse Williams or Sam Shepherd myself -- but this
essay encourages me to explore these playwrights.

It's midnight but I've already turned into a pumpkin. As I lay my head to sleep, it will be full of fond remembrances of a near perfect Saturday. I slept in, ate a leisurely breakfast (while still in my pyjamas). As I approached lunch, I figured that I should shower before having the second meal of the day. The only work I did all day was to replace the registration tag on my car. After talking to a friend on the phone, I had dinner with a group of 7 friends at the Berkeley Thai House. We gathered in anticipation of a performance of Mark Morris' L'Allegro il Penseroso ed il Moderato, which turned out to be very pleasing indeed. I was so happy to be among friends tonight. I walked home with my friend Dan, which gave us an opportunity to chat. And now I blog to give my dear readers something to read with their morning coffee tomorrow.

What more could I have asked of a Saturday?

As unread issues of The New Yorker and Times Literary Supplement pile up in my home office, I might apply a technique I learned today from coworker Tom: put the magazine subscription on the hold normally used for vacation until I go through the issues already on hand. Make that one year subscription into a two year journey of humanely paced reading!

As my housemates and I sat around the dinner table tonight, we heard a loud bang and then felt some quick shaking. It was an earthquake, though in the seconds after the rumbling, I fought hard not to go into a state of surreal denial. What did we have to do next? Should we stand in the doorway? What's the chance of an aftershock? When a minute or so had passed without any tangible shakes, I pulled out my Treo 300 and surfed around to find some info on the earthquake. It wasn't easy to find any information immediately after a quake, at least from a little cellphone/web browser; I did finally land on the "Most Recent Event" ShakeMap page. Yes, indeed, there had been a quake 6 km SE of Berkeley.

Another wakeup call, no doubt. The power outages out east already made me wonder how prepared we are for natural disaster. It's time to double check our preparations.

This evening, my housemate Ildi asked me whether I had read Jon Carroll's column from yesterday. "He mentions weblogs." Of course, I had to look up the piece, which starts:

I suppose blogs have had their day as a populist phenomenon. Democratic candidates for president have blogs now, and that's pretty much the death knell for cutting-edge status. If John Kerry has one, it's not a trend, it's an appliance.

But I think that's true only of blogs produced in the United States. In other countries, the Internet is still a revolutionary tool, a place for information censored in every other medium in the nation. Vox populi, and no pop-up ads. It's 1991 all over again.

Carroll goes on to commend Baghadad Burning, a blog that comes ostensibly from Iraq. "Oh, isn't that the blog that Lloyd mentioned on his blog recently?" -- yes, indeed.

Now that both Ildi and Lloyd have referred me to the same Carroll column, I am paying attention....

So often these days, having something mentioned by one friend is not enough for it to register. Once two friends independently mention a website or new item, then my attention becomes engaged. I'm a bit sad about this reality; shouldn't the recommendation of one friend enough for me to do something? Well, maybe -- but I'm just in dire need of my filters.

Tonight, I saw The Merchants of Four Seasons, my first film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The Pacific Film Archives is hosting a Fassbinder retrospective. I blame the PFA for getting me hooked on Kurosawa in December and making me a fan of immersing myself in the oeuvre of a given director.

I quite enjoyed the film tonight; I don't have much to say about Fassbinder yet. I may end up hanging out at the PFA over the next week....

The piece by Steve Winn in today's SF Chronicle about stand-up performers made me ponder whether bloggers who talk about themselves (like I do here) raise the same issues as the performers:

What are we actually getting when performers stand up and talk about themselves? Where does offstage end and onstage begin in first-person theater?

The answers are complex -- bedeviling to performers and directors and endlessly alluring to audiences. We're instinctively drawn to stories that arrive in the envelope of truth.

Believing that the artist standing before us actually lived through the experiences he or she re-enacts has a kind of testimonial power. We become de facto participants and fellow travelers in shows by Spalding Gray, Marga Gomez, Reno, Tanya Shaffer, Tim Miller or anyone else who chooses to stand and deliver autobiographically onstage.

Although it's way too late to write coherently about the "problem of evil" (How is it possible that a perfectly good and omnipotent God allow evil?), I did want write a bit about one particular spin on the problem that I've been particularly puzzled by as a Christian. If there is a heaven, then why do we have to go through this present age of suffering? It seems to me that heaven (or the new earth) will be a place in which humans will be not do evil but who are still free beings. So if such a state can exist, why could not God have been created right from the start? Genesis 1-3 shows that humans were created innnocent but ultimately fell, leading to the rest of history. But was the fall inevitable? That is, are free beings destined to become corrupted. No, according to traditional Christian teaching -- Jesus is an example of a free but perfectly good God/Man.

The reason I dwell on this particular spin on the problem of evil is that evil is often explained as the consequence of having beings having real freedom. So I picture a time in which we will be gloriously free but gloriously not wanting to sin -- that heavenly state. But can such a state really exist? In heaven, will humans never do wrong again? What's so special about heaven?

But is history the journey that must be taken to get to the glorious future? So it would seem that there is something very special about history, about our lives, our journeys that God deemed as worthwhile in some sense.

I have rambled here, struggling to express the question I have. Maybe I have to try again later....

My parents were and are generous to a fault. The spared no expense to get my sisters and me the educational opportunities that we needed and wanted to succeed. Two particular gifts stand out in my own mind as specific and profoundly influential shapers of my own life. I'll tell you about one today: a copy of the 15th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I have only vague memories of how we ended up with the 30 volumes of that incredible set of books. I see images of a door-to-door encyclopaedia sales man, a contract signed in multiple parts ordering the Britannica. I was ten years old at the time, and I couldn't wait to get my Britannica set.

The day that it was set to arrive, I ran home. I was not the type of kid to run too often -- but on that day, nothing was going to keep me from bursting through the door and racing down to the basement of the house in which there were three very heavy boxes of books.

I loved the EB. So many days would I just take down the volumes and thumb through the pages, diving into the mystery of things I couldn't quite grasp but knew to be incredibly fascinating. One day, I swore, I would understand this all.

If it weren't for the EB (along with the reams of yearbooks to keep the EB "up to date") -- a big expense for my parents who were part-restaurant owners -- I would not have: 1) gotten into the big questions about how human knowledge is organized, 2) created an independent study course as a senior to study the Britannica outline of human knowledge (called the Propaedia -- the brainchild of Mortimer Adler), 3) become so disappointed now with the online EB 4) become so curious about so many things as I am today.

I still have a copy of the EB Propaedia on my shelf today in Berkeley -- though not all 30 volumes.

Besides the magnificent oeuvre of Bach, the work of art that has spoken most profoundly and insistently to me the last several years has been Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, as particularly manifested in Louis Malle's film Vanya on 42nd Street, which in turn, was based David Mamet's adaptation. I've long wanted to write in depth about Uncle Vanya but have yet to muster the focus and energy to do so.

But I feel that I'm entering a new phase in my life in which I'm letting go of some old things to embrace a new vision. Part of that transition, I feel, will be aided in looking at why Uncle Vanya has meant so much to me and why I now feel the desire to move on.

So now I want to play a bit.
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