We live in The Age of Ophelia and of the sticky transom, and neither of those things are good, or worthy, when day is done. Ophelia is one of the most insipidly sad characters in all of Shakespeare’s greatest works — and in Hamlet, she not only dies a coward’s death — she also deeply burns disappointment into every reader of the play and observer of her character in performance.
Continue reading → The Age of Ophelia and the Sticky Transom
In the Rise of the Millennials, feelings are given a whole new status above and beyond any shared fact or shred of righteous communal reality. Today, “feels” are peculiarly individualized, and non-universal, and they are now powerful cudgels used against the unwashed and unwitting others.
Instead of honoring every whim and ninny, we need to be in control of our own feelings, evaluate the reality surrounding them in context beyond the self, and then make a rational, logical, decision on what to do next based on perceptive thinking and not on implied — explicit or otherwise — slights and insights and invented microaggressions and their ilk. We must not only keenly know the difference between purposeful cruelty and interpreted, environmental, intention, we must proactively act upon the right result.
Continue reading → A Hopeless Whipsaw Cascade of Warping and Woofing: Managing Your Own Feels
Unlike women, as men age, there’s a tendency to stigmatize our awful attempts at humor by branding us “creepy” or “perverted” or “just gross.” Plant an unfunny line on a 20-year-old guy and a teenaged woman might giggle, while the same line said by a guy over 60, to the same young teen, begets the world breaking apart as the whole tone and timbre of the conversation changes to a perceived perversion.
Why is that?
Is there always some sort of unspoken sexual underpinning to every male-to-female interaction that cannot be denied or generationally negotiated? Why doesn’t the curse cut the opposite way against older women who are labeled creepy and perverted in the same condition?
The internets have lately been filled with delicious and vile revelations about our blood. The media is in a tizzy of mice and memes and surgeons and even strippers — each one vying to try to measure and mess with our blood — and I’m sure all of this is all just the start of what just may become a regular Boles Blogs featurette: This Was the Week in Blood!
“Kill Your Parents” was a rallying cry of 1960’s America. We were embroiled in an unpopular war in Vietnam, the world was fighting to change with hope-through-force, and the liberal campus of Columbia University in the City of New York was embroiled in one of it’s worse moments in its history during the Spring of 1968.
The “Rude Mechanicals” play a major role in Shakespeare’s beloved A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
I think we’re on pretty safe ground in saying that the only purpose the Rude Mechanicals serve is a comedic one. The question is what kind of humour is being elicited, and is it possible for us to ‘get’ all of the comedy of the play today?
Well, some of it’s plain and ageless enough: Their repeated oxymorons, “most lamentable comedy”; Bottom’s diva-like behaviour, “That will ask some tears in the true performing of it”; and the complete hash that is the product of their attempts at amateur dramatics.
Today, I argue we have a whole new class of “Rude Mechanicals” in real society — but they’re Millennials, not Mechanicals — and they’re new, and rude, and play the same role in the drama of our lives as the Shakespearean mechs before them.
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