Wisdom and Woe

• Amazon

Supplemental:

• Valuska (2023) opera trailer
• A whale of a tale 1877 display of a dead beluga whale

Extracts:

• “The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that whales had been introduced on the stage there.” —Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (Moby-Dick, Extracts)

This meetup is part of the series Circuses and Snake Oil.

• Runtime: 2h 25m
• Year: 2000
• Unrated Content advisory
• Starring: Lars Rudolph, Peter Fitz, Hanna Schygulla
• Director: Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky
• Language: Hungarian with English subtitles
• Trailer: Werckmeister Harmonies

This meetup will consist of a live viewing, accompanied by discussion and analysis.

This meetup is part of the series Circuses and Snake Oil.

• Ex-Classics
• Gutenberg
• Amazon (400th anniversary edition)
• Librivox (Volume 3, parts 35-49) 7h 28m

Extracts:

• "And what to me, thus pining for some one who could page me a quotation from Burton on Blue Devils; what to me, indeed, were flat repetitions of long-drawn yarns, and the everlasting stanzas of Black-eyed Susan sung by our full forecastle choir? Staler than stale ale." (Mardi, 1.1)
• "From my window, where I was reading Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, I saw him in the act." ("Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!")
• "... I can imagine you seated on that dear, delightful, old-fashioned sofa; your head supported by its luxurious padding, and with feet perched aloft on the aspiring back of that straight limbed, stiff-necked, quaint old chair, which, as our facetious W— assured me, was the identical seat in which old Burton composed his Anatomy of Melancholy." ("Fragments from a Writing Desk")
• "... whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." (Moby-Dick, 1)
• ".... thou surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael." (Moby-Dick, 42)
• "... when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky whale.... he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac;" (Moby-Dick, 74)
• "A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that." (Moby-Dick, 16)
• "... in ten thousand ways, as if by a malicious agency, we mortals are woefully put out and tormented; and that, too, by things in themselves so exceedingly trivial, that it would seem almost impiety to ascribe them to the august gods. No; there must exist some greatly inferior spirits... and through them it must be, that we are thus grievously annoyed." (Mardi, 1.87)
• "All men are possessed by devils; but as these devils are sent into men, and kept in them... limboed in a bridewell; so, it may be more just to say, that the devils themselves are possessed by men..." (Mardi, 1.104)
• "An operator, ah? he operates, does he? My friend, then, is something like what the Indians call a Great Medicine, is he? He operates, he purges, he drains off the repletions." (Confidence-Man, 36)
• "The 'blood royal' is an extremely thick, depraved fluid; formed principally of raw fish, bad brandy, and European sweetmeats, and is charged with a variety of eruptive humours, which are developed in sundry blotches and pimples upon the august face of 'majesty itself', and the angelic countenances of the 'princes and princesses of the blood royal'!" (Typee, 26)
• "He asked me... how often I had been bled during my life..." (White-Jacket, 77)
• "'I'll bleed him!' cried Johnson at last—'run for a calabash, one of you!'" (Omoo, 50)

This meetup is part of the series Circuses and Snake Oil.

• Standard Ebooks
• Gutenberg
• OpenSource
• MIT
• Librivox 3h 46m

Supplemental:

• The Hamlet Podcast 182 episodes
• Shakespeare and the Four Humors interactive exhibition
• Hamlet (1948) movie trailer
• Hamlet (1990) movie trailer
• Hamlet (1996) movie trailer
• Hamlet (2024) movie trailer
• Hamlet (2026) movie trailer
• Hamlet (1993) from Last Action Hero
• Life Lessons from the Great Books lecture by J. Rufus Fears
• Love and Friendship in Hamlet lecture by David Bevington

Extracts:

• "... the Captain made his ceremonious way to the cabin, disappearing behind the scenes, like the pasteboard ghost in Hamlet." (White-Jacket, 39)
• “Very like a whale.” Hamlet. (Moby-Dick, Exracts)
• "For in this plaintive fable we find embodied the Hamletism of the antique world; the Hamletism of three thousand years ago.... And the English Tragedy is but Egyptian Memnon, Montaignized and modernized; for being but a mortal man Shakspeare had his fathers too. Now as the Memnon Statue survives down to this present day, so does that nobly-striving but ever-shipwrecked character in some royal youths (for both Memnon and Hamlet were the sons of kings), of which that statue is the melancholy type." (Pierre, 7.6)
• "Some moments passed, and he found the open Hamlet in his hand, and his eyes met the following lines: “The time is out of joint;—Oh cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!” He dropped the too true volume from his hand; his petrifying heart dropped hollowly within him, as a pebble down Carrisbrook well." (Pierre, 9.2)
• "If... the pregnant tragedy of Hamlet convey any one particular moral at all fitted to the ordinary uses of man, it is this:—that all meditation is worthless, unless it prompt to action; ... that in the earliest instant of conviction, the roused man must strike, and, if possible, with the precision and the force of the lightning-bolt...." (Pierre, 9.3)
• "... reading in boyhood the advice of Polonius to Laertes—advice which, in the selfishness it inculcates, is almost on a par with a sort of ballad upon the economies of money-making..." (Confidence-Man, 30)
• "He drules out some stale stuff about 'loan losing both itself and friend,' don't he?" (Confidence-Man, 30)
• "Or, as Hamlet says, were it ‘to consider the thing too curiously?’" (Confidence-Man, 43)
• "True, we sometimes hear of an author who, at one creation, produces some two or three score such characters; it may be possible. But they can hardly be original in the sense that Hamlet is, or Don Quixote, or Milton’s Satan." (Confidence-Man, 44)
• "... the original character... is like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself all round it—everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it (mark how it is with Hamlet)" (Confidence-Man, 44)
• "But Shakspeare’s pensive child / Never the lines had lightly scanned, / Steeped in fable, steeped in fate; / The Hamlet in his heart was ’ware, / Such hearts can antedate." ("The Coming Storm")
• "Byron’s storm-cloud away has rolled— / Joined Werter’s; Shelley’s drowned; and—why, / Perverse were now e’en Hamlet’s sigh ... / with speed / Of passion, Clarel turned: “Forbear! / Ah, wherefore not at once name Job, / In whom these Hamlets all conglobe.“" (Clarel, 3.21)
• "Through the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, he craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them." ("Hawthorne and His Mosses")
• "And hardly a mortal man, who, at some time or other, has not felt as great thoughts in him as any you will find in Hamlet." ("Hawthorne and His Mosses")
• "Before coming to Lucrino... you see the New Mountain. Curious to see this stranger (parvenue) from the abysses taking his rank among the elderly mountains... Could tell queer stories. 'But that the secrets of his prison house &c.'" (Journals, 23 Feb 1857)
• "If you... should not feel an interest in these three “counterfeit presentments,” do not fail to show them to—" ("Fragments from a Writing Desk No. 1")
• "I have in “my mind’s eye, Horatio,” three..." ("Fragments from a Writing Desk No. 1")
• "as with the reclining majesty of Denmark in his orchard, a sly ear-ache invaded me." ("The Piazza")
• "if the helmsman be a clumsy, careless fellow, or ignorant of his duty, he keeps the ship going about in a melancholy state of indecision" (Redburn, 24)
• "... resolving ere long to give the enemy a touch of certain Yankee steps, as yet undreamed of in their simple philosophy." (Israel Potter, 3)
• ""There's method in his madness," thought the officer to himself." (Israel Potter, 20)
• "Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king's ghost in supernatural distress." (Moby-Dick, 42)
• "The Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the craters for volcanoes; and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in hand." (Moby-Dick, 127)

This meetup is part of the series Circuses and Snake Oil.