Category: Uncategorized

Most of the posts in this category are simply leftovers from a previous era before the site had categories. Over time I plan to reduce that number to zero and remove this category. Until then, here they are. I had to put something in the box.

And The Most Influential Book For The Facebook Generation Is….

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

Harry Potter.

So says this Facebook research project that asked users to list, in their Facebook status, “10 books that have stayed with you in some way.”

First of all I think we need to get our terms straight. The Mashable article I’m linking to says “influential” books.  The request was “books that have stayed with you.” That’s not even remotely the same thing. I can sing you the rubber ducky song from Sesame Street but I’m not sure how much you could say it influenced my life. Likewise you are influenced by many different events in your life, without being able to recall them explicitly upon request.  Memorable and influential are not the same thing.

Second, I think I’d like to see this data broken out by age groups. The younger you are, the less time books have had to stay with you. Someone in their fifties or sixties stating that Catcher in the Rye (#9, 1951) stayed with them tells me something different than a thirty year old telling me that for her it was Hunger Games (#8, 2010). Or vice versa, which would be even more interesting.

Maybe someday, someone will try to assassinate the president and he’ll be found with a well-worn copy of The Fault In Our Stars (#42, 2012) in his back pocket, but today is not that day. The only influence that book’s had time to have is in influencing the parents of twelve year old girls across America to let them see the PG-13 movie.  (For the record my twelve year old girl has not read the book or seen the movie. I have read the book.)

It also really bugs me, by the way, that the Mashable author says “Unsurprisingly” the #1 went to Harry Potter. Is it unsurprising because you’re a twenty-something who hasn’t read many other books besides those, and still thinks that they are great literature? Or should that be taken more as an “it figures” commentary on the poor reading habits of the Facebook universe? I hope the latter.

To keep it relevant to this site, does anybody want to guess where Shakespeare shows up? He only shows up once, at #30, with Hamlet. I can find no other entry in the list that is older than this, however, so we’ll give him special points for being memorable after four hundred years. Well, not counting the Bible and Book of Mormon. Those always show up on these lists, just out of sheer numbers.

I guess I’m trying to figure out whether there’s anything to learn from this list. Does it even make sense for The Help (#48, 2009) to appear on a list next to Kerouac’s On the Road (#43, 1976)? Or childhood favorite Where The Sidewalk Ends (#77, 1974) alongside Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (#78, 2009) which half the audience read for the sex and the other half read for the computer hacking bits?

Here’s a theory. Let’s look at how many books out of the top 100 had a movie or tv version come out in the last, oh, say ten years.  I count 27 of them.   That’s actually lower than I expected, I’ll admit. But I’m sure it’s a pretty big contributing factor. I find it hard to believe that so many people actually read Gone With the Wind (#16) or Les Miserables (#60) and it didn’t have at least something to do with the movie/stage versions.

Personally I’ve read about a third of these.  A number of them are on my “never got around to it but probably should” list, but I tried that once with Catcher in the Rye and it just wasn’t worth it. I’d be willing to bet that many people answered with books that they had some familiarity with, and didn’t necessarily limit themselves to “read it cover to cover”.  If I consider all of the entries on the list where I saw the movie, or at least attempted to read the book? My number doubles.

What do you think of the list?  What surprises do you find?

So Lady Macbeth was Pontius Pilate?

~ duane ~ 3 Comments

Spotted this article on 5 Cliches That Mean More Than You Think and figured maybe there’d be some Shakespeare in it.  I was right, but not in the way I thought!

Cliche #2 is “I wash my hands of it,” something that, the notes tell me, is known as the ‘Macbeth Effect‘. Really? Shakespeare gets to call dibs on ritually cleansing yourself morally as well as physically? Because I’m pretty sure that Lady M was beaten to the kitchen sink by Pontius Pilate when he sent Jesus to his fate.

I get that there’s a difference in the guilt thing. Pilate washed his hands of it and that was that, he never thought of it again.  Lady M, well, we know what happened to her. But I’m questioning the assumption that everybody who says “I wash my hands of it” really means “I will try to wash my hands of it because of the moral stain I feel that will never quite go away.” I think it’s quite possible to wash your hands of something and never look back.

Then again, on the “think outside the box” cliche…

Study participants came up with fewer creative answers when they were literally sitting inside a cardboard box than the people who were seated next to the box.

I think that maybe this is a very silly study that I shouldn’t taking so seriously.

Review : “Teaching Will” by Mel Ryane

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

So the other day, the good people at Familius wrote and asked if I’d like a review copy of Mel Ryane’s “Teaching Will : What Shakespeare and 10 Kids Gave Me that Hollywood Couldn’t“. A book about an actress who starts a Shakespeare Club at the local elementary school? How could I resist?

Having gone into my own children’s classrooms since they were in the first grade (which would translate to maybe six years old, for my non US audience), I admit that I was looking for tips. All I ever do is a one time unit on some Shakespearean topic of the teacher’s choice, I’ve never had the guts (nor the opportunity) to set up a full length after school program, culminating in a performance. This is exactly what the author does.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: my POV for stuff like this is always, “I’m in it for the Shakespeare.” The Shakespeare bits will exert their force on me like a magnet. The more Shakespeare, the more drawn I am into the book.

Having said that, there’s not much Shakespeare in this. This is primarily a book about the author’s adventures in trying to teach these children how to work together to achieve something that they and most everyone else thinks is beyond their abilities. But it could just as easily have been about teaching them how to sing, or play baseball. A scene where a child finally “gets” the rhythm of iambic pentameter might as well have been the scene where the catcher finally manages to get the cut off throw to second in time to tag the runner.

Perhaps my baseball analogy isn’t completely fair, however, because that makes it more about competition. You’d expect the big climax of a baseball story to be the ragtag team of misfits winning the big game. Shakespeare is not about competing with anyone or anything, except maybe your own limiting beliefs about what you can accomplish.

The big climax of this story is the performance at the end of the year. With each chapter comes a week of rehearsal, chaos and catastrophe, and I spent the entire book thinking, “She’ll never pull this off.” Half the time it was impossible to tell who was playing each role because half her students quit and the other half refuse to play the parts they are given. It seemed like every chapter ended with the author going home to her dinner with her husband, sipping a glass of wine and pondering why she’d gotten herself into this in the first place.

A few words on that subject. The book really tells three stories. First is the attempt to put on a Shakespeare performance (A Midsummer Nights’ Dream, by the way, if that wasn’t your obvious first guess). The second is the “behind the scenes” story where we learn all about the author’s interactions with the kids, their own family situations, and basically all about life outside Shakespeare Club. Which kids hate each other, and why? Which parents are supportive of the idea and which are just using it as glorified daycare? It probably should not come as a surprise that this had to be a … what’s the politically correct term to use here … ethnically diverse, lower income, dare I say “inner city” environment? Nobody ever seems to want to tell the story of upper middle income white kids? I admit to making the comparison to Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, only with elementary school children. I hope that doesn’t sound racist of me. It comes from a POV that I can’t escape. When I walk into a classroom and try to teach Shakespeare to kids I will not have to deal with those issues. I respect and appreciate that somebody is doing it, hey, more power to them. But it makes the story less relevant to my own life. If I went into this book looking for tips about how to wrangle children into performing Shakespeare, too much time was spent hitting me over the head with “yes but don’t forget where these kids come from and the other issues they have to deal with”. That’s true of every kid. Just because their stories are different doesn’t mean that they don’t all bring something unique to the party.

The third story is that of the author’s childhood and her relationship to her own parents. I just plain didn’t care for these bits. Whose story are you most interested in telling? I would have preferred more content about the actual play rehearsals. I suppose it’s only now that I realize the subtitle of the book is “What Shakespeare and 10 kids gave *me*…” so perhaps that was really her goal all along? If so, I clearly missed it.

But, back to the story. I approached the end of the book, the performance was only a week away, students were still fighting and dropping out and chaos still reigned. Through the entire book I’d been saying, “This is a failure, and it will end.” It did not. The show must go on, and it did. It’s not a big movie scene with the whole town packed into the auditorium. On the contrary, the author goes to great lengths to let us know that some of the parents could hardly be bothered to show up at all. The performance goes exactly as expected, mistakes are made, lines forgotten, props dropped, and generally the chaos of rehearsal projects itself upon the stage, exactly like you’d expect in any other elementary school production.

“When it was over, we all cheered.”

I admit with no shame that my eyes watered and my vision became blurry the instant I read that. Hell it’s happening again just recalling it so I can write this. Good god, isn’t that what it’s all about? They’re kids for heaven’s sake. Of course it’s not perfect. It’s not about perfection, it’s about accomplishment. They didn’t quit. The author didn’t quit. As a parent I know that feeling of cheering your brains out not for the quality of your child’s performance, but for the very fact that it’s your kid up on that stage, showcasing not how well they did it, but that they did it at all. That’s something to cheer indeed.

“Hamlet’s on my nuts!”

Ok, I’m not telling where that line shows up, I’ll just say that the book is not over at the performance of Midsummer, and when I got to this part I laughed so hard I cried all over again. I’m glad I excused myself from the room to finish the book, otherwise my friends and family would have thought I’d gone mad.

I get that this was not a handbook in how to teach Shakespeare to elementary school children (though I would have liked that very much). It took me most of the book to accept that. As I said at the beginning, the Shakespeare content is a magnet to me. Every scene or line that snuck its way into the text made me want more, and it was difficult not getting that. I think that Ms. Ryane’s story is an excellent one, very well told, and I’m very glad that it had a happy ending. I just wonder how important Shakespeare is to that story.

Does Rosalind Woo Herself?

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

“Self-wooing, my liege, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting.”

The local teen group is performing As You Like It at our local library today, so I’ve been brushing up on the story. Since it’s so common to make the Robin Hood connection with Duke Senior (going off to live in the safety of the forest, away from his enemies, enjoying life with his friends, etc..) I was wondering whether a comparison existed with another classic story, Cyrano De Bergerac.

For those not familiar with the story, Cyrano loves Roxanne but cannot bring himself to tell her his true feelings. She loves Christian, but Christian has no skill at poetry and is afraid to woo her, so Cyrano literally hides in the shadows and feeds Christian romantic things to say to her, effectively wooing Roxanne for himself, in Christian’s name.

How does this compare to As You Like It?  Let’s look.  Rosalind is dressed up as the boy Ganymede when she runs into Orlando. Orlando acknowledges that he loves the lady Rosalind, but does not have the kind of poetry to woo her. Rosalind, as Ganymede, tells him what to say to get the girl.

It’s got some similarities — Cyrano hiding in the bushes is very much like Rosalind hiding under the disguise of Ganymede.  “But!” Bardfilm points out, “Cyrano’s intent was never to teach Christian how to woo Roxanne, but to win her himself.”

This is true. But still, are they all that different? Rosalind has this idea of her dream man, and knows exactly what he will say and do to woo her.  Orlando is basically the mannequin in this story going through the motions of turning Rosalind’s dreams into reality. She plays both the role of Cyrano and Roxanne, and Orlando is literally the middle man. She can’t marry herself. She needs a man. So she turns Orlando into the man that she wants, without him ever realizing it.

I don’t know, maybe it’s a silly idea, but sometimes those are fun too.

Shakespearean Ice Bucket Challenges

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Weeks ago, maybe you saw a few of your friends dumping buckets of ice water over their heads on Facebook. Then sports figures, politicians, and celebrities. I even saw Kermit the Frog do one, which I thought was hysterical — “Being an amphibian, dumping an ice cold bucket of water over my head could very likely put me into a dormant state where my heart my actually stop.”

Of course it’s all to spread the message to Stop ALS, so it’s all for a good cause.

Your Favorite Shakespeareans Tackle the Ice Bucket Challenge

Let’s start with Nathan Fillion, who gets modern day credit for being a Shakespearean thanks to his portrayal of Dogberry in Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing
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He calls out Tom Hiddleston, who took up the challenge:

He in turn nominates Benedict Cumberbatch and Helena Bonham Carter. Mr. Cumberbatch is about to tackle Hamlet, while Ms. Bonham-Carter has a number of credits, including Ophelia to Mel Gibson’s 1990 Hamlet.  (He also nominated Luke Evans. Now, I don’t know who that is, but I’ll come back to it in a minute.  Trust me.)

So here’s Mr. Cumberbatch making the best faces, doing it naked:

And now Ms. Bonham Carter, who doesn’t even get out her speech before the dude behind her can’t wait any longer.

But why should all these youngsters have the fun?  Sir Ian himself also played the game after being nominated by … Luke Evans.  See how everything is deeply intertwingled?

I don’t know who nominated Dame Judi Dench, but I love that she still looks and sounds like a queen even when getting doused:

Alas, Sir Patrick Stewart does not want to play. Or, rather, he opts to write a big check and instead puts his ice where it belongs, in his glass.  That would be funnier if I didn’t have such a huge list of his contemporaries playing along.

Finally, there’s this guy, even though he forgot his line. Consider yourselves challenged.