Charlie Rose

anne4444  12/29/2011 01:22 PM Report

Sounds odd, think different, but true:

The total vibration level of all human souls on earth will affect the humanity of our universe. It is the time for all individual on earth to take his/her responsibility and liberate his/her own soul towards higher frequency vibration of love and compassion.

Please do not trap your soul into low frequency vibration of money, justice, power, fame fear and any other things.

Please help yourself with liberation towards higher frequency of love and compassion, you will help us all. At end, we are all together as one earth with one vibration. The total vibration level of all souls on earth needs to match the new level vibration of earth in order for us to move forward.

It is the time for government to provide basic needs of individual to avoid the trap of soul.

It is the time for any intelligent men/women to find some ways or means to help lift human soul.

It is the time for us to watch movies, which make our heart melt with love. (any movies promote fear shall be banned).

It is the time for us to listen music which shakes our souls to higher vibration.

It is the time for us to make love with our loved one with great orgasm.

It is the time for us to do something to help all being on earth with great passion and deep love towards others.

It is the time for us to respect/honor all lives on earth through love and compassion.

It is the time for us to do anything without excuse to liberate our souls toward love and compassion.

WE CAN DO IT, WE MUST DO IT AND WE WILL DO IT. Our souls will vibrate very high. They will nurture our mother earth and whole universe instead of distressing them.

Ellen_Dibble  11/02/2011 07:51 PM Report

I'm looking to see why Greenblatt comes to the table on October 27th and then again within a week. I think the October 27th might have been partly occasioned by the coming of Halloween. I had to sort of sit with the piece about Protestantism and the shift in terminology at funeral masses right at this time such that the dead, with the turn of a phrase, would be viewed differently, shifting the "shape" of ghosts and continuities. It was out of that cauldron of religious rigidity that the Puritans came here. Shortly after 1600 a lot was happening. I think I read that a round of the plague also shifted things. And ReMant has posted so much history that my head swarms. And Gelles says more or less, who are we talking to? Well, it's late at night to be talking; the light has been blown out before the subject appears. But Hamlet has been on my mind, and I found myself circling around town doing errands Monday, returning to a certain doctor's office where there was a debate about collecting a specimen after having gone out for some coffee. I made a decision, stating, of course, To pee or not to pee, that is the question. Darn. It's like an ear worm now. But the interesting part to me was whether Shakespeare was viewing the play more from the perspective of the adults, or whether I should reconsider it that way. The first half of the play, up to Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern catching the conscience of the king, that far I followed the bard. After that, I would have walked out; I don't know why. A lot of good leading points at the beginning are better left off at that point, in my youthful opinion. Leave the questions; let me "write" a better ending.

JohnGelles  10/28/2011 04:26 PM Report

"...the most well read of any American president."

( I believe my copy function left that out. )

JohnGelles  10/28/2011 04:24 PM Report

From Wikipedia:

Theodore Roosevelt was ... an avid reader, reading tens of thousands of books, at a rate of several a day in multiple languages. Along with Thomas Jefferson, Roosevelt is often considered the most well read of any American.

When we consider this fact, there is no good excuse for reading less than a lot of Shakespeare. No doubt we owe ourselves some conversations with ourselves. But conversations with classical thinkers and thought are also due. I have erred in the direction of thinking and talking to myself.

This archive seems to be full of people talking to themselves. That's not as good as if there were more people whose talk was to other people -- real ones or other people's ideas that challenged our own beliefs.

JohnGelles  10/28/2011 03:53 PM Report

And then there is John Kenneth Galbraith -- one of my favorite heroes -- who at 97 said, Enough.

JohnGelles  10/28/2011 03:50 PM Report

When I was young I skipped Hamlet in favor of day-dreams of wanting things I did not have and being someone I never was.

Now that I am old, I am Hamlet and cannot decide even the smallest things to do or wish for in the present tense.

In the middle of these two times, I read Ernest Jones' Hamlet and Oedipus and thought I better understood the play and myself.

Now, Stephen Greenblatt turns a melodious voice loose to explain the play as a play then and now.

Is Hamlet my greatest Shakespearean experience -- No. That was the Age of Kings -- on PBS -- around 40 years ago. I watched it and imagined I understood politics as never before I had.

George Steiner, the intellectual giant in my life among thinkers, said characters in books were often more real to him than characters in life. As I read it, I felt it for myself. Many of these were real characters in non-fiction, and many were fictional characters created in fertile minds.

It would be nice to have read and loved Shakespeare as my eldest son has done. It would have been nice to have read all of Trollope as my classmate Stan has done. It would be nice to have been all that we can be -- like the recruiter says.

And then there is one of my favorite heroes -- who at 97 said, Enough.

Greenblatt? Shakespeare? Hamlet? Alphie? What's it all about, Alphie? Settle down. Be yourself. Be true to your nation and your friends and family. And be thankful for Charlie Rose if your too lazy to read as much as Teddy Roosevelt did -- maybe all his life.

JohnHanley  10/28/2011 02:06 PM Report

Wow, that's a lot of history. I don't know that much about that part of it, but I love this play. I like to think of Hamlet as a sort of Christian Achileus (did I spell that right?), because they are both being deprived of their nobility in a way. Does this make sense? I see the inaction of both as being motivated by a common factor, "Who am I to do anything now that this has happened?" Hasn't that got a lot to do with what's happening with Hamlet when he leaps from the grave, "It is I, Hamlet the Dane.", as I said, a Christian version of Achilleus.

REMant  10/28/2011 11:00 AM Report

Professor Greenblatt seems to share that combination of overly vivid imagination and seriousness of purpose with most of his colleagues. I wrote about Hamlet a year or two ago here, and I don't imagine he read it, nor perhaps Charlie, so I'll post it again: "I first saw Hamlet in the Burton film version, and it may have also been the last, because I'm afraid I've always thought of it as a yawner. It was, however popular with the public, tho its critics at the time claimed that it was a lower-class play, and that has something, I think, to do with Bloom's observation and the drift of this conversation, yet there may be more to it than meets the eye, for a contemporary noted that "the wiser sort enjoyed it." Despite all that has been said on the subject, I think you have to view Shakespeare in the context of a classicism where philosophy, character, emotion, effect and voice are not separated or at odds, and a moral is intended, and Montaigne's rather Stoic ethics and "protestantism" would fall in line with this emphasis. It is only relatively recently that morality has not been viewed as the central element in dramatics. Freud may, ironically in view of his Sophoclean borrowing, have had something to do with that.

It is fun tho to conjecture if there were any ulterior motives or veiled references in the plays, particularly now that we have a good idea of who he was and who his friends were, not that there wasn't plenty of material around to draw on. It may be, rather obviously, a commentary on events surrounding the life of James I, subject of many intrigues, which, if true, should interest historians. The bookish James, who acceded to the English throne in 1603, with the assistance of his friend Robert Cecil, was apparently on friendly terms with Shakespeare's "beloved" Southampton, and the king's wife, Anne of Denmark (Protestant, but opposed by Elizabeth), whose father enlarged the castle at Elsinore, was a theater buff. Shakespeare, who was chided for his pretensions, and his company were not only absolved, like Southampton, of involvement in the Essex affair, but also were elevated to "Grooms of the Chamber," and henceforth known as "The King's Men." Hamlet wore the royal imprimatur when it was published a year later.

Altho the Bard avoided direct political references after Essex's attempted coup against Elizabeth, (he wrote Othello, Macbeth and King Lear at this time), this play may well have been aimed at her and her ministers. When he was very young, James's father, Lord Darnley, had been murdered, apparently at his mother Mary, Queen of Scot's behest, allegedly because of his Protestant ties, and Mary either took up with, or was coerced by, the man many believed to have done the job, so, perhaps, the motive for revenge, and Hamlet's indecisiveness. (As it happened, that man, the Earl of Bothwell, was later taken captive by Frederick II of Denmark, Anne's father, who chained him to a pillar where he remained for a decade until he died.) But James was never much of a Protestant, despite his interest in the English crown, nor, it seems, very heterosexual. It has been suggested, as well, that Essex's rivals, William Cecil (Elizabeth's minister, who had Mary executed) and son, Robert (who became James's spymaster) were the models for Polonious and, his son, Laertes, tho in the context of trying to prove that daughter Anne Cecil's husband, the Earl of Oxford, authored the plays, which no longer seems creditable."