Why This Shakespeare Course Is Mine

Every semester, Professor Thomas Olsen asks his graduate students to write what their previous experiences with Shakespeare have been, what their interest is in his Shakespeare class are, and what their scholarly goals are regarding his class. Here's what I wrote:

The first play I read by Shakespeare was Romeo and Juliet. I was in ninth grade. I was a solipsistic romantic whose heart was too big for the school. Baz Luhrmann’s ultra-cool adaptation with Claire Danes and Leonardo Dicaprio was just coming out. I saw it with my first girlfriend at a discount cinema. I was developing my poetic skills. And yet, I did not care much for the play. Fixated on the story itself, I did not care for the tragedy, the unstoppable movement by which it reached its conclusion. I found it lamentable that two young people who I did not consider to be really truly in love should have to reach such an end so soon due to the explosive nature of their chemistries, their families, their tempers. One line did stick out, though. Early in the play, one of the characters comments that he has lately seen Romeo, apparently hung up on an unrequited love—my usual status in early high school and the preceding couple years—out walking by himself in the early morning, his tears augmenting the fresh dew. I can remember the exact moment I read it. It was early morning. I was sitting next to a window in an institution dedicated to education, like I am now. My new object of affection was hopeless; she stood before me: the new English teacher who had come in from nowhere to relieve the old teacher who had become terribly ill. The new English teacher was young, had dark red hair, drank tea from a metal portable cup every morning, listened to David Bowie. I was smitten. I longed to perform Romeo’s passionate passages on Juliet’s beauty for her, on bended knee before her and the class. Shakespeare had found his way in to another human. That one line was enough to let Shakespeare into my heart and mind. With that line, he had a foot in the door.
The next year, I read Hamlet. By the time I read it, I had already watched the Branagh version with my next girlfriend, who had me join her in running the school’s arts and literature magazine, which I became the sole leader of in a couple years’ time. I liked Hamlet a lot more. My grandfather had died, I had railed against and forsaken God, I had begun to wear black occasionally. I had had my heart truly broken for the first time. Things had changed, and quick. I had also begun to feel conflicted feelings toward my parents consciously for the first time. Hamlet had come at the perfect moment for me. But to be honest, it was mostly over my head, no matter how well I faked to the contrary. (I had also read Twelfth Night on the beach the summer previous to my sophomore year. I had forgotten this fact until beginning the next page of this reflection.)
By the final two years of high school, I had become a full blown literature fanatic. In eleventh grade, I spent every free period in the library, reading literary criticism on Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had become my obsession. Engrossed in American Literature my junior year, I read no Shakespeare. My final year, I swapped out my obsession with Hawthorne for one with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I also read two Shakespeare plays, one quickly and by myself (a term A.D. Nuttall makes interesting remarks about in his book Shakespeare the Thinker), the other slowly and with other people. The former was King Lear, and it truly was the book that made me a lover of Shakespeare. I would not come out of that book once I went in. For a weekend, all I did was read it, think about it, write about it, and repeat the cycle, absentmindedly shoving some food in my mouth every so often. I wrote an abysmal poem about it, and pondered Nature vs. nature to the extent of my young mind’s ability, which at that time lived on a diet of Stanley Kubrick films and dark music. I even neglected to notice the candle I was reading by had spilled its wax all over the floor. The most touching moment in all the play to me was Edgar’s speech beginning “When we our betters see bearing our woes” (sorry I chastised you for its absence in the recent production on campus). I wrote out the monologue in a card to my step-mother about a year before she died. The latter play was Macbeth; the raw power of its poetics, of its language, of its bleak vision and its bleak characters and its bleak ghosts gripped me and would not let go. I was made to memorize the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliliquy and recite it to the class (I was an actor with lead roles two years in a row at that point). Lines became so deeply woven into my mind I no longer knew the author. Lines from Macbeth spilled out into almost all the poems I was writing at the time, and I was writing a lot. Three years previous, I cordially admired poetry. Now I was dancing in its fire, trying to expiate my every scalding thought. All of my poems were full of sound and fury; all of my poems signified nothing. Lear’s themes obsessed me; Macbeth’s words obsessed me.
But I changed rapidly back then. You could say I still do. By the time I was attending Skidmore less than a year later, my love affair with Shakespeare had quelled. My assigned advisor was the school’s Shakespeare expert, a man by the name of Murray Levith. He even made it a point to look like Shakespeare. I was assigned to read The Tempest as the conclusion of his unsatisfying first half of Skidmore’s classics of Western Literature course, Evolving Canon, and I honestly don’t think I read past the first scene. The next semester I became obsessed with Blake and Milton. And my fantasies gripped me more and more—the ones I was writing (“Heirloom” and “Fragment from the Life of Fyck”) and the ones I was reading (The Lord of the Rings and Gaiman’s works). I never went abroad, as Professor Levith was frequently urging me to do, and I didn’t read another play of Shakespeare’s until finishing my undergraduate degree two years ago here, although I occasionally attended a performance (a good one of The Merchant of Venice at Skidmore comes to mind, one I walked out on, I think of Twelfth Night, at Emerson also comes to mind) and saw film adaptations. Eric Salehi’s class introduced me to Richard II, I Henry IV, and Henry V, had me revisit King Lear, Macbeth, and The Merchant of Venice, and acquainted me with “The Rape of Lucrece” and “Venus and Adonis.” The two plays from the Henriad I found especially interesting, and at moments, resonant. Hal’s stirring soliliquy at the end of I.ii. of how he has thus far not lived up to his potential and has squandered his talent, his name, and his time in bars and with women and with rogues moved me and struck a deep chord, on a personal note. That’s another moment where I remember where I was when I was reading it—it stirred the actor who I killed and buried inside of me after high school. I would like to stand on a stage and deliver those lines to a dark room with a hundred pairs of ears. I felt every one of those words, though Hal’s later actions alienated me. I’d rather continue squandering my time in bars with rogues than threaten to assault, rape, and kill an entire village of people.
Anyone serious about literature, and especially Western Literature, knows that there are a few works with which one must be familiar. The Bible and The Plays of Shakespeare are chief among these, though earlier epics are of course also of paramount importance. It has become a fervent desire of mine to more deeply and comprehensively familiarize myself with these two pillars of Western Literature, but not just to catch allusions in contemporary works. I wish to engage deeply with these works because of what they illuminate about humanity, what they might teach me about myself, what they might do again to the smoldering poetic fire in me, what great unending questions they open and explore or invite the reader to explore, and what they ask of us. I wish also to use this class’s particular angle—how Shakespeare exploited and joined other preexisting works by other hands and minds to create something startlingly new and everlasting—as a learning opportunity for myself as a would-be writer of fiction on how I might compensate for a lack of complete imaginative vision by using twice-told tales in the creation of something new and worth reading. It is the perfect time for me to take this class because I am weary of the modern world and all its vanity and lack of focus, and I wish to dive headlong into the past to feed my ravenous soul. I wish to study and learn as much as I can about the bible and the works of Shakespeare, for reasons both scholarly and spiritual. I am best as a scholar when my spirit is most involved. I am at my worst when I am detached or repulsed by my subject. At SUNY New Paltz, there are teachers who I know by first-hand experience and by reputation to be as wonderful at teaching these two major touchstones of the Western Literary Tradition as they are erudite respecting their areas of specialty. I have been waiting to take this class with you since I began as an undergrad here in 2005. I am focusing on only this one course so I can give it my full attention and get the most out of it in such a small period of time. I consider it an honor to be your student and I appreciate the grace the English Department and the Administration has shown me. My boots are on and I’m ready to roll. 29 January 2009

Good/Bad

What have Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, Steve Lillywhite, The Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr, and Bono Vox been up to in their several studios across the world as they prepare to make another album that untold millions of people will buy whether it is good or not?

On the good side, we have this: Eno, Lanois, and The Edge sitting around the lunch table seemingly impromptu bursting into an a capella harmonized version of an old favorite song of theirs. It is wonderful. They should have put it on the album.

On the bad side, we have this: the first single from the album and a major turn-off. It continues to do all the things we don't want U2 to do—churn out generic and uninspiring rock riffs comprised of tired power chords and set to Bono using a voice that is not as thrilling as his falsetto nor as moving as his baritone, rapping through idiotic free associations like "I got my submarine/You got gasoline" and self-consciously Bono, Cosmopolitan, lines like "I don't want to talk about the wars between the nations" before bursting into the songs chorus of "Hey, Sexy Boots!" Now, if you know me, you know I love sexy boots. I wrote a poem about ten years ago called "I Love Girls in Big Black Boots." But if U2 want to make sexy music, they have other options, like the "let's sit around my European flat and casually get it on" feel of "Babyface," the sweltering climaxing intensity of "Exit," or the sincere Joshua Tree b-sides "Walk to the Water." The absolute last thing U2 should be doing at this juncture of their career is writing more songs like "Vertigo." This song may be even worse than that one, and has immediately spoiled my hopes for a return to form from one of the world's greatest bands, now about seventeen years from their last truly great album.

The Beatles Perform A Midsummer Night's Dream, Get Heckled

The Collected Works of Yours Truly

Dan said he only had my Tom Waits cover. Frank has lost some stuff, and he is my archivalist. So here is what I do. Two folders. The Music of Kevin Larkin is old stuff, songs recorded in high school and maybe the beginning of college, several with Frank, some with Mike, others with John and Josh(es) and other oddities and relics of the past. The Music of Kevin Larkin Angioli is everything that is not complete shit that I have recorded with my MacBook, not including music I played with Eric, although there are a couple Nachtmusik songs in there (ones recorded by me but musically written by Eric). There are some quite old songs that I recorded for the first time, written back when I was Kevin Larkin, in this latter folder. Confusing, I know. Be sure to check out Limbo—it's really cool. In a way, I think each of one of my friends and myself is in limbo right now, so I wrote it with you in mind.
Secrets & Loss, when it's all polished and professional, is going to be the greatest song I ever had anything to do with when it is all done. The home demo version is the best I've been able to do so far. Eric and I usually play it last, after the bottle of wine is empty, and it shows. Got to work on doing it up front sometime, maybe tonight. Anyway, here you go.

1. The Music of Kevin Larkin
2. The Music of Kevin Larkin Angioli

Limbo

A Change Would Do You Good

So. Barack Obama is President of the United States of America and Joe Biden is Vice-President of the United States of America. Feels nice.

El Bandido

Another rough draft: El Bandido

All the Bees are Named in Babel

Just finished recording one of my "experimental" numbers. Recorded the guitar a few nights ago, inspired by Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35 third movement. Added the rest today. Three vocal tracks, woodsaw and cedar, music box, the flipped pages of an old volume of Poe, two Garageband synthesizers, a hip-hop built-in beatbox...I had to delete four of the tracks, leaving the final one at ten. If you'd like to give it a whirl, go here.

Don't expect a catchy chorus. It's a swirling threnodial whirl of chaos and it probably has something to do with how much Alan Moore I have been reading.

Spin the Black Circle into the Void

I keep trying to support the music business, when sometimes, it doesn't deserve to be supported. Since getting into Black Sabbath for the first time since I was 13 (and much heavier than I was then), I have bought several of their albums, mostly used, from Rhino Records. On CD, I bought: Black Sabbath, Master of Reality, and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. I already owned a used copy of Paranoid, also from Rhino Records. Well, buying used CDs is all well and good, but I bought Master of Reality new, and you know what? It sucks. Not Master of Reality. The tired old lame CD Warner Bros has out of Master of Reality and all the other Sabbath albums. Same little slip of paper with the same mildly reworded bio of the band with the same white inside with the same numbers in boxes and writing credits and song titles, some broken into five parts as though Black Sabbath was prog-rock band, and most importantly, the same shitty mastering and dull flat mix. I thought I wasn't a big fan of Master of Reality, but a lot of my feeling was  a result of the fact that the album sounded flat and hollow and like it had been sitting stagnating in a pool of bong water for thrity years. 

Instead of buying that copy, I should have just looked around the internet, read about all the fabulous remasters and downloaded higher quality versions that did the albums justice. The band has millions of dollars and the old Warner Bros CDs should not even be on the market anymore. (They even have incorrect information on them, like a tracklisting time length of 8:08 for Solitude, which actually runs for 5:02). Only remasters that live up to the important heritage and quality of these important albums should be available, which reproduce what the original vinyl was like. I bought a new vinyl pressing of the first album for Christmas and was wonderfully surprised to discover a gatefold opening with an upside-down cross inside with over-the-top gothic prose pieces written within it, begging to be read in one's best Vincent Price impression, ending with a passage about tolling bells and soflty falling rain, which is exactly what one hears when one drops the needle on this classic, amazing album. Since not everyone has a record player to enjoy them the way they are meant to be heard, consumers should not even hnve the option of buying these tired old Warner Bros pressings from when CDs were first invented. If I had known, I would have saved my money.

Master of Reality is an important album. It was released in 1971, only four years after the cloying sounds of "Penny Lane." I can not conceive of most drudge, doom, or even basic metal existing without it. "Children of the Grave" is the first song I know of to use the basic chugging palm muted power-chord sound. "Into the Void" seems to be a precursor for all drudge, doom, and drone with its C-sharp tuning and its slowly moving riff which descends into the darkness the song's and band's name promise. Offsetting these metal masterpieces are two beautiful instrumentals, one of which ("Embryo") is barely anything more than a brief segue, and the other of which ("Orchid") is a lush acoustic finger picked piece of neo-classicism. This kind of contrast prefigures the classical virtuosism of metal and the neo-classical flourishes of black metal. As a nice contrast to black metal, this album has a unfied Christian theme. Accused of being Satanists (by idiots), the cross-wearing Sabbath blokes wrote several tunes about saving your soul; death's inevitability; judgment and reckoning; the wrongs of war, greed, and pride; and other obviously Christian themes for this album, as well as balancing it out with songs again from Satan's view about how humans have made him "Lord of this World," which Sabbath is obviously not celebrating, just observing. Unfortunately, the opening track is a paean to marijuana, which I can't get behind, so the album starts off—dare I say it—weak for me, saved only by the infectious, crushing riff by Iommi.

Along with the instrumentals, co-creating the balance of darkness and light, heaviness and sofness, (heaven and hell) is the very sixties-like oddity "Solitude," the penultimate track. First time listeners won't even recognize it as Ozzy. It sounds like a Moody Blues song, or one of King Crimson's slower lilting earthchild kind of songs, with the mandatory flute playing. Played loud off this remaster with some incense or dim lighting late at night while relaxing, it is an easy song to let oneself drift off to before the crush of this album's closing song and masterpiece arrives. The remaster of "Into the Void" sounds like it was recorded this year. This speaks to both the quality of the remaster and the timelessness of the song. Though the album ends quickly, barely over a half hour, "Into the Void" does not leave you wanting. If it does, just put on Vol. 4 (Snowblind) afterwards; it is even better (arguably). But first find a good remaster and download it.


As an afternote, if you nine inch nails fans think the shared title of "Into the Void" is an accident, check out the later Black Sabbath (Heaven and Hell) album, Mob Rules, which features a song "Slipping Away, " which is the title of...the remix/remake of "Into the Void" on Things Falling Apart. If you're reading this blog you probably like several artists influenced by Sabbath. This is one of their most influential albums.

Download this fantastic 24 bit remaster here.

Eureka!

I've been reading a long work by Edgar Allan Poe that I had never even heard of (despite having a Complete Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe since roughly the age of ten) for several days now. I came across it in another Complete Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, this one called Edgar Allan Poe, Complete and Unabridged Fiction and Poetry and published by Barnes & Noble in China. It's an interesting work, to say the least. It is also very difficult reading. Poe is a very interesting character who has been reduced in public conception to some one-sided raving drinking maniac who only wrote over-the-top gothic poetry and fiction. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Though Poe considered Eureka a prose-poem, it is actually something of a quasiphilosophical-scientific proposition on the nature of the Universe, how it came to be, and how and why it will end, as well as our place in it. Sound ambitious? It is. He wrote it a year before he died and was more proud of it than anything else he had ever written. People scratched their heads and mocked him for it. There were several people bent on defamation of his character. One of these wrote his obituary. They had plenty to say about Eureka and they are part of the reason why we think of Poe the way we do these days. In the beginning of Eureka, Poe inserts a fictional construct—a letter from one friend to another from a thousand years in the future in awe and derision of humans of the previous millenia who had crawled toward truth laboring under the misapprehension that there were only two valid paths to knowledge: inductive and deductive reasoning, the ways posited forth by ancient men named Aries Tottle (Aristotle) and Hog (Francis Bacon). This part is humorous. There is a lot of humor in Poe's work, but the more humorous stories are not canonized. His sense of humor is so odd that we miss it sometimes. Poe argues that blinding leaps in intuition, which he describes as incalculable processes of deductive and inductive reasoning that have occurred unconsciously, are even more valid ways of finding Truth. The theory for the formation of the universe he puts forth in Eureka—a theory that comes from his intuition—sounds astonishingly like the Big Bang Theory (as named by its opponents). The funny thing is Eureka was published eighty years before the Big Bang Theory. People deride Poe for his hyperbolic enthusiasm, his bold and bald ambition, his Romantic grasping, and his complete disregard (which he acknowledges) for the empirical process, but amongst Eureka's fans were Einstein, a man who made many important scientific discoveries by intuitive leaps.  More on this as I plod through it.