Something/Someone Old

My Something Old this week is Kenneth Grahame's 1908 book The Wind in the Willows.

I loved this book as a child. As an adult, I started seeing myself and my friends as the characters. I was clearly the Mole; my best friend, Jan, was the Water Rat. Jan's lover and my friend, Susan, was clearly the faddish Mr. Toad. This was the scene that led me to make those connections:

The Rat came to help him, but their united efforts were not sufficient to right the cart. 'Hi! Toad!' they cried. 'Come and bear a hand, can't you!'

The Toad never answered a word, or budged from his seat in the road; so they went to see what was the matter with him. They found him in a sort of a trance, a happy smile on his face, his eyes still fixed on the dusty wake of their destroyer. At intervals he was still heard to murmur 'Poop-poop!'

The Rat shook him by the shoulder. 'Are you coming to help us, Toad?' he demanded sternly.

'Glorious, stirring sight!' murmured Toad, never offering to move. 'The poetry of motion! The REAL way to travel! The ONLY way to travel! Here to-day—in next week to-morrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped—always somebody else's horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!'

'O STOP being an ass, Toad!' cried the Mole despairingly.

As the years went on, the associations proliferated. I am now living with Mr. Badger and Mr. Otter.

Here's the first CD of an audiobook of The Wind in the Willows. I like hearing these sorts of stories aloud. I'm not sure about the voice the actor chose for Mole, but everything else is wonderful.

Something New

I watched a really excellent movie version of August Wilson's play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, night before last. It's about the lives of black people in the twenties in this country, so it's grim, but it's also splendid writing. This was Chadwick Boseman's last performance before his untimely death from cancer, and it's far, far better, in my opinion, than the Black Panther movie for which most people know him. It's actually an extraordinary performance. In fact, all the performances in this movie are excellent.

For those of you who don't know August Wilson, he was a remarkable playwright--other than Sondheim, possibly America's best playwright (though it's hard to compare musicals to other plays).

He was born in Pittsburgh in 1945, and set the majority of his American Century Cycle of plays in the district of Pittsburgh in which he was born. Apparently, Wilson did not know at first that he was writing a cycle of plays; he thought he was just writing unconnected plays about being black in America:

As Wilson continued to write plays about the African American experience, he realized that he had unwittingly written them in different decades of the 20th century. This prompted him to take on the challenge of writing The American Century Cycle, ten plays for ten decades, each representing different aspects of the African American experience. It took Wilson almost 20 years to complete the Cycle.

https://www.seattlerep.org/about-us/inside-seattle-rep/august-wilson-the...

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom was the second play written in the Century Cycle.

Wilson had finished it by 1982, and it premiered on Broadway in 1984. This was the play that gave Wilson his big break:

The play that brought Wilson national attention was Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which was accepted for the 1982 O’Neill Conference. Ma Rainey went to Broadway in 1984, followed by Fences in 1988. Fences won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, four Tony Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Denzel Washington's 2020 production is well worth watching. But be warned: as you might expect, it's not exactly a gay romp.

Something Borrowed

Seems like the West borrowed chess from either India or Persia.

Wikipedia is not always reliable, but I don't see why a propagandist would care who invented chess, so I'm guessing this entry is trustworthy:

The earliest predecessor of the game probably originated in India, by the 7th century AD. From India, the game spread to Persia. When the Arabs conquered Persia, chess was taken up by the Muslim world and subsequently spread to Southern Europe. In Europe, chess evolved into roughly its current form in the 15th century.

I also checked at Chess.com, and they corroborate the idea that chess came first from India:

Chess, as we know it today, was born out of the Indian game chaturanga before the 600s AD. The game spread throughout Asia and Europe over the coming centuries, and eventually evolved into what we know as chess around the 16th century.

But there seems to be a continuing debate on this point. I refer you to the article "CHESS: Iranian or Indian invention?" on the Circle for Ancient Iranian Studies website, https://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Sport/chess.htm. Here's a surprising etymological "borrowing" from Persia: the "rook" chess piece:

Rook which is a Western derivative of Rukh is another term for Iranian mythical bird Sên-Murv, and Simurgh in New Persian. In ancient Iranian literature (Avestan) Sên-Murv identified as Homâ and in Arabic introduced as Rukh. The Simurgh or Rukh, was depicted as a winged gigantic creature in the shape of a bird, that could carry an elephant or a camel. The functionality of the Rook piece in game of chess and its iconography in Iranian world is quite significant. The bird which Iranian believed imparted fertility to the land and the union between the earth and the sky. In India, the piece is more popularly called haathi, meaning "elephant".

Now, I really don't get how that castle-tower-looking thing could be the Simurgh, who looks something like this:

I must be missing some meaning the medieval Persians ascribed to the Simurgh, which isn't at all surprising.

Something Blue

I have a real fondness for Leon Russell. Any of y'all remember him?

I love this song, and remember it fondly from my childhood:

I just got my vaccination, and will probably be sleeping a lot today, so I might not be around as much. But I will check in, and let you all know how the first stick is going!