Saturday, April 26, 2008

Shakespeare in (Un)Likely Places



Grading papers is hard. So it's sometimes necessary to offer oneself
some motivation.

A few years ago—before the college had acquiesced to my constant and
vociferous whining, whining, whining and given me a MacBook Pro in
place of the hideous other-operating-system machine they had foisted
upon me—I discovered a show called Star Trek: Enterprise.

Those who are true Star Trek Fans will be better able to describe it.
I think I'd call it a prequel to the original series. I thought it
was all right. "Interesting stories, fast-paced and fun," I thought.
"The perfect fifteen-minute break from the intensity of grading papers."

"But," you cry, "wasn't that an hour-long show?"

Yes—but it's about forty-five minutes without commercials.

Oh, yes. And I was watching them at three times the speed with the
subtitles on. I felt guilty about wasting time that could have been
spent grading, and a loss of forty-five minutes would have been
unconscionable. So I'd grade five or ten papers, watch a fifteen-
minute show, get back to grading, take another break, et cetera. Soon
the forty-five essays (and four episodes) would be behind me . . .
untill the next paper came due.

Much later, once I'd been granted the Macintosh exception, I tried the
show again. And it was terrible. So slow . . . so . . .
terribly . . . slow. Macintosh didn't let you play them at three
times the speed with the subtitles on . . . unless you downloaded each
episode to the hard drive and watched them with Quicktime.

After doing that, it seemed like a pretty good show again!

But all this is more of a justification for taking breaks from grading
to watch still Star Trek-related shows. And it is. You can tell that
I feel guilty about it.

As for its relevance to this blog's topic . . . well, you'll have to
wait until tomorrow! I've used up all my tiume justifying my actions;
I don't have any left to explain them!

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest