My teaching debut gets more bowdlerized by the minute! I tried pitching a simplified version of the Mechanicals, and even still I was told “words like ‘lover’ and ‘killed’ are not acceptable, unless we had permission slips from all the parents.” If you can’t have Bottom kill himself, what’s the point?

At this rate, there’s pretty much no performance that we can do from Midsummer.  I’m losing faith in this project rapidly.
With just a week to go before showtime, I don’t even want to attempt getting a different play cleared, I just have to pitch the whole idea of doing any acting out of the text.

I really and truly don’t want to just lecture on the subject, that will be so boring.  I have some puzzles that I can give the kids as takeaways to do on their own, but I desperately need some interactive material or games that we can play. Help!

On a recent episode of Science Friday that had the story of the scientist who claims to have found evidence of the mythical Kraken.  His evidence is patterns found in a “midden”, an undersea pile of bones.  He argues that a creature of some intelligence organized the bones into patterns on purpose.

Debunkers of his evidence point to that bit of our brains that likes to find patterns in things.  When you see a cloud that looks like a kitty, it’s not because some magical being in charge of clouds shaped it like a kitty on purpose, it’s simply because that particular random combination of particles made your brain think, “Kitty!”  It is exactly the same as playing the lottery, watching “1 2 3 4 5 6” come out, and thinking, “Wow! What are the odds?!”  Exactly the same as the numbers coming out 35 17 3 4 22 30, actually.  We just don’t attach any significance to that sequence like we do to the other one.

What’s this got to do with Shakespeare?  Well, what if everything that we’ve read into Shakespeare’s work over the centuries is just that – stuff that we’ve read into it, rather than stuff that he deliberately put there?  What if he was just a guy who was just cranking out whatever got him paid, and he really and truly had no insight into human nature at all?

I often wonder about that. It’s a pretty safe bet that Shakespeare never sat at his quill and thought, “If I write this, people will still be talking about it four hundred years from now.”  But it’s also unlikely that if he was just churning out the first thing that came to his mind that we *would* be talking about him 400 years later.  So the answer is somewhere in the middle.  But at which end?

I got asked one of those “What one question would you ask Shakespeare?” questions the other day.  I decided that I’d ask something along the lines of whether he was just writing one play at a time, just doing what the audience wanted, or if he really did have the idea of something bigger, writing something that would last as long as it has.

In the past I’ve pointed to Sonnet 18 as evidence that he had some clue about his own longevity, what with the fairly obvious “So long as men can breathe and eyes can see, so long lives this” line.  Sounds like he’s coming right out and saying “My work will last forever.”

But then I thought, is he really?  Or is the image more generic, making the simpler point that “Having written this down, it will now last forever.” See what I mean? It’s not that he’s saying “My work will last forever because it is just that great,” maybe he’s simply saying “Stuff that’s written down is basically timeless.”

Thoughts? Are there other good examples that look like Shakespeare’s hinting at knowledge of his own timelessness?

As we celebrate the best lyricists in the music business over on Modern Shakespeares, I thought it only made sense to offer up a place to post the opposite end of the spectrum.  Here’s where you can post those lyrics that are so god-awfully bad that you can’t imagine someone had the cahones to write them down in the first place, let alone put them to music and shell out good money to turn them into a consumer product.

Names left out to protect the guilty (and because I’m too lazy to format this all nice and neat), but I think that if you’ve heard any of this songs you know who you want to strangle:

And I was like…
Baby, baby, baby oooh
Like baby, baby, baby nooo
Like baby, baby, baby oooh
I thought you’d always be mine (mine)

It’s not even the mindless repetition on that one that really puts me over the edge, it’s the casual “I was like..” at the beginning.  It’s bad enough that kids use it in casual rapidfire conversation, but to have sat down at a desk with all the time in the world and your entire vocabulary at your disposal, and to have selected that?  Brutal.

Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today i-is Friday, Friday (Partyin’)
We-we-we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today

Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes after…wards
I don’t want this weekend to end

There are so many bad lyrics in that song it’s hard to pick the worst.  I think that “Yesterday was Thursday, today is Friday, tomorrow is Saturday and Sunday comes after…wards” has to win some sort of award, however.

I’m talking pedicures on our toes toes
Tryin on all our clothes clothes
Boys blowin up our phones phones

Remember kids, if you don’t have enough beats in a line, just go ahead and repeat words as often as needed. I’ve heard that Ke$ha is actually a fairly intelligent student of music and knows full well that she’s writing garbage, but she’s doing so on purpose because she knows what gets radio play. I’m not sure I believe that. Or maybe I just don’t want to.

And a special reference to this one, because I know somebody’s going to bring it up:

Hip Hop Marmalade spic And span,
Met you one summer and it all began
You’re the best girl that I ever did see,
The great Larry Bird Jersey 33
When you take a sip you buzz like a hornet
Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole bunch of sonnets

I really had to listen to the song for myself – the lyrics truly are that bad. He even manages to make that last one rhyme by calling them “sornets”.  I’m still trying to figure out what you take a sip of.

Follow any popular music artist long enough and eventually someone will call him (or her) a “modern Shakespeare.”  I use to rail against this, replying with “Contact me in 400 years and we’ll see whether or not anybody’s still listening to your guy.  Then we can talk.”

Recently I was adding music to my playlist (I only really listen to music while programming, and for that I have one very specific playlist) and running music through Pandora for suggestions.  I laughed when Pandora told me that it had suggested a song because I like “intelligent lyrics.” 

That reminded me of the modern Shakespeare argument, so I decided to lighten up and have fun with it.  Let’s hear about some modern Shakespeares of yours.  Specifically we’re talking about lyrics.  What lyrics of what song make you stop and listen and say, “Wow, that was very impressive writing.”

I’ll start off with two examples that show my very unusual taste in music.  The first comes from Eminem’s Lose Yourself:

Too much for me to wanna
Stay in one spot, another day of monotony
Has gotten me to the point, I’m like a snail
I’ve got to formulate a plot or I end up in jail or shot
Success is my only motherf_cking option, failure’s not

Look at that rhyming structure, where he somehow manages to combine “wanna” and “spot” into “monotony”, and then rolls it right over into “gotten me.”  (I apologize from dropping in the curse word, but that’s a reality of modern music.  We don’t censor our Shakespeare when we quote him.)  Much of Eminem’s music does a pretty good job of telling whatever story he wants to tell, which granted is often a variation on “Screw everybody that doesn’t believe in me,” but I’m still impressed by the variety he gets into his lyrics.  Most songs of his that I enjoy walk that line between “I’m just talking to you, telling you a story” and “I happen to be speaking in rhyme when I do it.” And he does it without getting so gutter so fast that I’m embarrassed to listen to it. 

And now for something completely different, consider the hook from Adele’s current hit Someone Like You:

Nevermind,
I’ll find
someone like you.
I wish nothing but the best, for you too.
Don’t forget me, I beg, I remember you said:-
“Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead”

If you’ve not heard the song, it is (in my interpretation) the story of a woman who never stopped loving her former flame, and tries to get back into his life in the hopes that he, too, never stopped loving her – but finds instead that he did indeed find someone else, got married, and is perfectly happy.

“Nevermind I’ll find” is a great hook (especially the way Adele belts it out), and for me it’s the “never mind” that makes the song.  Had it just been “I’ll find someone else” then it would be a different song, it would have a positive “I’ll get over this, I’ll be ok” vibe to it.  But instead it’s “This is the world to me, I’m betting everything on you feeling the same way….oh, you don’t feel the same way…oh, ok….never mind,” and it’s so clearly just this crushing moment for a woman who’s accepting (unwillingly) the truth that the best she’ll ever have is a shadow of who she wanted. Especially when you couple it with that “I wish nothing but the best for you.”   And that’s all just what I get out of the story of the song, that’s not even saying anything about that brilliant structure that starts out so short and memorable and then ends on those drawn out slow lines.

All right, there’s your quick glance into my musical taste.  It’s worth mentioning that Eminem is in my programming playlist but Adele is not. While I like both songs, the potential random transition from one into the other is too distracting for me when I’m working.

What else have you got?  I’m not looking for “Hey did you know that Sting wrote a bunch of literary references in his work?”  Yes, yes I did.  I want to hear about the songs that you think are impressive, not just interesting.