Three Courses

I am having students read aloud in two of my classes (in the third they are parsing grammar aloud). Last night we had three lovely readings in NightShakes. One student read a passage from Much Ado About Nothing. BeAtrice has been listening covertly as Hero and Ursula speak of Benedick’s love for her and her own shrewish attitude. Here is the passage:

BEATRICE
What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?
Stand I condemn’d for pride and scorn so much?
Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride, adieu!
No glory lives behind the back of such.
And, Benedick, love on; I will requite thee,
Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand:
If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee
To bind our loves up in a holy band;
For others say thou dost deserve, and I
Believe it better than reportingly.

The student read the passage three times, beautifully, and on the third substituted “eyes” for “ears” in the first line:

“What fire is in my eyes?”

It is a lovely, telling mistake. In Petrarchan sonnet making (or Spenser, Sidney, even Shakespeare’s sonnet making), fire might well be described as dwelling within or shooting from the loved-one’s eyes. And back in Much Ado, BeAtrice surely has the spark (the pepper) to have firey eyes. But she has been listening in a bower, seemingly hidden from the speakers. The flashing truth — about herself — is overheard, and thus it is “ears” rather than “eyes” that receive the fire.

I’m reading Shakespeare pretty constantly these days and have begun tweeting lines that I find particularly good: funny, meaningful, deep, quirky. Here are two of mine favorites so far from Taming of the Shrew:

Sly. Well, we’ll see’t. Come, madame wife, sit by my side and let the world slip: we shall ne’er be younger.” (End of Induction scene, as Sly the beggar sits to watch the play)

Lucentio. Spit in the hole, man, and tune again. (Act III, scene i, Lucentio in disguise to Hortensio in disguise)

Ian,

I’ve been a fan for a lot of years (I was a Freshman in high school when a cool Junior wrote Mott the Hoople on the board — since at least then). During college your albums formed a core of my musical education (John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Bruce filled out the curriculum). I saw you for the first time on the follow-up tour to Welcome to the Club. That was me in the front row at Bloomsburg, jammin’ to the tunes. I saw you and Mick Ronson a few years later in the Chestnut Cabaret in Philadelphia, when you were playing with Steve Jones. Great stuff. But that was the last time I saw you live. Work got in the way I suppose, but no excuses. I wish I had seen you more.

Then about two years ago I bumped into a youtube video of that free concert you did in Rockerfeller Park in 2009. My God, I thought and frantically wrote my college buddies: “Ian still cranks.” After that I had one concert in my sights — you were playing near New Hope, PA, but Dylan was playing at Lehigh on the same night and I saw Dylan instead. Sorry.

So you’ve been on my mind, but life has gotten in the way. Imagine my surprise then when I looked up the address of World Café Live in Philadelphia. On September 13, 2012 I was heading to the world premier of Gamers, a documentary about dungeon and dragon players, video gamers, trekkies, larpers, etc. The movie was six years in the making – I have been closely associated with it – and by god I wanted to attend its opening. Then I saw that you would be playing downstairs on the very same night, at the very same time!

This letter is tilting toward the self-serving, and may not be particularly interesting to you, so let me get to the point. First, a high school band opened for Gamers, “Post Departure”: a guitarist, a keyboard player, drummer, and bass player. They were good. I sat at the bar sipping my Scottish ale and mused, “Do these boys, who are playing to a pretty full house, know who they are competing with downstairs?” If they do, good for them; if not, well, they have added bragging rights after that head to head gig.

The same goes for Gamers. Christine Farina’s low-budget documentary, a sort of guerilla shoot of various gamers, gaming stores, gaming conventions, and larps, was screening about 100 feet (I’m guessing) from where you were playing. I will admit a moment of shock, my body gave a visceral response when I realized I was going to see the movie instead of you, but it really was a no-brainer for me.

I have your new album, am listening to it now, and hope to see you sooner rather than later. For now, I’ll smile when I think that I very nearly saw you last week. From the set list, look’s like you had a great time, too.

Warm regards from a long-time fan,

Tom

This past Saturday I saw Bob Dylan in Big Flats, New York. He was playing the outdoor stage adjacent to the haunted house of Tagsylvania. The weather was perfect for a night concert. As the sun set beneath hills of the Southern Tier, the concert kicked off with “Watching the River Flow.” The band was in great form. Dylan opened with his rough singing voice, but as the night went on that voice became clearer, stronger, and more fitting. Bob’s singing, along with his keyboard, guitar, and harmonica work, didn’t always hit the “right” notes, but he got the songs right. Here’s the set list.

A typical knock against Dylan is his raggedy voice. Another is his haphazard performance style. We know he can play – we’ve heard it on the albums – but on stage he doesn’t always seem to care about technique. A further knock – and a significant one for those who name Bob as the Shakespeare of our day – is that his songs are not really that good – they are not literary – they don’t stand up as verse. I heard a pulitzer prize-winning poet once admit that Dylan was perhaps the best lyric writer of the rockers, but he hesitated to call him a poet.

Yet as I sat in the darkening New York evening, with the Big Dipper rising over the stage, I once again felt the touch of art. Singing with his 70-year-plus voice, Dylan breathed life into his songs – some half a century old (the encore was “Blowin’ in the Wind”). He wasn’t striving to duplicate the sound-studio, nor was he reaching for some new best version of old tunes, he was a time-tested ballad man, an old bluesman, working to connect with his audience.

I’m reading a lot of Shakespeare and Renaissance poetry right now. I’m thinking about content, style, and audiences. Wish I could get Dylan to come to campus so that my students could think about these issues through his twenty-first century lens.

I often go into the semester suspecting that one of my three courses will really stand out. Sometimes it does; other times an unexpected course grabs the spotlight — usually because the students are energized.

This term I don’t lean toward one course or another. I smile thinking that I get to teach these courses — I am excited by the challenge.

• Shakespeare: I’ve never taught a course devoted to Bill. But here I go. Some see the modern preoccupation with Shakespeare as a fetish. I don’t. With the course focus on ways of reading and writing Shakespeare, I see this as an examination of the English language at a very high level of sophistication.
• Short Verse of Early Modern Britain: Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser, Sidney, Drayton, Shakespeare, Campion, Wroth, Donne, Wither, Herrick, Herbert, Milton, Montrose, Marvel, Philips, Border Ballads. Yow! Reading several of these poets has informed my life in deeply important ways. I’m hoping to pass along the favor, especially as it pertains to meter and form.
• English Language and Grammar: This has been my favorite course for more than a decade. Don’t see why it should lose its glamour this time around: “What is a participial phrase and how does it function?”

I suspect there will be quite a bit of cross-over among these courses. Hopefully, I’ll have reasonable things to say on this, their unified blog.