Lately I’ve been reading a lot about William Shakespeare. I recently finished Anthony Burgess’ imaginative biography and I’m now well into Stephen Greenblatt's own award-nominated study on the life of The Bard. It’s been fascinating. Throughout my formal education, I’ve had a guiltily unoriginal obsession (when people find out I’m a Literature major, I always feel like they want me to have a more unique response to the inevitable conversation provoker: “Who’s your favorite author?”) with Shakespeare. So I felt that now—over a year out of college and currently without full-time employment—was as good a time as any to make an invested effort in learning more about him as a person.
Despite being widely accepted as the greatest playwright of all time, Shakespeare “the man” remains largely an impenetrably equivocal figure. There just isn’t a lot of hard historical evidence about his personal life. As Burgess put it, “Infuriatingly, whenever Shakespeare does something other than buy a lease or write a play, history shuts her jaws with a snap.” As my recent readings have led me to discover, any detailed biography of the glover’s son from Stratford must rely heavily on speculation.
For instance, there is a period of Shakespeare’s life, between his leaving Latin Grammar School in the 1670s to his appearance in the London theatre scene in the early 1690s, about which we know close to nothing. Plenty of scholars like to speculate that he worked as a schoolteacher or a lawyer’s clerk (which would account for the professional familiarity with legal vernacular that he demonstrates in several of his plays), but we do know this much: he didn’t attend university, produce plays, or do anything of historical notability for over a decade.
Suddenly I feel an intimate connection with this mysterious genius from the past. It’s possible that, if anyone would forgive my lack of tangible productivity at this point in my life, Shakespeare would. I like to imagine him at my age: working odd jobs; studying up on classic literature, recent history, or whatever seemed to tickle his fancy; living with his parents (yes, Shakespeare likely lived with his parents following his shotgun marriage to Anne Hathaway and before moving to London); listening to a lot of Mirah and Damien Rice on his iPod; looking forward to something greater.
I guess if Shakespeare had an awkward transitional phase in life, then I can have one, too. It has been all too easy to become frustrated by the books that warn me that no respectable graduate program will want to take me if I’ve spent more than a year or two out of college, or to see my peers already locked into life paths that I’ve yet to find the trailhead for; but at least I’m in good company.
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
17 February 2008
27 September 2007
a new twist on dad's classic recipe
banana nut bread
need i say more?
probably not, but i will anyway:
i used my dad's basic recipe for banana nut bread and "veganized" it. it's still not "healthy," but it's safe to say it's at least "healthier."
3 ripe bananas
1 tbsp ground flaxseeds
3 tbsp water
2 tbsp unsweetened apple sauce
2 cups flour
3/4 cups sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
about 1/4 cup chopped walnuts (depending on how nutty you feel. sorry, but no recipe for banana nut bread would be complete without this pun.)
a dash of soy or rice milk (I used rice)
Preheat the oven to 350°.
Viciously thrash the bananas in a large mixing bowl with a fork. In a separate bowl or cup, mix the flaxseeds, water, and applesauce, and whisk together with a fork. it should be kind of goopy (like egg whites!). Add to the bananas and mash it all together. Add the rest of the dry ingredients, minus the walnuts, and mix well, adding just a dash (about and ounce or so) of rice (or soy) milk as you do so. Fold in the walnuts.
Pour the batter into a greased bread pan and bake in the oven for one hour.
My roommate loved it, and I swear it tasted exactly the same as the kind my dad makes whenever we have three overripe bananas lying around the kitchen.
...Other Stuff...
I wrote a reflection the other day on my current situation in life and my thoughts about pursuing post-graduate education. Here's what I had to say about it...
Tonight I stayed up very late making stuffed mushrooms for tomorrow’s company potluck. The sleep-deprived feeling sweeping throughout my body—the aching back, the bloodshot eyes, the stomach that can’t seem to decide whether it’s hungry or sick, all exacerbated by the fact that I’ve been up since 5:30 this morning—brings me back to my too-long estranged student days. There is something dear about staying up late, working on something I half love, half despise because it is keeping me away from my bed, which I half love, half despise. When I stepped into in the bedroom to change into my pajamas while waiting for some of the ingredients to cool so that I might proceed to the next step in the unpredictably drawn-out culinary process, I momentarily caught an unidentifiable smell that instantly took me back to my late nights and early mornings in my Oxford flat, struggling against time and overwhelming fatigue to finish a paper on 20th Century British Theatre or Gender Roles in Shakespeare, wondering if I would complete it before the Study Abroad office closed, or if I would indeed have to walk all the way down to New College and pay about 70p to print out the whole thing.
I want to be a student again. Stuffed mushrooms, no matter how delicious they turn out, don’t give me the same depth of satisfaction as a well-written contrastive study of the differences between Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth’s distinctive approaches to queenly rule. I want to hear a bell tower chiming three a.m. somewhere in the distance, to try to force another cup of chamomile tea and handful of saltines into an upset stomach that really wants noting more than for the rest of my body to get a full night’s rest, and to know, somehow, as the glare of my laptop screen burns into my retinas, that there really is no other way I would rather be spending my time.
need i say more?
probably not, but i will anyway:
i used my dad's basic recipe for banana nut bread and "veganized" it. it's still not "healthy," but it's safe to say it's at least "healthier."
3 ripe bananas
1 tbsp ground flaxseeds
3 tbsp water
2 tbsp unsweetened apple sauce
2 cups flour
3/4 cups sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
about 1/4 cup chopped walnuts (depending on how nutty you feel. sorry, but no recipe for banana nut bread would be complete without this pun.)
a dash of soy or rice milk (I used rice)
Preheat the oven to 350°.
Viciously thrash the bananas in a large mixing bowl with a fork. In a separate bowl or cup, mix the flaxseeds, water, and applesauce, and whisk together with a fork. it should be kind of goopy (like egg whites!). Add to the bananas and mash it all together. Add the rest of the dry ingredients, minus the walnuts, and mix well, adding just a dash (about and ounce or so) of rice (or soy) milk as you do so. Fold in the walnuts.
Pour the batter into a greased bread pan and bake in the oven for one hour.
My roommate loved it, and I swear it tasted exactly the same as the kind my dad makes whenever we have three overripe bananas lying around the kitchen.
...Other Stuff...
I wrote a reflection the other day on my current situation in life and my thoughts about pursuing post-graduate education. Here's what I had to say about it...
Tonight I stayed up very late making stuffed mushrooms for tomorrow’s company potluck. The sleep-deprived feeling sweeping throughout my body—the aching back, the bloodshot eyes, the stomach that can’t seem to decide whether it’s hungry or sick, all exacerbated by the fact that I’ve been up since 5:30 this morning—brings me back to my too-long estranged student days. There is something dear about staying up late, working on something I half love, half despise because it is keeping me away from my bed, which I half love, half despise. When I stepped into in the bedroom to change into my pajamas while waiting for some of the ingredients to cool so that I might proceed to the next step in the unpredictably drawn-out culinary process, I momentarily caught an unidentifiable smell that instantly took me back to my late nights and early mornings in my Oxford flat, struggling against time and overwhelming fatigue to finish a paper on 20th Century British Theatre or Gender Roles in Shakespeare, wondering if I would complete it before the Study Abroad office closed, or if I would indeed have to walk all the way down to New College and pay about 70p to print out the whole thing.
I want to be a student again. Stuffed mushrooms, no matter how delicious they turn out, don’t give me the same depth of satisfaction as a well-written contrastive study of the differences between Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth’s distinctive approaches to queenly rule. I want to hear a bell tower chiming three a.m. somewhere in the distance, to try to force another cup of chamomile tea and handful of saltines into an upset stomach that really wants noting more than for the rest of my body to get a full night’s rest, and to know, somehow, as the glare of my laptop screen burns into my retinas, that there really is no other way I would rather be spending my time.
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