We Defy Augury . . . Hamlet Style

Tennis season has really slowed down my podcasting output-- I am becoming downright Hamlet-like in my indecisiveness and aversion to action, but I managed to squeak out a new episode (although you might want to wait a day or two to listen because I forgot to include an audio clip so if I get motivated I'll wedge it in somewhere . . . one of the great things about podcasting is that you can go back and revise your audio for an episode) and one of the reasons I took so long is that this episode tackles some very complicated topics about belief, the morality of whistleblowing, and the existence of Deep State surveillance; it's called "Reality Loser" and it is based on thoughts (loosely) inspired by Kerry Howley's book Bottoms Up and The Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State and Jeff Sharlet's book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.

It's Hard to be a Man in the 21st Century

Last month, I helped a female teacher create a "Manliness Survey," and making the survey was so entertaining that we discussed the issues in my English class -- it was fitting because we were in the middle of Hamlet, and while there is no question that Hamlet is intelligent and eloquent, there is debate over his machismo -- and this resulted in another student and me having a one-armed push-up competition in front of the class, and during this display of unbridled masculinity, the girls were yelling "We don't care! This is stupid!" and the guys were yelling "It's all about push-ups!" and while this was a lot of fun, it made me remember that on that same weekend, Catherine made me take the kids to Target, in order to shop for the two birthday parties that they were attending, and we bought some Squinkies and Pokemon cards, and while I was doing this, I saw my friend Rob, with his kids, doing the exact same task . . . and we said "Hi" to each other and then went our separate ways without commenting on how unmanly we were behaving . . . it was Saturday morning and we should have been chewing tobacco and using power tools, but instead we were both pushing shopping carts at Target, and I was learning the distinction between Squinkies and Zinkies.

Stacey Summons the Dead

Stacey and I have the same schtick when we begin Hamlet-- we both play the role of Horatio, who-- in the opening moments of the play-- is skeptical of ghosts and the supernatural . . . Marcellus explains, "Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy, And will not let belief take hold of him" and Horatio, in reference to the apparition, confidently asserts "tush, tush, 'twill not appear" but, moments after he says this, the ghost of Old Hamlet DOES appear and, after some good natured "I told you so!" by Barnardo (How now, Horatio! You tremble and look pale.Is not this something more than fantasy? What think you on't?) Horatio admits that "Before my God, I might not this believe without the sensible and true avouch of mine own eyes" and just before the apparition enters, Stacey and I always ask the class if they believe in ghosts, then chastise the believers for their irrationality and then we try to summon the dead, call upon the spirit world to strike us dead and stop our hearts, etc . . .  and there are usually a few kids who get upset by this-- who don't think we should fuck around with the netherworld, whether we believe in it or not-- but we've never been haunted or struck dead . . . until now-- apparently last week, the night after Stacey did her ghost bit, she was visited by a spirit in the night, a little girl in a green sweatshirt that hovered over her bed-- twice!-- and she woke her husband up but he didn't see her and now she wonders if there might be spirits walking the earth, and she wonders if she has summoned them . . . but of course, I think she was dreaming or saw a shadow or whatever, as I am a logical and rational man-of-logic who would never be perturbed by such rubbish.

Ghost in the Machine/ Ghost in My Head

I'm teaching Hamlet now, so whenever I see that little "remember me" check-box that asks if you'd like a website to save your information, I hear it in the voice of Old Hamlet's Ghost . . . remember me.

Tennis Etc.

So much tennis . . . and some Hamlet and some persuasive speeches in Public Speaking-- and a trip to the vet for Lola's exotic UTI-- hopefully the special urinalysis culture will give us the specific bacteria in her bladder that is causing the infection . . . but summer is coming.

Educating the Youth With Facial Hair Part II

It's very important to model what you are teaching-- if you are writing thesis statements, you should write one with the kids . . . if you are analyzing rhetoric, you should show them how it's done-- and if you're showing a clip Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, then you should trim your facial hair accordingly . . . it's just good pedagogical practice to do so (maybe next year I'll dye my hair blonde as well).

Trump Causes More Shit

Last week, after visiting the dog park, I tried to walk home along the river. It was damn near impassable. The grass and the path were strewn with goose poop. Disgusting for me, and a health hazard for my dog. She loves to eat the stuff, and it's laden with bacteria and parasites. The last time she chowed down on it, she threw up all over my van. Yuck.

This was the last straw for me. The geese never shit on the river path. There are a few areas in Donaldson Park that are consistently covered in fecal matter (and they are easy enough to avoid) but this winter-- perhaps because we never got solid snow cover-- the entire park was littered with the stuff. Every sporting field, every paved path . . . from the grassy meadows to the muddy banks. Poop poop poop poop. The only spot in the park not covered with goose poop was the dog park. But I couldn't walk through the other sections of the park to get to the dog park. There was too much shit. So I had to take the street along the park and cut into the park on the trail just past the public works building and the diesel fuel tank. This route is not scenic at all. It's damn near tragic. I live next to Donaldson Park so I can walk around in Donaldson Park.

My New "Scenic Route" to the Dog Park

I generally managed to keep Lola from eating goose poop on my way back from the river, but it was not pleasant or relaxing. So I was pretty irate when I got home. I had been through a scatological minefield, and I was certainly suffering from PTSD: Post Traumatic Shit Disorder. I was fired up. But instead of my usual complaining into the void, I decided to do something: I would write an email to the powers that be. I cranked out a couple paragraphs of crackpot commentary to the county parks director. I was vivid. I was livid. I was graphic. I was gross. I mentioned bacteria and parasites. I recalled that there used to be a guy that would come in and scare the geese away. He would set off fireworks and place silhouettes of dogs in the fields. What happened to that guy? Donaldson Park needed that guy! My tone was polite but frustrated. What other tone is there when you're dealing with goose-shit?

Here's what I got back. I was very pleased with the prompt reply (and properly indignant about the causes of the excessive poop).

A Prompt Clarification on the Shit Storm

Mr. Pellicane,

Thank you for your message regarding Canada goose numbers at Donaldson Park.  The County currently contracts with the Wildlife Services Division of the USDA, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services for Canada goose management on all County properties.  This include harassment and egg treatments.  They cover over two dozen sites throughout the County.  With our proximity to water, open space and mild winters, controlling geese is always a challenge.

The biggest problem we are having this year is with the somewhat milder winter.  Many geese that pushed southward last year, simply did not this year.  Additionally, with the federal government shutdown for 35 days in December and January, all contracts were suspended.  Harassment during this time was minimal – only what our staff could get to.

We are certainly behind on behavior modification and it is apparent in many of our parks.  Our USDA tech is back on the job (for now, anyway) however, we are playing catch up across the County.  I have asked for increased visits to Donaldson Park over the next week and if there is not another shutdown, continued aggressive harassment for the next few.  This should hopefully help alleviate some of the pressure on Donaldson Park from the geese.

Thank you,

Rick Lear

Director

Office of Parks and Recreation

Department of Infrastructure Management

Let's Assign Some Blame!

Trump! This was Trump poop. Caused by his government shutdown. And even better, Rick Lear alluded to Trump's arch-nemesis. He didn't call it by name (perhaps, like the EPA, he's forbidden). But when he refers to the "mild winter," we all know what he's talking about. Climate change! So I had stepped in Donald Trump's shit, caused by something he refuses to believe in, the Chinese hoax. I couldn't have been happier. English teachers love irony.

The biggest problem we are having this year is with the somewhat milder winter.  Many geese that pushed southward last year, simply did not this year.  Additionally, with the federal government shutdown for 35 days in December and January, all contracts were suspended. 

Rick Lear

I was also happy because getting upset about Trump shit is fun. This is because Trump is temporary. His ideas are outdated. He's a throwback, a dinosaur, soon to be extinct. A last gasp. In fact, despite the bipartisan quagmire and the incorrigible stupidity and corruption of the Trump administration, I'm feeling pretty good about the world, goose poop and all. This is mainly because I'm nearly done with Steven Pinker's book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. It's also because my wife is doing a lot of Zumba and looking great (but that's besides the point).

Pinker uses an avalanche of charts and statistics to remind us that we are living in the best of times. And this is because of th enlightenment values mentioned in the title: science, reason, secular humanism, liberal democratic ideas. The world has never been less violent, more healthy, more prosperous, safer, and more liberal. Despite what the naysayers prophesy, more people have rights than ever before, less people are at war than ever before, knowledge is more accessible, and democracy is on the rise. While there are challenges, we keep coming up with solutions. And the two existential threats-- the things that worry Pinker the most-- the environment (including global warming) and nuclear war . . . both of these things are improving. Slowly, but they are definitely improving. As countries grow richer, they do a better job preserving the environment; they reforest and recycle and use less fossil fuels and look for alternate energy sources. And we are slowly whittling down the number of nuclear weapons on earth. That number may never reach zero, but it doesn't have to. As long as we accept and understand the challenges, there are solutions on the horizon.

The Robots Are NOT Coming

Pinker also dispels some of the ridiculous notions that cause folks unnecessary anxiety: artificial intelligence experts don't fear the singularity. AI is not going to rebel and replace us. It's too hard to make a semi-conductor. It's too hard to make anything. It takes teams and teams of people and many highly technical factories and lots of resources. And we humans control all that. We are the kings of meat-space. And most of this perceived conflict is online. This is also the reason we probably don't have to fear technological nightmare scenarios caused by lone wolf lunatics. It takes too many smart people to create technology that advanced. Your computer may get a virus (but nothing as serious as Y2K) but you need a team of specialists to make a nuclear bomb or a super-virus, and it's hard to assemble that many people down with destroying the human race.

This is why rational people don't fear Donald Trump. He's not the face of the 21st century, he's a wart that will soon dry up. And fall off. He's an old wart.

Pinker does acknowledge that Trump will have an effect-- especially if we let him-- on some of these precious enlightenment ideals that have served us so well. He's an impediment to "life and health" because of his anti-vaxxer rhetoric and his role in dismantling our healthcare system. He's a threat to worldwide wealth because of his idiotic zero-sum notions about trade. Countries that are tied together economically cooperate. They don't go to war. He's certainly not helping economic inequality, nor is he a boon to safety, on the job or otherwise. He hates regulations, which often spur progress and make business seek solutions to problems (such as car crashes, plane crashes, poisoning, tanker leaks, lead levels, mileage restrictions, etc). He's not particularly keen on democracy and seems to have a penchant for dictatorial strongmen. He's no fan of equal rights, and his speeches and Tweets often have an undercurrent of xenophobia and racism. And he's a liar liar pants on fire. So he's not an ambassador or advocate to the wonders of available and accurate knowledge.

The Glass Is Half Full? So Lame . . .

Optimism is not cool. Pinker is an utter nerd. It's more fun to obsess over Trump and predict the end of civility, the end of civilization. Trump is certainly a shitshow, and Michael Lewis does a nice job illustrating some of the consequences of his incomptetence. And he's an environmental disaster. But we are progressing despite him. You need proof? Listen to Adam Ruins Everything Episode 1, where Adam talks at length with the Los Angeles DOT Seleta Reynolds. Streetcars, bike lanes, public transport, walkable neighborhoods and plazas . . . in the car capital of the country. In LA? Sounds like a hippie's dream and a conservative's nightmare. But this progressive vision is happening, despite Trump, and with federal funding. There are difficulties, of course, but when you hear this dedicated and intelligent government employee explaining that the market won't solve these problems of morals and values, it's really heartening. She's also really funny.

Pinker is an atheistic utilitarian who may not have enough feelings about anything to move the stalwarts on the left or the right. He glosses over some pretty bad shit. But that's because he's looking at the numbers, not at the emotions. Not at identity politics or anything particularly political. He's in the same corner as President Obama, who wrote a miniature version of the Pinker book for Wired Magazine. It's an essay called "Now Is the Greatest Time to Be Alive." It's not nearly as fun as visions of rusted out towns full of drug-addled opiate addicts (not the whole story) and porous unwalled borders which allow terrorists, criminals and rapists to pour into our nation. Statistically supported optimism can't match Chinese bandits stealing our intellectual property, black people who don't know their proper place (let's make America Great Again! And Institutionally Racist!) and liberal socialists who want to empower the government so that it controls every aspect of our lives. The end of times. That's what gets the clicks.

But I'm siding with Rick Lear. He's going to be around long after Trump is gone, directing county parks and rec infrastructure, fighting the good fight against the geese. He'll suffer mild winters and government shutdowns, deal with cranky emails, and continue to make this country greater than it's ever been. I have faith that he's going to make my local park greater. He's going to get rid of those geese (and their shit).

I believe.

Pinker's incremental pragmaticism does have it's problems. Robert Gordon, in his comprehensive work The Rise and Fall of American Growth claims that we've captured all the technological "low hanging fruit" and that advances will be tiny and slow for a long time. And Charles C. Mann provides a much more balanced picture in his new book, The Wizard and Prophet. Pinker is a fan of Norman Borlaug, the agricultural engineer who founded the Green Revolution‌, but there are those scientists who don't believe technology will bail us out of every dilemma. We might need old-fashioned conservation to preserve our way of life. Mann uses ecologist William Vogt to represent this perspective. It's one worth noting.

Pinker is also not very romantic. There's no room for honor and zealotry and fanaticism and mysticism and martyrdom and certain types of selfless ascetic heroism in his philosophy. He's no Hamlet, who says to his buddy Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." But Hamlet has seen a spirit, his father's spirit. The time is out of joint. Something is rotten. That's not so in Pinker's secular, statistical view of progress. Society will be less varied, but I have to admit, I don't really care. I won't miss the zealous fanatical whirling mystical martyrs one bit.

I'd much rather have a river blindness vaccine. And people are working on it.

Listen at Your Own Risk

Here are some podcasts that will twist your sense of morality back unto itself:

1) This American Life updates the noted George Saunders short story "Pastoralia" in Act Two of episode 623: We Are in the Future, the rest of the episode is trash, so head straight to "Past Imperfect" . . . it's the story of an African American woman (comedian and actor Azie Dungey) who played the role of a slave at Mt. Vernon, George Washington's estate in Virginia, and the difficulties and disparagement she suffered as a consequence of this oddly symbolic position-- a sole black woman representing all 316 slaves that Washington owned; tourists struggled with this reminder of reality (thought it was sorely lacking in numerical accuracy) and the moral of the story is that none of us are over the past, and none of us are able to get over it, white and black alike, so we're going to have to have some frank discussions about what went on back there in the mists of time and how we're going to portray these folks that we all have in common;

2) Episode 792 of Planet Money, "The Ransom Problem" presents a wicked dilemma that combines Catch 22 and Hamlet's most famous soliloquy . . . when you've been abducted by terrorists demanding ransom, and you have to decided whether "to pay or not to pay"; the U.S. and Canadian governments refuse to pay kidnappers, while many European nations will foot the bill . . . and while in a utilitarian sense, it makes sense not to pay ransom, because you don't want to incentivize abduction, this tactic doesn't seem to be working . . . anyway, this episode will run you through the wringer, you'll change your position several times, and by the end you won't know what to think or do . . . not only does the podcast deal with the economic implications of ransom, it also tells the entire wild abduction story of Amanda Lindhout . . . and it all happens in less than 20 minutes;

3) the wake of a flood is probably the worst time to discuss the cockamamie flood insurance policies in our country, because you're bound to come off a bit callous and unfeeling, but the folks at The Weeds and Slate Money do a great job of being informative, empathetic, and knowledgeable about what we need to do in the future to amend the absurdity (not that it will ever happen).

11/15/2009

Shakespeare wrote the maxim "brevity is the sole of wit" but he had that blowhard Polonius deliver the line, so I don't think Shakespeare believed that at all, because he was never brief, especially not in Hamlet and when you think of witty people, they usually aren't terse like Clint Eastwood or John Wayne, they are usually voluble, like George Carlin or John Stewart or me.

Literary Psychoanalysis

I am more like Hamlet and my wife is more like Fortinbras . . . and this works out well.

Even Subjective Questions Can Have Wrong Answers

My Shakespeare class was asking me a number of questions about how Shakespeare's plays were enacted in Elizabethan times, and while I had a few answers for them, I eventually had to admit that one of the best uses of a time machine would be to go back and see a production Hamlet or Twelfth Night at the Globe Theatre, and then I asked the class to speculate on this hypothetical question: if they had two chances to use a time machine to see something in the past (not alter history) then what was the other thing they should see-- besides a Shakespeare play-- and a student quickly guessed the other "correct" answer . . . which is a dinosaur, of course, and a few students debated my "correct" answers-- someone suggested the Lincoln Assassination, which I must admit is a pretty good thing to go back and see-- and I decided to ask my friend and colleague Kevin, who was teaching English next door, if he knew the correct answers to this thought experiment . . . and I am so glad I asked him, because my classes laughed about his answer for the rest of the day (and I will admit that it was before 8 AM in the morning and I caught him off guard, but still, his answer was egregious) and so after I posed the question, he thought for a moment and said, "So it can be anything in the past, personal or in history, right?" and I confirmed this, and then he thought hard, searching for the correct answer and finally said, "Maybe I should see my own birth?" and then he realized what he said, and I said to him, "You want to see yourself coming out of your own mother's uterus! That's disgusting!" and my class agreed that no one should want to see their own mother's distended private parts (and I know Kevin's mother, which made it worse) and Kevin realized his error and tried to back-pedal quickly: "Okay, I take that one back . . . how about a dinosaur . . . I'd like to see a dinosaur" and we all agreed that was a better choice.

As Billed . . . the Times Are Super Dark

As a teacher, you have to remember that any one of your students might be going through some shit-- they might be in "super dark times" and you might not be aware of this and you might be trying ot get them to peer-edit or read Hamlet, but they might have other things on their mind . . . Kevin Philips takes this to the extreme in his new coming-of-age thriller Super Dark Times . . . it reminds you that if your son is acting weird, the reason might be that his friend killed a kid with a sword (by accident) and they've hidden the body and are waiting for the shit to hit the fan . . . this review calls the movie the opposite of the nostalgic naïveté of Stranger Things . . . it's a mid-90s version of Stand by Me or River's Edge-- the movie is best just before the super dark times and during the super dark times, once everything explodes into mayhem it becomes more of a slasher/thriller, but it's still worth seeing, there's beautiful imagery, pre-internet cell-phone boredom, menace, some disturbing scenes, and a slow dive into the chaos that must occur (there's also a fantastic symbolic opening scene which I won't spoil here).

Tragically Close

I'm trying my best not to lose my temper with my children, my students and my soccer teams (and this is a tough task, because I'm simultaneously trying to drink less beer during the week) and for the majority of Tuesday, I was successful -- I had a smooth soccer practice with my U-9 team, despite the cold weather and the fact that my older son was in attendance -- but he didn't fight with his brother, and the team listened better than usual, and I was patient about explaining the drills and getting things organized (plus I had a lot of help from the other dads) and my kids were rewarded with hot cocoa once we got home, and then my older son showered and the younger one got into the shower, and I figured I was home free: I had navigated an entire day without raising my voice . . . but fifteen minutes later, when I went to check on Ian in the shower, he was just standing there, doing absolutely nothing -- his hair wasn't wet, there was still hot cocoa on his face, he was just letting the hot water run over him while he daydreamed, and while in retrospect, I can see the appeal of this, I couldn't deal with it at the time, and I may have done some yelling and banged a bathroom door and washed his hair rather briskly, so that some soap got into his eyes . . . and it irritates me that I was so close to making it through the day without losing my shit, but this one little incident, because it happened so late in the day, when my patience has worn itself thin, was my undoing . . . but I will take solace in what Hamlet says to his buddy Horatio, when he realizes that his fate is out of his control: "when our deep plots do pall . . . there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will."

A Fun Thing To Do If Someone Leaves His/Her Email Open

This prank was the brainchild of my friend Stacey, but I took the ball and ran with it . . . lesser artists borrow, but great artists steal; fellow English teacher Kevin left his email account open in the office, and usually when this happens someone will write an over-the-top absurd epistle of love to the boss or something equally ridiculous that it's immediately recognized as a joke, but instead of the usual tact, Stacey simply e-mailed another teacher (as Kevin) and asked for some Hamlet materials -- so that this teacher would bring them to his room and he wouldn't know why-- and I liked the understated nature of this concept, but thought it would be funnier if twenty people came to see Kevin and he didn't know why, and they didn't really know why either, and so I sent out e-mails to all the English teachers, with headings like "weird rumor" and "crazy coincidence" and "I have something for you" and I left very simple messages, such as "you wouldn't believe who I ran into from your past" and "no big deal but I heard something about you that I don't want to put on e-mail" and "remind me to tell you this story, too complicated to write it" and this worked like a charm, teachers started showing up in his classroom, and he didn't know why and they weren't sure why and finally he ran into the hall, screaming "I don't want anything from anybody! I don't have anything for anybody!" which is a pretty good result for a joke conceived at 7:20 AM on a Friday (after a late pub night on Thursday).

Diwali Miracle

My wife had off yesterday for Diwali-- her district has a high percentage of Indian students and "the festival of lights" is a very popular Hindu and Jain holiday-- and she originally planned to use her free time to take a trip to DSW and buy yet another pair of shoes, but then thought better of it (she has over a hundred pairs of shoes) and she did some fall cleaning instead, and while she was rummaging through a drawer full of art supplies in Ian's room, she found Ian's pet lizard-- alive and well!-- the lizard that has been missing since October 1st when Ian and Alex negligently left him on a toy truck in Alex's room and-- surprise?-- when they returned he was gone . . . so we assumed that he disappeared into the storage space between the walls or was eaten by the dog, but he somehow made it across the hall back to Ian's room and slipped into a dresser drawer-- Umberto Eco calls these moments in movies and books when you have to fill in the time between scenes or chapters "transitional walks" . . . no one knows exactly what happened to Hamlet on that pirate ship, you just have to imagine it, and we'll never now what Bossk did for those 19 days out in "the wild" of our house, but I like to imagine that he had many nocturnal adventures, journeying to the sink to lick water droplets from the cool porcelain, evading the dog (who sleeps in Ian's room and loves to eat small critters) and hunting bugs under Ian's bed . . . anyway, if Catherine didn't have off for Diwali, the lizard would have never been found, so I'm thinking of converting to Hinduism . . . and making Ian do so as well-- he was really sad about the purported death of his lizard, I caught him crying in the shower a week after Bossk had gone missing, and so yesterday Catherine took him out of school an hour early so he could see the miracle of the lizard before going to the middle school soccer game (and so she could bask in her heroic mother-of-the year Diwali light) and also, I should point out that we've got a new mystery to solve, a mouse was eating food on the shelves in the study so Catherine put a glue trap out last night on the table and now the glue trap is gone, which means a mouse is dragging it around somewhere (or the dog ate it) and so while we've got the lizard back in his tank, there's another creature loose in our house, having wacky adventures-- I'll keep you posted.

Trump, Shakespeare, Assassination, Viral Media, Abe Lincoln, Wife-Beating, Etc

James Shapiro's book Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future is far more fun and compelling than the title; Shapiro, a noted Shakespeare scholar, looks at how American Shakespeare productions in eight different periods of American history reflect the politics and predilections of the times . . . so you've got:

1) Othello in 1835 and themes of miscegenation;

2) the cross-dressing genius of Charlotte Cushman, who apparently played Romeo far better than any man could;

3) class warfare, populist riots, elitism, and Macbeth in 1840s Manhattan;

4) Abe Lincoln's meditations on Hamlet . . . apparently he liked Claudius' confession soliloquy (my offense is rank, it smells to Heaven) better than "to be or not to be"

5) The Tempest and immigration in 1916;

6) feminism, the role of the woman and all that in 1948, with The Taming of the Shrew and Kiss Me Kate . . . the way Shrew  was staged often indicated how the director felt about the growing amount of women in the workforce and the role of women in general;

7) adultery and same-sex love in Shakespeare in Love and 12th Night in 1998 . . . apparently major revisions were made to the theatrical version of Shakespeare in Love to make it appropriate for a general movie-going audience-- in the original script, Shakespeare took much longer to realize Viola was a woman and thought he had fallen in love with a man and was confused about his sexuality-- that was the main conflict, but that got stripped down for the 1998 audience, which was just starting to embrace homosexuality;

8) and the wild left/right culture wars of the Trump era, embodied by a version of Julius Caesar wherein a Trump-like figure is assassinated, sparking a firestorm of typical right-wing outrage and internet virality;

and at the heart of this is the fact that America loves Shakespeare even more than England-- and it often evokes our darkest sins in a way that we can handle and discuss: incest, suicide, adultery, racism, sexism, class warfare, democracy, tyranny, etc and it would be a shame if the same thing happened in America that happened in England in 1642-- the theaters were shut down because of civil war between parliament and the crown, ending in the beheading of Charles I . . . hopefully the right won't abandon Shakespeare as elitist melodrama and the left won't abandon him because he was a white male (though the term didn't exist yet) and we'll be able to use him to air our debates and grievances and politics in an artistic and public forum.

Dogs and Shakespeare

Our family is dog-sitting for a dog that does not respond to his name -- and nothing is more embarrassing than the "master" trying to grab an evasive dog at the dog park; I felt like King Claudius in the Kenneth Branagh production of Hamlet, when he awkwardly attempts to grab the mad and strait-jacketed Ophelia -- while still maintaining his kingly demeanor -- and she eludes him (2:54 in the clip above) -- the only consolation is that my dog, sensing an opportunity to show off his good behavior, because a model pet, loyal and attentive, in order to show me that he cannot and will not be replaced by an interloper.

Perks of my Job

Teaching is fairly predictable: once you've taught a topic a few times, you know what questions the kids will ask and you know what issues will raise interesting discussions, but there are occasional super-excellent unpredictable moments along the way (such as this one) that are spontaneous and priceless, and something in that vein happened yesterday afternoon; I was giving the kids some background on Shakespeare, as we were about to begin Hamlet and I told them: "Chaucer was before Shakespeare, he wrote the Canterbury Tales in the late 1300's and he wrote them in Middle English-- which is really hard to read . . . but Shakespeare wrote in a more modern kind of English, which is much easier to read, it was named after the ruler of the time . . . anyone know what kind of English it was called, Shakespeare's English?" and a lovely girl-- an intelligent girl, I should add, so you don't get the wrong impression from this one particular response, a response given late in the day in the midst of a dark and snowy February afternoon, while I was lecturing about iambic pentameter and the Globe Theatre -- anyway, this wonderful girl sitting in the front left gamely took a shot at my question about the kind of English spoken during Shakespeare's time, a kind of English named after the ruler of the time; she said, "Metric English?" and her answer didn't really register in my brain, and I said, "No . . . Elizabethan English" and then there was a beat, and then the entire class realized why she said "Metric English" and we all laughed and laughed (even though the official adoption of meter sticks in the UK wasn't until far after Shakespeare's death).

Dave Makes an Inspirational Poster!

This morning during my first period College Writing class, I scrawled a brilliant and inspirational epigram on an 8.5 by 11 piece of printer paper . . . these are seniors and we have one more essay to go before the year is finished-- all we want to do is get this last Rutgers essay complete and on the books, so the successful students can purchase the credits, I can teach some Hamlet, and we can end this shitshow of a year; here is my pearl of wisdom . . . designed to curtail procrastination and inspire action:

You can't stop writing until you start writing.

The End is Nigh

In class today, Hamlet-- who recently returned to Denmark from a near-death adventure with pirates-- confronted Yorick's skull today and the inevitability of decay . . . and my seniors, who returned from their near-death adventures over prom weekend, must now also face their own imminent decay-- they are graduating and growing older by the minute and will never look this way again (also, I'm writing this over the din of professional lawncare equipment-- that shit is so LOUD).