Coincidences?

When I was writing about my ideal weekend, I failed to mention that that very weekend, when I whacked through Vermeer's Hat:  The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, The Girl with the Pearl Earring was on, and so I naturally watched it again.  Despite its re-creation of Vermeer's family and 17th-century Delft, I didn't like it any better than I had the first time, when it first came out, but then I hadn't liked the best seller from which it came either.  Similarly, the fine funny Slings & Arrows series on the Sundance Channel that same weekend concerned Hamlet, when, of course, I was reading Haig's The Dead Fathers Club, besides which I had from Netflix Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well, his curious, modern corporate version of Hamlet.  And Joslyn Art Museum opened its "Elegance of the Qing Court:  Reflections of a Dynasty Through Its Art," which concerns the most prestigious, longest Chinese dynasty of the Manchus, who in the Vermeer book were about to charge over the Great Wall into Chinese history as the Qing/Manchu court.  (As Joslyn is at pains to keep telling the public, it's pronounced Ching as in "ka-ching.")  I saw the elegance with the million-dollar screen as centerpiece the following Tuesday, but my point is the show opened that Saturday.  I suppose I could call the coincidences serendipitous, that happy word serendipity standing for unexpected good fortune, but I get a bit nervous about alleged coincidences.  To mention Indra's web of everything being interconnected seems too strange.

Continuing, an old teaching friend of mine, who spent a late January week here with her drama students, is directing Euripides' Medea this April, that play having made Tony winners out of great actresses who had the lead role.  I re-read it, because Viv asked for suggestions; but, even though I have the Judith Anderson LPs of it--she was one of the Tony winners as Medea--I had used when teaching World Lit classes, either the passage of time and/or my court experience led me to pronounce Medea as one psychotic bitch and to strongly urge Viv to make her a voodoo sorceress.  (Medea is one of the most powerful sorceresses in myth, helping Jason steal the Golden Fleece against her own father, killing various people including her brother, so besotted with Jason that, when he gets a new girlfriend and tells Medea to get lost, she sends fatally poisoned robes to the new girlfriend and father-in-law, then slaughters her two young sons by Jason, flying off by dragon power.)  Anyway, History International obligingly showed a documentary on voodoo and its related obeah and santeria history and congregants here now, an estimated million and a half voodoo practitioners alone in the U.S. 

I am currently watching the Rainer Werner Fassbinder masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), from Netflix, which has 13 episodes and an epilogue, each disc minutes over three hours.  I had seen it back in the Eighties on Bravo, when that was truly a brilliant cultural channel full of live performances and foreign films rather than tired repetition and "reality" show dreck (a good German word for "shoddy and inferior merchandise").  In fact I had to wait for its recent release after re-mastering.  Anyway, my current book is a literary thriller in turn-of-the-century--if you want to be fancy, you say "fin-de-siecle," which is the same in French and refers to 1890-1910--Vienna, Frank Tallis' Vienna Blood:  A Novel (Random House, 2007), about which I had read a recent rave review along with Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves:  A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2008)--jeez, telling us what we're reading again!--and made an immediate trip to Border's for the two.  Fassbinder's TV series takes us through the familiar decadent Twenties and Thirties in very decadent Berlin, as the musical Cabaret also celebrates, whereas Vienna was decadent a bit earlier.  Tallis' novel, about forbidden secret societies and early forensics and psychological profiling, has horrific murders with Jack-the-Ripper sexual mutilations based on Mozart's The Magic Flute, Freud and Mahler as background characters.  (Tallis is a practicing clinical psychologist, as is one of the two leads, the other a detective.) The commonality in both works is the ominous rise of the National Socialists, the Nazis.  OK, the kicker:  last night reading the novel, I came across this line (p. 127 in the paperback):   "Among the small objects attached to the silver chain [of a man's charm bracelet] was an effigy of a man in a kaftan suspended from a gibbet.  It represented a hanging Jew."  Later, watching Disc 3 of the Fassbinder, I had another familial surprise.  The macho oaf, Franz Biberkopf, who is the anti-hero of the Alfred Doblin novel-Fassbinder epic, is again reading the newspaper aloud and announces that the famous conductor Bruno Walter's final concert is April 15th.

Well, that date is not only Tax Day now in the U.S. but also the date of the Titanic's sinking and Abraham Lincoln's death.  But, given my Great Grandparents Kaftan/Koftan marrying on 15 April 1886, does it mean anything that out of 365 days that's my birthday, or that Great Aunt Bozena/Bessie Koftan Chapin and her daughter died on 21 November 1927, my sister's birthday also 21 November?  That's why saying "coincidence" makes me nervous.

LATER NOTE:  Having finished the Tallis book, I can add one or two other "coincidences."  One of the murder victims was a Czech; the time period was of the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Habsburgs (as the book put it), from which the Kaftan and Hlinovsky families fled by steerage to the United States.  The book takes place in 1901 Vienna, but I recognized some of the places from being there in 1969, which added to the pleasure, the way seeing movies set in Rome, Zurich, Athens, other places I passed through, lets me relive that too-brief trip.  Also, the book concerns an always relevant topic, super patriots who hate Jews, blacks, homosexuals, women, etc., etc. One of this strident, dangerous group of seething bigots is a doctor who throws a young English woman out of his medical classes because women don't belong there, are not capable of being doctors.  The next morning I read in the Omaha World-Herald that a federal judge ruled in favor of a Southern Baptist seminary who fired a female professor because "women are biblically forbidden from teaching men," and the school's "ecclesiastical decisions [are] protected under the First Amendment's religion clauses."  The woman had sued.  (21 March 2008, p. 14A.)  In the book the doctor creates a public furor, writing letters to newspapers, and is fired.  Anyone who says religion and politics aren't hopelessly one and the same does not understand history or the way religion has always interfered with government, which is why this story's tale of intolerance is monstrously familiar.