It's like the O.C. of Shakespeare plays.

This is the best description I've ever heard of it. Yes, yes, so very, yes.

Reading Romeo and Juliet, it's so clear how silly it is. The O.C. is a good comparison. But seeing it performed, especially the Zeffirelli film, still breaks my heart. Some of the speeches, taken on their own, are still magic to me.

I don't look for bleakness when I read. But I do often seek out the tragic, which is a different animal. It can be cathartic, as JZ and connie, noted, but it can also be sort of ... inspiring? Which sounds Hallmark-y, but something like The Time Traveler's Wife, for instance, always reminds me that joy can be had, and not necessarily be diminished, even if it's going to come to an end.

Re: R&J--there's an hysterical episode of "The Nanny" where some Broadway producer hires Fran to play Juliet in the sequel he was writing.

I adore Uncle Earle's definition of tragedy, the inevitability of it all, the way basic characteristics feed into fate. I do enjoy the artistry of seeing something that came up 200 pages ago suddenly showing its effect. It's like a puzzle where all the pieces could only go into one shape, no matter how much you wish it otherwise.

The Jonathan Firth R&J was the only one that made me feel for Romeo or Juliet.

I am less a fan of unrelenting bleakness than I was from ages 13-22 or so, and I'm not sure what I'd think of Hardy if I revisted him today (I read all of his novels when I was 14, and loved them). I'm still drawn to stories about how each of us is our own worst enemy, more drawn to stories that are critical of The Establishment, and madly in love with a certain kind of self-awareness that's cynical and hopeful all at once.

Really, I'm looking for the novelized versions of post-Various Positions Leonard Cohen lyrics.

I remember a Shakespeare class in college where we discussed how R&J was structured so that up until Mercutio's death, it could have turned into one of the comedies, and even some of the devices at the end (the missed communications and the fake/real poison scenarios) were classic tropes for comedy. I think I would have liked it better that way, and I've always been curious if it might have started out as such.

The play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) takes that idea as its premise (also including Othello as a comedy but for a "misplaced hanky").

Oh, I love Antony and Cleopatra! I wrote a paper on it in college, and I still love the title: "Hips, Lips, Tits, Power: The Desexualization of Antony and Demonization of Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra."

I can't believe I just pulled that whole damn title outta my ass; I wrote it in....um, 1992?

I'm not sure what I'd think of Hardy if I revisted him today (I read all of his novels when I was 14, and loved them).

That's interesting to me. Because I read Tess at ... sixteen? And loved it, and still do (despite a better appreciation of how he can sometimes be a bit purple). I also wouldn't call all of Hardy "bleak," per se. Tragic, but not bleak. I don't know if that distinction makes sense outside of my head.

why we read

I am a story ho. everything else can be bad , and i still go with it. and BTW,in my world character development is a story.

I have a friend who moved here from Vietnam as a child is writing her memoirs of that time. She just wrote an introduction - and I said perfect -- that what it needed to pull all those separate narratives together.She asked me why I hadn't said anything before -- and I told her they were all good stories. i liked them, but I was so involved in the stories,that I didn't even realizes something was missing.

Uncle Earle explained briefly. A comedy was a happy affair wherein all ended well; a tragedy ended with catastrophe -- death. There were violent conflicts between people in tragedies; they made mistakes and you followed them through to their bitter endings. But ...in fine tragedies, such as the Greeks and William Shakespeare wrote, what happens must be inevitable -- unescapable. It must make you feel right about the ending. And great tragedies must have beauty in them; otherwise what's the use!...

Think of everything that happens in the play as adding up correctly to make the ending, just as if you were to take 5 and 2 and 6 and should add them up to make 13. Right! Well, that sum was inevitable."

Ginger wins. I love this and will use it with my students next year. Thanks!

I have to confess, actually, that I hated The Red Pony and the Pearl so much that I am not sure I have read any other Steinbeck in the original form.

I generally love Steinbeck, and those are the two that I hate. (The Red Pony was taught by a teacher I hated, so that may have something to do with it.)

I've never read Moby Dick. I tend to seriously dislike "man in lone battle against nature" books (Old Man and the Sea, anything by Jack London, etc.), so I figured my limited reading time would be better spent on something that I'm more likely to like.

It's interesting how reading a book with a particular teacher can influence how much you like it or not. I kind of feel like I ought to give The Red Pony another chance. I think that I hate books that teachers that I hate make me read, but I get a more honest opinion of ones that I read with teachers I liked. Like, with Mr. W in twelfth grade, I liked the ancient Greeks, Hamlet, Faulkner, and Mourning Becomes Elektra, and I really didn't like The Centaur, Hemingway, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Heart of Darkness.