Today, I was productive.

[charloween]

I am totally in love with my Shakespeare class. Yes, it's only the second week in, but we spent three hours yesterday picking apart The Taming of the Shrew, looking at a few key speeches and scenes and going over all the different ways to perform the main characters. Is Kate jealous, headstrong, feisty? Physically or mentally damaged in some way? Is she a brooding teenager who likes to cut herself or a bitter older sister who, whenever she meets a guy, always loses the guy to her cute younger sister? What about Petruchio? Monster, bohemian, or scoundrel out for a wealthy spinster to marry? Who you make these people will mean you'll get different effects from the text. It's a fun little play with a clear central problem in its performance: how do you treat the whole idea of "taming"? That final speech of Kate's can pay off the play in many different ways, but there's a whole lot of character stuff that has to happen before you get there to make it credible. She goes on and on about how great it is to be a sweet, submissive wife, knowing that her big, strong husband is there to be her lord and master.

It's fun Shakespeare for directors, rather than boring Shakespeare for English lit students. I so picked the right class. After that Filming Literature class last year, I started to become suspicious of the whole English lit discipline. After this course (a theatre course) I am resolved to raise my hands and back away, slowly. Shakespeare is something to geek out about, not something that should bore you to tears. There's just so much possibility there. And the best part is that this course tickles my academic geek brain enough to motivate me to get on all the other stuff that needs gettin' on. (Mostly I just like the feeling of my brain being active.) Plus, the prof is damn cool: he rejects the idea that there's Meanings and Messages out there, only just what happens to you during a performance. :D

Next week we get to watch the version that Jonathan Miller directed for the BBC. That would be the version of The Taming of the Shrew starring John Cleese.


I got more done than I thought I would, and in the doing feel far better about the things that I've got left to do.

Grad school application status: I've sent in the online applications for Glasgow, McGill and both York programs. Transcripts for those four are all delt with, too. Reading only wants paper, so I have to go grab those from the RO on Monday. Tomorrow I'll photocopy the stuff that needs photocopying, finish the two different statements that the York Film MA wants from me, and if I can, write my research proposal for the Reading application.

Of the five applications, two are 100% ready to go, but for reference letters. If I get my reference letters on Monday, I might actually be able to mail everything off that day. (It's unlikely. However. One can dream.)

The best part is that only the York applications are due on Tuesday. The others I might actually send in early. I know, I'm scared too. After those go off, I have three scholarship/award packages to put together. Some of those need transcripts and research proposals and epic novels about my life and how I'm so awesome that I'm an obvious and natural choice to be given thousands of dollars to watch television for the next two years.

Easy, right? ...sigh. Point is, in terms of tasks-to-complete and total brain power required, I'm definitely on the final stretch with these things. Tomorrow I'm going to spend the day in the library, and it's going to be Most Excellent. I'm going to do some research, write some proposals, and Be Productive. Priority one is to take the York stuff over to Grad Studies when I'm on campus Monday; nothing else has to be off before the end of the month.

Now maybe I'll get ahead on my actual class work. I'm not behind, not yet. Since October I've been running around getting all this stuff for next year put together, and now it's almost done.

On top of all of that, I also managed to bake some muffins (okay muffins, not excellent muffins) for breakfast (ca. 1pm - but to be fair, I'd accomplished three impossible things before breakfast), do two loads of laundry, and make a few necessary phone calls. I've even put the grad app stuff in separate enveloppes and addressed some of them. (I need more enveloppes.... *adds to to-do list*) Then I watched some old Doctor Who: Peter Davison years. I'm completely in love. It's really easy to see where David Tennant gets his Doctor from: it's all there. You can tell the wee David was totally captivated by Davison's Doctor, 'cause there's a lot of Five in Ten, there really is. What I wasn't expecting, though, was how much of Tom Baker's performance is there in the way Davison's playing the Doctor. The really smooth way Baker had of delivering some lines - sometimes you'd think it was the other actor there, not Peter Davison at all. Eerie, but also entertaining to watch.

There's been a lot of brain today. Problem is, after all that activity, I'm crashing. It's 9pm and I'm very ready for bedtime.

However. I still need to arrange with vulgus what's happening tomorrow.

And also I have to wait for Virgin Mobile to call me back to confirm that my phone number is switched over to my New! Phone! I'd rather be in bed by 10 (I was up until 2 this morning, working on those grad apps), but I have to wait for that call. Grrararg.

I'd be more pissed if the folks at Virgin weren't such superstars at customer service. I'm more than a little in love with their marketing and print media team. Two of the manuals are titled "This One Tells You How Stuff Works" and "This One Tells You About The Terms and Conditions". When they ask you to pick a phone number, they say that one of the number options are calling out "Pick Me! Pick Me! Pick Me! (If you put your ear up to the monitor you can hear them!)" And so on, through their site and paper documentation. That's good customer service: be a bit silly and make me laugh! FiDO's dogs were cute for a while, Bell's beavers are just dumb and Rogers has marketing that's "hip" and "cool" the same way that MTV shows lots of music videos.

But I'm still waiting for Virgin to call me so that I can GET ON WITH MY EVENING. Still: you can't argue with cheap phone rates ($15/month!) and a company with a healthy sense of the absurd.

Comments

[firstgold.livejournal.com]

In my grade nine English class, we studied The Taming of the Shrew and got to watch the movie with Michael York and Elizabeth Taylor. It is one of my favourite of Will's comedies (if I may be so bold as to call him by his first name). For my group's project, we performed a puppet show with puppets that I made. I had them until very recently, when I passed them on to charity.

[naturelf.livejournal.com]

And Richard Burton! Don't forget Richard Burton!

I'm watching that version tonight in prep for Thursday's class. The year before that film, Taylor and Burton starred together in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, which was one of the most intensely violent films I've ever seen. ...Apparently there's lots of tits in Zefirelli's Shrew. Oh, Italian art films.

I love high school puppet-show projects. We did one in grade 10 history. :D

[ksaldria.livejournal.com]

I <3 Shakespeare ^.^

[naturelf.livejournal.com]

Me too! This class is such delightful crack. :D

Any thoughts on what I should do for my alternate staging? All the examples the prof gives us are all so much better than anything I could think of.

[ksaldria.livejournal.com]

Hmm...that's a hard one just because there's so many possibilities. As far as settings go, turn of the century England might be interesting if you incorporate women's suffrage into the picture and portray Kate as a struggling suffragette fighting for independence from all the overbearing men in her life.

As you know, it all comes down to characterization. Petruchio for example is traditionally portrayed as a con because essentially that's what he is. What kind of con however, is up to you. Maybe he starts off marrying Kate for the money but once he gets to know her a little better he starts to sympathize with her and they slowly begin to understand one another. Eventually Kate realizes that Petruchio is driving her crazy teaching her how to be agreeable so that she can get people in this patriarchal society to do exactly what she wants without realizing that they're doing so. In this case the "taming" is Kate realizing that if she really wants to be independent and make the world a better place, she has to change her methods.

I always thought Ten Things I Hate About You was a really good modern interpretation of the play. It's worth renting if you haven't seen it already. For even more fun, rent Forbidden Planet and compare it with The Tempest. Good times :)

[naturelf.livejournal.com]

Hee, thanks. We were talking about Ten Things in class last week, and a few talky bimbos were all, "Like, it's like really important to like, like make sure kids are like exposed to like Shakespeare, 'cause like the stories are like a classic." I resisted sporking them, but barely. I do remember the film, though, and did enjoy it when I saw it. (Other fun adaptations include Clueless from Emma, which is more my vintage of teen comedy. :D)

I think the prof wants a really radical staging (his words: "do something interesting with it"), which is what's tripping me up. We've also got Measure for Measure, The Tempest (♥ Forbidden Planet! - what about Chronicles of Riddick and Macbeth!), Merchant of Venice and Othello to work from.

It's the radical part that's throwing me. From all the examples he's given, he seems to want some particularly politically-charged setting from the 20th century. Escaping refugees, that kind of thing. I was wondering about The Tempest in a 60s Paris commune (essentially conflating La Chinoise with Bertolucci's The Dreamers), but I can't quite make it fit.

Whatever I end up doing, I'll probably tear a key character down to some essential trait, and find a world to build around him/her (and try to not make it a Firefly xover). SIGH. My life is so tragic, eh?