An Extremely Literary Week: BEA, Housing Works, and Shakespeare

I have just had possibly the most literary week of my life (outside of majoring in English at university), and it was spectacular. Here are some of the highlights:

BookExpo America

This is the annual trade fair for publishing in the US (which also attracts a lot of foreign exhibitors). As I did last year, I borrowed a pass from one of my coworkers and attended the fair for a few hours on Thursday. I got to gawk at the exhibits, catch up with some former colleagues, and grab a pile of galleys that I'm very excited to dive into (not literally):

And parked right in the Javits Center was the Penguin truck!

The moment I spotted this reminded me of being seven years old again, watching the ice cream truck come around the corner. (Maybe I was a weird kid.)

Housing Works Book Fair

Over the weekend, I volunteered at the Housing Works Book Fair. It's a great organization -- all proceeds from the bookstore go towards combating homelessness and AIDS. They have a street fair every summer where used books and media are sold very cheaply ($1 books!), with food, live music, and other festivities. There were pavilions full of books, which I was helping stock:

And at the end of the day, there were still boxes upon boxes of books remaining, so we constructed a great wall of books along the sidewalk (from which the books were loaded onto a truck):

Shakespeare in the Park

Tonight, my friend Deb won tickets to Much Ado About Nothing, the first play of this summer's Shakespeare in the Park. I adore Shakespeare, and though I've entered the lottery for (free!) tickets many times, I've never won. I was thrilled to finally be able to partake of this New York summer tradition, and it was every bit as excellent as I expected. I'd forgotten how funny Much Ado About Nothing really is (I read it years ago), and it's so much better live than it is on the page. I can't wait for King Lear during the second half of the season!

And that was my week. I'm looking forward to more literary pursuits in the coming months!

La Bohème at the Met Opera!

A few friends and I got rush tickets to the Metropolitan Opera's production of La Bohème yesterday. I've never seen it live before (even though I have three different recordings on my computer). It was absolutely worth the experience; the show was spectacular. I can't believe what I've been missing. (Rodolfo's character, especially, tugs at my heartstrings.)

It's always interesting listening to music with lyrics in a language I don't know, because so much more of my understanding depends on the vocalists' interpretations of their parts. (The Met Opera has electronic panels on the back of each seat displaying translations of the lyrics, but I tried not to rely on that, because watching the staging of the production is a huge part of the experience.) You can always get a rudimentary understanding of what's going on, because there's enough overlap between the various Romance languages (though that leaves German lyrics nigh impossible), but the nuances are really up to the vocalists, in their facial and body language down to the minute inflections of their lines. For instance, in this production, the audience could tell in the first act the exact moment when Benoît loses control of the situation at Rodolfo's apartment -- you could tell by his posture and the vocals of the other characters how inebriated he was getting.

Another element I've noticed: it's hard for any stage performance to adequately develop character, because it's constrained to about two hours, and there's only so much of each character that the audience gets to see. I do like how -- other than the marketplace scene -- Puccini doesn't include any group or choral numbers. The opera focuses narrowly on the lives of the six central characters -- and really only three or four of them are developed at any depth; the small cast lends it a sense of intimacy that you don't often see in some of the larger, more traditionally theatrical operas in the repertoire. It would be a good choice for an indie opera house -- I'm not surprised that Rent (a very creative update on La Bohème where everyone dies of AIDS instead of tuberculosis) remained an Off-Broadway production despite its success.

Now I really must see Rent. I missed both the original production, which closed when I was in high school, and the revival, which went dark quite recently. (I have the soundtrack to that, as well, and I do like how Jonathan Larson includes so many nods to Puccini.) I've heard mixed reviews of the film, but one of these same friends is organizing a screening of the original production -- I'm super excited! :-)

If I Used Twitter

my post for the night would be:

Helping my sister with an English project on Julius Caesar -- haven't had this much fun with Shakespeare since college! #EnglishMajorArmadillo

That is all.

NYTimes: Richard III, Lost and Found

In recent news -- making both archaeological and regular news headlines around the world -- the bones of Richard III were discovered under a parking lot in Leicester:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/world/europe/richard-the-third-bones.html?hp

I'm inclined to be more sympathetic towards Richard III than literature portrays him (Shakespeare's play was an instrument of the Tudor smear campaign against the Plantagenets). He probably suffered from "younger sibling syndrome," as did many "spare heirs" of monarchs in the Middle Ages -- see Scar vs. Mufasa in The Lion King (and play "spot the Shakespeare references"). This was also probably exacerbated by his uninspiring physical appearance -- see Tyrion Lannister in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. (Especially in those days, physical birth defects were seen as portents of ill fortune.) Richard came by the throne in a slightly roundabout way that involved some unsavory tactics; certainly, he can't have been completely innocent in the Princes in the Tower episode. But he was by and large a competent administrator who contributed significantly to the nascent English legal system and, notably, lifted most public and private censorship of written work -- not a move to be taken lightly, especially given the political turmoil surrounding his ascension and reign. He was ruthless, to be sure, sometimes excessively so, but his were much more violent times. (Nasty, brutish, and short would be about right.) Richard III was not, among his peers, particularly remarkable in his ruthlessness -- which the Tudors, Shakespeare, and partisan historians conveniently forget.

Anyhow. I imagine it must have been a fascinating experience for the modern-day descendants of Richard III, a few of whom contributed some DNA to the project.

Abstruse Goose: In Cabin'd Ships at Sea

Whitman in the modern age (courtesy of Brett):

http://abstrusegoose.com/477
(You may have to click on the image to make the font a more legible size.)

It frustrates me to no end when people claim that poetry written long ago is irrelevant to life today. Part of the appeal of literature is its timelessness -- that while the specific time and place depicted might be past, human nature has not changed over the centuries. (I maintain that the Oedipus Cycle is one of the original family dramas. Would anything that messed up air on modern television? (Wait, A Game of Thrones is now on HBO. I take that back.))

Seriously, if you think poetry is outdated, quote your girlfriend some Yeats or Neruda or Shakespeare. Or, if you have a boyfriend, some Anne Bradstreet or Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

The Ones Left Behind poster!

The promotional poster for The Ones Left Behind is out!

Simon's (the male lead) costume is composed mostly of pieces on loan from the drama department, but Muireann's (the female lead) is my design. Tommy (the composer) and I wandered around in a little Asian fabric shop in San Jose for a good hour, looking for the perfect fabric. It's made of this great satiny material -- it looks even better in person, and should show up wonderfully under the stage lights.

Anyhow, as it says on the poster, ticket reservations are open! They're free, so you should all come see the show!

The Ones Left Behind, a Musical

I'm costume director for a musical one of my friends wrote, called The Ones Left Behind:
http://theonesleftbehind.com/
(There are some demo videos up, if you're curious.)

It's set in 1840s Nantucket, so lots of hoop skirts and waistcoats. Anyhow, we're raising money to cover the cost of the production, via Kickstarter:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/298015226/the-ones-left-behind

If you're at all interested in helping us make this happen, please consider pitching in -- even a dollar or two will help us meet our budget.

The show runs in Spring Quarter. I'll post more about it as it gets in full swing. :)

Edit: Nix the hoop skirts. They'll have petticoats, but hoops are probably out of reach. They are whaler's wives, after all.

Why being an English major is more fun (and more scandalous) than you'd think

I'm looking at my book lists for this quarter, and one of the required readings is called 'Tis a Pity She's a Whore. (It's an English play from the reign of Charles I, and I'm told it's quite good.)

They would never have gotten away with that in grade school.

Plot Device (No, Really)!

Funny, relevant, and very well-made:

The Stanford Daily: Shakespeare (Kind of) in the Park

An article I wrote (I think it's my first lead story!) that runs today:

http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/05/13/shakespeare-kind-of-in-the-park

As You Like It is really funny (though I'll admit that I often find Shakespearean humor more amusing than I do contemporary humor), and the Stanford Shakespeare Company does it quite well. You can see the review for details, but suffice to say that I'd gladly see it again. If you're on campus, go see it! Tickets: http://shakespeare.stanford.edu.

(I also realize that there's a bit of a skewed representation of my journalism on the blog. I'm predominately a book critic, but it seems like everything I plug here is about drama. I'll try to remember to post more of my book reviews!)

Edit: If you're interested in books, or just journalist-y things that I write, there's now a new button in the sidebar. Someone told me it would be a good idea, but I forget who it was, so thanks!

The Stanford Daily: StanShakes Triumphs with "Julius Caesar"

An article I wrote last week:

http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/02/25/stanshakes-triumphs-with-julius-caesar/

Julius Caesar is amazing -- I went through several phases of "favorite Shakespeare play" and it's my most recent favorite. I loved A Midsummer Night's Dream in elementary and early middle school -- I thought it was absolutely hysterical. It was also the time, at least in elementary, when kids were obsessed with the notion that the other gender had "cooties". Go figure. Then, in middle school, I really liked Hamlet. I think it might have been the brooding, misunderstood, woe-is-me element of it; most teenagers angst and have persecution complexes and think their parental figures don't understand them (I wasn't so far removed from that myself; I merely had... different ways of expressing it). And then, in early high school, I started taking Latin again, and rediscovered a love of Roman history and political structures. Hence the especial fondness for Julius Caesar. Somewhere in there, I briefly liked Macbeth (oops, sorry, I mean "that Scottish play"), but my tenth grade English teacher sort of ruined it for me. I was, apparently, reading it too much in historical context, rather than as pure literature. But that's another story.

The New Adventures of Queen Victoria: Bunny Hamlet

Hamlet is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, and this is an especially humorous interpretation:

http://www.gocomics.com/thenewadventuresofqueenvictoria/2010/07/17

A whole new take on lucky rabbits' feet...

NYTimes: Summer Shakespeare, Outside and Urban

One of the many things I love about summers in New York:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/theater/04shakespeare.html?ref=nyregion

I intend to catch at least one play this summer. Anyone want to come?

NYTimes: Tips on Scoring Discounted Tickets to Musicals, Plays, Museum Tours, &c. in New York this Summer

A handy article for anyone in New York for the summer:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/travel/28linestrategy.html?hpw

Entertainment in the City isn't cheap; Broadway shows, operas, concerts, &c. are mostly beyond your average college students' budgets. The ones that don't cost as much, like museum tours, Shakespeare in the Park, that sort of thing, all sell out ridiculously quickly; I know people who have waited in line, in ungodly hours of night and early morning, to try to get tickets to Shakespeare in the Park. (Yes, the part of me that laments the decline of literacy of the masses is greatly heartened to hear it, even though it means that I didn't get to see Othello last summer.)

Chances are, though, that after this article, people will flock to these once-secret box offices, and these tips will grow obsolete within the summer. Ah, well.