Happy Bloomsday!

Yes, once again I have blown my chance to write a special Bloomsday post about the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses, in which Stephen Dedalus presents a little lecture in the Irish National Library on his theory of the relation between Shakespeare’s biography and his works, and Leopold Bloom completely undercuts this solemn exposition by wandering around to check whether the classical sculptures of goddesses scattered throughout the library have anuses. Oh well, there’s always next year—and at the rate I’m going, though my reading of Shakespeare will long be finished, we will still be hashing over the results.

Truly, Joyce is Shakespeare’s only near competitor in the language as artificer. He knew it, and you should too. Listen if you can to the annual Symphony Space  Bloomsday on Broadway reading from Ulysses live on WYNC New York, from 8 pm Eastern Daylight Time in the United States and Canada, or to recorded readings on WBAI, New York’s Pacifica radio station. (By the way, did you know that Stephen Colbert says one reason he moved to New York was to be able to see this annual event live? He’s since participated in it more than once. Do you still wonder why I love the guy?) And read the book, as I am urging you to read Shakespeare, receptively and with your whole humanity. Don’t listen to the more and more insistent drumbeat that insists that long books, like Ulysses or Moby-Dick or William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, are boring and demand too much attention. Remember that like Shakespeare, such books are above all (intentionally) funny. As with Shakespeare, if they don’t make you laugh you’re not doing it right.

The Internet, some say, is making us stupid. But some of us don’t need the help. I don’t mean people who don’t like Ulysses, or think they don’t. Apart from tastes differing, most people aren’t introduced to it properly—again like Shakespeare. (A pause to thank Phil Church, my teacher at Kenyon College who gave me the properest introduction to Joyce anybody could have asked for.) I have no problem with them. I do have a problem with people who think that flaunting their cultural ignorance is a badge of cool. Guess what: it wasn’t Clay Shirky who coined the phrase “Here Comes Everybody.”

Anyway, Happy Bloomsday, and there will be another post on Mercutio soon, I promise.

Cue the Fake News Show Fanfare

October 2, 2008. Just one month until a presidential election that made me feel better and better with each passing day about my decision to expatriate. As a leftist whose belief the Democrats meant what they said went out with Jimmy Carter, I had nothing invested in the outcome—except to see how Stephen Colbert would ridicule the candidates. Some days it was the only thing that kept me going.

Tonight’s Colbert Report looked especially promising. Stephen was set to interview one of the only talking heads I respect—a fellow Torontonian, no less—Naomi Klein. The show kicked off as usual, Stephen seated behind the giant C-shaped desk designed by a college classmate of mine. But things soon took an unusual turn. Stephen was talking about comparing the candidates to characters from Shakespeare! And then—not unlike Woody Allen pulling Marshall McLuhan (another Torontonian) from behind a potted plant in Annie Hall, he brought on Stephen Greenblatt. Stephen Greenblatt! Author of Will in the World and one of America’s best-known Shakespeare scholars.

I was so excited I could barely listen to what he said. All I could hear was the voice in my head whispering: A Shakespeare scholar on Colbert! If Greenblatt can do it, why can’t you? Only Greenblatt was at the C-shaped desk. I would get to the Hot Seat, the space where Stephen does his main interviews.

The content of the interview didn’t matter much. Greenblatt compared Obama and McCain to characters in Shakespeare. (Note: I can’t tell you which ones specifically; I can’t review the show because I live in Canada. Comedy Central, whose website features the complete Colbert Report archives, is geoblocked; in Canada one can only see Colbert on the Comedy Network website, which doesn’t have this particular clip. Way to go Viacom, standing in the way of the pursuit of knowledge!) This sort of comparison is always dodgy at best. Years after the fact, I recall another example vividly. During the Clinton-Lewinsky kerfuffle, the Village Voice asked a number of B-list New York theatrical figures which Shakespeare characters were germane to the situation. The obvious comparison is Measure for Measure. There, Angelo is both a sexual hypocrite and a lascivious voyeur—Clinton and Kenneth Starr at once. Needless to say, not one of these theater professionals mentioned the play amid the predictable trite comparisons to Hamlet.

But the more I think about Shakespeare, the more I think there’s something very wrong with the whole idea of such comparisons even coming from a scholar of Greenblatt’s stature. On The Colbert Report they are in their proper place—as amusements. Like those online algorithms that tell you which European city you should live in or which Doctor Who companion you’d be, a “Which Shakespeare Character Are You?” game is good for a laugh (unless, like George W. Bush, you want to be Henry V and keep coming up Cloten, the buffoon from Cymbeline, no matter how you change your answers). That, and a nice bit of PR, is all it was for Colbert and Greenblatt. Colbert got to look sophisticated, which he actually is, and Greenblatt got to plug the paperback of Will in the World. Nobody got hurt.

But what if you took such comparisons seriously? It could end in tears. And that will be the subject of another post. (Always leave ‘em wanting more, isn’t that the first principle of blogging? Besides, I’m still seriously working out my thoughts on these questions. I’d rather not post them half baked.)