A Year of Shakespeare

I took the weekend off the blog to celebrate my wife’s birthday without the sword of Shakespeare hanging over our heads… (SUCCESS), and to try and bring a measure of comfort and consolation to a friend dying in a VA hospital (FAILURE). Along the way, I thought a lot about my Shakespeare project and the reasons for pursuing it.

My friend is only 51, a veteran of Desert Storm. Over the last six months, I’ve watched helplessly as his world collapsed around him: pulled over for a minor traffic offense, being uncooperative with the officer, being accused of a narcotics violation (in what he says was retaliation), spending three months in jail during which his mortgage did not get paid, foreclosure, homelessness, and then, on top of everything else, the diagnosis of terminal cancer.

My friend is irascible, and has been since his mother put him on the bus for kindergarten. He never made it to school that day, getting into a fight with the bus driver that led to a suspension when he was only six years old. His mother tells me that’s the one constant ever since. Ricky has a knack for getting in trouble. It’s just that this time, trouble came for him, with a size and scope far beyond his abilities to cope.

I’ve never dealt with such a monolithic bureaucracy as the VA before. I don’t like hospitals generally, either as a patient or as a visitor. But as I walked the halls of the nursing home where they placed him after he was diagnosed as terminal, I couldn’t help but be saddened by the senseless final acts occurring within the “Home for Heroes.”

It was just like an ordinary hospital, only without all the joy. So many men — mostly men, of course, in that generation — who had served their country so bravely, now reduced to staring blankly at muted TV screens or sitting aimlessly in corridors waiting for visitors who never came.

Walking the halls, I was reminded of scenes from high school when I got out of class with a pass. At each doorway, I’d see faces of people caught in the distracted haze of abject boredom — girls twirling their hair, struggling to pay attention. Guys tapping their fingers or flicking their pen to an unheard drumbeat. All of them waiting for the next bell to ring, the signal to move on to whatever’s next.

It felt like these men were waiting to die. Through my own head there echoed a scene from Dead Poet Society: Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary…

Time goes so fast, like it’s on rails. It’s going to go, no matter what you do, but you might as well attempt something big while you have the chance. Make each moment count. Celebrate the little things. Tell the people you love how much you care.

It made me glad that the 48 hours preceding had been set aside for my wife. We stayed at the beach, raced gokarts, saw Avatar in 3D at IMAX. We shopped at Whole Foods and lay in bed watching the NFL playoffs (she’s a football geek, what can I say). Little things, but done with great awareness of how fleeting and ephemeral this journey is.

So if you’re out there, give a great big hug to the person closest to you. Commit yourself to doing wild, audacious things to make life better even for people you’ve never met yet. Plan tomorrow on committing a random act of kindness.

And if you read, read Shakespeare.

First, the apology.

I’m sorry for any grammatical mistakes. Normally, I tend to be a grammar Nazi and hold back my writing until it looks presentable in public or can at least bear my own scrutiny. But if I did that here, my posts would take weeks and defeat the nature of a continuous blog that is intended as a reading companion.

While I’m not going to ignore proper form and good graces, you can tell already that I’m a highly excitable guy, especially when it comes to wordplay. With Shakespeare, all the worst tendencies in my manic nature come out. I’m probably going to drive you crazy with my enthusiasm, but that’s why my login is U2TIGGER. I bounce.

I’m not much fun when I’m not bouncing, but it makes rabbits and eyeores mad from time to time. I certainly don’t count for much in the land of owls.

And herein, the confession:

I’m a lousy scholar. But you could tell that already, I’m sure. I’m curious. And eager. And passionate. But then so is Ramona the Pest…

So if you wanna bail on this crazy year of Shakespeare together, I don’t blame you a bit. But for what it’s worth, I’m going to continue to be who I am — though I do plan on cleaning myself up a bit from time to time.

I’m only now grappling with how to present the books and my reactions to them. If this were a classroom, this approach would make a lot more sense. We’d arrange the chairs in a circle and I’d toss out a provocative question and we’d go round and round trying to make sense of it together.

I’m not the teacher here. Shakespeare is. I have absolutely no doubt that you have a LOT more to bring to the table than I do. In fact, I have no right to be standing up here in front of the class. The structure is all wrong. I defer to the venerable Harold Bloom and the shelves of Shakespeare scholars when it comes to serious matters. Good God, I am a trifling amateur here — just an avid reader.

I say that now because much of what I say and do will seem simple and wrongheaded to experts and professionals, especially those who specialize in English or Shakespeare or higher learning — you name it. To borrow from the Tao of Pooh, I am a bear of little brain.

But there you are. I am going to keep reading and posting and revising and hopefully improving. It’s just, well… I tend to get a bit worked up about the things I love. And Hamlet is definitely one of those…

Thanks for your patience and understanding as this blog evolves matures.

Advances in technology don’t always signify progress, or at least not the unmitigated progress we are promised: cars may be a significant step up from the horses that they replaced, but bring with them highways, smog and petroleum dependency. Newspapers vanish in the Google News wake. Nobody writes snail-mail letters anymore.

While the Kindle and its clones are all the rage, books in paper with glorious heft and margins to write in continue to be read — at least for now. I cling to the Romantic delusion that there will always be a subculture of Americans who read for the sensual pleasure as well as the conveyed idea. A book is an experience as much as it is an abstract evocation, a conjuring, an occurrence merely in the mind.

We savor its timelessness when we enter its labyrinth. Even now I’m struggling with the ephemeral quality of this blog… writing directly to keyboard instead of with the usual notebook and pen. I dislike the taxi-meter atmosphere that an electric metronome creates.

Nevertheless, Twitter continues its global assault across the parapets of our most sacred insitutions, including literature. All in good fun, of course, so long as the big books, the mighty works, continue to be read and reread…

http://shelf-life.ew.com/2009/12/29/twitterature-classic-tolstoy-twitter/

I thought I’d be able to blog while the family experienced a “Big Chill” weekend up in Northern California — boy was I wrong! With so much going on (in a good way), I found it all but impossible to concentrate on meaningful posts. It hurt at first to miss a day (or two), but now it’s time to get my mojo back.

We spent one of the days together in San Francisco. Despite my pleas for a day of bumming around City Lights bookstore and Fisherman’s Wharf, we took in the musical Wicked instead.

That, and George Clooney’s new movie Up in the Air have given me serious pause for reflection heading into the readings that will begin January 1.

If you haven’t seen Wicked, it involves a slick role reversal of the Good Witch/Bad Witch paradigm in The Wizard of Oz. The moral universe spins on its head… what appears righteous and upstanding on the surface turns out to be nothing of the kind, while evil is just misunderstood.

Aside from my displeasure that they didn’t stick to the script and deliver what might have been a tragic (in context) ending… I was left pondering for hours the notion of what comprises true goodness and how we recognize it.

Up in the Air proved to be a perfect double bill — a sophisticated tale about right & wrong and what constitues moral/acceptable behavior as we age and become more aware of the Machiavellian nature of the world.

I don’t like giving away plots. So no spoilers here if I can help it (whoops, did I go too far with Wicked?). The movie reminded me a lot of Alan Ball’s masterpiece, American Beauty for its character depth and richness of story. At times comedic, at others poetic and even tragic, it sparkles with sharp storytelling and deft narrative.

I’d love to engage a discussion about the ending here as well, which I didn’t care too much for from a personal point of view. But matters like this will just have to wait till Hamlet begins at the top of the year, unless there is breaking news on the poll front here on this site.

Gee, it feels great to be writing again!

An UPDATE, courtesy of Julie, and luckily of the good kind…

As a result of an intense search, investigators have already recoverd the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign that had been stolen from Auschwitz only a few days ago (see below).

It boggles my mind, not only that authorities could have found it so quickly, but that they discovered it had been cut into three pieces. Neo-Nazis apparently were not involved.

You can read more here at the Yahoo link I was provided. It’s a rather scattershot retelling, however, and you might want to find a New York Times/International Herald Tribune version if this is your first encounter with the crime and its follow-up.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_poland_auschwitz_sign

A confession:

The subheading of this blog has been changed. I’m guessing the Bard won’t mind terribly if instead of spending 365 days with him, I devote 362 to him instead.

While wandering around Petco last night, questioning again how pointless and material this season of holiness has become, I realized how my location (see below) for this line of inquiry was no coincidence.

If you’ve read Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, you might recall a pointed question asked by one of the female characters. She wonders why it is that we love animals unconditionally… and yet how almost impossible it can be to do the same with humans. Our pets do not stint or play games with their affections; we respond in kind, by opening up and pouring out our hearts in ways that perhaps reveal the true nature of our deepest and purest emotions.

Love among human beings is more complicated for many reasons. But it occurred to me (duh) that Christmas is the one time of year we set aside specifically to practice that ideal among our fellow men and women: to give unto others, and to remind them how much they mean to our lives.

It’s a classic theological inversion of the selfish gene.

If you watch enough commercials, you detect the not-so-subtle suggestion that it may be noble indeed to give, but truth be told, we’d all naturally prefer to receive. That’s what makes Christmas feel so lurid and crass if observed from afar. It’s a bunch of people shopping just because it’s the expected thing to do. Doesn’t matter if you feel a damned thing. Or know or care or empathize with the person you’re buying for.

How easily the marketplace taps into this syndrome! Shop till you drop. Not only is it good for the national economy, it fulfills your social obligation at the same time.

But if we’re aware to it, the image of the Madonna and Child before our very eyes beckons us to search our souls for the deeper spirit and purpose of giving. For that bond is an expression of utmost love in both directions, bestowed and received with a measure of freedom and joy that outshines all other relationships except that between us and our Creator.

We echo that love, mirroring the grand metaphor in this season, not through the purchase of material objects but by our turning away from ourselves and meeting the needs and desires of others. When we connect like this from soul to soul, a magnificence can’t help but radiate forth. But we have to realize that comes from the heart, not a store. That this is a time when the market must shut down and the church open its doors.

Of course this connects to Shakespeare! No — I haven’t lost my mind or direction. At least I don’t think so. Not yet.

For what it comes down to is a distinction between the spiritual and the profane. We are creatures of both, spirits in the material world.

Which of these we honor from moment to moment is up to us.

But now — and at Easter and Thanksgiving — the Bard must kindly oblige to step aside for a purpose even more universal and grander than himself.

Browsing a great bookshop or record store is one of the great benefits of living in an urban area or college town, or traveling — especially in Europe where, despite the concessions the entire globe is making to digitized culture, a bookish norm still prevails (thank God).

It feels like a throwback to a bygone era, walking into a wall-to-wall labyrinth like Powell’s in Portland…

I live in an area where the only places to buy CDs now are Best Buy and Walmart. Independent record shops still spring up from time to time, but the cost margins in the industry are just too cutthroat for them to survive very long. With digital downloading and amazon a mouse-click away, even the giant retailers find it nearly impossible to compete.

I adore amazon and look forword to owning a Kindle soon, but I hope we find a way to preserve the tactile experience of reading a book. Online deals cannot replace the joy of entering a sphere where we have no idea what we’re looking for — counting on the color or texture of a cover to catch our eye or feel good in our hands; that we’ll fall madly in love with a premise on a dust jacket and take home a stranger tonight, just because we started reading while sitting on the floor and couldn’t stop.

Corporate bookstores do their best to stock local titles and preserve a literate atmosphere in a retail dog-eat-dog economy, but I find it sad that even during the Christmas season, the emphasis remains on pure consumption.

The days are dwindlinig before the Shakeapeare reading officially begins — and this site has a more sharply defined focus. I’m exploiting that gap now to vent my sadness about the darkness in human behavior (see below) and my own melancholy at the commercialization of the holidays.

I feel like Charlie Brown. I confess this sadly, having grown up loving Christmas as my second most favorite time of the year. (I won’t tell you what wins first place till we get there together in 2010.) Luckily, it doesn’t fall during a shopping season and still maintains its innocence and wonder.

I’m not naive. I realize that the Wonder Years expire and that we all must find ways of moving on and adapting as adults to nuanced and compromised worldviews. It can be tricky, but we find our own identities as the months pass by, trading bits of idealism for Machiavellian acceptance of how things truly are and probably have always been.

But Christmas for me is a season of wishing, of cherishing the best and brightest of who we are and hope to be. I don’t find a lot of that left in our culture these days. We don’t do much carolling in Southern California. (It doesn’t snow here for one thing.) Yet there’s a lot of shopping going on, even in a wrecked economy. It makes the idea of holiness outside church seem just a gloss.

Meanwhile, I find myself slipping into a deeper and deeper internal meditativeness. I just don’t care that much anymore about the formality of the whole setup. In the midst of my gloom, it’s volunteer work with the homeless that saves my sanity.

More and more, I’m realizing that this sacred sense “out there” must be created together, communally, if it is to exist within our homes, our families, our communities and our society.

Echanging gifts is a token remnant of a deeper meaning that has now been largely lost. I’m sure I can’t be alone in feeling much happier receiving a CD that someone has burned for me out of love than a regifted widget that has no relevance besides filial obligation. When what it actually says is, “I have no idea who you really are.”

We all have to do our part to keep up a certain facade, that’s understood. The sadness for me comes from that loss of a potential for spiritual renewal that we can experience from authentic reminders of how much we matter to one another — from hugs, from bellylaughs, from whispers, from kisses that smoulder down to our wool stockings.

That these are not bought items is a truism and a cliche. Maybe though our new goal during the holidays is to find a way to smash through the crassness by performing random acts of kindness for a stranger or a child. For the silent suffering in your neighborhood, across the nation or a continent away.

Fa la la la la and all that. I hope the Holy Spirit is alive and well wherever you happen to be tonight…