Watch out for this one! Betty calls it "a tome". I am reluctant to press her on the matter, but I fear it cannot be comforting.

 

         A New Opera, Shakespeare, and Me

   For sixty-five years I have been working, in one way or another, but steadily, with Shakespeare. The first stage production I saw of one of the plays was King Henry IV. Part One. Bewildered by much of what I  saw, I was nevertheless convinced that something greatly important was going on. So, I took to acting as Leontes in Winter’s Tale.

   In a couple years, there came those two films by Laurence Olivier, his Henry V and Hamlet. It is utterly impossible to describe the impact those two “movies” had upon us. No one I knew had ever seen or even dreamed of such things. They were for us the music of which Caliban dreamed and waked to dream again. They taught us so much and moved us so deeply that we  were forever changed.

IN MEMORIAM

 

                            

                   KAY LOHRENZ CHRISTOPHERSON

                                 1936-- 2012

            she lived and loved in spite of everything

                                 January 9, 2012

   That early September day of 1950, in Powell Wyoming, on that day when I was to begin the life of a teacher: it went like this:

   I walked into the room, tenth grade English, looked about me, and there she was, half way back on my right, in the second to the window row of desks.

Twelve of Them

                       

                             Some say that ever gainst that season comes

                                       Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,

                                       This bird of dawning singeth all night long.

                                       And then they say no spirit dare stir abroad,

                                       No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,

                                       So hallowed and so gracious is the time.

Photo Trial for Christmas post Grange

                    Discovering the Altona Grange

                   In the Nick of Time for Christmas

   All my life they were standing out there-- out in the country. I used to drive by one of them out pheasant hunting. Those Grange Halls. I had no idea of what they were beyond their probably having something to do with farming. But, sadly, I lacked the curiosity to find out more about them.

   Then, now, old as I am, the recent meeting of the Gold Hill Club was invited to meet in the Altona Grange, half a dozen miles or so due north of Boulder. And there it was, the ritual building, where I learned what I now cannot imagine having lived this long without. It was a revelation.

The New TV Season

         

                              

                                          

                                        By One with an Agenda

   The most extraordinary thing has happened on prime-time television. We had been watching for the start-up of the new series “Hell on Wheels” on AMC-- about the push West to build the transcontinental railroad. Surely an interesting subject, don’t you think.

11-1-11

  It’s All Hallows, the day to honor and supplicate all the saints at once. Maybe you would call it economical, but It feels good to me  anyway. You have to admit that the Church really knew how to use the calendar.

  Not to mention that it’s one of those Number One days this  year. 11.1.11 Think of that!  Why is it so impressive, Numbers  are  plumb mysterious….  even to mathematicians, I’m told.

    And tomorrow is All Souls, the day for me to remember and think of and appreciate all my dead. Good souls all. They were my  good luck.

   Thank heaven that Christ Mass is on its way. Though I don’t believe a word of it, I am nevertheless  profoundly affected by and drawn to it. I look forward to the Angels’ singing.

    And speaking of not believing in it, we spent early Halloween at the film Anonymous. All that Elizabethan stuff about the Queen, her lovers, and some jerk named Shakespeare.

   A guy leaving the movie ahead of he turned back to say, ”Bunk, right?” Yup that’s it; the film is sumptuous bunk. It’s a fantasy of Elizabethan politics and scandal with a sub-plot of Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? Well, it’s the old story: third rate poet, Edward DeVere, Earl of Oxford. He’s characterized in the film as the very model of the romantic, post-Goethean artist, too pure, too tormented, too special, too soulful and rare for this world. His life is a longing for release from his suffering in the act of writing poetry.

    A man like that in Shakespeare’s London would have been so  rare as to be freakish. Shakespeare and his fellows were, and thought of themselves as workmen, as makers of poems, and  plays, and paintings, and dances, and architecture, and statues, and music. We forget that our idea of the artist is largely an idol of the nineteenth century. But we enjoyed the movie, even if it did ask us to believe the blockbuster of historical fiction that the queen’s lover was her own son! The blockbuster continues to bust when we are told that their son was no other than the Earl of Southampton, who is now no longer possibly Shakespeare’s lover, but the “secret son” to whom DeVere  dedicates those sonnets of “his”. How’s that for movie making!

    I read that the movie makers are distributing a “study guide” to distribute in high schools, the better for our children to understand the Shakespeare phenomenon.

   Socrates was made to drink the hemlock for talking sense to the youth of Athens. Today big money is made talking pure bosh to students.