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Osama Dozen-Dongs posted:Speaking of Shylock, I've heard it claimed that the portrayal wasn't originally meant to be positive, but rather a sort of base, materialistic, animal-like being who points to his flesh instead of his soul. Is there any base to this? Shylock's a real Rabbit/Duck. I think you can legitimately read him as a cartoonish villain written with some superficial gestures at sympathetic depth and complexity, or as a genuinely sympathetic character who's put in the position of -- and punished for becoming -- a villain he never wanted to be. It's important to remember that Shylock isn't the central character in Merchant, and if there's any trend in Shakespeare among secondary characters it's that they play in an enormous range. What Shylock has in addition to his range, though, is a context of antisemitism that turns character interpretations into proxies for complicated political argument, and in the process elevates the character to a centrality that I doubt he was intended to have. We wouldn't ever stage Hamlet as the story of Polonius, but every production of Merchant I've seen has really been some version of The Tragedy of Shylock. So people interpret Shylock as though he were a primary character rather than a secondary one, and in the process ask something like the wrong questions. Nobody would read Hamlet as a statement about what it means to be a stepfather, or what Shakespeare thought about stepfathers, even thought the play has a stepfather in Claudius; to the fragile extent you can make a play about an issue, it seems sensible that the issue ought pertain to a well-explored character rather than a secondary one. That sounds airy, but Shylock is in Merchant a lot less than people think. He has about half as many lines as Portia, which makes his role about the size of Toby Belch's in Twelfth Night or Aaron the Moor's in Titus Andronicus -- they all weigh in at about 350. In other words: If you read Shylock for sympathetic complexity you're going to fail if your standards for complexity are the same ones you'd apply to e.g. Othello or Falstaff or Hamlet. The role isn't big enough to allow them. That doesn't necessarily make Shylock a stereotype, but characters of Shylock's size tend to be either stereotypes (like Aaron or Toby), subject to massive interpretive range (like Gertrude), or both (like, well, Shylock). Furthermore, Shakespeare's use of stereotype characters in Toby and Aaron didn't make him incapable of writing fully-realized and sympathetic characters of the same types (fat epicures and moors) in Falstaff and Othello, so I'd be cautious about any reading of Shylock that treats him as a central character. Toby, Aaron, Falstaff, and Othello show just how different -- and how much more human -- Shakespeare's 1000-line characters can feel compared to their 350-line counterparts.
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Sep 29, 2016 19:44
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3Romeo posted:Oh, and what's your hot take on the 2016 Trump zeitgeist? I don't even know anymore. The Obama presidency brought out the crazy in poor white people the way cocaine brings out the crazy in blonde strippers. So that makes the Trump candidacy something like a 3AM phone call from a bow-tattooed single mom screaming that she loves you so much she wants to eat your face. Now we're at the point in the race where she's driven her Eclipse across the lawn and she's kicking the front door, and as much as I know no good can come of letting her in I can also feel my death wish getting a boner.
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Sep 29, 2016 20:27
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Brainworm posted:I don't even know anymore. This is the most beautiful commentary on the race I've had the pleasure to read. Thank you, sir.
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Oct 6, 2016 17:44
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Defended my diss back in August and getting my degree in a few weeks, which makes me another reader of this thread who began and completed a doctorate during the life cycle of this thread. Thanks Brainworm for the informative and fun reads along the way! Now if I can just gull some committee into giving me a job...
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Dec 13, 2016 02:14
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I am amazed this thread is still going, which I shouldn't be because it's on the A/T front page despite starting in 2010 some time. It's been a great read, and I'll search back through it when I've read the books it references. Because of you, Brainworm, I bought Paradise Lost yesterday. Something I've wanted to do for a long time. Maybe twelve years ago I was minding the Students' Union office come book shop. Sitting, bored, I took one of the many traded-in copies of Paradise Lost* ** off the shelf, read few the first few pages, then decided to buy pints with my €10 instead. I've made quite a few stabs at writing over the past two years with self pub'ed novels, essays, poetry, and short stories and I wonder if a wasted business degree could have been switched to something more suited twelve years ago had I gone home with that book. Probably not, but I still wonder. I've read Book I, and knowing the opportunity to engage with local academics would cost me money I'm looking forward to reading analysis of it. At the end of Book I I'm looking to see if anyone else relates with a profound sadness to what has just happened? There's so much evidence of humanity, and all its problems in that first book I'm looking forward to seeing how its addressed. I know people find a lot of sympathy for Satan, so maybe my interpretation is on the right. For an actual question for you I'm wondering if you find there's less devotion to exploring the depths of literature to the point of amateur specialisation or nerdery now than there was ten or twenty years ago? And I don't mean it in a way that people aren't interested, or aren't determined, rather the way people approach media has changed? People are more willing to create now than they are to consume. To give some reasoning: One thing that scares me is the "read, read, read," advice for writers. I enjoy writing and I read a huge amount during my teens. But for the last ten plus years I've found it very difficult to force my way through a book, and novel length fiction is incredibly difficult. I know you put this down to life bullshit, which certainly holds true to me. I would imagine there's definite truth to the thought that I've written more fiction in the past eighteen months than I've read. But I'm talking more about the effects of society on media than my own e/n problems. I have read forum posts, many threads as good as this, and I've read tonnes of news articles, serious journalism, literary and academic articles, Tweets (not facebook posts,) Wikipedia articles, manuals, and serious debate in chat rooms. I've also seen far more people interacting online, for good and bad, and there's more creating happening than I could ever have imagined twenty years ago. I'm a bit older than is possibly typical for the millenial attention span problem but it does make me wonder if the attention given to older texts will wane? Especially older texts that work at a level that needs serious interrogation. Not that this is happening in academia but by the people out there who have so much easier routes to quick hits, as well as the ability to create and share their own work that they'd rather do that, for both good and bad.*** I guess people could always write a novel, but printing it was difficult. Now it's entirely possible to get a novel onto Amazon at no cost to yourself. With a webcam you an create youtube videos and podcasts, and share them with anyone. There's free wordpress sites for blogging, and I know there's decent photography and film being made with iPhones. When there's so much instant doses of media, and it's so much easier to create, will (or do) people spend less time on study/research, and more time getting the thing they want out to the world? And how will that relate to the state of art? *Ha! Asterisks'ed footnotes. ** I took one of the many traded in Paradises Lost would work too. *** And the other problem of that: the bubble. I feel like releasing my writing is like howling into a gale. The people close to me will pay some bit of attention but the idea of actually communicating on a large level seems incredibly unlikely. I know alienation is ancient, but the strength of the alienation seems stronger, and more dangerous.
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Dec 17, 2016 20:12
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elentar posted:Defended my diss back in August and getting my degree in a few weeks, which makes me another reader of this thread who began and completed a doctorate during the life cycle of this thread. Thanks Brainworm for the informative and fun reads along the way! Congrats, dude. In the time this thread's been going the whole field has shifted from interviewing at MLA to using e.g. Skype to vet people for campus interviews, so once upon a time I'd have offered to get you a beer at MLA so we could talk about where you're interviewing. But PM me if you've got questions about anyplace. Sometimes I know someone who knows someone, so maybe I can get you a read on what it's like to work there or what hiring priorities might not have been expressed in the job ad.
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Dec 18, 2016 19:43
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Mrenda posted:[...] I'm wondering if you find there's less devotion to exploring the depths of literature to the point of amateur specialisation or nerdery now than there was ten or twenty years ago? And I don't mean it in a way that people aren't interested, or aren't determined, rather the way people approach media has changed? People are more willing to create now than they are to consume. I don't know that I have any good way of knowing. My intuition is that people have always been creative; there's never been a shortage of people writing -- for instance -- cringeworthy erotica or derivative science fiction. What I think we're seeing is a more efficient harvesting of that work into the public. In other words, I suspect the change we've seen is in what people do with what they write, not in the amount they write and (with some exceptions) in its nature. Unlike mixing music or editing film, I don't think that writing a novel has become any easier or less time-consuming than it was twenty years ago. The digital revolution happened much earlier for word processing than it did for other media. Also, there are about 40 million more Americans today than there were twenty years ago. Even if everything else stayed constant, you'd expect to see a 1% year-over-year increase in the amount of public art (or "art") just as a function of a growing population. quote:[...] for the last ten plus years I've found it very difficult to force my way through a book, and novel length fiction is incredibly difficult. I know you put this down to life bullshit, which certainly holds true to me. I would imagine there's definite truth to the thought that I've written more fiction in the past eighteen months than I've read. But I'm talking more about the effects of society on media than my own e/n problems. I went through something similar and still go through phases of it from time to time. If I don't make a deliberate effort to read books, I'll read whatever's at hand -- more and more often, that's whatever I can get on my phone. That's one thing. Another is that I am and have long been an impatient reader. I won't give a novel more than a few pages to get my attention, and I'm quick to drop it if it bogs down. To be fair, that's not exclusive to my reading. My wife notes (complains?) that I'll drop a series after a bad episode, and I think that's about right. It took a lot of convincing for me to pick up Breaking Bad after "The Fly." I don't know how common that is. But the point is that I don't think what you're experiencing is unusual. I have similar experiences myself. On one hand, I'm impatient with my leisure reading because I have a lot more options than I had twenty years ago. On the other, I'm also more likely to kill time by reading something dull (tweets, internet journalism) because the logic of that choice feels different. It's sort of like the difference between watching a specific television show and just watching television. With the second, you're just killing time. If it helps, I found some nice ways to change that habit. The first is culling apps from my phone. The second has been making individual web applications for things I need to do online (banking, grading, and so on). Having a general-purpose browser open is a lot like flipping channels, and it's easy to kill an hour or two that way. That's one thing if you enjoy it, but another if (like me) you wish you'd used that time for something else. quote:When there's so much instant doses of media, and it's so much easier to create, will (or do) people spend less time on study/research, and more time getting the thing they want out to the world? And how will that relate to the state of art? I don't think so. People like to think of students as critics as frustrated artists, and there may some who are. But I think that many (most?) good students study (or good critics write criticism) because they enjoy it for its own sake, not because making art is too difficult. Like, Roger Ebert could have parlayed his success as a critic into a career as a movie writer (his IMdB page credits him on the 1976 film Up, under the pseudonym of Reinhold Timme, and in collaboration with Russ Meyer). Point is, if he' had a yen to make movies he'd have done it. Maybe he'd have embarrassed himself, but he wouldn't have starved. That said, books and movies are still a lot cheaper to make and distribute than they were twenty or thirty years ago. There's more of them, and there's a whole cottage industry built around helping people find out which ones to read and watch. So there's some new space -- meaning demand -- for popular criticism of the "what's good?" variety, which is another way of saying that there are still gatekeepers, but the nature of those gatekeepers has changed. If the zero-reader condition twenty years ago was that my book couldn't get published, the zero-reader condition today is that nobody knows that it exists or cares to read it.
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Dec 18, 2016 20:58
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Brainworm posted:I went through something similar and still go through phases of it from time to time. If I don't make a deliberate effort to read books, I'll read whatever's at hand -- more and more often, that's whatever I can get on my phone. That's one thing. Another is that I am and have long been an impatient reader. I won't give a novel more than a few pages to get my attention, and I'm quick to drop it if it bogs down. To be fair, that's not exclusive to my reading. My wife notes (complains?) that I'll drop a series after a bad episode, and I think that's about right. It took a lot of convincing for me to pick up Breaking Bad after "The Fly." Impatience is a big thing for me, but in many ways it's about a generalised lack of engagement. Part of that is down to deeming something worthy of your time. And part of it is down to impatience. Not in the sense I don't give things much time, but unless I'm looking to respond to something, actively going into it to critique or address it I have a lot of impatience. Something really needs to stand out to grab me. I definitely see this with photography/art. I like my photos (when I don't think there awful,) and a lot of that is because I've put effort into them. With other photographers the situation and context of their work is important. If I go to a gallery I know a curator has decided they're worthy, and at that point I'll decide if the artist appeals to me or not, or if I think the curator is a moron. I've made a trip to the gallery, so the sunk cost in time and effort means I'll address the work. The same happens with the photographers I know. If they produce something I don't appreciate, or at least not quickly I'll spend time with it and ask myself, "What is their intent?" I'll give them the credit from having produced (something appealing to me in the past) that their work is worthy of deeper consideration, and my effort. Even if that effort is just to answer why it doesn't work for me any more. For other work my effort is either from me setting out to find new work, or from a social requirement where I'll give an artist time to have an influence on me. The Creative forums here are an example. I'll spend time with their work over others because of that social connection, whereas if I read their story, or saw their photo elsewhere I wouldn't take the time. That's enough for me to say, cynically that a lot of the poetry and literary world is like a giant pyramid scheme. It's part networking at one level, and part critique/review at another. To get my book, essay or poetry in the hands of someone with the influence to drag other people onto it, I have to buy awful poetry chapbooks, and talk to people who couldn't metre their way out of a Special Olympics sprint. With so many people, at the lower levels in TV, and at pretty much all levels of poetry and fiction looking for something I find it very difficult to engage meaningfully. When people say, "I loved your poem," I've now taken to asking them why. Otherwise I'll just get the simple statement and no engagement. Then you see people worry that they might be wrong about something, and how that can cost them as someone trying to elevate their own work. For me this is a huge problem with the art world: the lack of willingness to engage. And if I'm being honest a lot of the reason I do engage with others is because I'm looking for people to engage with my work. Although I can dress it up knowing I'd like everyone to be more engaged with everyone else. In that sense your earlier comments about the paranoia people have during their grad life was nice: that honesty and your colleagues being respectful but forthright with you is a good thing, and a sign they're worth working with. It's something I really feel is lacking in my world, and I need it if I'm going to push ahead with any of the writing I try. quote:I don't know how common that is. But the point is that I don't think what you're experiencing is unusual. I have similar experiences myself. On one hand, I'm impatient with my leisure reading because I have a lot more options than I had twenty years ago. On the other, I'm also more likely to kill time by reading something dull (tweets, internet journalism) because the logic of that choice feels different. It's sort of like the difference between watching a specific television show and just watching television. With the second, you're just killing time. This goes back to my previous statement. It's not just a matter of being impatient, but the feeling that nothing will come of engaging with so many things. If I watch Captain America there's plenty of places I can go to talk about the competitive, pedarastic tension between Bucky and Wolverine. For most novels I read, or essays, or poems there's none of that. If I could read something, assess my response and then have engagement afterwards I know I'd be far more motivated to finish the drat book. It's in that sense, a more selfish sense that I'm going to poetry readings, and reading other people's blogs and writing responses directly referencing the original piece. If I take the first step of trying to engage with someone maybe more people will engage with me, and down the line with others. And not just because they're a literary agent, or professor in a prestigious school, but because any thought-out opinion is worthy of addressing. quote:I don't think so. People like to think of students as critics as frustrated artists, and there may some who are. But I think that many (most?) good students study (or good critics write criticism) because they enjoy it for its own sake, not because making art is too difficult. Like, Roger Ebert could have parlayed his success as a critic into a career as a movie writer (his IMdB page credits him on the 1976 film Up, under the pseudonym of Reinhold Timme, and in collaboration with Russ Meyer). Point is, if he' had a yen to make movies he'd have done it. Maybe he'd have embarrassed himself, but he wouldn't have starved. This is something I disagree with,* the idea that critique is not creative, and that critique cannot be art. At least if I think of art as something that communicates, inspires thought or evokes feeling. I generally paint with broad strokes so something very specific I read could spark a critique that's not just about someone's writing (Francesca Woodman and an article about therapeutic art is what I'm thinking of,) and that can have me write a response that deals with both the immediate thread of the article, the original art being discussed, and the societal situation that surrounds all of that. What I'm writing is at best an essay on culture, but I don't feel my motivation is any different than when I write romance fiction. quote:That said, books and movies are still a lot cheaper to make and distribute than they were twenty or thirty years ago. There's more of them, and there's a whole cottage industry built around helping people find out which ones to read and watch. So there's some new space -- meaning demand -- for popular criticism of the "what's good?" variety, which is another way of saying that there are still gatekeepers, but the nature of those gatekeepers has changed. If the zero-reader condition twenty years ago was that my book couldn't get published, the zero-reader condition today is that nobody knows that it exists or cares to read it. I hadn't thought about it that way, to be honest. And again I'm rebelling against it because of my own circumstance as a creator. I like Bruce Springsteen as much as the next child of a Dadrock fan, but I don't feel the need to go out and pay for his music. His €0.001 royalty for me listening to his album on Spotify is more than I would ever give him directly. If it wasn't for his cultural position, and ubiquity as a star I could happily ignore him. For me there's art just as good as 75% of his recordings being played to an audience of 30 people in my town. And I guess this is where "The Canon" comes into it. Born in the USA is an album that stands above the vast majority of recordings, at least for me. I read Kafka's The Castle (or part of it) because of Kaska's place in the literary tradition, and his writing was enlightening, at least in what he attempted with his prose. But for the authors publishing in Ireland (where I live) it's only because of local connection, wanting to support Irish industry and my own laziness that I buy their work. If the journals weren't available in my local bookshop I wouldn't seek them out. If someone produced an epic I wouldn't go looking for it because it's not Paradise Lost. I guess that's all a long way of saying the value many see in a lot of work I feel can equally be found in other works. For you it seems that the way to elevate the position of one's writing is through relationships in their work to work that's been elevated to The Canon. In a way my local version of that is the Great Irish Literary Tradition, which I've seen so many try to tap into with horrific results. And from that it's up to me to realise that in all I do. I can engage with the Irish literary tradition, or curse it, but ultimately it's what I deal with*** *Well, not really disagree with it. I disagree with something you didn't say but I'm taking from the statement. And this is the perfect example of what I'm saying in the whole paragraph as well as my blase attitude (and ignorance) for technical and academic terminology, and jargon. ** And a lot of this is how I'm reading Paradise Lost having just finished Book II: that it's all a game.*** The futility in Satan fighting against heaven, unable to defeat God. Yet him not realising that it is his purpose to do this, his purpose as both choice and fate. It can go very nihilistic, Mammon, I think with his "let's wallow in hell with our own cool stuff," or it can go "Let's fight" as with Beelzebub, and ultimately each choice is valid as long as it is your choice. That this is what the revolt is about, along with sin and knowledge, and evil, and at the end of it your free will: the purpose you derive from the risk you take, and finding satisfaction in new purpose from whatever result comes you're way. You're not going to kill god, but you can have fun trying. (And if I knew more about Milton I'd even be willing to say that the entire book is representative of his own risking of heresy by writing an epic about killing God, and him being all, "lol, can't kill god. Imma write it anyway. It shall be a right hoot.") ***I am reading PL because I've always wanted to, but the specific impetus that walked me into the bookshop was reading a thread from a PL Professor. That's the engagement that took my credit card out of my purse.
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Dec 19, 2016 00:05
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Brainworm posted:The second has been making individual web applications for things I need to do online (banking, grading, and so on). Having a general-purpose browser open is a lot like flipping channels, and it's easy to kill an hour or two that way. That's one thing if you enjoy it, but another if (like me) you wish you'd used that time for something else. Do you know of a good resource to learn that skill? I do have a bit of an issue with treating my browsers like channel-flipping myself and this sounds like a possible solution (outside of just pure will-power) but I know jack about coding or programming anything.
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Dec 19, 2016 15:07
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Lowtax, Lowtax's Wives, Anita Sarkeesian and plagiarizing identities who was GaTeWaY I wrote this on shifter forums for her, I got the ideas from some lovely hs class and books, she recompiled the ideas and took credit for them as her own you have a massive liar on your team man Full text of "Sarkeesian2010.pdf (PDFy mirror)" yo pedophile shithead the people at maxogc.net told me one of your ex wives or current wife pretended to be my teenage transsexual shifter identity GaTeWaY aka g8w4y the 300 ping sniper on hillhse that went on to be a top ranked Shifter_v1g and Shifter_K leader was it some loser from Shifter_TG or Shifter_X? was it from Dan Touesnard Chump - aka Doomtrain from team axiom that i lead who used theexiled as a home base with his family (poo poo version of shifter) i have so many people that will vouch for who i was, the type of feminism i was talking about back then and the ethics i was preaching i have all my old aims i have demos of me playing during this era with the name wtf is your problem u loving pedophile? you think its feminist to steal a trans kids identities and take credit for the ideas? gently caress u kzn, post: 13520, member: 158 posted:I like how Dare is taking this "we should be inclusive" position while at the same time being one of the loudest voices in support of old T1 style pug picking, which is exclusionary as *scoot*. Ya you don't know me. having been lgbtqia my whole life i did a lot of shifter while saying i was a girl, i got called "it", i got into fights with absent from TW irl who was a rival team leader in Shifter, who would call me various racist terms in real life with his goon buddies (which are just censored on this forum with other racist terms - like see how k-i-k-e- when spelled correctly word filter turns into kike for example - thrify individual is pretty racist a word filter for a slur against jews imo - censoring it or word filtering doesnt take the racism out of it, u cant cover that stuff up). i got called this stuff at school by tribes players, i got robbed at school by tribes players, i got pushed into lockers and had rocks thrown at me by tribes players. i have seen the violence and fascism that toxic groups create first hand while being trans myself and no absolutist authoritarian sjw or upper-middle-class racial minority is going to censor what ive lived through for ego points and feels - thats how kotakuinaction and tumblrinaction happened but I'm not gonna react just post. this anti semitism has been following me since a single digit age on geocities, it isnt going to stop till its dead All the noobies I trained in Shifter and some later in LT, made into pro players, some of these noobies are even on the private testing team now. One or two might even be on staff if I'm remembering right. Were ziro and z3ro really two different people? I have them both on my steam but keep thinking they're the same fellow smurfing... I can remember when Stork could flat out not Home D at all and when Opsayo sucked at LT and was obsing for a year just to learn and when Sleepy was perma-benched. How about the E-Sports organizations I started solely about being inclusive to noobies and training them, like HawkBats which I inherit from some of the first openly gay Tribes players?, or the Unknown Cult [?] - meant to include everyone not on the #1 team as a union. The smurf team the -Toes that Benny, Sharper, etc., and I ran. All the shifter Revivals where I had to manage 300+ person aim contact lists? Bringing Shifter league to TWL with the help of Nonreg and Lix later having them rig matches for us LT noobies (but shifter/quake/cs pros) on team A Perfect Circle vs terraforce's Blood Eagles? Participating as leader of various teams like {FL} FreeLancers which Kovaak from Quake and I ran in late gen shifter, taking over from Mr. Fuji, Lester Chen the head of Youtube E- Sports is from that team and played as Cra$h. https://www.linkedin.com/in/lester-chen-7aa9a92b x_x| where I was taught much by f0rg0tt3n-s0ul who went on to play Cal-I 1.6 with lurker and also taught them a few new tricks as well. The Fruit Cult which was solely meant to combat the exclusive, elitist attitude of Imperial Order our rival archetype team (absent from tw's team). Countless others, seed, pd, dgd, hw, DOD, mh, etc. etc. How many literal trans, gay, womyn, othered, intersectional E-Sports figures were on that team? Anita Sarkeesian? {FL} WonderGirl one of the best turret farmers to ever play the game???? - pretending to be a black nurse named Wendy from Kentucky LOL. Naw Never Couldn't happen. Dare is a big liar. All of the leagues and ladders and tourneys I've run and done - those golden broadsides take care and love to deliver to people, they come from the Shifter Battle Arena, invented by Billatron and Osiris, adapted from Bunny's The Shifter League from UFR and KIN days. Some of this stuff I was doing before t2 was even being marketed for, at a very young age, leading teams of adults on my local pub server hillhse. Ive done more than my fair share of noobie training. I have run noobie nights and noobie only teams where I trained people daily. I have trained hundreds individually personally, in how to play Tribes and especially in Shifter. I'd like to bring it to youtube one day like Kovaak has done with Quake. For now it costs money for my lessons or a show of real heart. I teach noobie nights in reflex cpma pro bono after a year of practicing. I am no t1 elitist. t1 is just objectively the most superior game in the series and least controversial and most inclusive. And I've seen enough indie and sequel tribes games fail I simply have no will to be the best or most generous in midair when so many of the players are supposed to be Archetype players already. It isn't wrong to run best of breed pu's in LT when you're looking to compete. At least I never flat out banned whole servers of people showing up to pu if they weren't up to snuff like Chump used to. Try that on for size and see who's the elitist or cold. Ive given enough of my time, money, and blood to Tribes, now give me something back, like a good game, or a good tourney that does what its advertised to do. I'm sick of the noobies with attitude self-glorifying themselves off playing terrible iterations of the series or that have permanent victim complexes because they were benched in A+ pus. The A+ pus are A+ for a reason and aren't advertised as being inclusive. If your draft tourney is meant to be inclusive. Then make it inclusive. And don't blame me when you screw it up because that isn't very Archetype like. -edit- and since this was deleted by the cover up admins http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=686637
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Dec 19, 2016 16:44
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Dare please go gently caress up threads that deserve it and not the good ones
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Dec 21, 2016 19:48
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Stabbatical posted:Do you know of a good resource to learn that skill? I do have a bit of an issue with treating my browsers like channel-flipping myself and this sounds like a possible solution (outside of just pure will-power) but I know jack about coding or programming anything. There are applications that'll do this for you -- Fluid, Fogger, Coherence, and so on. If you search for site-specific browsers you'll find a bunch of them. The real benefit to site-specific browsing is being able to choose profiles of extensions stylesheets on a per-site basis. Most of the time, though, I just want to launch a page in a browser without toolbars, etc. I'm a linux user when I have a choice, so most of the time I just write a .desktop file that launches code:On a mac, you can use Automator to turn a shell script into an actual application. That's useful for other things, too, like automatically resizing images or automatically Googling five-word literal text strings from a document (since you can just drag them to the Dock).* On windows, I don't have a clue. * To do that, just open Automator, find the Run Shell Script action, paste in your shell script, save it as an Application, then drag the application to the Dock. Done.
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Dec 21, 2016 22:01
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Thanks for the reply! I actually think this will help me down the road!
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Dec 22, 2016 00:01
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Do you have any books you recommend about teaching English? Particularly at High School and Junior High-School levels.
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Feb 1, 2017 02:24
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Apocron posted:Do you have any books you recommend about teaching English? Particularly at High School and Junior High-School levels. I hope this question is still live. The short answer is Doug Lemov's Teach Like a Champion. It's good regardless of your discipline or field, but Lemov started out as an English teacher and -- maybe as a consequence -- even his STEM-typical teaching techniques work well in a discussion-based lit classroom. If you're looking for something more like a research-driven framework for systematic (departmental) improvement, Coe et.al.'s "What makes great teaching?" (available here) is a good place to start. The long answer is that while students in junior high and college are developmentally really different, it's also true that: (a) most classroom techniques that work well for graduate students work well for middle schoolers, because (b) the most common problems at both levels -- and all the levels in between -- are understructured learning arcs that bungle really basic things (like communicating learning goals). I really can't state that enough. I start next Fall as our college's Teaching and Learning Consultant (the person who teaches faculty how to teach), and any data-driven approach to improving teaching really compels you to focus on the highest part of the bell curve. That is, what matters is the most common experience for your most common student, not the 10% of your faculty doing killer collaborative student research or experimenting with flipped classrooms. At that point -- that is, the statistically most common student experience -- you've got all kinds of basic poo poo going wrong. Faculty slap readings on a syllabus but never use them in class. There's not even an attempt to structure the knowledge base, foster student/student or faculty/student collaboration, or emphasis on students' intrinsic motivations (or ownership of projects or material). Stuff like that. So the books I'd recommend about teaching in that context aren't really books. As far as interventions go, a book is high-effort: great for faculty who are intrinsically motivated to do a better job, but too high an ante for the average teacher. There, it's worth checking out databases of individual papers. For Higher Ed., the best one is probably IDEA, although for things like writing instruction there are narrow-focus databases like COMPPILE. Also, sorry about taking so long to respond. Mrs. Brainworm (II) and I had a daughter in December, and I'm starting that new position in the Fall, so I'm only just now getting ahead of the workload.
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Apr 27, 2017 01:48
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Congratulations on the family addition! Listened yesterday to this NPR story about "a group of inmates at a high-security prison as they rehearse and stage a production of the last act—Act V—of Hamlet." Flagging for you and the thread in the event it is of interest!
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May 18, 2017 17:28
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Business of Ferrets posted:Congratulations on the family addition! Thanks! I teach a Shakespeare course where we meet with people who do prison work. Agnes Wilcox (from the NPR story) visited that class regularly before she retired. Now we work with Scott Jackson at Notre Dame Shakespeare and a handful of prison educators. For a bunch of obvious reasons we don't get to either visit or talk to the prisoners directly, but we do get to read some of what they write. If you've never seen this stuff, it's fascinating. It's one thing to know that the prison population is a cross-section of the U.S. when it comes to being, say, intellectually and emotionally perceptive, and another thing to see that expressed in how they talk about Shakespeare or understand a role.
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May 18, 2017 20:38
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Have a quandary, albeit of the good sort? I'm weighing two academic publishers for a book. Both have responded enthusiastically to my proposal; both would like to send it through initial peer review. Publisher A is a mid-size press, very highly regarded for the particular niches I work in and a few others, though they are less familiar to people who don't work in those areas. They're the press I targeted from the beginning; I know the staff there personally, and I know they would do a loving amazing job with my book and promote the hell out of it. Publisher B is a behemoth, the kind of publisher that establishes you as a "serious scholar". They're a relative newcomer to the sort of project I'm offering, but I'd probably be high up on the list of a series they are developing around related topics. However, I've heard mixed reviews of how they actually work with authors—some admittedly very good, some not so—and I have less confidence that the resulting product would be what I have in mind going in (which could nonetheless be a good thing...) or that they will promote it to the same extent, beyond the attractiveness of that name on the spine. B is only even involved because one of its editors came through my school doing clinics on proposal prep, offering critiques and the like; I put mine in, expecting to tighten it up before sending it to A. But B editor liked it enough to ask for sample chapters, and has liked those sample chapters as well. Meanwhile A is waiting on the go-ahead to proceed with review. As someone without a tenure-track job, heading into yet another job cycle, I know a contract with A would make a huge difference, while B would make a huger one. However, I really don't want to lose my relationship with A for future work, which I'm far more likely to place there than with B. There's also the personal angle, where I don't want A to feel like I'm betraying them, though I know with the market as cut-throat as it is right now, I can't afford to let that be a primary consideration. The one further consideration is that much of the work is on highly contemporary subjects, with the field shifting constantly; I need to get this book out and soon or I'll have to rewrite or possibly scrap the whole thing. Any thoughts? (Sorry for length and potential confusion!)
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May 23, 2017 00:26
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elentar posted:Have a quandary, albeit of the good sort? I'd go with A. No question. Just because I would doesn't mean you should, but I'ma lay out my reasons anyway. The first is that sure things can fall apart. The most likely outcome is that your book gets published the first time through. But sometimes it doesn't, and the way you've described this make me think that if you jump from A to B, and the deal with B falls apart, A may not remain an option. That's another way of saying that if you took the manuscript to A first, you ought to finish out the process with them as long as they handle their end responsibly. It's a small world, right? Ten years from now, your contacts at A will be at B, C, D, E, and F, and you don't want their first professional impression of you to be "guy who jumps ship." The other part is ecosystem. There's a whole cadre of mercenary assholes trying to remake the world in their own image. So I work with publishers the way I'd want to be worked with, I don't buy investment properties I wouldn't live in, and I work hardest for the people who work the hardest for me. All that said, you've got to do what you're comfortable doing. For me, the best metastrategy has been to analyze the hell out of small decisions and go with my gut on big ones. So the bigger this decision is for you, the more I think you should trust your instincts regardless of which publisher they point you to. And that said, I don't know whether that's the best of all strategies -- I'm at a top fifty college, which isn't an R1 and also isn't selling plasma. Seriously, I've just turned forty and have no idea whether I've under- or over- performed.
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May 23, 2017 13:08
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Brainworm posted:And that said, I don't know whether that's the best of all strategies -- I'm at a top fifty college, which isn't an R1 and also isn't selling plasma. Seriously, I've just turned forty and have no idea whether I've under- or over- performed. I think getting a permanent academic position at pretty much any non-fake university counts as over-performing? Even more so since it's in the humanities.
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May 24, 2017 03:51
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:I think getting a permanent academic position at pretty much any non-fake university counts as over-performing? Even more so since it's in the humanities. I think the way I said that sounded too much like I was fishing for affirmation when I was really trying to frame the problems with giving advice. Like, I am happy and my life is objectively awesome. That doesn't mean that I give good advice, because a lot of the things -- especially the financial things -- that make my life great have nothing to do with my day job. In this case, I have the luxury of not having to be a publication mercenary because I'm at a college where founding a Shakespeare nonprofit counts as research, I'm already tenured, and I have sensible non-academic ways to pay the bills whenever the Trump administration gets its poo poo together well enough to cut our legs out from under us.* Added up, that means that I'll never, ever have to apply for a job at an R1. * Like, we specialize in high-need, high-ability students. About a fifth of them are international, and about half of them go into health fields. They're making every piece of that pointlessly difficult.
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May 24, 2017 14:08
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Brainworm posted:I'd go with A. No question. Just because I would doesn't mean you should, but I'ma lay out my reasons anyway. Thanks! That was definitely the way I was leaning, but helps a lot to see it laid out—I'm at least reasonably certain that the book that will emerge from A will make me a lot happier than the one that would come from B, and maybe a job that would prefer the more prestigious book to the better book isn't one I'd be happy in long-term anyway? I dunno, any job would be pretty cool right now (and the gig you've created sounds ideal, in terms of basically creating your own grounds for tenure and promotion as you go...) but if I can't publish my way into something sooner or later I'll catch onto something else.
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May 27, 2017 02:15
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elentar posted:Thanks! That was definitely the way I was leaning, but helps a lot to see it laid out—I'm at least reasonably certain that the book that will emerge from A will make me a lot happier than the one that would come from B, and maybe a job that would prefer the more prestigious book to the better book isn't one I'd be happy in long-term anyway? I dunno, any job would be pretty cool right now (and the gig you've created sounds ideal, in terms of basically creating your own grounds for tenure and promotion as you go...) but if I can't publish my way into something sooner or later I'll catch onto something else. Glad this works. And for what it's worth, I don't think that hiring is sensitive to fine-grained judgments of publisher prestige -- even at an R1. Everyone understands that things like impact ratings, citation counts, and journal rankings are at best wildly imperfect proxies for assessing the qualities of research and publication that people actually value. So while they can be great at starting conversations about hiring, promotion, and tenure, I think that they're also overvalued because they're so definite. I had this conversation a few times as department chair, and now that I'm deeper into administration I'll probably have it more often. But, basically, the best hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions are the ones that most improve your program, department, or college. Sometimes that means hiring the person who publishes the "it" book twice a decade, and sometimes it means hiring the person whose faculty/student collaborations end up in mid-tier journals. I guess what I'm saying is, you know, publish. But when it comes to job searches, the right framework is something like "where do you see your department going, and how can my teaching, research, and service help you get there?" At least, that's better than "my research area is X and I can teach XYZ."
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May 30, 2017 17:25
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Here's one: when it comes to first drafts, do you have any One Weird Tricks to stop tinkering with sentence structure and get back to writing new content? With stuff for work (strat comms/tech writing) it's never a problem because it's all informational, but with my fiction lately it seems like I keep adjusting for e.g. tone and voice more than I do actually writing the loving story. I know what it's from (the insecure urge to get everything exactly right for your 5001 Fiction Workshop because if you don't, people will think you're a fraud and don't belong here), but while that sort of thing is helpful if you're happy writing short stories, it doesn't exactly make you prolific. Grad school taught me a lot but it also gave me some bad habits I'm finding difficult to break, even three years out.
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Jun 19, 2017 05:15
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3Romeo posted:Here's one: when it comes to first drafts, do you have any One Weird Tricks to stop tinkering with sentence structure and get back to writing new content? I have two weird tricks. The background: I've spent 18 months working on a novel. The first year -- 14 months, really -- was just figuring out how to write. I mean, I laid down a thousand words a day, but most of them undid themselves. It was "but what if the setting were like this?" and "what if this character were like this?" And so I ended up with 400K words of different chapters from different stories with different tones and characters. When my daughter was born last December I spent the gaps between feedings and diaper changes reading what I thought was my draft. It was horrifying. The best-written stuff I hadn't thought about at all. Some of the worst was passages I'd slaved over. At least for me, style is like a girl's acne. The more she fixates on it the worse it's gonna get. So I've got two weird tricks. I don't delete anything while I'm writing. Composition has a writing phase and an editing phase, and I switch from one to the other only once I've composed a complete section -- say, an arc of 100 pages. I never had to enforce that boundary writing articles or my first couple books because the process moved quickly enough not to be frustrating and I didn't have to worry about how all the pieces fit together -- that is, I started writing with a clear Idea of where I was heading. That's my second weird trick: outline. When I started my rewrite in February, I made a detailed outline of everything that was going to happen -- which character's actions caused what, how those added up to a catastrophe, and how those catastrophes played out act by act and scene by scene. And I stick to that outline. I have near a half-million word of evidence that say the project won't get finished if I don't. If there's a third weird trick it's not giving a gently caress about style. Better writers than I can choose a style and write in it. For me, style emerges from narrating the events I see in my head and (later) cutting out the words I don't need.
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Jun 19, 2017 15:55
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Let's talk Coriolanus! I really like this play, but some of the criticism I've seen leaves me scratching my head. Most critics seem to portray Coriolanus as a petulant Roman manchild who's butthurt about not getting a position, but I don't really see that at all. It more seems like the guy has (literal!) Asperger's, or some such, and he really and truly just doesn't relate with most people on a personal level like everyone wants him to. In fact, reading this play (and watching the pretty decent Ralph Feinnes version) solidifies my bias against some critics interpreting characters too much through their own lens and being unable to empathize with someone who is very different than they are. Bleh. I'm probably just Eng 101 rambling at this point. Basically, I was wondering your thoughts on this awesome play! I haven't read you gloss on Shakespeare in a while and I don't want this thread to die 
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Sep 11, 2017 03:41
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ceaselessfuture posted:I really like this play, but some of the criticism I've seen leaves me scratching my head. Most critics seem to portray Coriolanus as a petulant Roman manchild who's butthurt about not getting a position, but I don't really see that at all. It more seems like the guy has (literal!) Asperger's, or some such, and he really and truly just doesn't relate with most people on a personal level like everyone wants him to. In fact, reading this play (and watching the pretty decent Ralph Feinnes version) solidifies my bias against some critics interpreting characters too much through their own lens and being unable to empathize with someone who is very different than they are. Bleh. I'm probably just Eng 101 rambling at this point. Basically -- basically -- I read Coriolanus as the tragedy of a legitimately talented technocrat who's constantly surprised the world isn't a meritocracy. It's a fish-out-of-water story, like Crocodile Dundee, except that people die. Shakespeare loves this situation with his military characters. The idea that "winning the battle means you did things right" gives Shakespeare's tragic military heroes a maladaptive confidence. Othello, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, and so on, they all get blindsided because the world doesn't work the way they think it does, and they catch on to this way too late because their way of thinking has been demonstrably successful on the battlefield. That's basically the tragedy of Coriolanus: Coriolanus has a worldview that, if it isn't entirely right, isn't also entirely wrong. I think I like Coriolanus as a character (more than I like, say, Titus or Othello) because his principles sometimes feel close to mine. The first is responsibility: For Coriolanus, this looks like do-ocracy. The person responsible for making dinner decides what everybody's eating. In that world, there are basically two cardinal sins: not making dinner (so that someone else has to do it), and complaining about dinner. If you wanted a choice, you could have made dinner yourself. The second is competence-based ethics: For Coriolanus, there is zero difference between being a bad person and being inept. Failing to do something you promised to do is the same thing as lying, because the only things that matter are: (a) You said you'd do something, and (b) You didn't. It's hard to tell whether Coriolanus thinks this way because he doesn't understand people's feelings or because he thinks they round down to zero. Either way, the first two episodes of the play -- the food riot and the battle of Corioli -- define these values of Coriolanus's and how they're in conflict with the world. The Wrong Side of Do-ocracy Coriolanus starts with a food riot, and Coriolanus's first action is abusing the rioters: quote:What would you have, you curs, The first thing to note about this speech is that it suggests some history behind Coriolanus and the rioters. Coriolanus doesn't say "sucks to be poor" or "he who doesn't work, neither shall he eat." He says that the rioters are impossible to satisfy, and that he can't trust them. That's based on some history, and as the first two acts of the play unfold we get an increasingly clearer sense of what that history looks like. The first thing we find out is that the Volscans are about to invade -- a point that Coriolanus has been pressing to the cosuls, though none to this point have believed him. quote:Messenger. Where's Caius CORIOLANUS? And -- here's the important point -- Coriolanus volunteers to go fight the Volscans; he's promised to do at some earlier point, and Cominius holds him to that promise. This, in Coriolanus's mind, is how the world ought to work. If you don't want Rome burned to the ground, you go out and fight the Volscans. This is partly why he thinks of the Volscans' arrival as good news; he knows Rome is full of poo poo talkers, so this is a chance to set things right: you send people out to fight and make an example of anyone too lazy or chickenshit to pick up a sword. It's an easy solution to high grain prices, because -- although we're not yet privy to why -- Coriolanus thinks most people who pretend to be good Romans are going to show their asses the moment things get real.* Competence and Value The next problem shows up at the battle at Corioli. Everybody knows that saving Rome means defeating the Volscans, but the Roman soldiers turn tail. Again, Coriolanus takes them to task for it: quote:You souls of geese, When that doesn't do the job, Coriolanus goes full-on murder machine, storms the Corioli by himself, and forces open the gates so that his soldiers can do some safe mopping up. After that, there's another moment of reflection on his character: quote:Titus Lartius. Worthy sir, thou bleed'st; And after the battle is properly finished: quote:I have done There's a lot of speculation about Coriolanus's motives, but the obvious one is that he actually believes the content of that second speech: it is every Roman's responsibility to do what they can for Rome. He hasn't done anything good. Instead, it's just baseline -- that is, his service in the battle is what you should expect from a Roman, and anything less is deficient. Aftermath So at this point in the play, and from Coriolanus's perspective, the Romans have hosed up all over the place. They were intentionally blind to the Volscan threat, unwilling to take responsibility for managing Rome's food stores responsibly, and ran away when their lives -- and the lives of every other Roman -- were on the line. What they did in each case was understandable, at least to us. The citizens weren't rioting because they understood the political nuances of the Volscan invasion and limited grain stores. They were just scared. The consuls didn't give away free grain because they wanted people to starve next month, or because they wanted to reward bad behavior. They were just lurching from one crisis to another. To Coriolanus, none of that matters. This kind of thing has (probably) happened a few times before -- which is why he opens the play with the "curs that like not peace or war" bit. Shakespeare's just letting us in to a couple moments in Coriolanus's personal hell of Roman entitlement and ineptitude. The reason things are different this time -- at least for Coriolanus -- is that he expects the consuls to set things right. But the machinations of Brutus and Sicinius carry the day, and the second riot sees the citizens reject Coriolanus's bid for consulship. Coriolanus ends up furious because even though he's right ("It is a purposed thing," he says about the riot, "and grows by plot"), nobody is willing to do anything about it. It's the food riot, Volscans, and fleeing soldiers all over again. That's a long way of saying that it's easy to paint the Roman mob as basically good and Coriolanus as a giant manbaby. Really, the Romans are subject to ordinary human frailties that -- if it weren't for Coriolanus -- would get them burned to the ground by the Volscans. Coriolanus's problem is that even though he's rarely wrong (especially about people), he's also unwilling to deal with them as they are. That makes his contempt for them self-destructive even when it's also probably justified. quote:I haven't read you gloss on Shakespeare in a while and I don't want this thread to die It's nice to write one. My job lately shifted to half teaching and half administration, and the upshot is that I get to teach a non-first-year course on Shakespeare once every two years. If it weren't for this, I'd probably never have dug into Coriolanus. * If this situation requires an historical gloss, its that municipalities like London stored grain in reserves, and made arrangements to import grain from e.g. the Baltic, in order to control prices. During failed harvests in e.g. 1587, and again in 93-97, this meant that there was constant pressure to release more grain from storage to help lower grain prices. The great danger -- especially with the Volscans at the door, and the need to press farmers into service as soldiers -- is that controlling prices too aggressively at the beginning of a crises means that you run out your reserves and people end up starving later on. It's hard policy, and the situation in London in the decade before Coriolanus was written. I think the nuances of the problem would have been familiar enough not to want exposition to the play's original audience. In other words, Coriolanus's line isn't "gently caress the poor." It's "The Volscans are invading. We don't know how long we'll be dealing with them. If you give away grain to the rioters now, we won't have any to eat later. Also, we all have a clear responsibility to fend off the Volscans, and anyone who isn't willing to help do that shouldn't get free food." His frustration is that these both of his principles seem reasonable, and nobody seems willing either to enforce or recognize them.
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Sep 12, 2017 19:40
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Coriolanus is one of my favorite plays, and I've always tended to read it in terms of the timocratic soul, so I very much appreciate your account. I've considered, on and off, assigning it in a class (I teach philosophy and political theory, not literature, but I can get away with it). Is there any secondary literature you might recommend?
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Sep 12, 2017 20:10
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Awesome writeup! I like the notion that he's so concerned with duty that nothing else matter much to him. Can you comment on the relationship he has with his mother? She's an interesting figure and probably one of the coldest Shakespearean women I think. How is she so easily able to manipulate her son? In terms of secondary sources, I've been listening to a great Teaching Company course on Shakespeare and it had three episodes on Coriolanus. Brainworm would obviously know better though. PS- how's the new position treating you?
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Sep 13, 2017 02:56
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El Miguel posted:Coriolanus is one of my favorite plays, and I've always tended to read it in terms of the timocratic soul, so I very much appreciate your account. I've considered, on and off, assigning it in a class (I teach philosophy and political theory, not literature, but I can get away with it). Is there any secondary literature you might recommend? There's been plenty written on Coriolanus and politics, and Cathy Shrank's "Civility and the City in Coriolanus" (from Shakespeare Quarterly*) is a really nice historicist account of the ways that Coriolanus would have been politically experienced by an audience that was not itself republican. It's a more specific treatment than you'd get from e.g. Skinner's Liberty Before Liberalism, and might make either a good substitute for (or addition to) that book if it's the kind of thing your class would ordinarily cover. If you want a more general introduction to Coriolanus, I'd go with Marjorie Garber's chapter from Shakespeare After All. It's comprehensive and economical, and apart from offering a non-controversial reading of the play also labels the label-able bits of political thought that Shakespeare incorporated into Coriolanus (like Meninius's version of the fable of the belly). It's not exhaustive there, but might make a good jumping off point. * From 2003, and available through MUSE.
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Sep 13, 2017 19:38
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Much obliged - thank you!
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Sep 14, 2017 05:44
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So I'm off to see The Tempest next week. I don't really remember much about it at all. Can some kind soul tell me enough about it so I can appreciate what's going on but not so much that you ruin it for me?
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Dec 2, 2017 19:22
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It's about a librarian with a mold problem.
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Dec 2, 2017 19:56
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FightingMongoose posted:So I'm off to see The Tempest next week. I don't really remember much about it at all. Can some kind soul tell me enough about it so I can appreciate what's going on but not so much that you ruin it for me? Basically -- basically -- the play's backstory involves a duke (Prospero) deposed by his brother (Antonio) and exiled to a remote island in the company of his then-infant daughter. The island is inhabited by an imprisoned spirit (Ariel) who Prospero "frees" in exchange for a period of service. It was also inhabited by an infant monster, Caliban, who Prospero enslaves after trying to raise him as a child alongside his daughter. The play begins with Miranda now a teenager, and with Prospero having Ariel and Caliban in his service. A ship with the traitorous Antonia aboard passes close enough to the Island for Prospero to magically crash it, and strand both Antonio and the rest of the ship's passengers (the King, his son, their assorted counselors, and a couple riff raff servants) on Prospero's magic island. There, Prospero basically harasses all of them into mending their ways. This is a comedy, and most of the comedy involves Prospero being an overprotective parent while arranging a romance between his daughter and the King's son, Ferdinand, and Caliban's drunken escapades with the crashed ship's riff raff. If you're looking for character arcs, Prospero is like a happy version of Lear. Both plays involve an adult making a late life transition when they discover that the tool they use to control the rest of the world has outlived its usefulness. Lear never makes that transition, but Prospero does. Prospero also gets two really nice speeches. That's unusual in a comedy, and those -- plus the character development of a well-played Prospero -- is why Tempest gets performed more than the rest of Shakespeare's late plays put together.
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Dec 5, 2017 14:47
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Thanks for the reply. Trip report time: The company doing the production decided to go off book so I spent a lot of time watching Prospero monologue to a wooden doll, a lot of time listening to what I guess was the original Shakespearean verse set to a capella, and at the end it was revealed that Prospero was an old man in a nursing home. On the plus side the actor for Prospero was really good and I found them quite moving when they were talking to the audience or another actor and not a doll.
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Dec 10, 2017 11:34
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FightingMongoose posted:Thanks for the reply. Trip report time: Oof.
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Dec 10, 2017 14:27
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FightingMongoose posted:Thanks for the reply. Trip report time: That's hella lame
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Dec 10, 2017 22:32
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I mean, posting a link to a Ton Gauld cartoon is always relevant, but here it's particularly so. https://www.theguardian.com/books/picture/2016/oct/01/tom-gauld-on-shakespeares-the-tempest-cartoon
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Dec 10, 2017 22:50
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FightingMongoose posted:Thanks for the reply. Trip report time: Our Shakespeare Festival's artistic director called a version of Titus like this "long on concept." The more bad Shakespeare I see, the handier that phrase is. Like, I saw a Lear production last year that was (a) post-apocalyptic and (b) done in original pronunciation (so everyone sounds like Yosemete Sam). There's nothing exactly wrong with either one of those, although neither one improved the play, and at least the setting left me wondering whether the actors and directors understood anything about it to begin with.* Also -- also -- Tempest is a comedy. It's supposed to be funny. If this director wanted to do a not-funny Tempest about a senile Prospero, they should have just done Lear, which is the tragic version of exactly the same play about an aging man with absolute power (a) giving it up and (b) marrying off a daughter in order to secure his legacy. But I'm glad your production's Prospero was good. Tempest can be carried by the Stephano/Trinculo/Caliban comic trio (a.k.a. leader, henchman, and "I don't think this is a good idea" guy in the vein of Michael Scott, Dwight Schrute, and Jim Halpert) and by Prospero's soliloquies. It's nice if Ferdinand and Miranda are good, but you don't need it. * Like, tragedy involves things getting worse. That's hard when the apocalypse has already happened.
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Dec 11, 2017 22:30
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Brainworm posted:Our Shakespeare Festival's artistic director called a version of Titus like this "long on concept." The more bad Shakespeare I see, the handier that phrase is. I'm not exactly getting what that phrase means, I've never heard it before. Is it something to do with having a big idea about how to do a play without thinking through the details, something like that? Also, I just finished reading Frank Herbert's Hellstrom's Hive, having not read any other Herbert, and I'd just like to ask if you'd read it and what you thought about it if so. I was genuinely surprised it wasn't more well known because I found the first 2/3rds or so of the book gripping and fantastically executed. I started to lose interest a bit when Janvert ate Hellstrom's chemical-laced food because it seemed like the plot was moving from a novel based on spying, governmental intrigue, and bureaucracy into a bit of a farce at that point between the just mentioned falling for an obvious ploy, the death-loving, the swapping out of Fancy with a similar-looking person although I could feel the tension again shortly afterwards. The ending was a bit sudden and didn't feel like a solid conclusion (which I suppose was the point) but I was really impressed how well Herbert managed to get across all the conflicting motivations and personalities of each character. If Dune does that anywhere near as well, I'll have to shoot it up my to-read list.
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Dec 16, 2017 22:50
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