Primrose Road

This came up on the Yugntruf email list the other day:

"The Essence" was created and is performed by Allen Lewis Rickman, Yelena Shmulenson, and Steve Sterner, three of the younger veterans of Yiddish theater. "We tell the entire history of the Yiddish theater, kinda-sorta, in eighty minutes," said Rickman. "We tell stories in English and act and sing in Yiddish -- with supertitles -- and the audience laughs and cries and whatevers. And it's 99 44/100% nostalgia-free."

"It's not just for alter kakers," explained Shmulenson.

I'd love to see this -- anything about the Yiddish theater that has the (chutzpah?) to advertise itself as being "99.44% nostalgia-free" has got to be good -- but because I teach on Long Island until 5pm on Mondays, there's no way I'd be able to make it to Manhattan by 7. In any case, the performance will take place at 325 E 6th Street, tvishn 1st and 2nd Avenues, on Monday, Feb 4th. So go do something Yiddish-y next week.

Next week, I'm giving my Writing from Lit students their first "Library Assignment." In this class, they're supposed to learn how to (1) write about literature and (2) write research papers, so I want them actually in the li-berry from time to time instead of on teh intarwebs, picking-and-citing from not-always-up-to-snuff literature databases that are often merely encyclopedias rather than collections of critical articles. For this Library Assignment, students will work in groups of four or five and find TEN reliable print sources on the semi-ridiculous topic that their group has been assigned.

This week (Wednesday, actually), I am taking my final comp exam, which is a capstone oral exam via conference call (very convenient when you live 1200 miles away from your university). So while I prepare to answer questions posed by the disembodied voices of my advisor and dissertation committee, I leave the "semi-ridiculous" topics to you, kind reader(s?).

Post in the comments a semi-ridiculous topic (hilarity preferred) -- or more than one -- on which students could find ten print sources (books or journal articles). Those selected will receive (1) a million dollars, payable in chips from the Atlantic City casino of your choice, (2) my enduring love and affection, (3) my students' eternal wrath, and (4) meaning, at last.

Most arguments against new media have already been made by either the Unabomber or Plato.

Yesterday, I directed my Business Writing students to several known diploma mill websites and gave them the following "ethical dilemma" to attempt to resolve:

You are an employer, and you learn that an employee's master's degree came from an unaccredited diploma mill. After speaking with the employee and several colleagues, you determine that the employee genuinely didn't know that what (s)he earned/purchased was not a valid master's degree (i.e. (s)he believed that one could earn a master's degree with three month-long online courses and a 15-page book report). What do you do?

After looking over the websites, several students responded that they would fire the employee, not so much because (s)he had a diploma mill "degree," but because (s)he fell for the diploma mill scam.

"Just look at the 'faculty' pages," one student said (and others echoed her sentiments). "Some of them look like mugshots, and none of them has an accredited degree! How could anyone not know that something's not right?"

And they appreciated my "if it teaches 'Angelology,' it's a diploma mill" rule. Lots of cries of "Angelology? What the hell?" and "What does it mean for my B.S. in Engineering if somebody else can get a bachelor's in Angelology?" My faith in Generation Y has momentarily been restored.

In all of the writing classes I teach -- freshman composition, business writing, tech writing, writing from literature -- I make sure early on to address ethos, pathos, and logos, those three musketeers of the rhetorical triangle that composition teachers must learn to love and respect (sometimes). If you're going to write a persuasive argument (especially a 'give-me-money-please' business proposal), you have to carefully consider your audience and present yourself to that audience as knowledgeable -- or as an expert, if that's what your audience wants. The rhetorical triangle illustrates for students the variables involved in constructing an argument.

Many students immediately recognize that the ethos and pathos elements of an argument are variable. (One exception: the student who does the ethos = ethics = morality Sunday School move and uses personal belief to establish credibility, i.e. "I am a person of faith, therefore I believe that abortion/homosexuality/evolution is wrong, therefore you should too.") The most challenging variable in analyzing a rhetorical situation -- not just for them, but for me too, as you'll no doubt see momentarily -- is often the 'logos' element, the words, the stuff the argument is made of.

I read a number of skeptical blogs because of my interest in debunking supernatural beliefs that seem on the surface to be about love and tolerance but are really about self-absorption, narcissism, and making money off the less fortunate or less educated. Skeptical bloggers often argue for the importance of empirical evidence in making decisions related to public policy, education, and medical matters; in these respects, I wholeheartedly agree with them. Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children because of what Oprah and Jenny McCarthy say need a better understanding of how evidence works. (One cannot blame these parents, however, for being sucked into this pseudoscience. They are simply turning, in desperation, to those who promise them definitive - though wrong - answers as opposed to no answers.) As long as people refuse to accept what we've learned from observation and experimentation in the last 600 years or so, PTAs and fundamentalist organizations will continue to convince school boards to teach mythology as science and history.

At the same time, they sometimes seem to advocate an Enlightenment-style philosophy of "if it can't be observed or measured, it doesn't exist." It's often difficult to talk about or theorize history and literature from this hyper-empiricist point of view. Take, for instance, the following argument from unobservability, presented and challenged in Bill Bryson's recent book Shakespeare: The World As Stage: there is no empirical evidence that Shakespeare owned any books; therefore, Shakespeare did not own any books, Shakespeare was not well-read and could not have written the plays attributed to him. Bryson cleverly responds that there is also no empirical evidence that Shakespeare owned pants. Therefore ...

Now, I (in my persona as "scholar"?) can't prove that Shakespeare owned or wore pants, but I can argue that it's more likely than not that he wore pants. I would have to make this argument via cultural artifacts: paintings of men wearing pants, writings that reference pants, bills that suggest money changed hands in relation to the production of pants, instructions for making pants, etc. As the New Historicists have taught us (I mean, of course, those studying literature and drama from an historical perspective), we can use documents to partially reconstruct a cultural scenario, though we must always acknowledge that we're working only with bits and pieces of the past, and that there will always be multiple readings of the bits and pieces available to us.

I'm not saying empiricism is a bad thing; obviously, it's incredibly useful these days in the sciences, which are being challenged by those who claim to be speaking for God. But it doesn't work as well for literature, and it doesn't serve the same functions. If I argue from twentieth-century philosophy and performance theory and a smattering of tracts, pamphlets, and playtexts that the Early Modern English theatre was profoundly anti-illusionistic in both metatheatrical and signaletic terms, I'm (I would hope) helping students of Early Modern drama better understand what they're working with. If someone then challenges my work with an additional smattering of evidence that theatre in the 16th and 17th centuries was somehow proto-Chekhovian or proto-Strasburgian, I'd be able to accept that work as an alternate (or maybe even more correct, depending on the scenario) theory, in part because our argument wouldn't put anyone's health or well-being in danger.

"The FBI hunts down the most vicious criminals online," reads a half-page ad for the new thriller Untraceable, "but the most dangerous one is hunting them."

I'll bet that in the world of American crime thrillers, the FBI hunts down criminals via Google searches.

According to film and television, any and all information is available to us with a web browser and a couple of clever keystrokes. Computers never fail, except when they explode. On police/courtroom procedural dramas, often all it takes to catch a criminal is a simple search of a database of fingerprints, which never fails. And somehow, TV's fictional rendering of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit (Law and Order: SVU) is outfitted with gigantic hi-def flat screens that display information relevant to the case (a function served by simple marker-boards on the other two Law and Order series). Lawyers and court employees involved in jury selection have to worry about the CSI Effect because of the widespread belief that when it comes to criminal investigation, computers can do just about anything.

No wonder today's college students think that Google and Wikipedia are all-powerful.

Slightly terrifying clip on this morning's McLaughlin Group: Mike Huckabee telling an audience that he's in favor of a Constitutional amendment to ban abortion and same-sex marriage. (Pat Buchanan, of course, thought this was a viable possibility.) I'm no political scholar (obviously), but I do know that the purpose of Constitutional amendments is to guarantee rights not already explicitly guaranteed by the Constitution. An amendment that would effectively take rights away, therefore, does not make sense in the context of the US Constitution.

There was also lots of talk of this country being founded on the freedom of religion. Except, one of the founding principles of America was the separation of church and state, not freedom of religion, or the freedom to work religion into every aspect of American life.

This semester I will be teaching three classes, traveling to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC for a seminar every weekend, presenting a paper at the Renaissance Society of America conference, and working on two articles/dissertation chapters. Thus, blog posts will likely be infrequent and make less sense as the days go by. '
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Proof of my already-faltering state of mind: yesterday, I read a review of a performance that used the text of Brecht on Theatre. This sounds interesting, I thought, and immediately wrote down the theater's name and phone number and checked my calendar for a convenient weeknight on which to see the play. As I picked up the phone, I realized that the phone number in the review did not contain an area code. Since at least 2003, Manhattan has had three area codes: 212, 917, and 646, and no listing would ever omit the area code.

The reason for the omitted area code was that the performance took place in the early spring of 1988. I was off by about twenty years.

Hamlet/Bart (after stabbing Polonius/Chief Wiggum): Polonius! What are you doing here?

Polonius/Chief Wiggum: I hide behind curtains because I have a fear of being stabbed. (To Laertes/Ralph) Laertes, I need you to do a big boy job for daddy. I need you to avenge my death.

To whomever arrived at Primrose Road via a search for "shakespeare types of poison": I want to read your paper when it's finished. ;)

Shakespeare's contemporaries have a lot more fun with poison -- see esp. Webster's The White Devil and the 'anonymous' Arden of Faversham. Artists, take note: there's lots of money to be made in the poisoned painting industry.