rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind
I am such a DORK. In an impulsive fit on Wednesday, I went into Tower Records to see if anything worth purchasing was left, and I discovered a copy of the Globe's This World's Globe CD set, which I decided to snatch up for a friend of mine in the department, as I'd been all gleeful the day before that the professor of the class I'm TFing played "When That I Was" off of the Globe recording during his Twelfth Night lecture, and my friend remarked that someday he'd like to hear this recording. (I am kind of Appalled that I still have friends whom I haven't forced to listen to this recording, but whatever. I also discovered Wednesday that one of my friends has not read Susan Cooper's King of Shadows. This is a Problem.)
So anyway, the CD set. I know that I already have all of the music on the CDs, because I have The Food of Love, But What Are Kings?, and Such Sweet Sorrow. This has not stopped me from wanting to tear open the wrapping and listen to them anyway. I blame the "Elizabethan and Jacobean contemporary playgoers' anecdotes in the original pronunciation of Shakespeare's time" listed on the box, which are definitely not on my CDs. I don't necessarily want to own them; I just want to hear them... I have problems, clearly.
I'm also not really sure when I should give it to him, since we're not usually gift-exchanging friends, but that's a separate problem.
In other news, I am teaching Twelfth Night on Monday, and I'm really nervous about it--nervous enough to have had an anxiety dream yesterday in which most of my students mutinied and stormed out halfway through the hour. There are many factors at work in this anxiety, I suspect: it'll be the first section after I received (late) midterm evaluations; one of the other TFs is going to be sitting in to observe, since we've all been assigned to visit another TF's section; it's Twelfth Night, so I really want the students to love it; it's Twelfth Night, so if I can't teach it effectively, what are the chances that I'll be able to teach anything, ever?
And finally, I'm reading The Shakespeare Wars by Ron Rosenbaum, and it's really irritating me for some reason I can't figure out. It's not *just* the sentence fragments littering nearly every page. Nor is it just things like the fact that he keeps referring to Lukas Erne's book as Shakespeare as a Literary Artist and says twice that we consider Shakespeare's birthday to be April 23 because that's when it was registered (as though the problem is that we actually have a date of birth, but just choose to distrust the record for some unknown reason). And it's only partly that he seems to think that the only people who have anything significant to say about Shakespeare are a) textual scholars (the rest of academia being a waste of time?) or b) Peter Brook. I don't know what it is, because the material itself is pretty interesting, but something about the book just grates.
So anyway, the CD set. I know that I already have all of the music on the CDs, because I have The Food of Love, But What Are Kings?, and Such Sweet Sorrow. This has not stopped me from wanting to tear open the wrapping and listen to them anyway. I blame the "Elizabethan and Jacobean contemporary playgoers' anecdotes in the original pronunciation of Shakespeare's time" listed on the box, which are definitely not on my CDs. I don't necessarily want to own them; I just want to hear them... I have problems, clearly.
I'm also not really sure when I should give it to him, since we're not usually gift-exchanging friends, but that's a separate problem.
In other news, I am teaching Twelfth Night on Monday, and I'm really nervous about it--nervous enough to have had an anxiety dream yesterday in which most of my students mutinied and stormed out halfway through the hour. There are many factors at work in this anxiety, I suspect: it'll be the first section after I received (late) midterm evaluations; one of the other TFs is going to be sitting in to observe, since we've all been assigned to visit another TF's section; it's Twelfth Night, so I really want the students to love it; it's Twelfth Night, so if I can't teach it effectively, what are the chances that I'll be able to teach anything, ever?
And finally, I'm reading The Shakespeare Wars by Ron Rosenbaum, and it's really irritating me for some reason I can't figure out. It's not *just* the sentence fragments littering nearly every page. Nor is it just things like the fact that he keeps referring to Lukas Erne's book as Shakespeare as a Literary Artist and says twice that we consider Shakespeare's birthday to be April 23 because that's when it was registered (as though the problem is that we actually have a date of birth, but just choose to distrust the record for some unknown reason). And it's only partly that he seems to think that the only people who have anything significant to say about Shakespeare are a) textual scholars (the rest of academia being a waste of time?) or b) Peter Brook. I don't know what it is, because the material itself is pretty interesting, but something about the book just grates.