I finished memorizing "On n'est pas des grenouille" (We Are Not Amphibians) by Serge Gainsbourg and looked for the chords but no one had posted them. I'll start working them out tomorrow.
I weighed 90.6 kilos before breakfast.
Before 9:00 I logged onto the Zoom meeting for my Shakespeare lecture with the plan to try this time to type my lecture notes with the hope that it will save me time. I had my pen and notebook handy just in case that didn't work out.
Continuing with 1 Henry 4.
Professor Lopez says he's been reading our emails and they are less detailed this week because Henry IV is quite different from The Comedy of Errors. There is bit of an expectation problem when reading history plays. How to read any Shakespeare play requires a way of thinking of Shakespeare. Most are reading for information and have persistent questions about access to information that Shakespeare or his audience would have and thinking that would help us understand what sources he was working from and to what extent he altered details.
Would his audience know the history behind his play? How much information is necessary? How much theatrical practice allows the audience to be clear? How much would cause confusion? Are we supposed to understand what people are saying? What attitude must we have? Is he writing to his audience or with some other purpose?
To get Shakespeare's relationship between his plot and his sources, they are based on extant stories. He took what was already being told in some form and redramatized it. He liked to work with what was already around.
The language on a granular level shows relations between characters in complexity and what they mean. What social relations are lost by the fiction? The relationship between genre and experience, how is genre a determining factor, etc. For example Bibilical allusions.
To get the total picture and one's own interpretation one will have to read the play twenty times. We are not expected to do that in this course. This is only an introduction to Shakespeare. To get all of Shakespeare one must read it twenty times or more. Does Professor Lopez have command? No, even though he's read it more one hundred times it exceeds his grasp. He has tools and can do it quicker but it's a life project just for this play alone. There is always more to learn. There are resources, plot summaries and books about the play to orient you but if unsettled you are like everyone.
One can read Henry IV without needing historical information. It's about a civil war; a prince transforming to a king; his relationship to Falstaff; Hotspur and his wife; and rebels carving England. But the play is not a history book and one wouldn't read it for historical information. The play is a work of art with formal character to teach you how to read it.
Tips to read less for information. Read as an interactive form. Read to get the formal effects and to get the play artistically.
Shakespeare's audience would have known Henry IV better than you but you are better educated. Universal literacy is a modern fact and most of his audience couldn't read. There was an elite group in his time that was educated earlier and better, but iIlliteracy was high. We are already ahead because we can read. They were not stupid but don't think he wrote for history buffs. He knew better than them because of research.
The events of this play took place in 1399, 200 years before he wrote about them. Do we know what happened in 1821 in Canada? We can look it up but 200 years is a long time. He did not assume currency. He has to rely for theatrical effects on what he gives in performance. It could be in excess of understanding.
In the beginning the king shows up and talks. He delivers four awesome lines that are cool but confusing. They are shaken and they are worried. They are trying to find peace so there must be war. "Broils" means "conflicts" and maybe his audience gets that word. They need peace for new wars. There is a deliberately archaic reference to strands far remote. We are in civil war but need go to end it so we can have a new war. He talks for 33 lines, gradually giving a sense of what's happening. He wants to go to the holy land to chase pagans in the place where Christ was "nailed for our advantage." Crusades were often penance.
It is a confusing start. We want peace for war is an unsettled thing to say at the start of a play. In 1.1.27 we see that this is not new, as he's been talking a year or more about this.
Carving out a space for the play takes twenty lines. He looks for an advisor and asks Westmorland. He learns that in Wales Mortimer has been taken. It is hard to figure out. Mortimer is one of his military commanders. When leaders talk of alliances it's hard keep up. One must read the footnotes. Mortimer went willingly to Glendwr. Hotspur took prisoners. The exposition of the play is complicated in a mimetic way. They are paralyzed in actions and looking to the future while hacking through the present.
The first four lines are about finding time to fight war.
In 1.2 Shakespeare makes a typically drastic change of tone. Enter the Prince with Falstaff. Falstaff is an ambiguous but decayed knight who has sacrificed status with his behaviour. He's large and his visual impression must be distinct but looking socially ambiguous.
In a life of pleasure why care about the time of day?
The first scene is about finding time, and the second is about knowing the time or having no relationship with time.
We are structurally lifted out of pressure of knowing the story. But above information is formal experience. He's using the similar material of time to suggest something about the conceptual architecture of the play. What is he telling about time being important for some but not for others? He's introduced the time note and it's floating around. He rings the time note in the next scene in another way. The language of time. What happens with the sound of time as we progress?
The first scene takes little time but has lots of info. The second scene is expansive but with less content. Banter and wit shows they are reveling in wasting time. They are thieves seeking sensual pleasure. They set up a robbery and Poins sets the plot in motion. Tonight he's here and tomorrow they'll have money. This precise planning in time is a comic version of the king's talk of time. Temporal coordinates. History and military in the first scene, comic dissolute action in the second.
Hal must move between two worlds. The difference between the worlds are important in the play. The establishment of the story and the king wishing Hotspur was his son. The other scene putting both sets in time and employing them differently. Shakespeare is not content with this. After that Hal is alone and says to himself or the audience that the sun is an image of nobility. He is the son and must act like the son of a king to become the Sun. He says I'm hanging out for now because it's good for my rep to have something smothering to rise above. This is contradictory and complex and there is something unpleasant about it. The contrasts between Hal and Falstaff and the king.
Hal looks great at first because he's gonna commit a robbery for fun, making the most of his time by wasting it. But the king is also wasting time because he can't use it the way he wants. We are supposed to like Falstaff and his festive principle. Hal says it's temporary because I'm really like my dad but that's a disappointing comparison. We like Hal less for this. We like him at first because he's fun but he takes it away. He bides his time in a calculated way. He is in control and he's deceiving his friends because they are the clouds that block him from being the Sun.
There are holidays in the calendar but if they were all holidays it would be boring. Everything in its place. There is the movement of the sun but different from no time like Falstaff. Because I'm bad I will look better later when I rise. He isolates his self image in the future differently from Henry. Within the idiom of the play Henry is humble to serve Christ and to atone but Hal is about himself and he wants to rise above everyone. Contrast dad and son. Military, festive, then identity. Hal is separate and has further separation from his dad because he is calculating and selfish. Another time note.
In 1.3 the king is mad about a new fight with his servants. I used to be nice, letting everyone have what they want but now I'm going to be myself. It is a similar idea to what Hal just said. I will be myself. One is supposed to judge me by what I was and what I will become. Henry wants to be the king he always was and not the king he's playing. One will see the difference soon. Shakespeare is saying kings must act in a certain way but formally he's putting in front of us different scenes that are united about time and self becoming.
There will be a big lecture on Wednesday Ocober 13. Follow this lecture to learn to uncover what Shakespeare is doing to expand the conceptual range and to make more reasonable relationships between the characters mostly about time and self becoming but also more than that. A concrete idea about how to coordinate the elements in artistic form.
I had no problem typing the lecture so I think from now on that's what I'll do. Of course making sense of my typing shorthand and expanding it will take as much time as the lecture or more.
I weighed 89.2 kilos before lunch. I had saltines with five year old cheddar and a half a glass of lemonade.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor.
At Spadina and Queen there is a preacher in a baseball cap who looks like he's an alcoholic and has been homeless. He has a microphone and amplifier that is so bad that it's almost impossible to understand anything he's preaching. It's like he's praising Jesus while being smothered by a pillow.
When I got home I looked out my window and a cyclist rode by carrying a teddy bear the size of a real bear.
I weighed 88.7 kilos at 18:00.
I finished editing my lecture notes at 19:30 and so it took an hour and a half to edit a one hour lecture. I think that's better than if I had hand written and then transcribed it. Maybe I'll get faster.
I read chapter six of The Scarlet Letter, the chapter that describes Hester's daughter Pearl. She does seem to be a bit of a demon child but then because of her mother's shunning by the community she is not allowed to have any friends. It's no wonder that she throws rocks at the other kids. She is obsessed with the scarlet letter on her mother's breast and her mother also always dresses her like the letter in scarlet.
I made pizza on naan with Parmese sauce, a cut up slice of ham, french fries and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching an episode of Gomer Pyle.
In this unlikely story Camp Henderson hosts a visiting soldier named Manuel Cortez from a fictional small country in South America called The Thirteenth Federated Constitutional Republic of Greater San Miguel. On a map of Brazil it is a dot behind a mountain. He is there to learn how to bring Marine discipline back to his country's army. Sergeant Carter is selected to be his host and he starts by letting him inspect his platoon. He then tells him he can pick any one of them to be his guide during his stay. He picks Gomer because of his honest face and they become fast friends. Manuel reveals that he is only a corporal and he insists on staying in the barracks and working side by side with the men. While they are digging a ditch a woman comes through the fence calling for Manuel in Spanish. He introduces her as his very good friend Consuela whom he just met. Gomer tries to tell him he can't have civilians on the base when Carter sees her. Carter gets Manuel to tell Consuela she has to leave and she finally wiggles away angrily, gesturing and shouting in Spanish. Carter calls Gomer a knucklehead for not letting Manuel know the rules. Manuel demands that Carter apologize for calling Gomer a knucklehead. He refuses and so Manuel challenges Carter to a duel. Carter refuses to fight and so Manuel thinks he's a coward. Gomer tries to explain to Manuel that the esprit de corps of the Marine corps demands that if he fights Sergeant Carter he would have to fight him first. Manuel decides that Carter is a bad leader and needs to be replaced by a good leader, who is Gomer. He goes to tell Carter to remove his stripes. Carter blows his top just as the colonel walks in and reveals that Manuel is really a general and he's only been posing as a corporal. Manuel decides that Carter is not a coward after all and has been resisting dueling with him. He says he will take back the idea of esprit de corps to his country.
Consuela was played by Lisa Gallegos but not much is known about her.
Manuel was played by Larry Storch who learned many accents growing up in the Bronx and developed hundreds of impressions which served him well as a comedic actor. He started out as an MC in burlesque houses. In 1953 he had his own TV variety show called The Larry Storch Show. He became lifelong friends with Tony Curtis when they served on the same submarine. The idea that Cary Grant said "Judy, Judy, Judy" came from an impersonation of Grant that Storch did in his nightclub act. Later Curtis got him roles in his films such as "Who Was That Lady I Saw You With", "Forty Pounds of Trouble", "Sex and the Single Girl" and "Wild And Wonderful." He played Corporal Randolph Agarn on "F Troop." He was the voice of Phineas J Whoopee on "Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales" and "Underdog." He did the voice of Koko the Clown on "Out of the Inkwell."
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