School is about to start it would seem there’s a lot of spending going on before anybody has learned anything. Every major chain in the world is banking on the labor day school-year spending blitz. Dorms are being re-painted, swept and readied for all those cheap futons, the campus book stores are worse than a B&N on Christmas Eve, and the lecture hall microphones all have new batteries.
That’s why this year, even if you’re not going back to school, why don’t you dust off your academic think cap, sit in on a few top-notch courses and brush up on all those literature classes you missed, for free?
Harvard’s Open Learning Initiative is offering two courses of interest to our readers: The Heroic and the Anti-Heroic in Classical Greek Civilization and Shakespeare After All: The Later Plays.
MIT has a huge backlog of literature materials available, going back as far as 2005, through their Open Course Ware initiative. All areas of study are covered, but here are links to their Literature course wares and their materials on Writing and Humanistic Studies
Also of note is a website called Virtual Professors, where you can find a host of videos ranging from a lecture on the Poetry of Bob Dylan to Executive Communication and Business writing, as well as a series on Milton from the award winning John Rogers. Also there you can actually matriculate into real courses for free. Worth a look.
For a huge amount of information, check out the Open Courseware Consortium (of which MIT is a member) for a list of schools that share their materials online.
Bob Dylan’s new album, Tempest, releases September 11, 2012, exactly eleven years after the release of Love and Theft. Since The Tempest was Shakespeare’s last play, some have wondered if this will be Dylan’s last album. I kind of doubt it, and here’s why. Dylan himself has pointed out that they are two different titles since his drops the article, but he often seems to deflect such questions in interviews. Dylan possesses a proclivity for rewriting Shakespeare, and his upcoming album title is not the only example of said proclivity. Love and Theft clearly shows Dylan’s tendency to re-write Shakespeare. The following list from Love and Theft includes a few of Dylan’s allusions to Shakespeare and allusions to other literary authors and characters.
from “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum”
Dylan’s narrator says, “They’re going to the country and they’re going to retire. They’re taking a streetcar named Desire.” Dylan alludes to Tennessee Williams, making the Williams title a literal mode of transportation for Dylan’s own characters, whose names are taken from characters in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.
from “Floater (Too Much to Ask)”
Dylan sings, “Romeo, he said to Juliet, ‘You got a poor complexion; it doesn’t give your appearance a very youthful touch.’ Juliet said back to Romeo, ‘Why don’t you just shove off if it bothers you so much?’” With this, Dylan improves upon Shakespeare’s tragic love story, giving Juliet a spine and some spunk.
from “High Water (for Charley Patton)”
Dylan sings, “Charles [Henry] Lewes told the Englishman, the Italian, and the Jew, ‘You can’t open up your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view. They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on highway 5.’ Judge says to the High Sheriff, ‘I want him dead or alive, either one. I don’t care,’ high water everywhere.” Lewes was a nineteenth century, English Renaissance man. Here, Dylan fictionalizes Lewes’ life, and Darwin’s is also revised.
He says, “Big Joe Turner looking east and west from the dark room of his mind, he made it to Kansas City, Twelfth Street and Vine, nothing standing there, high water everywhere.” Here Dylan rewrites the life of Big Joe Turner, an actual blues man from Kansas City.
from “Moonlight”
Dylan sings, “Trailing moss and [mistletoe?], the purple blossoms soft as snow, my tears keep flowing to the sea. Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, it takes at thief to catch a thief. For whom does the bell toll for [sic], love? It tolls for you and me.” Here Dylan has borrowed from John Donne and Ernest Hemingway and re-used the words for his own purposes. I don’t think of the use as plagiarism; instead, it’s merely an allusion.
from “Po’ Boy”
The narrator claims, “Othello told Desdemona, ‘I’m cold; cover me with a blanket. By the way, what happened to that poisoned wine?’ She said, ‘I gave it till you drank it.’ Poor boy, laying ‘em straight, picking up the cherries off the plate.” In these lines, the author seems to mash up the plot of Hamlet with the names of Shakespeare’s Othello, allowing Desdemona revenge on Othello for falsely accusing and murdering her.
from “Cry a While”
Dylan sings, “Last night across the alley, there was a pounding on the wall. It must have been Don Pasquale [breaking in to make] a booty call.” Dylan alludes here to Gaetano Donizetti’s comic opera, Don Pasquale (1843).
from “Sugar Baby”
The narrator says, “Look up, look up. Seek your maker before Gabriel blows his horn.” Here Dylan alludes to the archangel Gabriel, who explained Daniel’s visions and announced the birth of Jesus to Mary.
Speaking of plagiarism, Dylan was accused of plagiarizing South Carolina poet Henry Timrod on the album, Modern Times. Like me, Timrod was born in Charleston, South Carolina. Also like me, he taught in Florence, SC. Here’s a picture of the school:
Like Timrod, Dylan is something of a poet. In the mid-sixties, Dylan wrote a book of poetry called Tarantula (1971), which he claims he didn’t intend to write.
In addition to poetry, Dylan has prose literary links, a non-fiction book he wrote called Chronicles: Volume One (2004). So far, there has been no second volume. Here’s a brief audio excerpt of the memoir.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdIi8T2KrZw
There’s also Dylan’s literary connection with Joyce Carol Oates’ short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Apparently, Oates was inspired after listening to Dylan’s “It’s All Over, Baby Blue.”
One other indirect literary connection happened in 2000 when Dylan wrote a song for the film Wonder Boys, which was an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s novel of the same name. Check out the awesome video for “Things Have Changed.”
My guess is that Bob Dylan will continue to make albums as long as he’s alive. Based on his past work, Dylan seems bent on re-writing literature and history. Don’t expect him to start changing that now.
Y is for YOLKS
When living in exile in the Channel Islands, Victor Hugo would rise at dawn and eat 2 raw eggs, drink a cup of cold coffee, then begin writing.
There is a habit among writers — namely writers aiming to cross into the realm of The Known — to mimic the actions of other great writers. We think if we have the writing schedule of Hunter S. Thompson or the home office of William Shakespeare, then maybe we should be able to produce writing that equals their works.
It’s a good idea to learn from successful habits — not that I would be caught mimicking Thompson anytime soon — but at the same time, I think it’s a better idea to forge new ones. In fact, I think it should be a common goal for writers to land on such a list as The Awl assembled. Personally, I find the “B is for Booze” section uninspiring, so perhaps I should aim to be the first author to live solely on broccoli and blueberry juice. It is not that I should want to be set apart by my habits, but that my habits should be a more honest representation of me (and I love broccoli and blueberries).
Set let us endeavor, then, to not mimic, but learn, and then carve our own, wonderful entries in the A-to-Z listing of literature.
Over at the Financial Times, Harry Eyres makes a few interesting observations on the state of poetry in relationship to sports.
… Pindar is of particular relevance here because his surviving complete poems are all victory odes associated with games … Just as much as the athletes, he wanted to win and hated coming second.
I can’t say much more on the article here because of FT’s, erm, conservative internet copyright policy. (Please do give the article a read). But maybe it’s about letting athletes strive for excellence, while forcing poets to be “accessible.” Big props to London mayor Boris Johnson then for commissioning the poet Armand D’Angour to pen an Olympic Pindaric Ode for the London games. I know what you’re thinking: I missed it too. Thankfully, Matt Pickles and the University of Oxford have made the text available to the public, with a Greek translation if your English is rusty.
Typography, or the application of fonts as we of the computer generation like to call them, have always played an integral role in how a book is perceived. For instance, a paper for a school assignment looks best in Times New Roman, because that’s the way it’s always been (for us young-ins). Some buck the trend and go with something like Papyrus or Book Antiqua or something like that, but in general, professionalism in the academic world is associated with ubiquitous font. Besides, 5,000 words of Papyrus is like stabbing the eyes with ancient egyptian needles. We’ve all been there.
For paper-back novels, Garamond, Minion and Dante have been a go-to for the last decade. You might not recognize them by their individual shapes, but you’d inherently equate them with reading a book. Similarly, if you saw a book set in Times New Roman while flipping through, you might think it amateurish. But this begs the question: how much do we trust fonts?
Errol Morris, the famed documentary director and an essayist for the New York Times, decided to research this phenomenon. Back in early July, Morris ran a quiz, entitled “Are you an optimist or a pessimist?” that asked the reader about their perceived safety in the face of an Asteroid catastrophe here on earth. But as it turns out, we weren’t being polled on our extra-planetary paranoia.
Morris set the poll up so that it would randomly display one of a few select fonts: Baskerville, Comic Sans, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica and Trebuchet. As it turns out, the font has a very important role on the how much we “trust” the text.
Comic Sans, the clown of the font world, ranked lowest in trustworthiness and highest and distrust. Baskerville, on the other hand, was the most trustworthy and the least distrust-worthy. David Dunning, at Cornell, helped wrangle the data.
ERROL MORRIS: I am completely surprised by this. If you asked me in advance, I would have guessed Georgia or Computer Modern, something that has the imprimatur of, I don’t know, truth — truthiness.
DAVID DUNNING: The word that comes to my mind is gravitas. There are some fonts that are informal — Comic Sans, obviously — and other fonts that are a little bit more tuxedo. It seems to me that Georgia is slightly tuxedo. Computer Modern is a little bit more tuxedo and Baskerville has just a tad more starchiness. I would have expected that if you are going to have a winner in Baskerville, you are also going to have a winner in Computer Modern. But we did not. And there can be a number of explanations for that. Maybe there is a slight difference in how they are rendered in PCs or laptops that causes the starch in Computer Modern to be a little softer than the starch in Baskerville.
ERROL MORRIS: Starchiness?
DAVID DUNNING: Fonts have different personalities. It seems to me that one thing you can say about Baskerville is that it feels more formal or looks more formal. So that may give it a push in terms of its level of authority. This is, of course, speculation. I don’t really know.
It’s important to understand that this test worked, but the reasons behind it are unknown as of yet. For the complete article, which is a must read in my book, head over to the NYT: “Hear, All Ye People; Harken, O Earth.” Interest piqued? Check out the Most Popular Fonts of 2011 by MyFonts.com.
Oh, and the next time you type up a paper and really want to stick out, think again before changing the font. Read the article to find out why.
