Maggie's Farm

I do not recommend that anyone waste any time on Shakespeare's plays without listening to Prof. (and Shakespearean actor) Peter Saccio talk about them first.

For us, it has been like being half-blind, and finally getting the right glasses.

Prof. Saccio's retirement from Dartmouth is a huge loss for the College, but anyone can listen to his course via the Teaching Company's recordings. A bit expensive, but if your library doesn't have them, ask them to buy them.

Listening - and re-listening - to Saccio is a pure delight. A quote from the piece in Dartmouth Life:

On the day of the lecture, Saccio begins almost dispassionately. "The death of Falstaff," he says, "is a short passage, in prose, related by simple characters leading common lives."

And then he begins to act the parts of those characters, explaining between lines how Shakespeare employs biblical allusion, Elizabethan thought and culture, word play and stage direction. He describes how Falstaff, near death, plays with his bedclothes and examines his fingertips, noting that contemporary doctors tell him that what Shakespeare portrayed four centuries ago is grounded in the physical reality of death.

The room becomes electric.

Saccio continues, "For Falstaff, in his final moments the world is getting smaller and smaller. He is 'focusing down'—as dying people do." He points out a reference to the 23rd Psalm towards the end of the scene and begins, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want..." and the classroom becomes utterly silent, spellbound.

Breaking the silence, Saccio concludes, "I've been trying to enter into Shakespeare's imagination. He imagined a scene that was peaceful, hopeful, bawdy, silly, childish, drunken, lecherous and terrifying—terrifying both physically and spiritually. All at once, in only 40 lines. I put my cards on the table," he concludes. "The man could write."

Photo: Leon D. Black Professor of Shakespearean Studies Peter Saccio

I do not understand the physics of Bussard Fusion, or whether it can ever be commercial. Interesting that California wants to fund it, though.

Update: Above story is not true. Thanks, reader.

It is 40 years since the silly and juvenile 1967 "Summer of Love." Cinnamon Stillwell remembers it. Quote: 

Among '60s disciples, it's an article of faith that everything that came out of that summer was a boon to American society. This has certainly been the impression conveyed through popular culture. Rarely are the more pernicious offshoots of the social and political experiment known as the Summer of Love referenced in the glowing and groovy portrayals seen on PBS and the History Channel.

But in its haste to dispense with all tradition that came before, the Summer of Love generation threw out much of the good along with the bad. The attempt to live in a manner that is essentially unsustainable led to a proliferation of divorce, drug use, promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases, and all the perils and problems associated therewith. Too many people left their families, became addicts, and in some cases, lost their lives.

When all social boundaries are tossed aside and self-fulfillment becomes one's raison d'etre, society breaks down and, with it, all sense of morality. Seen in this light, the Summer of Love starts to seem more like the Summer of Folly.

Exactly. Read her whole piece.

The Irrawaddy, you may recall, runs south through the center of the nation I still call Burma. Photos from the cruise here. Photo of the luxury cruise ship, calling at a port, below.

A re-post for book lovers

Book lovers (and book dealers) from New England and New York travel hundreds of miles on an annual pilgrimage to the Annual Pequot Library Book Sale, in elegant Southport, CT., on the last weekend of July. It's a gold mine of used books, arranged by categories, and the serendipitous finds can be wonderful. Two years ago I found the complete Pepys diaries. 

Their 120,000 books on sale come from estates, donations, and especially from other libraries. The money raised helps support the Pequot Library.

It goes on for 5 days beginning Friday, and prices go down each day, and everything is free on the last day. However, the place gets raked over carefully, so Saturday is maybe the best day to go. In a way, I hate to let more people know about this event, but it's my duty as a blogger.

Another piece from the show at MOMA. This is by Brazilian Beatriz Milhazes, called Eggplants. I was certain that I had the camera level.

Here. h/t, Viking. A sample:

Made it to the MOMA "What is painting?" show yesterday. Their new building is excellent. As usual, the place was packed.

Do I love Modern Art? I dunno - I just like to look at stuff and to think about it.

I learned that "painting" is anything man-made (or man-altered), based on a flat surface which engages the eye when you stand and look at it. I could have thought of that, but it seems overly-broad: would not that definition apply to a Men's Room sign, when one is in need of one?

Anyway, it's a very eclectic show, with the predictable and silly all-white canvas which makes you wish you had a magic marker in your pocket. I liked this very large piece by George Baselitz, "Woodsmen."

We're in love! Let's drink!

A country song by Rodney Carrington. Not OK for work, but cute - not porn. "If you love your country, then show them to me..."  It's a guy thing - some might say a bit adolescent. (h/t, Ace)

The music video, with many bare chests, here. 

Ships can weather far worse storms than this, but it's unusual to have a helo taking film at the same time. This is the cruise ship Voyager in cyclone Valentina in the Med on Valentine's Day, 2005. Not very romantic. (h/t, And rightly So)

Asians and Westerners literally see the world differently. From a piece at Live Science:

Nisbett illustrated this with a test asking Japanese and Americans to look at pictures of underwater scenes and report what they saw.

The Americans would go straight for the brightest or most rapidly moving object, he said, such as three trout swimming. The Japanese were more likely to say they saw a stream, the water was green, there were rocks on the bottom and then mention the fish.

The Japanese gave 60 percent more information on the background and twice as much about the relationship between background and foreground objects as Americans, Nisbett said.

This 62' 1926 Elco yacht is powered by twin diesels and, to my mind, is one handsome craft. Regular readers know that I am fond of the Elco tradition, partly because my Gramps owned the Elco dealership for New England. This one is for sale.

How to hide from the wife when she wants you to do something around the place, while catching a few Zs. A good year-round use for your camo.

This bit came in over the transom:

The New York City Public Schools have officially declared "Jewish English", now dubbed "Hebronics", as a second language. Backers of the move say the city schools are the first in the nation to recognize Hebronics as a valid language and a significant attribute of American culture.

According to Howard Ashland, linguistics professor at Brooklyn College and renowned Hebronics scholar, the sentence structure of Hebronics derives from middle and eastern European language patterns as they evolved into Yiddish.

Professor Shulman explains, "In Hebronics, the response to any question is usually another question with a complaint that is either implied or stated. Thus 'How are you?' may be answered, 'How should I be, with my bad feet?'

Shulman says that Hebronics is a superb linguistic vehicle for expressing sarcasm or skepticism. An example is the repetition of a word with "sh" or "shm" at the beginning: "Mountains, shmountains. Stay away. You should want a nosebleed?"

Another Hebronics pattern is moving the subject of a sentence to the end, with its pronoun at the beginning: "It's beautiful, that dress."

Shulman says one also sees the Hebronics verb moved to the end of the sentence. Thus the response to a remark such as "He's slow as a turtle," could be: "Turtle, shmurtle! Like a fly in Vaseline he walks."

Shulman provided the following examples from his best-selling textbook, Switched-On Hebronics:
Question: "What time is it?"
English answer: "Sorry, I don't know."
Hebronic response: "What am I, a clock?"

Remark: "I hope things turn out okay."
English answer: "Thanks."
Hebronic response: "I should be so lucky!"

Remark: "Hurry up. Dinner's ready."
English answer: "Be right there."
Hebronic response: "Alright already, I'm coming. What's with the 'hurry' business? Is there a fire?"

More examples on continuation page -