By Bart Barry-
SAN ANTONIO – Nothing is returned to normal, not even our last catastrophe’s new normal, and it becomes more obvious the few times you catch someone trying to act like normal. Thursday’s first trip to a supermarket in 10 days found everyone’s adapted to these bizarre circumstances except the employees.
While customers’ habits have changed enough to have the marketplace nearly empty of shoppers the marketplace’s wellmeaning attempt to keep a full staff in place works against itself as more employees than customers makes the employees frantic in their habits of busylooking, the product of 200 years of post-industrial-revolution habitry – “time to lean, time to clean!” – so the only ones constantly breaking sixfoot radii are the workers everyone wears equipment to protect. They swerve round you and dash before you in a futile attempt to burn a surplus of energy that makes you batty if you retain it – for what else is anxiety, ultimately?
A better boxing writer would be playing along with his peers, livetweeting decades-old matches because they happen to be broadcasted as if live on Disney’s sports property, but I can’t bring myself to it. These fights are available on YouTube forever and watching them with commercials to support multinational revenues doesn’t feel patriotic as it did when we used to drive to the mall with Old Glory flying.
Saturday, which has become lovely in its timelessness, found me bouncing between The New Yorker and Shakespeare. In the 35 or so years since I watched my grandmother read The New Yorker I’ve often marveled at the quantity of sparetime one might need to justify a subscription. Piles and piles of them I’ve accumulated over and over, refusing to dispose of them till I’ve surveyed every page, while never surveying more than a third the pages before peeling off their labels and walking them to a nearby lobby, coffeeshop or laundromat.
All that’s changed. On the one end I have, on average, 16 perfectly empty hours every Saturday, and on the other end I have an evolving surfeit of self-forgiveness for not-reading whatever I once believed I must read. It’s not nihilistic as all that, though I have noticed for six years now a creeping nihilism (blame meditation?); it’s an honest accounting of how much I’ve read and how microscopically little I retain of it.
Saturday I began reading new short fiction by Ben Lerner, which isn’t great, and wondering why his name was enticingly familiar to me. The Contributors page didn’t help. Google did: Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was marvelous, and I enjoyed it in 2011 and thought of it often while using said station in 2014. That trip to Madrid was about nothing so much as standing before Velazquez’s masterpiece, Las Meninas, at El Prado, a 10-minute northwards hike from Atocha Station.
A couple Saturdays ago I came on a short piece in The New Yorker that treated, in part, that very painting, as its author, believing himself terminally ill before coronavirus, chose as his dying wish of sorts to spend many hours looking at the painting again with new eyes. He made a wonderful comment: Velazquez could not have been painting himself via a mirror positioned where you, an observer, stand, set between the canvas and the royal couple, unless he and everyone else were lefthanded. Touché! There is quite a bit of chromatic aberration edging the shadow at the centerpiece’s feet, though, so lenses were employed even if Velazquez put himself in freehand.
It came to me Saturday morning Petruchio might be Shakespeare’s most enjoyably masculine character, and a couple hours got gobbled up a couple hours later by The Taming of the Shrew. The play hasn’t aged badly as its critics. Shakespeare, as critic Harold Bloom wrote quite a few times, buries his undertakers. Reading the play with a father’s eyes – my sixyearold daughter is nearer Kate than my fiveyearold son is Petruchio – I found some essential wisdom in the play’s courtship, particularly as Petruchio treats so directly the subject with his future father-in-law, Baptista:
Though little fire grows great with little wind,
Yet extreme gusts will blow out fire and all.
So I to her, and so she yields to me,
For I am rough and woo not like a babe.
Far from dashing for his rifle or assuming a postfeminist fetal position (practical redundancies, those), Baptista sincerely wishes Petruchio luck. Many of the comedic elements are still funny, despite 430 years and thousands of renditions, and the language is gaudy rich: “You peasant swain, you whoreson malt-horse drudge!” Petruchio’s ultimate motivation – “I come to wive it wealthily in Padua – / If wealthily, then happily in Padua” – doesn’t feel congruous today as it likely felt in 1592, being that Petruchio is already wealthy and today’s ruling class, ironically, better insulated from what economic calamities now befall the rest of us decennially.
Petruchio laughs at himself and circumstances, embraces absurdity, acts as a dutiful wingman, knows his purpose, speaks to his elders respectfully if directly, and woos not like a babe – would that young American men were reliably given such an example. By the end of Taming of the Shrew you can envision Petruchio sharing an ale with Jack Falstaff while laughing merrily at a Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. match, something one cannot say for Hamlet or Othello or Romeo (or even Henry V unfortunately).
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
