Two Movies

I've been to two movies in the past week; that's pretty close to a record for me, since I don't go to lots of movies. 

I saw Fences first, and what a film.  I don't know how I never read the play before, but holy cow, it's powerful. 

You know how people always ask if there's a great American novel or if America can do tragedy?  I think Fences is a pretty damned great American tragedy.  It reveals a core of racism, which is our tragedy.

Beautiful acting, directing, photography.  I really couldn't ask for more from a film.  I sure as heck hope the Oscars won't be so white this year.

Here's an interesting take on Fences  from Black&Smart.

Then I went to see Rogue One, expecting the fun I expect from Star Wars films.  (And noting that the films I think of are the first three out, because I can't remember the prequels, having seen them each once.  But also, I enjoyed the most recent one before this, The Force Awakens.  And, to be honest, not having read any press about Rogue One, I thought it would be a sequel to that.)

Not impressed.  It didn't help that the back of my chair kept getting kicked by a kid, or that another kid had a meltdown in the chair next to me (a surprisingly quiet meltdown, to be sure), and was shortly taken out by an adult (who had come with a crowd of like 5 little kids).

I may have missed things early on (see: kids in theaters), but it took me a long time to realize that this film was supposed to be set just before the first one.  I kept thinking, but Darth Vader is dead, isn't he?  and when are Poe and Rey going to show up?

There were lots of explosions and such, but the humor was pretty weak, and that's part of what made Star Wars films fun; they sort of chuckle at themselves for being space cowboys.

Shockingly, I'm going to see another film this afternoon with a friend, setting an all time record for me for seeing films in theaters within a week.

Academic Anxiety Dream

I had an anxiety dream last night.  I was looking for my class on campus, trying to find the right building, figure out the room, and no one had a printed bulletin (no one has had a printed bulletin in years, of course), and I kept trying to find it.  And I didn't know what I was going to say if/when I found it since my syllabus wasn't ready.

And I kept thinking, wow, break went by really fast, I'm not usually this unprepared.  What am I going to do?

I haven't had an academic anxiety dream that I remember in a while.

***

I hope your holidays are/were good ones.  I got back home yesterday to a messy house; I'd been intending to clean it up before I left, but with snow incoming, I'd left a day early.  It's rather dreary and depressing to come home to a messy house.

I have much to do: pay taxes, clean up the house, de-ice the drive (since the snow just sat while I was gone, not much, but enough to get nastily icy), and yes, prep courses for spring.

I have a course reassignment for spring, for which I'm eternally grateful.  And my search is over, I hope.  (We did our part, and will only need to do more if for some reason a contract can't be made with an appropriate candidate.)

Searches basically are a black box at this point, for most of us.  We turned in ranked names and filled out paperwork.  The chair takes those names, and requests to hire someone (but may choose someone else that we didn't rank as high), and then paperwork gets done, deans dean, and so on.  A call is made, or more than a few calls, and then at the end, we'll be told (if we're lucky) that candidate X will be joining us in the fall.  And that will be that.  Fingers crossed.

At any rate, with the search over, and the paperwork done (I hope), and only two courses (and not composition!), this semester is looking to be better.

***

I got a bad cold in early October.  It went to my lungs, and stayed there, giving me a gunky cough for a couple of hours a day.  So the week of finals, I went to the clinic, and the PA gave me a prescription for an antibiotic.  Like a good patient, I took the whole 5 day course.

It seemed to be doing the trick, except yesterday I started having lung gunk again.  And today it's back.  I should call the clinic again.  Ugh.

***

I'm making a late start this morning, but now I'm on my way!

Sympathy for my Students

My violin teacher told me that she has her college students tell her something new about the composers of their pieces.  I'm guessing this is to get them to look up the composer and read, say, a Wikipedia entry, which would at least give them a basic intro to period, place, and the composer's history.  At any rate, I've been doing this.  For some it's easier than others.

According to Wikipedia, Bach may not be buried in Bach's grave.  Neat.

And JB Lully, the super famous French Baroque composer wasn't born French?  Nope, according to Wikipedia, he was born Giovanni Battista Lulli in Florence, and became a French subject in 1661.

This week, though, my new piece is by Beethoven.  What new can I possible learn about Beethoven to tell my teacher?  (Lots would be new to me, but not to her.)

So I decided instead of stopping at Wikipedia, I'd look up some scholarly articles.  Now, I start with a huge advantage over my students there, because I know how to limit the searches and such.  But still, I looked at articles that were way, way beyond anything I could understand (because I don't know the theory stuff, especially). 

And that's what happens to my students all the time, especially when they look at specialized articles in, say, English lit.

So, how do we get students to begin to read and understand those articles? 

***

I was reading a student's Shakespeare paper today, and it cites a bunch of sources that sounded suspect, so I started looking, and the suspect sounding ones were mostly papers by undergrads, put up on the web by their schools (it looked like), with one other looking like it was someone doing research for an SCA type group (not bad for what it was, but not what my student should have been depending on).

Reading Papers

I was going to start by saying it's the grading jail time of the semester.  But really, other than the first week or so, it always feels like the grading jail time of the semester.  (I tend to give small, low stakes writing assignments spread across the semester, so it's my own fault.  But I think these assignments are valuable to students.)

I'm reading poetry papers right now.  I gave them three topics to choose from, and many are writing about the poetry book we read (whose author skyped with our class), and mostly, these are really good.

Yes, some could use a stronger thesis, and many could do better if they embedded quotations to give them context. 

But their writing really shows that they're reading these poems as poems, and thinking about them well.  And that's very good.

One of the things that strikes me about these papers is that they tend to read grief as "depressing" rather than as "grieving" or "deeply emotional."  For me, "depressing" is more existential, more a matter of despair and hopelessness, while grieving, even deep grieving, is less hopeless and more just dealing with loss.  I think.  I'm not sure how to express this.

Is Lear depressing?  Or deeply emotional?  or something else?

Does grief feel depressing to you folks?

Book Order Hades

I submitted my book orders today for two courses for next semester.  I'm over a month late, and that's on me.  But, the system is a mess.

I managed to log on, and started with one of the courses, intro to lit.  I tried to look at what I used the last time I taught the course, but instead came up with texts I've never taught. 

So I started afresh, and worked on ordering, and I think it worked, with the minor glitch that there's no good way to make sure the rental text counts as a rental text. (We have a rental system so that for any given course, one text can be a rental text.  It's great for big lit anthologies that no student really wants to buy.  Probably also great for intro science texts that no one needs after the course is over.)

Then I started on my next one.  Apparently, it's got texts from last semester, but that's a different iteration of the course.  I was able to choose two texts, including the rental (The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, which I find useful for any early modern course for basic background stuffs).  But stupidly, I clicked "recommended" rather than "required" for the rental.

I looked up an ordered other texts, and then I realized I'd clicked "recommended" rather than "required" and stupidly went back to try to change it, at which point I got caught in a rather endless loop and couldn't get out to submit the books. 

I finally got out by ordering another book, which is fine, and which will work, but what a stupid bleeping system.

What should take ten minutes took over an hour.  Thankfully, I can skip grading stuff and just toss it in the bin instead, right. 

What?

I can't?

Then what do I do to make up the hour of time? 

Oh, yeah, that's MY TIME.

Stupid [expletive deleted]s.

This is Why I do Draft Days

On Monday, my upper level Shakespeare class will work on peer revising rough drafts of their semester projects.  They have to turn in a draft of their project to their peer revision group on Sunday afternoon, and then have to come in Monday with print outs of the other peers' projects, with notes and such written, so that they spend Monday's class period in useful discussion.

Then they get a week to revise before turning in the final project.

There are several options for the project, the most intellectually difficult of which is to write a traditional lit crit paper.

So naturally, at the end of class today, when we'd discussed draft day stuff a bit more, one of the weaker students in the class came to ask if I have open office hours today.  (I don't.  I pretty much have job related stuff to do until 7 or 7:30 pm today.  Happy Friday.)  Then she asked if she could email me a question, and I asked her what the question was.

And she said that she's having difficulty writing her lit crit paper.  So I asked her what her argument is.

And she said, and I did you not, "I want to write about women in Shakespeare."  You might well be proud of me that I didn't burst out in laughter or in tears. 

She doesn't have an argument yet.  So I suggested she start by thinking about a specific play to make an argument about, and reread it, and think about what she might want to say about the play.  For previous assignments, she's read some criticism, so I suggested that she might go back and think about where she disagrees with a critic or thinks a critic's argument misses something important, and that would form a starting point for her paper.

The good thing is, if she starts working intently today, and works hard through Sunday to do something to turn in, and then has a whole week to work hard, the paper will be a while lot better than it would be if she'd waited until next Friday to begin working, right?

I live a rich and full fantasy life.  My students are going to be working hard this weekend to get a draft of this paper done.  Better that than starting next week!

Straw Men

I'm tired of being set up as a straw man.

No, I've been here for 15+ years, and I don't think I've ever known anyone who thought grammar drills and worksheets were great ways to teach writing (here or anywhere else).  In fact, shortly after I got here, the department voted to discontinue a grammar test that we were all supposed to give as part of the final for whatever writing course we were teaching.  When we discussed it, no one could even remember how we'd come to have it as a requirement; it had just been left there so long.  And, of course, no one taught to it, so far as I ever heard.  And most of us made it count minimally for the final grade because we didn't think it mattered. 

No, I've never met a Shakespearean scholar who didn't think about staging issues and recognize that Shakespeare wrote plays to be enacted in a theatrical space.  That's not to say we don't find other aspects of the plays interesting, but I've never seen the denial the theater folks attribute to us lit folks.  (Of course, actors and other theater focused folks have lots to teach all of us about acting and Shakespeare.  It's just that I don't know any Shakespeareans who think that isn't true.)


Maybe it's just the time of the semester, but dang...

So busy, and so many things happening that require attention.  I feel like I'm juggling very fragile glassware, and it's going to start crashing up there and falling as very sharp shards all over my upturned face and my desperately moving arms and hands.

I'm so tired of the crappy rumors people spread when they're really clueless.  But you can't answer the rumors because the actual issue is confidential (and you're hearing them third or fourth hand).

Email Signature Lists?

I got an email from a student the other day in relation to a committee I chair, and I swear, the student's signature thing had nine lines of activities plus a phone number and preferred pronouns.

Do your students provide a full list of activities?

Each activity gets a line:

This major.
That minor.
This club
That other activity,

And so on.

I see this a lot around here, and I'm wondering if it's also something at other schools?

I'm guessing (only guessing) that students are being told that it looks professional to mention their activities?

Teaching a Friend's Poetry

In my Intro to Poetry course, I'm using a book of poetry by a friend; my colleagues and I tend to use one more recent book of poetry when we teach the course in order to help students get a feel for how to read a book of poetry as a collection.

This book is fantastic, and the students seem to be enjoying it.  They have lots to say, and what they say suggests they're reading pretty carefully.

That said, sometimes they're a bit off. 

In one of the poems, for example, the speaker talks about being at a funeral with her child.  At one point well into the poem, she hands the child to her husband so she can throw dirt onto the grave.

But several of my students missed that, and from the way the poem uses direct address, decided that the speaker must be a new widow, burying her husband.  So I've pointed them to the part where she says that she hands the child to her husband.

I'm pretty careful only to use evidence from within the poem.

When I started studying English, I took a course in theory and criticism.  In the course, we focused primarily on a book of poems by George Oppen and sort of on hermeneutics.  Sounds interesting, doesn't it?  Except it was pretty miserable because often, when someone would point to something in a poem and say, "this says X," the professor would say, basically, no, it isn't X, because I know George and that didn't happen.  And it always seemed to me very unfair to ask us to try to read poems if they only make sense if you know the writer. 

(Retrospectively, I realize that we were probably all pretty naïve readers, but the principle holds.)

And then, of course, I try to be careful to separate the speaker of a poem from the writer, even though with a lot of more confessional contemporary poetry, that separation feels difficult.

(The other thing that made the course miserable was the professor's unwillingness to define or explain "hermeneutics" except to say that "hermeneutics isn't [this]," or "hermeneutics isn't [that]."  As I said at the time, my car wasn't either of those things, either, but I was pretty sure it wasn't hermeneutics.  (This was in the days before the internet, or even email, and my dictionary didn't provide much help.  I SHOULD have gone to the library and asked a librarian for help, but I wasn't that sophisticated a student at that point.)

I've never understood why he didn't just take half an hour and give us a nice introduction to hermeneutics and interpretation; I hope he had a good pedagogical reason for spiraling around it instead, but I've never figured it out.


Anyway, my friend is skyping into my class from afar today, and I'm excited for them to get to talk to her!

Page Limits on Assignments?

Like most teachers, I think, I don't like when students ask how long a paper should be, especially when it feels like what they want to do is the minimum.  You probably know the sort of paper I'm thinking of.  The student gets a page minimum (n), writes blather for n-1 pages, and one part of a sentence onto n, and then stops, pretty much mid-whatever, because they've done the page minimum.

It's not most students, but it happens, right?  And that's always my worry.

What I want, in my ideal world, is for students to start working on what they want to say, and to say it well until it's said, and be done.

When the shoe's on the other foot though, when I'm writing a statement for a grant or something, I totally want a page limit.

If you tell me, write two pages explaining your project for a grant, I'm pretty happy.  If you tell me to write no more than three pages explaining why my colleague should be tenured and promoted, I'm pretty happy.  But if you shrug and say, just write as much as you need to?  I'm unhappy.

If I know that everyone is just writing two pages for that grant, then I know I'm not going to turn in something wildly out of proportion to what others are doing, and mine won't look either overwhelming and too big, or like I didn't care enough to really explain. 

The same with the tenure letter; if I know no one's going to turn in a 12 page letter to get their colleague tenured, then I won't feel like my three pages are unconvincing because I could only write three pages.

(Of course, in either case, I'm going to work like the dickens to say a lot, as clearly and convincingly as possible in the allotted pages.)

How about you?  Page limits for student writing (even as suggestions), or no?

Celebration!

I just got news that my sabbatical application has been approved by my campus.  Now, of course, it has to be approved by the governing folks.  But historically, they've approved sabbaticals if the state university campuses have approved them (because the university campuses, when they approve, say that they can cover them budget-wise).

The only difficulty on my end is budgeting, but I think I've got that handled.  I'll use some savings, but that's what savings are for.  (And it's not like I'm going to start spending money wildly on a Porsche or something.)

This is bright news for me in a difficult semester.  And boy, I can't even say how relieved and happy I am; words, as always, fail me.  Or I fail them, I suppose.

I'm going to start a new label in celebration!

Safety Pins?

The big question in this post is about safety pins.  Are you seeing them around?  I'm sympathetic, but I guess I feel like we're going to forget really quickly.  What do you think?



Other than that, I've been muddling through.  That's how it's been.

I've been ill; just a head cold, but miserable in the head cold way for almost three weeks.  (It's MUCH better now, and has been steadily improving since about Thursday, thanks for asking.)  For most of those past three weeks, I've been coughing a lot, and waking up every couple of hours during the night coughing.  So I've been barely sleeping.

I've been involved with interviews, many of them.  All good, but they take a lot of time.  And then there's the related paperwork, which takes a lot of time, too.

I'm involved in a task force which will come to partial fruition this coming week.  Fingers crossed that it goes well.  I have a couple hours (maybe) of prep to do for my part, then the actual event.

Much of the week was spent doing 20 minute conferences with all my writing students.  It's a lot of time, but very helpful to all of them, I think.  I hope.

I realized on Tuesday afternoon (between conferences) that I'd be teaching "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" on Wednesday, though I hadn't reread them since I last taught the course some 5+ years ago.  Great poems, but what to do?  (It went fine.)  (On Tuesday, I went home about 4, got into bed and semi-slept for 2 hours, got up, prepped for a couple hours, and went back to bed around 8:30 and semi-slept

I've been feeling like I'm juggling, and something's always about to drop and break.  It's not a good feeling.

I've fallen behind on grading.  I need to rethink this sort of assignment because the grading's onerous, even though the assignment is really valuable in getting students to read critically.

The one bright thing is practicing the violin when I haven't been coughing too much.  It totally takes my mind off everything else, just focusing on trying not to sound really bad. 

The Day

This is a big one.  I thought there were big ones before, but this seems way, way more important.

I voted a couple of weeks ago, which is legal in my state.  I didn't have problems, but then, I'm a white, middle-aged woman with easy access to legal ID.  And my local city clerk seems to be not crazy.  (I don't know her politics, but what I hear is about making sure everyone has clear information about how to vote and such.)

I drove by my polling place (it's on the best route to work) this morning at about 7:15, and the parking lot was full, and the street parking was close to full.

Vote well, USians; please, please, please vote well.

(I don't own a pantsuit, and none of my clothes are white, but I am wearing a nice blue sweater.)

McMansion Hell

Have you folks seen this site, McMansion Hell?

Basically, the writer is an architectural critic who explains why it is that McMansions are so darned ugly.  They basically do two sorts of posts.  One is the broad explanatory post, taking some issue and explaining how it works in the architecture.  It may be an overview, as here, or it may focus on a specific aspect of houses, and show different ones with explanations, as with this on front entries, or this one on landscaping, or this one on roofs.  The second sort of post takes a specific house, staged by realtors for the market, and critiques it.  Here's one on a house in Virginia.  And here's one from Georgia.

So I have a bit of a love/hate, or maybe more a love/fear relationship with this site.  I love it because it explains so much about that aesthetic and why McMansions seem so unpleasing aesthetically. 

But I hate/fear it because every post makes me more aware that I live in a sort of ugly McMansion, not guilty of the highest level of McMansion excesses, perhaps, but pretty up there.

For example, if you look at the Georgia house, and scroll down to the kitchen, where the writer talks about white appliances?  Yeah, I can see my white kitchen appliances from where I sit.  And I'm not getting new ones any time soon (I hope!).  So white appliances, check.

Open concept.  Yep, check.

At one point the writer talks about someone's TV being old, but it's basically a big screen TV from maybe 10 years ago.  If it works, what's to complain about?  There's nothing wrong with a 25 year old TV that works, is there?  (Asks a woman who owns a 25 or so year old TV, and who just got a new big, flat screen one a few years ago because the old one couldn't talk to the CD player I bought used.  The old one was good, and color, even if it was only 13".)

My house is probably a 7 on the scale of 1-10 horribleness.  Maybe a 6. 

In addition to the ugliness, the architect talks about the cheapness of materials and building techniques used to build McMansions, and here's where my house falls squarely in.  Bad roof shingles, check (now not bad, because I had the whole thing replaced).  Vinyl siding, check (but seriously, I would hate to have to restain or repaint every three or so years).  Minimal insulation (well, at least I had a lot added when I had the roof redone, so hopefully that is solved).  And so on.  It's sort of worrisome.

On the other hand, I don't have the money to decorate a lot, so my house doesn't have the most egregious decorating faux pas, I suppose.  On the other hand, it's pretty much just whatever old furniture I've picked up over the years, and a few pieces I've bought for specific purposes.  (The writer of McMansion Hell says they specifically show pictures of realtor staged houses, and not houses real people live in, because they aren't making fun of real people.)

When I bought my house, it was in a newish neighborhood, on a cul-de-sac where all the houses were built, but also near areas that didn't have streets through and such.  For a while, it stayed like that.  But in the last three years or so, there's been a building boom, streets have been put through, and a lot of new houses are going in, and they're all so McMansion.  My house is already one of the smaller houses on my street of 9 houses, maybe the smallest.  But the new houses going in are way bigger than most of the houses on my street (there's one that's way bigger than the others, and about the size of the new houses).

Maybe this means our housing values will go up?  Which doesn't matter until we decide to sell, of course, except that our taxes will also go up.  And the city may decide to put in sidewalks.  (It's a cul-de-sac; everyone just walks along the side and no cars are driving fast.)

So, there we are, something fun to read; or, if you're like me, something fun and perhaps anxiety-producing!

Surf Scoter!

Surf Scoters are pretty rare up in the North Woods.  They're way more common in the way up North.

But there's been one nearby, so I went out after work on Friday, drove a bit, and got to see it.  (And took a couple of pictures; these are cropped, and not nearly as good as pros take, but enough to remind me.)

Pretty exciting.  It's so very cool that there are email lists and such that people use to share information about bird sitings and such.  (I'm sure there are lots of such things about other stuff, but I'm on the edge of the birder world, so that's what I see.)  It sure makes it lots easier to get to see rarer birds than it would be.  (Though, population decreases work against that, I bet.)

Happy November!

I spent all weekend in grading jail, and now I'm out!  At least until Friday.

I gave midterms last week (in two different courses), and had several students not take them for a variety of health-ish reasons.  And because some of those involve time to get better, they weren't able to schedule makeups until this week, after I'd given back midterms in class and gone over them (I can't see making 20+ people wait to get midterms back because one or two people were ill).  So I had to write two new midterms.  And I'm willing to do that, and did it, and without complaining to the students, but dang, it's frustrating to have to write make up midterms.

I was talking to one of my colleagues about it, and he said it feels like we're having more students with mental health issues.  That may be.  Is that your experience?

Of course, we want students with mental health issues to get the help they need, to not feel stigmatized, and to succeed. 

But, for example, that means we have to write extra midterms, so it takes extra time.  And we're all already working more than 40 hours a week.  Where does the extra time come from? 

I guess the questions for me are:   are other folks seeing more students with mental health issues (and having those issues require additional work for instructors and such)?

How do you balance the additional needs of those students with all the other demands on your time?

By the Wayside

Every so often, I'll look at a blogroll, and think how much I miss certain blogging voices.  And maybe I'll click over, just in case. 

Today, I found a link to a State Park place where I may have been before (or not); I have vague memories of a place that looks a lot like the pictures on line.  But maybe a lot of places look like that and I just don't realize it?

And I found a blog I used to read that's been updated, A Gentleman's C.  (I must be the last person alive who doesn't use an RSS feed.)

To the Theater

I went to a play the other day, put on by a local amateur group, Shipwrecked!  An Entertainment.  (The play premiered in the US in 2007.)

It did some interesting things, choices the director made, and the theme of tale-telling.  But there were a couple of parts that were, well, problematic.  Or is it just me?

In short, a 19th century white European male goes off to see for adventure, ends up stranded on an island off Australia, where he eventually meets some Aboriginal people.  He saves the people, and then is basically offered his choice of brides, choosing a woman he met early on.  Later, homesick, he leaves his wife and family and returns to Europe where he writes and sells his story, to both acclaim and doubt.

The problematic, initially, for me, was the representation of the Aboriginal people.  They weren't played in blackface (thank dog) but were played in tattery looking clothes (think caveman pictures from the 50s more than not) and did more grunting than not.  Like those old caveman pictures, they were played stooped, mostly.  The crowd seemed to find the effect comic.

Now, I get that by the end the audience is supposed to question his tale, to wonder if he's ever seen Aboriginal people, or had these adventures.  But while the Aboriginal people are on stage, there was nothing to suggest that the performance was thinking about what it means to present Aboriginal people in this sort of way.

The lesser problematic part was during the choosing a wife scene, where one of the potential brides was played in broad drag.  Again, the audience laughed.

But, I wonder, how would it feel to sit with my African American or Native American students to see this play?  How would it feel to sit with a transgender student to see this play?

I don't think it would feel comfortable.  The fact is, of course, most African American or Native American students have seen far worse, experienced far worse.  But this would be like yet another paper cut in the skin of life.  I wouldn't want to participate in giving that paper cut.

To put it another way, it's not a good sign that I was grateful, ever so grateful that at least they weren't in blackface.

As tends to be the case here, the theater audience was very white.  So as the play was presenting the Aboriginal people, it felt like a bunch of white people secretly (or maybe not secretly, but imagining themselves as the only possible audience) enjoying the racism of the representation.

I haven't read the play, so maybe this performance wasn't at all what the text suggests, or not at all like the play that premiered in New York.

I did read a couple reviews (including in The New York Times), and they didn't seem to notice race issues.  But then, theater often seems like a bastion of white privilege, with white folks just not noticing racism because they imagine they're in an all white space.

Has anyone else seen the play?  Thoughts?

I saw a play last year by a Nigerian-American playwright, set in Africa, with all African characters, but played by white folks (in this Midwestern area), and it didn't feel racist in this way.  It felt like the African characters were represented with respect in a way that just didn't come across in Shipwrecked.  I think that other play was played as a sort of timeless story, a story set in a culture, but a story that they expected to speak to all humanity and represent all humanity, in the way that we imagine Shakespeare speaks to all humanity, if you know what I mean.

Is there a way this play can be performed that doesn't feel racist?

(I was thinking, if they played the European guy in shipwreck-ish clothing, and the Aboriginal characters in, say, modern business attire, could you get at the sense that the main character's storytelling is problematic?)

Agincourt, Again

It's St. Crispin's Day!

That's the day when we remember that we don't remember well, but are easily manipulated by patriotic rhetoric.  Or, at least, it we should remember that we don't remember.

In Shakespeare's Henry V, the play's most memorable (at least to me) passage comes in Henry's speech before the battle of Agincourt. 

I seem to post about St. Crispin's Day every few years.

In 2007.

On Veteran's Day, 11 November 2005.  (Where I posted the speech.)

And last year, the 600th anniversary, 2015.  (Where I posted even more of the speech.)


****

I got an email from a colleague today, a colleague who sometimes gets really petty.  And this is one of those times.  The problem is, when she gets petty, other people have to rein her in, and then she gets really mad.  Unfortunately, right now, I'm the one with the reins.  (But, if the pettiness persists, other folks will help.  Still, she'll be most mad at me.)

Last week, I made the mistake of asking another colleague (who's in a position where they're supposed to answer these sorts of questions) a question in the department office, and then since I didn't understand the shorthand of her answer, a followup question.  And she blew up at me and started ranting at me for being so so rude.  So I apologized, said I hadn't meant to be rude, but had just not understood.  And she blew up at me more.  So, again, I apologized, and said I hadn't meant to be rude, and she blew up at me more, and then she turned and walked into her office. 

That was really unpleasant.  Let's just say, I'm averse to conflict.  If the zombie apocalypse comes, you don't want me on your side.  If you need a latrine dug, then you may want my help.  If you need someone to visit while you're in the hospital, then you may want me to.  But if it comes to a verbal fight, in a hallway or anywhere, then no, I'm crap at that.

If I could have done it financially, I would have turned in my letter of resignation that day.  I still would, if I could do it financially.  (I did discuss it with the chair.  Meh.  Neither good nor bad.  This is one of the favored folks of the chair.  But if she ever verbally attacks me again, I'll file an official complaint, I guess.)

I used to feel like, mostly, the folks in my department treated each other decently, and that somehow made the nastiness of the state government, the nastiness of state and local politics, the nastiness of administrative desperation... survivable. 

And now, I don't feel that.

Shakespeare Writes a New Play!

Or not.

The Guardian has an article this morning that talks about the new edition of The New Oxford Shakespeare (ed. Gary Taylor), which credits Marlowe with collaborating on the Henry VI plays and names Shakespeare as the author of Arden of Faversham.

I'm not much into authorship issues.  I think it's pretty clear to me that theater is wildly collaborative, but I wouldn't have thought Marlowe would write with Shakespeare at that point in their careers, when Marlowe was already popular, and Shakespeare was a beginner. 

As to Arden, which is a blast of a play to teach, I'm reminded of Don Foster's work claiming that "Elegy" as Shakespeare's based on computer analysis, and then deciding later that it wasn't.  Of course, everyone would love to find another work by Shakespeare. 

I don't think it's the first time Shakespeare's been suggested as the author of Arden.  The question is, how does it change things?

For folks who use The New Oxford to teach (and I don't think Shakespeare anthologies sell much outside of teaching requirements), then it will make it easy to include Arden in a Shakespeare course.  I don't know if that will happen much, though.  I think it's easy to choose, say, Titus as one of the tragedies to teach in a survey, especially if you're going to teach Hamlet later, or Othello, because it brings forward revenge tragedy as a genre and race, both of which make for fruitful discussion.  And there's lots to talk about re gender, violence, masculinities, social order, etc.  But I don't think I'd choose Arden to do the same work in a class.  I'm sure some folks will choose it, and make it work well for them.

If Oxford puts out a new edition of Arden as Shakespeare, that's interesting.  (It's already available for a reasonable price in their World's Classics series, along with A Woman Killed with Kindness and Other Domestic Plays.  And there's the Methuen edition, which is reasonably priced and useful.)

Other than that, how do these findings change what we write or teach about Shakespeare?  How do they change what we see on stage?

Maybe Arden will get some more stage time, which is good, because I think it would work really well on stage (I've never seen it).

I doubt it changes much for the Henry VI plays; they'll still get taught in Shakespeare courses, and in drama courses, and maybe they'll get added to the occasional Marlowe course.