Primrose Road

An essay in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine: "In Defense of Lurking," by Virginia Heffernan.

Heffernan praises the practice of wandering from message board to message board without posting (or worrying about how to compose a post that won't be attacked as newbielike, trollish, or uninformed), of "read[ing] without writing; tak[ing] without giving." Americans are wracked with guilt over leisure time; we have to reconfigure everything as work, she writes, to the point that even readers of novels have to convince themselves that they're learning something, that they're somehow being productive.

I'd write more, but I'm exhausted from the second-qualifying-exam crunch. To paraphrase a friend and fellow graduate student, some days blogging feels too much like homework.

Let's go a-flaneuring through the Interweb of Unproductivity.

Arden I: The World of William Shakespeare, a virtual-world Shakespeare game, is now available for download. According to Edward Castronova's Terra Nova blog, the game, which is set in a Richard II universe, includes

"Shakespearean quest lines; historically accurate tavern games; NPCs and resources drawn from Shakespeare; Shakespeare Q&A games that give experience points; Shakespeare text objects that grant power (text-as-treasure); Shakespeare texts accessed verbatim, in summary, and in quest/plot form."

Castronova's concern is that they "failed to design a gripping game experience." If players are not immersed in the world of Shakespeare, then it seems that, in light of the Synthetic Worlds Initiative's ideas about learning-via-immersion, the developers still have some work to do. However, when I read about the immersive promises of new media performances (and games), I cannot help but hear echoes of literary critic Catherine Belsey’s recounting a visit to Llancaich Fawr, a “living history museum” in which actors play the roles of seventeenth-century residents of the manor house in order to teach and entertain present-day tourists. Belsey understandably finds it difficult to intellectualize from the “living history” perspective; one cannot interrogate the past while participating or pretending to participate in it.

I'm not going to go into this any further because I'm developing an article/dissertation chapter on the problems with recasting interactivity as immersion, and don't want to, y'know, plagiarize myself. Next week (a non-grading week before final papers come in!) I'll see if I can borrow a friend's PC in order to actually play Arden, and I'll report back then.

I was going to add to Sunday's review of The Wooster Group's Hamlet a note that every ten minutes or so, there was a rumbling beneath our feet. But I need to check into that first, because it would be embarrassing to confuse A-effects with the 6 train.

On Saturday, a post over at Jewlicious criticized Sarah Silverman for her YouTubed comments on the writers' strike, straight from the picket lines. The post was entitled Sarah Silverman is a Moron and the Writers' Strike is Exhibit A.

When I initially commented on the post, I suspected that the writer's anti-Silverman sentiments might actually be veiled anti-union sentiments. After all, it's not like Silverman was waving excrement-on-a-stick at passersby in the video; she actually gave a fairly good explanation of what the WGA strike is all about, and why the writers' demands are "extemely reasonable." But after reading through additional follow-up comments, I realized that perhaps the underlying sentiment/attitude is not anti-union at all; it is -- ::drumroll, fanfare, etc.:: -- anti-Jewish-woman-making-a-living-off-of-publicly-raunchy-comedy. Note the love shown for George Carlin and Lenny Bruce in the follow-up posts. Apparently there's something about Sarah that makes it impossible for her vulgarity to be accepted as irony over there on Jewlicious.

Even her seemingly genuine attempt to explain the writers' strike was dismissed as an egoistic attempt to draw attention to herself. I hate to go this far, but the Jewlicious post was ultimately (and those who know me outside the blogosphere know that I rarely express this sentiment) anti-women. And to see so many young Jewish women buying into that idea ... well, I'll end on that note.

I should start with the observation that at intermission, several disappointed audience members in front of me talked about leaving. And 80% of the row did leave. I suspect that these theatregoers were expecting a performance of Hamlet, and what they saw was a performance about Hamlet.

Throughout most of the play, a 1964 Broadway performance of Hamlet starring Richard Burton was projected onto the screen behind the actors on stage. The film had originally been intended to bring a genuine theatrical experience to moviegoers; the Wooster Group's performance commented on the impossibility of bringing a genuine theatrical experience to moviegoers.

The stage set was similar to the film's, as though the film was somehow projecting itself out on to the stage. The stage action followed the film's camera angles with the help of a table on wheels and the actors' movements. The actors moved, for the most part, exactly like the actors on film. This exposed how what would have looked "natural" (and perhaps even stagelike) on film was awkward and jerky on the actual stage.

During several scenes, the screen went blank (blue), with only the word "UNRENDERED" digitally imposed on it. These were definitely the moments where this performance became a play about Hamlet, not just about the 1964 attempt to bring theater to movie houses. First, when Polonius speaks to Ophelia and warns Laertes "neither a borrower nor a lender be," we see an "unrendered" screen interrupted, just for a moment, by an interior shot of Polonius' house from Michael Almereyda's 2000 film. The "unrendered" screen appears again after a second, but Polonius delivers his borrower/lender speech in Bill Murray's voice (the audio from Almereyda's film).

Later, the Player King concedes his speech to none other than Charlton Heston, whose melodramatic Trojan War tale from Branagh's 1996 film appears on the screen in Windows Media Player (hmm ... possibly a comment on the word "player" in the digital age?) as a file named "C_Heston.mov." The characters onstage watch, engrossed at first, but then start to get bored, turning away, laying down, chatting with each other.

There was a microphone placed downstage left, where Hamlet delivers (all, I believe) his more "famous" speeches. I wasn't sure whether this was meant to suggest a hackneyed Hamlet, a self-absorbed Hamlet, or perhaps a rockstar Hamlet.

The only decision that didn't work for me was having Gertrude and Ophelia played by the same actor, who made sure to leave parts of Gertrude's dress hanging out beneath Ophelia's following her purposefully hasty costume changes. The Gertrude/Ophelia conflation has been done before, and it is, in fact, the subject of (too) many psychoanalytic "Hamlet loves Mom/Hamlet's a misogynist" readings. The Wooster Group's production did, however, rather amusingly call attention to the fact that Gertrude and Ophelia couldn't be on stage at the same time -- at "The Murder of Gonzago," after Hamlet left his mother's side for "mettle more attractive," he noted to himself, "well, we'll have to skip over all this Ophelia stuff, won't we?"

Ultimately, I believe that what made this Hamlet "new" (something not easy to do with Hamlet) was the fact that it was neither a straightforward staging of Hamlet nor a straightforward "quoting" of Hamlet, but rather a play about quoting Hamlet.

As I'm catching up on my reading for the annotated bibliography that's due in less than three weeks:

1) For lack of a better expression, Artaud gets wackier every time I read him.

2) Grotowski was right in pointing out that Artaud's theatre of cruelty was more of a manifesto than a method.

3) And Artaud wasn't much of an upstanding philosopher, either. His commentary on the Balinese theatre derives from his encounter with a Balinese theatre "display" of sorts at the Paris Exposition in the 1930s. Fascinating how he tries to pass colonialist display off as ritual.

4) His plague-theatre analogy is almost ... Cartesian? ... in its insistence that what makes theatre *interesting* is how it "attacks" only those organs and body parts associated with consciousness.

That's enough theory for today. I'll post my review of The Wooster Group's Hamlet later this weekend. For now, enjoy this blurry cellphone photo of Cooper Union kids spinning the Astor Place cube:



Despite the fact that the East Village really isn't the East Village anymore, some things never change.

I'm up early on this non-teaching day to bake the following:

(1) Mascarpone brownies
(2) Pumpkin pie (which, despite my belief that all desserts must contain cheese, will contain no cheese).

My plans to stage a Thanksgiving coup are going well so far. I've convinced my mother to allow me to make the stuffing (she usually just boils store-bought bread cubes in water) and actually stuff the turkey (she fears salmonella) at her apartment tomorrow.

I like cooking for her because she has the palate of a picky seven-year-old. She's good practice for the children I would like to have someday, post-dissertation.

Have I just broken some sort of unspoken "don't blog about your mother" rule? I hope not.

After baking, I'm off to dinner (I've already warned my dinner companion that I will likely have flour and cocoa powder in my hair) and then to The Wooster Group's Hamlet at the Public Theater. I'll post a review (though not too in-depth; my advisor thinks I should write a proper review and send it to Shakespeare Bulletin or the like) sometime after Turkey Day.

Ok, downloading music illegally does take money out of the artists' pockets. And we don't want that.

(Producers refusing to give up a few more pennies for DVD residuals also takes money out of artists' pockets, but that's another story.)

Since last year, the RIAA has been sending letters to students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Thus far, 129 letters have been sent out. These letters basically give the (typically young, undergraduate) students one of two options: either hire a lawyer, go to court, and make a futile effort to explain yourself -- and probably miss a lot of school in doing so -- or just pay the RIAA a $3000 "settlement."

There are probably guys out on Sixth Avenue right now selling illegally copied CDs. And the RIAA is picking on college kids who downloaded music for their own use? Sounds to me like they figure that because these students' parents are likely paying for them to go to college, they're a lot more likely to have $3000 to part with than one of the Sixth Avenue guys would.

129 X $3000 = $387,000. I wonder how much of that went to the artists whose music was illegally downloaded.

I'm from Queens. I can smell an extortion scheme a mile away ...

Searches for variants on "Saturn in the eighth house" make up 17% of all traffic to this blog for the month of November so far. Maybe I should use a time machine to return to my formerly woo-tastic self circa 2000 and change this into an astrology blog and make lots and lots of money off of it. $60 for a natal chart, $400 for me to replace Saturn in your eighth house with Jupiter in your eighth house.

(Those TV commercials about the guy named Bob purport to do something similar.)

OK, no more filthy astrology jokes.

I'm also seeing a significant number of searches for "copysquash," a word I made up in reference to the Dozier Internet Law cease-and-desist ridiculousness. This can only mean that copysquash, along with awesometacular, pathetisad, and spectricipant will soon become part of the common vernacular.

I went to Barnes and Noble yesterday to order a comp book that The Strand (awesomest bookstore ever) hadn't been able to get for me. While waiting for the woman at the desk to find my book, I spotted this spectacular literary masterpiece: Secrets of the Monarch: What the Dead Can Teach Us About Living a Better Life, by Allison DuBois, the "communicator" who inspired the TV show Medium.

Here is what you'll learn from Ms. DuBois' book:

Like the monarch butterfly, whose survival as a species depends on its predecessors' actions several generations before, everyone is influenced by their ancestors. But it is up to individuals, Allison says, to create their own legacies and pass the fire and passion in their lives to their children, their children's children, and the generations beyond.

In Secrets of the Monarch, Allison passes on important life lessons she's learned through communicating with the dead.

We're influenced by the actions of our ancestors and we have to remember that we will influence our descendants. WHO KNEW? Shocking, groundbreaking stuff.

Caterpillars may turn into rare butterflies, but butterflies are still slimy caterpillars with wings.