Category: literature

Sex, Drugs and Midsummer Nights

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When I study Shakespeare, my goals are more creative than academic. I don’t want to be an expert in Elizabethan England. The plays are starting points for conversations, for creative experiments. I don’t care to get the plays right. What I do care is to know them. I want to know as much as I can about how the plays work and what they contain. 

Midsummer Night’s Dream is not as much about sex as it is about sexual tension and attraction and the madness that can happen when young people have their sexuality policed. Hermia and Lysander want to fuck. They are extremely attracted to each other. Hermia’s father must take them to court to try and intervene. 

In the context of the play, the duke is the judge who will decide Hermia’s fate. It just so happens that this family court case is brought before him in the days before his wedding. So, he is full of sexual tension, too. When Hermia defiantly asks what is going to happen when she disobeys her father’s order to marry Demetrius instead of Lysander. Death or the monastery. 

Even the gods are horny and beefing. Oberon and Titania are feuding over a child and they use humans to act out their desires. This is where the drugs come into play. The drug that Oberon instructs Puck to apply to his victims while they are asleep will cause them to fall in love with whomever they first see when they wake up.

I keep thinking about casting this play and I imagine Joe Rogan as Oberon, Steve Will Do it as Puck, Chelsea Handler as Titania. I’m thinking that Natalie Cuomo would make a good Hermia and Kerryn Feehan would crush it as Helena. The cast of actors in the woods has to be some Gas Digital characters. Zac D’Amico as bottom would be great. The legion of Skanks would make up the other cast members. 

Be Your Own Favorite Writer

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I believe in working at something until you are so invested in it that you can no longer see if it is good or not. This lack of judgment can lead you into some interesting territory. If you stop judging your own writing as good or bad, then how do you know if you are on the right path? The sign to look for is in the pleasure you get from the process of writing.

If you don’t love writing, then you might want to try experimenting and practicing until something clicks. If you can remain patient with the process, then you might stick with it long enough to actually get into the groove of writing. This can lead you to some epiphanies you never would have imagined without that enthusiasm for your own work.

Being a fan of your own writing doesn’t mean that you won’t improve. You can still be critical, but you want to be much much more energetic and aggressively forward moving in your writing. Generate ideas and digest language. Conjure up memories, harness emotions like electricity. Keep moving forward and you will improve. When you feel what it is like to write with more focus and direction, it will become funner, dude.

When I get up in the morning I go and write before I check my phone. This gives me time to process my thoughts without all of the noise of the internet interrupting my ideas. This has been super fundamental to me growing to love the process of writing and to enjoy my own writing even more than Shakespeare.

Prospero’s Wisdom: Power and the Greater Good

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The Tempest is highly relevant and relatable to our culture today. Especially after coming out of a pandemic, a kind of banishment, we can relate to Prospero’s situation. He had to make do with some very trying circumstances. It’s not just Prospero’s plight that connects this play to our culture, today. In an almost kaleidoscopic way, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a hall of mirrors for our times.

Prospero washes up on an island with an inhabitant who wants to kill him and to rape his daughter. This would be nightmarish, horrific, were it not for Prospero’s ability to control Caliban with his spells. There is a military imperative. Prospero’s interest in the literary arts led to him ignoring politics and opened the opportunity for his brother to betray him. Alone with his daughter on the island, he has no choice but to control its violent inhabitants. It is either control or be victimized for Prospero.

Still, there is something entirely creepy about Prospero’s controlling ways, necessary or not. Especially when it comes to his daughter. He orchestrates an encounter where she will fall in love. He manipulates the situation to arrange a marriage. In doing so, he is very deliberate about controlling their sexuality. He wants them to fall in love and to get married, but he is manipulating their sexual urges to do so. 

The metaphor of the island has a lot of significance to us, today. Islands have become symbolic of secrets, of illicit and illegal behavior. Prospero establishes a kind of law and order on the island. He is a benevolent master an anti-Epstein. He manipulates the players and works them up to do what he wants, but he is not doing so for personal gain but for what he thinks will be best for the greater good. It is only through Prospero’s ability to renounce his powers, to give up his competitive advantage that we come to trust him. Yes, he is controlling, but with good reason and as soon as he can give up his power, he does. 

The only way to trust someone is to see them in a situation where they have power and do not use it. Otherwise, we can only attribute good behavior to a lack of power. It is through restraint that we gain respect. For this past year and a half, we have all been banished to our own islands. The great hope is that this time of forced introspection, of limited mobility will have helped some of us, enough of us, to overcome our fears and hungers enough to see what a positive solution could be. We need people who are willing to give up their power for the greater good.

This summer will be a “brave new world” and we will do well to listen to the wisdom of Prospero.

Becoming Jakespeare

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Shakespeare wrote 37 plays and 2 epic poems and a collection of sonnets. He had 20 years of solid productivity. I’m going to start my writing career at 50. 50 is the new 25. You must set goals if you want to accomplish something as great as that. It’s kind of mind boggling how much work that is. 2 plays a year for 20 years. From 50-70, that’s going to be my goal: to surpass Shakespeare.

Till then, I’m going to study his writing. When I started listening to his plays during the pandemic something clicked. I realized that to change anything about us for the better we must understand our origins. Shakespeare better than any other writer in the English language has portrayed the psychology of our history. The US is a multicultural nation, but we speak and think English. It only makes sense to study one of the writers who used English most powerfully. 

I started somewhat randomly with the Comedies, but I am beginning to design a curriculum for myself to follow. To accomplish this goal, I have to manage my time wisely. I have some serious transformations to achieve if I want to become the greatest writer in the English language. Is this an insane goal? Not really. I’m on my Master P No Limit mindset. It’s not going to be easy, but that’s the goal. How will I know if I am achieving my goal? I will have to publish a book in five years, in 2026-27 to launch my attempt. I’m building a rocket ship for the next five years and when that day comes, I’m going to send it.

The book will come from these blogs. I am writing one a day and as I accumulate ideas about Shakespeare and the various connections to contemporary culture and business the whole picture will become clearer, and I will be able to describe it better. I will know these plays as well as anyone on the planet. Why? Because that is my training ground. I have more fire inside me, more motivation than anyone else. Shakespeare’s writing is my gym, the plays are my mountain to climb.

I imagine that by the time I’m a couple years into this project I will start to get book deals. When I publish the book, it will build up anticipation for the stories. The whole thing is going to be a documentation of the habits I develop to achieve this goal. People might only care in retrospect, but I want to show the process of getting there. 

In addition to studying Shakespeare with more vigor than anyone ever has before, I will also be doing a survey of art history that has been influenced by Shakespeare. In addition to studying, I will be creating. I will be doing original photography and painting inspired by the plays. I’m going to fully immerse myself in the creative world of Shakespeare until I know the taste of the marrow. I’ll be drinking bone broth for breakfast. 

Of course, this will mean traveling to England. I will have to live there for some of this journey. I will also obviously have to visit Italy and France, where many of the plays are set. Greece as well and even Egypt. This will give me an opportunity to create interesting visual documents of the times. When I get an idea like this, it becomes everything I need to organize my energy. 

Now, let’s talk about some of the odds that are stacked against me. First, I must be crazy to attempt to outdo Shakespeare. If I know that it is crazy, it’s not crazy, though. Right? I know it’s crazy. Now, it is possible that I could produce two great works a year for twenty years from 50-70 and retire and live in the countryside somewhere for a couple of years before joining the bard wherever we go. That doesn’t seem impossible. Why does it have to be crazy to want to be the best? Shouldn’t we all have that as a goal?

I do have some challenges, though. The first one is that I am tone deaf. My daughter and I sing a song called “Off-Key Jake” where we make fun of how badly I sing. I do have a decent voice in a certain register, but it is very limited and if I try and sing most songs it is struggle city and I am basically monotone and off key as heck. If I’m that bad at singing, then how am I going to write beautiful lyrical lines of dialogue? 

You must know your weakness to improve it. 

How cringe is this? Is it even funny? Or is it just a bad bit at this point? Or are you intrigued? Are you wondering if I’m going to do it? Do I have your attention? The thing is, I must stick with it long enough for you to see, but that’s why I’m calling my shot right now. I have five years to study Shakespeare and I’m calling this process “Becoming Jakespeare.”

What’s the worst that can happen because of this goal? I can fall far short. So what? That means nothing. Say I even come the tiniest bit close to my goal, though, and I write a few things that stand the test of time and give people entertainment and food for thought for hundreds of years into the future. If I do that, then I will have done something good. If not, no big deal, but come on folks. Have we given up trying? 

If you have the vision, you can see it through. It gives you power and purpose in all your interactions. I have decided this is my path and I’m going to be forming a curriculum for Summer and Fall quarters. When do I expect people to start following along? Probably in the Fall of 2022 I will have people following my path. I’m going to attract my competition. Nobody else is trying to outdo Shakespeare that I know of. They will, though. I’m stoking an ancient fire. 

What do you think? Corny or impressive? How will we measure the success of this project? Why do I think that I could do this? What is my opinion of myself that is so high as to even think such an arrogant thing, let alone to blog about it? I don’t know. I just feel confident. I have a very low opinion of my work in so many ways, but I still think that I can be the greatest dramatic artist in the English language of all time. 

Will they be plays, novels, movies, episodic serials or what? I think that the two-hour experience is key to it. I will be doing visuals of course, but the audio could be good on its own. I am going to do audio versions with contemporary comics. There’s a lot to do. Thanks for reading and following along. This is going to be fun.