Mishaps and other haps

So I am reading Stephen Greenblatt’s new “biography” of Shakespeare and I am not sure it is really working for me as a biography. I keep wanting to put it down when I think of it that way. Why? Well, biographies tend to be very fact-driven. That is sort of a defining characteristic of the genre. As Greenblatt admits, a lot of the details of Shakespeare’s life are sketchy and that’s why biographers have had trouble tackling him.

Greenblatt is a New Historicist, though, and the book might work fine for me if I think of it as a representative of that genre: re-create the world around the writer and figure out how the latter (and his/her creative output) was shaped by the former. Since I double-majored in literature and history in college, New Historicism naturally appealed to me quite a bit. I walked a thin interdisciplinary line, however. One history prof. noted this in a critique of a paper I wrote late in my undergrad days: “This sounds like it was written by a literature major” (i.e. it was factually too “soft” to be Real History, properly done, and the language was more like literary criticism than history). A second draft of the paper cleared this problem up.

Later on, I had some of that interdisciplinary blending trained out of me by some very kick-ass historians, which might be part of the reason I have trouble reading literary criticism now (and particularly New Historicism). When Greenblatt writes something that he doesn’t know to be fact– “Shakespeare might have done X”– I cringe and start grinding my teeth. Because, well, he might NOT.

HOWEVER, in writing a New Historicist “biography”, Greenblatt does something that historians do not have the balls to do (or, more truthfully, have been trained NOT to do)– he SUPPOSES. This offers quite a bit for the imagination, as long as you don’t necessarily *believe* it, and adds something to the story that you could not take away from a conventional biography. He can talk a lot about Stratford and England at the time– people who passed through, things that happened– things that a historian would KNOW, but would discount as irrelevant if no line could be directly drawn between these things and the subject of the biography.

So maybe I should continue reading.

Oh, and thanks for working extra hours this week so that you can spend my birthday with me, Julie!

Today I just want to express my gratitude to my friends and family– the people who share their lives with me. Thank you for making my world richer and fuller. It means everything.

I think when the holidays are over this year, I am going to sit down, evaluate whether this year was an improvement over previous years, and decide whether there are things that I can propose to make the last month and a half of the year better for my friends and family.

One thing that came up a couple of times was donation of money to an organization in lieu of giving gifts to people (either a charitable organization or an interest group that promotes values and/or community that is important to you). I like this idea.

Also, more ways of doing things for people you love that will help them or make them feel good.

I just returned from running out for a couple of things I needed before taking off for Florida and was briefly among the shopping throngs. I don’t want to ever be one of those parents and I don’t want my kids to be so consumed with material things. Standing in long lines to buy some bits of plastic, metal, cloth, etc. just seems wrong when you could be making cookies with your kids or playing with them or taking them somewhere more enjoyable than a crowded mall or store– in short, doing something that will be more meaningful in the short-run and more memorable twenty or thirty years later.

Hi, downstairs neighbors! You know that pounding sound you heard about 9 this morning that sounded like someone was hammering the bejeezus out of the floor? Well, that’s exactly what it was. You see, I’m making candy and all of the peppermints had to be crushed into little bitsy pieces. And there were two bags of peppermints. The best method for this is putting the peppermints in a sturdy plastic bag and hammering them on a hard surface, which happened to be the kitchen floor. So that’s what all the pounding was. Everything is fine upstairs and I’m sorry I woke you up. I know you like to sleep in on Saturday mornings.

So here in Madison we’ve had a couple of bright, sunny days lately, which really seems unusual since we have had weeks of overcast, rainy/frosty, coldish weather. (No snow worth mentioning yet since the freezing and the precipitation haven’t coordinated their efforts thusfar)

Moreover, a lot of us wake up when it’s dark, go to work, and drive home when it’s dark, so even if the sun is out for a while, we don’t spend much time outside enjoying it.

After several weeks of living in darkness, sleep problems and dramatic mood swings may kick in. I have heard a lot about the benefits of bright light therapy, but that requires extra time (it’s not as effective as real sunlight, so you need more exposure time) and money. Plus, you have to realize that it’s lack of sunlight that is kicking your ass and not something else entirely.

However, recommendations for fighting off the winter blues also have a nutritional side: http://healing.about.com/cs/conditions/a/sad.htm

My personal theory/discovery/recommendation is that orange juice with calcium and Vitamin D is helpful. It seems to have a little bit of everything anyway. (Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, nor have I done any controlled experiments on orange juice and SAD. If you are highly allergic to orange juice, maybe you should ignore my advice.)

You know you are totally absorbed in a video game when you start making up words to the music as you are playing. At one point I did this when I was playing Dr. Mario on the NES fifteen years ago. I don’t remember all of the words now, but every time I am reminded that Dr. Mario is out for the GBA now, I hear the video game music in my head. I haven’t heard the music in fifteen years and I don’t plan to buy the game for the GBA, but I know it’s going to take the rest of the day for me to forget about those falling capsules and for the music to stop.

It is Saturday and there is nothing pressing today, so it has been a good day for running assorted errands.

I picked up ingredients for yet another batch of fudge (I have plans to try several variations before I give it a rest). Then I decided I needed Beethoven and coffee. Bach and coffee probably would have been better since Baroque music screams “Holidays” for me (traditional Celtic music also does), but the library had more Beethoven in and I certainly needed MORE of something, so I grabbed a bunch of Beethoven. And coffee.

Then I went to Penzey’s. I made a point of driving the wrong way through the parking lot because that is what I always do.

So after I bought the liquid gold, I was driving home and I noticed that the sign at Walgreen’s currently reads “Magic Bullet Now Available.” I wonder if they realize exactly how hilarious that is? I guess there must be an actual product on the market called “Magic Bullet.” Seems like someone could sue them for false advertising. Any takers?

It has been a couple of years since I ordered tea online, so I was scouting out some recommendations this morning and I came across a Taiwan company with this explanation on their homepage:

“We are farmers.
Too, we are sellers.
So we can provide premium Taiwanese tea
in incomparable product lines,
at unbeatable price,
and with most freshness.”

It almost reads like verse. Someone should write an epic poem about tea production. That would really strike my fancy. Certainly, there has been quite a bit of poetry written about tea over the centuries. The language of discussing tea is quite descriptive, analogous, and comparative. Perhaps the epic could focus on production of a particular type of tea and could refer to other ways that poets have described certain teas. There could be an unfolding of relationships and history that resembles the lists of lineage in the Old Testament. Perhaps it would end with a cozy insulating the tea of a famous twentieth-century writer.

I have known about this website for a while, but am starting to realize just how much it rocks:

http://www.vrg.org

VRG provides lots of sound nutritional information, as well as articles about other topics related to vegetarianism. It is not a site trying to convince readers that vegetarianism is a good thing or that meat is a bad thing, but a source of information for people who are vegetarians or who want to know more about nutrition and vegetarianism.

It does contain some articles on interesting political issues: should prisoners be allowed to choose vegetarian meals; how to promote vegetarianism via investing; should vegetarians be more conscious about the amount they tip in restaurants since vegetarian food tends to be less expensive than meat (and therefore 15-20% of meal cost may not really be a decent tip). Those sorts of things. There is one article on animal rights, which mostly notes how animal rights activists feel about things and that many of them have chosen to become vegetarians.

So overall, the site is very multipurpose and probably about as objective as it is possible to be while still supporting a particular cause or choice. I guess one of the articles that impressed me most was an argument *against* the idea that humans are biologically designed to be plant eaters (http://www.vrg.org/nutshell/omni.htm). You just don’t see that on sites that are more “pushy” about vegetarianism (and who are those other sites preaching to, anyway?).