* I haven't received any further updates about Kirk, but as soon as I do, I'll get the word out.
1. I think what I wanted, when I retired, was to see if I could expand my experience with the plays and poems of William Shakespeare. In order to do that, I went through a period of shedding my role as a classroom teacher of Shakespeare, of thinking about Shakespeare's works primarily as a source of ideas or of meaning and thinking about how to make the plays and their ideas come alive in the classroom. I had started this process many years ago when I no longer taught the Shakespeare course at LCC and when I became more involved in Shakespeare performances, playing roles in a handful of plays and helping to narrate the Shakespeare Showcase.
Recently, I've intensified my renewed experience with Shakespeare's works, have diversified my experience with Shakespeare's world. For example, this morning, for several hours, I put on episode after episode of the podcast Shakespeare Unlimited. I especially enjoyed listening to Derek Jacobi, in a two part episode, talk about playing the role of Hamlet (here), in particular, and acting Shakespeare in general (here). But it's not just the best actors who have fascinating stories about playing Shakespeare. I loved listening to an episode discussing the documentary movie, Still Dreaming, which tells the story of Fiasco Theater's Ben Steinfield and Noah Brody mounting a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Lillian Booth Actors Home, a nursing home populated by retired actors, musicians, dancers, and singers. This episode is here.
I listened to all kinds of other episodes focusing on such subjects as women acting Shakespeare (here), the lives of women in Tudor England (here), how racial tensions that we think of as current are very much alive in Shakespeare's plays (here), the history of Shakespeare in the Park in Central Park (here), and more.
You can view the entire list of Shakespeare Unlimited's episodes, here.
2. Later in the day, I began to slowly read and absorb Helen Vendler's book, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. In her book's introduction, Vendler lays out her project which is to offer a close reading of all 154 sonnets with emphasis on how these sonnets work as lyric poetry. She closely examines how the architecture of the sonnet, its structure, brings to life the complications and complexities of the mind of the poems' speaker. Vendler examines the way lyric poetry is a word by word, line by line record of the fluidity of feelings, their depth and contradictions. More particularly, the sonnets, which are 154 different dives into the mind and the feelings of the poem's speaker, examine the nearly infinite variety of ways the speaker experiences love, ranging from feelings of the deepest admiration to the darkest jealousy and disillusion.
3. Today, not only did these Shakespeare Unlimited episodes come through my smart speaker, but today I discovered the app called Pro Baseball Radio. Now that I've figured out how to play what's on my cell phone through my smart speaker, I can now have a baseball game on while I do things around the house, or even while I read. This breakthrough makes me very happy. I love listening to radio broadcasts of baseball games. Today, I listened to parts of the game between the Padres and the Mets and to nearly the entire Yankees and Mariners game. I wasn't so much interested in the outcomes of these games as I was pleased to have the sounds and rhythms of baseball in my house.
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