February
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0437 Thursday, 22 February 2001 From: Maria Concolato Palermo <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 22 Feb 2001 22:11:49 +0100 Subject: 12.0420 Cornish Curates Comment: R: SHK 12.0420 Cornish Curates And if it were 'Romish'? Just an idea. Greetings.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0436 Thursday, 22 February 2001 From: Abigail Quart <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 22 Feb 2001 12:36:07 -0500 Subject: Popular Culture >From the Buffy/Angel FAQ at Salon Magazine's Table Talk: "MoG stands for Ministers of Grace and refers to Cordelia, Wesley, and Gunn. The term is taken from a line in Hamlet, "Angels and ministers of grace, defend us." (Spoken by Hamlet when approached by the Ghost of his father, the King.)"
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0435 Thursday, 22 February 2001 From: Werner Broennimann <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 22 Feb 2001 10:22:14 +0000 Subject: green-eyed jealousy "Green Eyes" is one of the songs on Erykah Badu's new album "Mama's Gun". Its first stanza, called first movement (a low-volume, jazzy mock-historical 30's recording, making the story real old, with the singer as it were listening to her own former self as a brave and good girl) goes like this: My eyes are green 'Cause I eat a lot of vegetables It don't have nothing to do with your new friend Great stuff to keep jaundice and Munch's painting far hence. Werner
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0434 Thursday, 22 February 2001 From: Alex Houck <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 21 Feb 2001 22:03:01 -0800 Subject: Carl Upchurch I just attended a lecture/dialogue with speaker Carl Upchurch and I feel the urge to share my experience with the list. He is an advocate for urban youth, the niggerized, who is best known for his Gang Conference of 1993 and his book CONVICTED IN THE WOMB. His book chronicles his ignorance of his personal potential, how he dropped out of school at age nine, and wallowed in crime, he spent twenty-two years collectively in different penitentiaries. So, what did this urban youth from a robber and crook into a keynote speaker that tours the country and volunteers at juvenile halls? Shakespeare. While in solitary confinement, Upchurch found a dusty copy of "The Yale Shakespeare" (a collection of sonnets) propping up a corner of his table. He only picked it up because it differed from unfathomable boredom created in his grey world. He had no idea who Shakespeare was, the name Shakespeare meant nothing to him--but still he read the sonnets. As he read and re-read he began to identify with the voice of the sonnets. One sonnet in particular he identified with the most, he committed it to memory, and shared it with us. Sonnet 29 When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd, Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate; For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings. Upchurch identified with the "disgrace" and "bootless cries" of his "outcast state", and through this introduction to the inspiration of literature found his own worth. Shakespeare put Upchurch on the path to self-worth. There have been many accounts on this list of how Shakespeare has changed their lives, this is a case of how Shakespeare saved a life. There is no indication that Upchurch would have survived the rest of his term in prison, the twenty years since his release, had he not cracked open the book that propped up his table. So, Shakespeare marks a turning point in Upchurch's life, but it does not stop there. Once we have identified with the lark rising to heaven there is then the choice of what to DO. Do we continue to sit in our offices and debate the significance of quarto versus folio, OR do I, you, we, choose to share the words with those that do not know the words exist? Do we continue to nod at the TV as reports of police brutality in the prisons is exposed, or do we write and march to see that change is done? Do we share the hope? Or do we selfishly defend our hope against a hope of a different color? Am I accusing anyone specifically? No, we are all at fault, because we can always do more. Carl Upchurch is not a perfect man, nor is he an imperfect man. Still, he continues to share with those who think that they are imperfect. I urge you to read his book, CONVICTED IN THE WOMB; Shakespeare can go beyond the stage and academia. Where else can you take Shakespeare? Alex Houck Santa Clara University
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0433 Thursday, 22 February 2001 From: Stephanie Hughes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 21 Feb 2001 19:13:57 -0800 Subject: 12.0412 Re: Hamlet and Oedipus Comment: Re: SHK 12.0412 Re: Hamlet and Oedipus Pat Dolan said, > I'm wondering if Stephanie Hughes realises how profoundly relativist she > sounds when she suggests that we shouldn't attend to Jefferson's racism > and rape (can a slave consent?) or Columbus's violence and greed. Oh, dear. A relativist! Shudder. Well, at least it's a profound relativist. (They're the ones who like to see Mussolini get credit for making the trains run on time, right?) Of course we should examine the truth behind our ikons. I don't think what I said suggests we shouldn't. But where in former times there was a drive to make some faulty human into a semi-divine, now we have gone to the opposite extreme. The recent trend seems to me to be to tear down every image of value, to demonstrate that in this brave new world where all men are created equal, all are created equally pathetic, all liars at heart, or drunks, or womanizers, and as a corollary to this view, all acts, however brave they may appear on the surface, have dreadful consequences. This is a terribly grim and desolate attitude and not good if we wish to raise hopeful, energetic, eager young people. > The trouble with "Ultimately we need to honour our pathfinders, not for > what they didn't do, or did wrong, but for what they did right," is that > it requires us to ignore or suppress the evidence. No such thing. My post was a response to the person who spoke about the shift in his feelings about Freud, from hero worship to hatred. When the truth about Freud's equivocations came out back in the 70s (80s?), to me it was a relief since it meant I could understand where all that nonsense he was preaching about Oedipus and penis envy was coming from. At that point I was free to appreciate him for what he actually did, help the study of human nature to become accepted as a science, taught at universities so that others, with fewer social barriers to face, might be free to pursue the truth. Of course everything that you say about the history behind Jefferson and Columbus is true, and good to know, but none of it invalidates what they did that makes us remember them. Hundreds, thousands of southern landowners owned slaves, bought and sold them and sometimes slept with them, but only one wrote the Declaration of Independence. Hundreds of lunatics set off in little wooden tubs to cross oceans, sail around the tips of Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope (delightful euphemism), get ice bound in the northern Atlantic looking for a northern route to China, and certainly many killed, raped and infected the natives. Most of their names have been lost. We honor Columbus, not because he was a good man or even because he was the best of the explorers who came to the shores of America, but because we happen to have his story. Because some landowners raped their slaves, should we disavow Jefferson? Because exploration opened the door to colonization, shall we disavow our explorers? I'm concerned because I see a generation of children growing to adulthood without heroes. The trouble is, since kids have to have heroes, when thoughtful adults don't offer them appropriate heroes, they pick bad ones, like M and M. We connect with our children at a profound level when we share our heroes with them. My Dad's hero was Abraham Lincoln. Watching the recent program on Lincoln on PBS, I'm sharing something wonderful with my Dad, who's been gone a long time, but who was there with me in my mind. Whether you care or not that Lincoln "saved the union," he bore a level of suffering that is truly astounding and bore it for a very long time. Though he tottered under the weight of it, he never fell. The many faults of heroes like Lincoln, Jefferson and Columbus do not detract in the slightest from what they did that makes us remember them any more than Babe Ruth's drinking and misbehavior take points off his home run record. There are heroes in the realms of moral choice, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Raoul Wallenberg, Mohammed Ali, the great religious leaders. We don't scorn them because they couldn't play baseball. Stephanie Hughes