Continued from yesterday’s discussion when I realized that the following does not fit in a comment 🙂

JM wrote, "I guess it comes down to a philosophical, rather than a simple black and white choice for me. "

Which was, actually, my initial point – go back and look where I specifically spoke of not making it an either/or thing. Knowledge is an interesting thing.  We can get it for ourselves, and then we can impart it to others.  Both take effort on our part.  Though technically people can learn from you even when you didn’t intend to teach, I’m talking about the deliberate awareness of "I am trying to teach you something" in this case. My point was not for people sit on the "I have X much knowledge and therefore wish to hang with people who have (X+1) or (X-1) knowledge", but rather to look at the forces that compel us in one direction or another.  I could focus on learning, or "going deeper" to use our original analogy, to the point where I care about little else.  Or I could take what I know and spend the rest of my life imparting that to others, and though maybe I might increase my knowledge a bit here and there, it would be a side effect of my teaching, and not the primary goal. Of course those are the polar ends, much like the person who’s never seen the ocean versus the dude who builds his own bathysphere to visit the Marianas Trench.  Everybody ends up in the middle.  My original point was to get into which way the forces pull you *more*.  Is it more valuable to you to increase your own knowledge, or to impart your knowledge to others?  Not an either/or, and if I’d asked "what is valuable to you" then of course the answer is "both".  But reality is rarely 50/50, and it would be a pretty poor argument for people to say "Oh, both equally, all the time."  Tangent : When I interview programmers I’ll often divide the world of software into broad areas like "user interface", "server-side / infrastructure" and "database", and then say "Where are you most happy? Pick one."  Never in all my time asking that question has anybody comfortably said "Oh, server side, definitely" (or what have you).  Every person, without fail, tries to hedge and say "Well, I can do them all."  That’s why I ask it, because I didn’t ask whether you could do them all, I asked which one makes you the happiest, and for you to answer that question you need to pick one. Tangent over. Different Tangent : A long long time ago, when I hung out on USENET newsgroups, I once put forth "Duane’s Rule of Categories" that says, "Whenever you propose a list in which you claim all people fit into N categories, regardless of the size of N, the majority of your responses will be from people arguing that they do not fit into any of your categories." Second tangent over. So, back to the question at hand, since I’m getting into it now :).  Let’s go back to our scalar that now goes between "100% Teach" and "100% Learn".  It *approaches* those two ends, and naturally cannot ever really touch them, so let’s stop talking about absolutes that make no sense in the real world.  You have to place yourself on this spectrum somewhere.  I can’t stop you from claiming "50/50, right in the middle!" (see tangents #1 and #2 :)) but I don’t think it does justice to the debate to claim that, since it’s almost certainly not true.  You are an entity of limited resources (there’s 24 hours in the day for all of us) so there will be times when you have to pick one opportunity over another. Got a side picked, even if it’s just 49/51 in favor one way or the other?  This spectrum is what originally had me thinking.  Because the math doesn’t balance.  If I know something, then I can teach that to 100s of people, right? But I can only learn it once, and learning it is, primarily, for little ol’ me.  True that I can pass on what I learn, but it’s not like it’s perfectly 1:1, I’m a human being not an information sieve.  It’s this knowledge lifecycle that intrigues me, because of course to teach you have to learn, but they happen at such different rates that they have to find a different equilibrium for each person.  The professor with his nose in a book would in all likelihood, if asked a question, answer it.  That doesn’t mean he takes 20 hours out of his research time every week to go teach a class, unless the university forces him to do so.  Or he could be the young upstart who spends most of his time hanging out on blogs like this one looking for people to chat with, and totally ignores his mandatory research until publish-or-perish kicks in and he has to come up with something. Five years ago I found that I wanted to talk about Shakespeare, but had nobody to talk about it with.  I’d spot a reference in a tv commercial, point it out to people, and have nobody know what I was talking about.  I didn’t, however, rush off to sign up for Shakespeare night-school classes so I could find a like-minded audience.  Instead, I started this blog.  Now when I want to talk about Shakespeare I have a place to do it, and people who listen and want to talk about it with me.  This has, in turn, brought more Shakespeare into my life since he comes up in conversation far more frequently (teachers, coworkers, playgroup moms are always asking me, “So I hear you’re all about Shakespeare? You run a site about him? What’s your favorite play? Is it true he might have been gay?”)  On the whole I expect that my audience is learning more than teaching, by the simple fact that most traffic reads but does not post.  The folks that post are the ones I learn from.  There are Shakespeare sites that go way, way over my head.  I could spend time on them and learn much more than I currently know, but I don’t.  I tend to dip my toe every now and again, and take a little taste.  I don’t have to blog at all, I could just research for my own interests.  I could blog less, and at a higher/deeper level.  But those things don’t interest me.  What I wanted to create, and hopefully have, is a place where anybody who wants to talk about Shakespeare, at any level, can jump in and do so.  And by existing, we raise the universe’s Shakespeare quotient by a couple points 🙂 On that note… see ya.

We’ve covered this ground before, but as I listen to Bill Bryson’s “History of Everything” book an analogy occurred to me that I wanted to get down. You can’t ever really fully “get” Shakespeare.  The man’s just not around anymore, and he left few clues as to what he was really up to.  Even if he was still with us and could answer our questions, we’d still be limited by the simple and unfortunate fact that we cannot crawl in his brain and be him for a little while (though how much we might wish to be!) There’ve been other analogies – I like the line attributed to Peter Brooks about “splitting the atom and unleashing the infinite energy”.  But right now I’m thinking about swimming in the ocean.  Go deep.  Deeper.  While it’s not technically infinite, it’s pretty damned close enough.  We’re about as near to understanding the deepest part of the ocean as we are to understanding how Shakespeare felt about his wife and kids. We may think we know, we may have evidence on which to base reasonable guesses, but do we know? Do we have first hand experience? No, not even close. So, here’s my question.  On the one end of the spectrum you’ve got oceanographers who have seen more of the oceanic depths than most mere mortals, and on the other you could occasionally find somebody who’s never actually seen or touched an ocean.  And you’ve got a bunch of people somewhere in the middle.  Likewise, with Shakespeare, you’ve got figures who’ve spent their lives combing over every last smudge and speck of every letter of every Folio, and you’ve got people who maybe have some general concept of the word Shakespeare but wouldn’t know their Hamlet from Green Eggs and Ham. Where would you rather have people be? Most regular people with no interest in studying marine biology can enjoy a dip in the ocean.  They may even like to swim with the sting rays or take in some scuba diving.  And at every turn there could be a professional who has done more, deeper, saying “No, you fool, you’ve barely scratched the surface, you have no idea what you’re missing! You just don’t get it!” Most regular people are also not Shakespeare academics, or theatre folk.  But they can still take in a play, maybe read them for fun, maybe quote the man from time to time.  And there can always be the Shakespearean equivalent of the oceanographer turning his nose up, sighing and saying, “No, you fool, you’ve barely scratched the surface, you have no idea what you’re missing! You just don’t get it!” You’re down there in the deep end, hanging out, checking out the wonders that only you can see.  Perhaps it is your job, and you’ve got the benefit of having someone pay you to get better and go deeper.  Or maybe you’re self taught.  Either way, what would you rather have? One or two others down there with you who equally “get” it? Or would you rather swim back up toward the more shallow end and entice more people to get into the water in the first place? In a way it is a very specific, somewhat selfish question – what would you prefer.  But it’s also got a broader application.  In a given situation where there is some sort of “finish line”, is it better for a small group to cross the finish line, or for a much larger group to all move closer to the line?  What if we were talking about something like grade point average?  I’m tempted to bust out the Star Trek  reference (“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”), but I’m trying very hard not to make it a question of “outweigh” because that implies some sort of failure of the smaller group, which I don’t think is the case here. (I’ve also just realized, while writing this, that I caught a piece of the movie “A Beautiful Mind” on television late the other night, and I’m beginning to wonder if I’m directly channeling John Nash’s revision of Adam Smith …) Anyway, that’s enough of that.  Feel free to dig in and tear apart.   P.S. – I think regular readers know my answer.  I’ll never be a “deep” Shakespeare guy, and even if somebody told me tomorrow that I could support myself doing nothing but this I suspect that I’d still be right about on the same level I’ve always been.  I don’t even love having the deep discussions, and admit freely that people lose me quickly.  Given the choice, I’ll take a world where in any given crowd somebody could come up with a Shakespeare reference, and have an equal chance that the rest of the crowd actually *gets* it.

http://community.livejournal.com/bard_in_boston/78160.html

Somerville’s Theatre@First is looking for directors for our seventh annual one-acts festival. This year our theme is "shaken up Shakespeare" so we’re in the market for scenes from the canon, reinterpreted with a modern (or not-so-modern) twist!

[ Story continues, at the link… ] Personally I’ve never had the skills to be a director.  I know what I’d like, in my brain, but I could never articulate it in a meaningful way.  I’d love to see somebody one day tackle my “Juliet is blind” idea.

I’m really sorry that I missed this.  It’s been a long time since I was in college, but this sounds like a blast. http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2010/03/06/for_shakespeare_fans_at_wellesley_the_plays_the_thing/ Imagine a dorm full of kids performing Shakespeare.  Several plays at once, kids dropping in and out as other needs require (i.e. sleep, food, class…)  24 hours of straight Shakespeare. The whole thing apparently played out on Twitter.  Don’t ask me where I was, I must have been seriously asleep at the switch.

“Shakespeare’s words never stop; that’s the rule,’’ said Ashley Gramolini, a senior theater major and the Shakespeare Society president.

That just gives me warm fuzzy feelings.  I like a world where Shakespeare’s words never stop, if even for just 24 hours.

Now, see, here’s a better way to do it.  I posted that lesson plan about “Plan Romeo and Juliet’s Wedding” and we all tore it apart for just plain wrongness on many levels.  http://community.livejournal.com/quillofferings/131603.html Instead consider these 5 quick scenes in which the author has taken an existing scene from the play (welllll…..4 out of 5), and then with a twist, changed everything. I think I like #2 because you’ve still got a story with that one.  With #1 there’s no story.  #3 and #4, which are basically the same, you get a happy-if-unsatisfying ending. The author and her commenters mostly like #5 the best, but I like that one the least.  If you throw in “here’s what wisdom and maturity would have taught them” then you’re back into the whole area where you’ve so fundamentally changed the point that the story need not ever have been written.  It’s almost sanctimonious in its “Well obviously this is the way it would have gone if the characters were smart” argument. What this continues to prove, however, is that none of us is Shakespeare.  It’s fine the way it is, and it’s silly of us to try rewriting it.