I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn’t have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I’m sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: “Who’re the right actors for these roles?” “How should this be staged?” “Do I really want to set this in Denmark?” His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. “Is the financing in place?” “Are there enough good seats for my patrons?” “Where am I going to get a human skull?” I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question “Is this literature?”
Day: December 10, 2016
Fenris Bound — Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire
From Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire’s Book of Norse Myths. Published by NYRB. My son and I have enjoyed the hell out of it.
Perpetually postponed to the future (Alan Watts)
…we have an absolutely extraordinary attitude in our culture and in various other cultures—high civilizations—to the new member of human society. Instead of saying, “Thank you,” to children, “How do you do? Welcome to the human race; we are playing a game, and we are playing by the following rules… We want to tell you what the rules are so that you’ll know your way around, and when you’ve understood what rules we’re playing by, when you get older you may be able to invent better ones.”
But instead of that we still retain an attitude to the child that he is on probation; he’s not really a human being, he’s a candidate for humanity. …we have a whole system of preparation of the child for life, which always is preparation and never actually gets there…. as a result of this problem being insoluble, it is perpetually postponed to the future so that one lives—one is educated—to live in the future, and one is not ever educated to live today.
Alan Watts.
Coronation of Sesostris — Cy Twombly
Strips #313, #314, #315 — Samplerman
Biblioklept 