Romeo & Juliet

Here's a slideshow of some pictures of the last play I directed at Collegiate - Romeo & Juliet. Some of them really need to be seen big, so click here if you want to see them full size.



The wiki page we put together for the play will give you an idea of the kind of work we did on the play and where some of the ideas came from. One of the aspects I was most proud of was the Music - all written by students - and you can listen to some of it here.

And here's an early draft of the opening video that went along with it. This is not the version we used - we cut it down some, and took out a few scenes. It was much cooler on the huge screen in the theater with our brand new Line Array Sound System (the best in any school system in Virginia), but this gives you a basic idea. When we first played it on opening night, with the new sound system, it was like witnessing the power of the fully armed and operational Death Star.



I was really proud of the actors and designers on this show.

If you're interested, pictures from the other past plays are here.

The Internal Thermostat of Leaves

Nature is so astonishing. Listen to this 1-minute podcast about how leaves maintain a constant temperature from Antarctica to Puerto Rico. Amazing.

Sleep & School

This is pretty much common sense, but here is an article that offers substantive proof of the benefits of sleeping more for students, and also the fact that they would sleep longer if we were to start the day later. Here's the paragraph I found most intriguing:

The researchers found a strong association between hours of sleep per school night and GPA, level of motivation, emotional disturbance and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Each additional hour of sleep on school nights reduced the risk of scoring in the clinically significant range of emotional disturbance and ADHD by 25 percent and 34 percent, respectively.

Here's the whole article.

And please answer the Poll on the right side of this page.

The Hunger for Fiction Disguised as Nonfiction

This is an interesting article about the whole fiction/ memoir/ exaggeration issue brought to the fore mainly by James Frey and Oprah, but also by the story of the MIT students told in Bringing Down the House and several other recent works. I have no problem with exaggeration, which I always presume to be a part of memoir, and most of this is a fight over labels rather than ethics. The author here brings up some interesting issues with regard to David Sedaris, but Sedaris is completely open about his exaggeration, which in my mind makes him ethical. He has even written about his exaggeration itself. What I find most interesting is that nonfiction sells better than fiction, and that is where most of these problems begin. It is truly a sign of our times that people want to buy nonfiction, but what they actually long for and love most is fiction.

I wonder why that is...

Chaplin and J. Edgar Hoover

Many people know Charlie Chaplin for his impeccable vaudeville technique. W.C. Fields was reported to have called him the best ballet dancer in the world. But fewer people are acquainted with his politics. His film The Great Dictator used his little tramp image to satirize Hitler - and this was in 1940!

I didn't know about this film, Monsieur Verdoux, which is being run again in New York at the Film Forum. It was released in 1947, and dealt with the issues of the Cold War. The subtitle is "A Comedy of Murders." Here is the NY Times article about it that I read today.

And now that Robert Downey Jr. is back on top of the world with Iron Man, I am reminded of how brilliant he was in Chaplin. Al Pacino incomprehensibly won the Oscar that year, which, given the depth and technical brilliance of Downey's performance, seems like grand larceny. It's definitely worth another look.

Hillary Clinton & the Glass Ceiling

In the (sadly) now defunct British Literature class, one of my favorite units has always been the one on Virginia Woolf. We study A Room of One's Own, and while the students find it tough reading, they routinely report the conversations that result to be among the best of the entire year.

And this year, as in all years, we have lived those issues. The first year I taught the course was immediately after the Larry Summers incident, and every year, current events have pushed us deeper and deeper into the heart of these intense problems. While I ultimately supported Obama, I was really taken by Clinton, especially at first. I think what Woolf would say is that Clinton's anger and frustration got in the way so that she was not able to "express her genius whole and entire" and to "burn incandescently" like Woolf feels Shakespeare did. Obama has worked through his sense of injustice in the world, as he outlines so powerfully in his books, and this is a big part of his appeal to me - the magnanimity with which he treats those who attack him, most clearly in his dealings with Reverend Wright when Obama refused the easy rejection and paid the consequences. Clinton understandably is still working through a lifetime's worth of frustration and anger, and part of what turned some voters like me off was the edge of desperation that marked the second half of her campaign. She is right that while she did not break the glass ceiling, she put eighteen million cracks in it. And for that, we should all be grateful.

Here's a good article that sums this up, and asks, as I do, why it is that Clinton's last speech of the campaign was her most powerful and genuine. I suspect this is because she felt that in order to win, she still needed to project a certain image that was in some fundamental way either at odds with her soul, or if not that, then at least partial. Woolf said she felt women needed a hundred years from when she was writing before the progress could truly manifest. If her prophesy is correct, we still have twenty to go, which would make the time right when my current students come of age.

We live in exciting times.

Karen Armstrong

I am currently reading two books by Karen Armstong - A History of God and In the Beginning: a New Interpretation of Genesis. Armstrong's command of her subject is extraordinary. The Genesis book is more personal but still excellent scholarship, and expresses a great deal of what I have often believed about that book, particularly the idea that the contradictions in the text are not unskillful writing, but instead are intentional complexities that show us how inadequate our current axioms about God are. I am sure I will write more about this, but suffice to say that her books are the equivalent of a graduate course in Western religion.