I've moved on to Arthur Miller

In my previous post, I forgot to include the one thing that kept going through my mind while listening to Antigone. As I'm sure you know, the story of Oedipus is that he kills a man he doesn't know is his father and marries a woman he doesn't know is his mother, who is the queen of Thebes. He assumes the throne, they have four children, two sons and two daughters. Chaos ensues. His mother/wife, Jocasta, has a brother, Creon.

In Antigone, Creon's son, Haemon, is engaged to Antigone.

I keep stumbling on this. I'm guessing that marriage to a first cousin wasn't uncommon in ancient Greece. (I know in ancient Egypt, brothers and sisters in the royal family married to keep the royal bloodline pure.) But Antigone isn't just Haemon's cousin, she's also his aunt. I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous. Did these people have zero common sense?

I'll be moving this to the previous post.

When Choosing A Career I Ignored My Heart And Did What My Brain Wanted. Now All My Brain Wants Is Prozac.*

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Today I finished listening to Death of a Salesman. Except for the kind of references you can't help running into if you're a serious reader in twentieth/twenty-first century America, I had no knowledge of it before I started it a few days ago. (I'm listening to these in the car and I don't drive that much, so it can take a while to finish even a short play.)

I'm confused.

Am I supposed to like Willie Loman? Respect him? Mourn his death? Is he supposed to be Everyman? Because I find him simply obnoxious. The world revolves around him, anything that happens in the world is being done to him personally. His son doesn't want to be a salesman, he's doing it purely to spite him; his son has no identity beyond being Willie's son. It's horrible.

He also seems completely crazy. Everything is either the best there is or it's shit. His sons are either perfect or they're worthless. One thing goes wrong with the car and it's garbage and he was cheated by the salesman. I have no idea what kind of personality disorder this is, but it's clear that's what it is. And he's emotionally abusive to his wife, constantly telling her to shut up because he's talking. Of course, because he's always talking. He complains that people haven't told him things when the reason they haven't told him is that he keeps interrupting them! I didn't particularly want him to commit suicide, but I would have liked to see somebody deck him.

I can't figure out how much of this is supposed to be a problem. Are we supposed to find him as despicable as I do? I've had this problem before. The first time I remember is when I was twelve years old, watching All in the Family. I've never seen more than half a dozen episodes because I loathe Archie Bunker. It's not his racism; I get the point of his racism. It's the way he treats the wife and daughter he claims to love. His awfulness to his family was gratuitous; he didn't have to treat his family the way he did to be to make Norman Lear's point. I couldn't watch the show because it made me sick to my stomach.

Anyway. I did get two things out of it. First, the point of the play seems to be that you should know yourself and be happy with who you are, even if it means leading a small life and never being respected by the whole community—neither of which Willie Loman ever does, but which his son, Biff, has resolved to do.

And second—and far more importantly to me—Harold's line in The Boys in the Band, "Attention must not be paid." I didn't realize it was a play on Linda Loman's line, "Attention must be paid." Interesting that all the characters in The Boys in the Band are struggling to learn the lesson Biff learned.


*The 5th Wave, Rich Tennant