The Women Of Trachis, 1

Deianira, wife of Heracles, frets.  She had been saved from a miserable future when Heracles had taken her from home and married her.  But since then he has always been away, on one gods' adventure after another.  Currently, he has been gone over a year, with no word of his whereabouts.

Deianira's nurse suggests she ask her son, Hyllus, if there is any news of his father.  Hyllus: "Oh, Heracles?  Yeah, he was a slave to a Lydian woman.  Now he's in Euboea fighting Eurytus.".  Deianira: "Huh.  That's exactly what the prophecy said he'd be doing."  Hyllus: "What prophecy?"

[The lack of communication before today is absurd.]

Hyllus goes to find more information.  The Chorus enters and commiserates with Deinira, but ultimately reproves her for her pessimism: this is Heracles, after all, and he's made it through worse scrapes before.  But Deinira explains that when he left this last time, he had told her that in a little more than a year, he would either be finished with the tasks forever or he'd be dead.  That day of reckoning has now arrived.  [Which kind of explains why everything came to a head all of a sudden.]

A messenger arrives with news from Heracles's herald, Lichas.  Heracles is on his way back home.  The messenger expects a tip.

And there was much rejoicing.

Lichas himself arrives with a gaggle of captured women in tow.  Heracles is taking care of some divine promises, but will be home shortly.  It seems Heracles had visited Eurytus in peace, but was dissed badly while he was there.  Shortly after, he killed Eurytus's son Iphitus in a fit of rage, by throwing him off a cliff.  As punishment, Zeus handed him over to the Lydian woman for a time.  When that was through, Heracles went back to get his revenge on Eurytus who got him into the trouble in the first place.  Simple.  And utterly ridiculous.

The women, meanwhile, are the pillage from the victory, and are screwed.  Deinira pities them, and focuses especially on one young, possibly noble girl [named Iole].  She asks Lichas for the details about this one, but he knows nothing-- she's been silent since her capture-- and can't figure why she'd care anyway.  The women are sent inside.

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I've read this about five different times, and simply can't get interested in the story.  Partly, it's because the Heracles mythology is kind of coming out of nowhere.  He's been referenced, of course, in many of the previous works, but this particular episode is totally new, and doesn't seem to have any importance at all.  So far.

Or maybe it's the translation, by a guy (Michael Jameson) I haven't read before.  The introduction, at least, was impenetrable-- like he was writing an analysis just to fill out the assignment, and couldn't care less if what he said was interesting or not.  I've written papers like that myself.

So far, this play is a dud all around.

The Secret Knowledge (David Mamet)

Interesting and enjoyable, though it wasn't exactly what I expected before I started reading. 

The beginning was very thought-provoking as Mamet presented his critiques of different aspects of modern political society-- and his criticisms of the education system were especially apt.  As the book progressed, though, I found it to jump around from topic to topic, and even from thought to thought, without landing on any one place or developing any one idea to its fullest.

After a few chapters of this, I realized what I was missing.  This is not a book that presents an argument of any kind.  It is simply one man's exploration of his own developing ideas of how society works, and relating those ideas to different specific examples from his own everyday experience.  Once I caught on, it was very effective-- because this is how we all actually think through these problems most of the time.  We don't sit down and logically work out a master philosophy.  Instead, different events grab our attention in different ways, and sometimes they grab us enough that we insert those experiences into an overall impression of the world.  Then we plow ahead with the rest of our lives.

In Mamet's case, his overall impression wasn't working anymore, so he sought new information to develop it further.  But the process is still the same-- some of the new information catches his attention more than others, and as a writer he gets to present it to the rest of us.  For the rest of us, we could, if we had the skill, write an entirely different exploration of our own ideas.  In the end, the important thing is that we all do have a different set of ideas, and that we all get the chance to explore and develop them independently.  The worst difficulty comes when an authority attempts to interrupt that exploration and impose a uniform approach on all of society.

As I said, the sections about education caught my attention more than any other.  We really do need a way prepare adolescents to take care of themselves by developing useful skills.  (And there's nothing wrong with those useful skills actually being the Humanities he rails against-- so long as they're actually useful-- meaning attractive to some customer somewhere.  And public funding alone doesn't count.)  A good start would be to explain to the adolescents that this needs to be the end result.  Following their dreams is not useful advice.  Coming up with strategies for self-sustenance, by following their dreams if possible, is useful.

One other passage was especially original: Mamet's discussion of the Monty Hall problem.  What was unusual was that he didn't treat the problem as a mathematical exercise.  Instead, he looked at it as an actual offer by a real person offering a deal, and developed a real insight out of it that I never would have come up with myself.

Essentially, he imagines that the game show host must offer the following bargain: After the contestant selects a door, the host must give the opportunity to switch to the remaining doors.  Backed into this corner (if that's the way the game is presented, he's screwed), the host ingeniously comes up with the only way to turn the odds back toward his own favor: by playing a con.  The host offers additional information, pretending to be helping the contestant with the next stage of the game.  The contestant, blinded by what he sees as a fatal mistake on the part of the host, overinterprets the information and pounces on the perceived advantage by standing pat.  The host then coasts away with the odds in his own favor once again.

In other words, the whole problem is a design on the part of a disadvantaged player in order to regain the advantage, camouflaged (as all cons are) by the wishful thinking of the mark.  And that's why everyone falls for it.

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A couple other items of note: I took notes in pencil in the margins of the book, when Mamet's words (or rather, the gaps between his sentences-- this is consistent with the way he writes his plays) brought to mind examples that are rattling around in my own current perception of the world.  I don't know if these notes are helpful, or if I'll ever look at them again, or what, but it was a way to hold onto themes even as the reading of an entire book was spread over several days.

I purchased this book in July 2011, the same time I got my iMac and in the shopping spree that accompanied it.  It had been reviewed in, and Mamet had been interviewed by, all my favorite podcasts, including Ricochet and Uncommon Knowledge.  I couldn't pass it by.

And finally, I didn't consider this a sidelight from the rest of the project.  I have to mix in some modern (i.e. 20th-21st century) works with the others if I don't want to simply be cataloguing the past.  This is expecially true for political and economic works, so stay tuned for more to come.