Prospero's Books

"Farewell lecture"

This spring, my colleague, Richard Turner, and I were asked to give "farewell lectures" on the occasion of our retirement from fulltime university teaching. Mine was about the transparency and opacity of language and the "cosmic" importance of stories. If you'd like to read my lecture, I've posted it on this site.

A twenty-first-century Shakespeare?

Scott Malia, at The Shakespeare Blog, writes:

While Shakespeare appreciation might be near universal among writers, it begs the question of comparison. Who among today’s writers is what might be considered the twenty first century answer to him?

His initial suggestion: TV and film writer Aaron Sorkin--a great candidate. Over at The Shakespeare Teacher, Bill and his readers suggest others.

In my Conversations with Shakespeare course, I lead students through half a dozen of Shakespeare's plays, as well as later works in explicit "conversation" with them: Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Smiley's A Thousand Acres, Cesaire's A Tempest, Gaiman's Sandman treatment of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and others. The course ends with a play that I find the most "Shakespearean" of recent dramas: Tony Kushner's Angels in America. My students always find lots of ways that Angels is in implicit, if not explicit, conversation with the Bard.

So Kushner's my candidate--not in the quantity of his output, but in his almost unique ability (among many others) to give his subjects both cosmic and fractal dimensions. If you haven't read or seen the play, do so (especially the amazing HBO film of it), and see if you agree.

Melting the wax tablets

Tim Boucher at Pop Occulture writes

Been reading Epictetus lately, who is absolutely awesome and worth reading. Never heard this before, but apparently students of philosophy in Antiquity used to take notes during the day on wax tablets, which they would then melt down at night. Obviously, this is partly a practical issue if you don’t have paper. But it seems to go much deeper than that, making a statement about the nature of a student’s relationship to knowledge. That is, while you’re learning, your understanding of a subject is being developed. It is not, by any means, final or mature. The act of melting down the wax tablets containing one’s notes on philosophy trains you to detach yourself from your own interpretations and to continually seek the truth.

A practiced imagination

"I would rather have in my science class a young person who was raised on fairy tales and Harry Potter than a person who spent elementary school science classes measuring the growth of bean sprouts in styrofoam cups on the classroom window sill. We all know that bean sprouts need sunlight and water; that's common sense. But it requires a practiced imagination to appreciate the spinning loom of the DNA that makes the plants what they are. . . ."

--Chet Raymo, Science Musings

Unless we were poets or lovers

This week, in my "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, we read Neil Gaiman's Sandman adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with, among other things, a chapter from Ervin Laszlo's Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos (near the end of the What I've Been Reading list in the right column of this blog).

My premises for the week were

3a. Connections among parts of systems are not always obvious.

3b. Connections within, and among, literary texts are not always obvious. In some of Shakespeare’s plays, magic works by making non-obvious connections among parts of natural and social systems.

Laszlo writes:

The emerging vision of reality is more than theory, and it is of interest to more than scientists. It gets us closer than ever before to rending apart the veils of sensory perception and apprehending the true nature of the world. Even in regard to our life and well-being, this is a happy re-discovery: it validates something we have always suspected but in modern times could not express (nor, unless we were poets or lovers, did we even try). This something is a sense of belonging, of oneness. We are part of each other and of nature; we are not strangers in the universe. We are a coherent part of a coherent world; no more and no less so than a particle, a star, and a galaxy (2).

Modern science doesn't tell us that fairies are real. It tells us much stranger things.

City and forest

Last weekend, I met for the first time a regular reader of this blog, Jay, who tactfully reminded me that I hadn't posted for two weeks. My excuse was that I had just finished the first two weeks of a very busy semester. But that's no excuse, especially since my students are giving me so much to write about.

In my "Conversations with Shakespeare" course, which I've subtitled "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality," we began last week reading A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with a couple of essays on the play and a couple of introductory chapters from books on systems theory. I offered two pairs of premises:

1a. The universe is composed of systems: physical, chemical, biological, cultural. Stars, starfish, star chambers, and starships are all systems.

1b. Artworks can be seen as systems: cultural systems that emerge from, and reflect, biological systems, social systems, and other cultural systems. As Hamlet says, art holds “a mirror up to nature.”

2a. Systems are integrated, indivisible.

2b. Successful literary texts, like other artworks, are integrated, indivisible. Aristotle called this integrity “unity of action.”

In his book General Systems Theory, Lars Skyttner writes:

Through the constant interaction between system and environment, environment affects systems and systems in turn affect the environment. When it comes to social systems, this interaction is especially pronounced. Its scope is suggested in the following pairs:

Living system

• Society
• We
• Self
• Ego
• Mind
• Consciousness

Environment

• Nature
• Them
• The other
• Id
• Body
• Subconsciousness (64)

Skyttner could have been talking about the two interrelated worlds of city and forest that provide the setting for A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play reminds us that "civilization" exists within a larger system of which we're often unaware. In leaving the day world of the city and entering the night world of the forest, Shakespeare's lovers and amateur actors descend into the "uncivilized" dreamworld of their subconscious and discover deeper truths about themselves.

Shakespeare on film

Duncan Macleod and Ennis Macleod, in Australia, have begun a blog, Duncan's Shakespeare, reviewing film adaptations of Shakespeare, with links to other reviews and information.

Spore and the "Long Zoom"

Today's New York Times Magazine has a fascinating article, by Steven Johnson, on the forthcoming computer game Spore. The game will embody what Johnson calls "the Long Zoom," the visual experience of rapid scale-changing that can be found in the use of Google Maps, in the opening shot of the movie Fight Club, or in the on-screen exploration of the Mandelbrot Set.

The game Spore, being developed by Sim City-creator Will Wright, will start players with a single cell and enable them to move through multiple layers of emergence until they have populated a universe. At each level, new factors must be considered; for example, the level of populating a planet will involve, according to Johnson, "the complex dynamics of ecosystems and food webs."

Johnson writes,

It occurred to me as I wandered through the halls of the Spore offices that a troubled school system could probably do far worse than to devote an entire, say, fourth-grade year to playing Spore. The kids would get a valuable perspective on their universe; they would learn technical skills and exercise their imaginations at the same time; they would learn about the responsibility that comes from creating independent life. And no doubt you would have to drag them out of the classrooms at the end of the day.

Lynn, Lynn

Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, or monomyth, is a remarkably good way to describe the learning process. To learn, we must leave the comfort of the familiar, of what we think we know, and enter an unknown territory, a territory that can be frightening. There we are confronted with challenges, even dangers. If we overcome these challenges, we can return "home" with boons, in the form of new knowledge and skills, and apply them to our lives. The traveler who returns home is not the traveler who left it.

A friend and colleague from the Boston area has given me a piece of urban folklore that echoes this point. I report it here merely as a folklorist, with no wish to slander the good folks of Lynn, Massachusetts:

Lynn, Lynn, city of sin,
You never come out the way you went in.

(The illustration above, from Wikipedia, is a postcard from about 1910, showing Lynn's first school house.)

Stories as preparation for science

In his book Once upon a Number (see What I've Been Reading), mathematician John Allen Paulos gives yet another justification for studying literature:

The computer scientist David Gelernter has written that the study of the Talmud with its layered, ever more nuanced and cross-indexed stories, parables, conundrums, and commentaries, provides as good a preparation as any for rigorous scientific and mathematical reasoning. . . . The same is as likely to be true, I submit, of any sufficiently rich text that is pored over with sufficient intensity and thoroughness (143).

(For a related argument, see my earlier post "Genes as Storytellers.")