Planning The Class

We’ll start the semester with a viewing of Ridley Scott’s first feature film The Duellists, and then proceed to the following texts in an order I haven’t quite fathomed or fashioned yet:

Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing;

Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac;

Byron’s Selected Poems;

143 rather short poems; 

a handful of stories by de Maupassant;

a handful of tales by Poe;

Shelley’s Frankenstein;

and Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.

"Be Mind Full": Cawdor Castle Motto

Captain, Shakespearean

Captain, helping: "Read your Shakespeare."

Note: I was in the laundry room to settle the unsettled washer again.  While I was sitting upon the washing machine, I had thought to do a little homework or a little pleasure reading.  Captain helped me to settle upon the classic.

Prepping for Class

Shakespeare's Macbeth, of course.

"Lay On, Macduff"

                 I will not yield
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet
And to be baited with the rabble's curse.
Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane
And thou opposed being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last.  Before my body,
I throw my warlike shield.  Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'

          Shakespeare's Macbeth, 5.8.3334


Macbeth's final lines, though not his final appearance in the play . . . .

Not as Obvious as It Ought to Be

Teach the book on its merits, not on its laurels.

(And by book, I mean anything.  I mean specific books first, of course, the ones by Homer and Melville and Austen and Shakespeare and whomever is popular in the moment, but I certainly mean anything also.)

Play-Time: From the Medieval to the Renaissance

The manuscript poster--
Spring 2017:
English 46A
Come join the fun!
I'll make it as memorable as I can.

Vintage: "To His Lady"

Here's a decidedly vintage sonnet: October 6, 1983
          First Assignment: Sonnet
          Prof. Richmond's English 117S: Shakespeare

TO HIS LADY

I shall not wander in twisted conceits,
Nor cultivate crazes best left behind,
Nor waste vain efforts procuring young sweets,
When virtuous love composes my mind.
Good thoughts, better words, most excellent verse--
All features to furnish (with wit, with tact)
Fond feelings that now I merely rehearse,
Motions I go through, scenes I enact.
My stage-craft flourishes, though plotting's a ruse:
"Love is a masque where we all play our part."
What use for the scenery, when lacking a muse?
What use for the masque when the muse lacks a heart?
You'll grant I never saw a goddess go:
Down with the masque, my dear--on with the show.

--Matthew Duckworth


(I was cleaning out some boxes in the garage this afternoon when I happened upon a very old box filled with very old assignments--oh beloved undergraduate days.   Prof. Richmond actually read my sonnet aloud in class, which pleased and embarrassed me to no end.)

Waiting For Macbeth

Seyton: sculpture mix; dark green, transparent brown, and celadon glazing.

Shakespeare: "Cabined, Cribbed, Confined"

MACBETH:
Then comes my fit again. I had else been perfect,
Whole as the marble, founded as the rock,
As broad and general as the casing air.
But now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in
To saucy doubts and fears.—But Banquo’s safe?

--Shakespeare's Macbeth 3.4. . . .

Study Session

"The labor we delight in physics pain."
          --Macbeth from Macbeth (2.3.46)

I believe it's best to take that line out of context.

Me: Scotch On The Rocks. You?

Thinking about Macbeth and Macbeth.

Macduck . . . On The Blasted Heath

The title makes no real sense, but I'm rereading my favorite of Shakespeare's tragedies, Macbeth, and so I'm indulging myself.

Self-portrait #51.

Banquo:  The earth hath bubbles as the water has,
          And these are of them.  Whither are they vanished?
Macbeth:  Into the air, and what seemed corporal melted
         As breath into the wind.  Would they have stayed.
                    (Act I, scene iii, 79-82)

Marching Orders

William Shakespeare's Macbeth;
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein;
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest;
Guy de Maupassant's The Necklace and Other Short Stories;
Mark Strand and Eavan Boland's The Making of a Poem;
E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News;
assorted stories and poems via handouts;
and some appropriate film clips.

English 1B: Spring 2013

Reprise: Ophelia II

I'm not sure why I am drawn to such images, but I am . . . to the point of creating and documenting them.  "Ophelia, you're breaking my heart . . . "  Who sang that?

Reprise: Ophelia

Shakespeare: "If It Were Done When 'Tis Done"

Light -- and dark -- reading.

Northrup Frye: Imagination Trumps Experience

No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us.  Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself.  It seems to be very difficult for many people to understand the reality and intensity of literary experience.  To give an example that you may think a bit irrelevant: why have so many people managed to convince themselves that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare's plays, when there is not on atom of evidence that anybody else did?  Apparently because they feel that poetry must be written out of personal experience, and that Shakespeare didn't have enough experience of the right kind.  But Shakespeare's plays weren't produced by his experience: they were produced by his imagination, and the way to develop the imagination is to read a good book or two.

--Northrup Frye, from his The Educated Imagination
(emphasis, mine)

Let's all "read a good book or two" . . . this week.  And the same the following week.  Imagine what greatness, what expansion of experience, what increased depth and breadth of imagination . . . therein awaits.

"Seyton!"

I'm thinking of a particular speech from Shakespeare's Macbeth: 
V.III. 23-34.  (Seyton is Macbeth's retainer and body-servant.)

Long ago, I wrote what I felt was a successful piece explicating Lord Byron's use of this same passage in his own masterpiece Don Juan.  I should hunt up those old words and see if there's any validity still there.  In the interim, I'll reread that piece from the Scottish play.

William Gibson: "A Walking Shadow"

At the moment, there are two particularly resonating pieces in William Gibson's 1999 cyberpunk novel All Tomorrow's Parties that I would like to share.  I'm also thinking -- or feeling, perhaps, as Laney might -- there's an echo of a few famous lines* from Shakespeare's Macbeth in Gibson's title.  Maybe that's just me.

In the first passage that I'd like to quote, I think Gibson provides a somewhat humorous self-portrait in his description of this particular character, a very adept killer.  I haven't done any kind of research to see if such is common knowledge, at least among those who know, but when I look at the author photo from 1999 (and consider Gibson's look over the years), I do see something a bit autobiographical in the passage.  Consider:

     But he does not draw [the knife] now, and the traders see only a gray-haired man, wolfishly professorial, in a goat of grayish green, the color of certain lichens, who blinks behind the fine gold rims of his small round glasses and raises his hand to halt a passing cab.  Though somehow they do not, as they easily might, rush to claim it as their own, and the man steps past them, his cheeks seamed vertically in deep parentheses, as though it has been his habit frequently to smile.  They do not see him smile.


In the second passage, we get what I would consider an apt insight into tools, whether a knife (as in the novel) or in the handouts and prompts I make more or less everyday.   (I'm not eschewing focus or direction or precise utility for the students, not at all; still, the "handles" -- the ways I may manipulate and use those handouts and prompts -- ought to be "simple" to afford "the greatest range of possibilities".)  Imagine the handle of a knife from the kitchen: plain, streamlined, straight in design, I'm guessing.  Now imagine one of those knife handles shaped specifically with finger grooves, shaped to be held in only one way; that second knife affords a very firm grip, but only in one position, yes?  And therefore, the utility of the knife is limited, prescibed, overly-shaped.  Not the kitchen knife, though, as you can shift your grip to suit the particular job at hand.  All that's part of the meaning I find in the passage from Gibson below.

I love finding the truth in as many disparate places as possible. Consider:

     The handles of a craftsman's tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user's hand. 
     That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.

--from William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties


*Those lines from Macbeth, from the character Macbeth himself in the last act just after he hears that his wife, the queen, has died:

She should have died hereafter,
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.  Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.  It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.