CSotD: Bring on the Gravediggers!
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When we were reading Hamlet in college junior year, the professor asked the purpose of the gravedigger scene. We went around the seminar table talking about comic relief and the need to ease the tension and onward and so forth and the wisdom flowed like fine wine.
Then he pointed out that Shakespeare was maintaining a troupe of actors, which included a clown or two, and he needed to write roles for everyone. This didn’t negate the “comic relief” aspect, but it was a reminder that art sometimes yields to practicality.
We celebrate both the political and the humorous here, and there’s not only a dire moral need for comic relief at the moment, but a practical obligation to funny cartoons not to ignore them.
So as the song goes, “Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight!”
I’m not sure how you’d manage this anyway, but it made me laugh. Bear in mind that I also chuckle at signs saying “Employees must wash hands.” There’s never one around so I just do it myself and hope nobody notices.
Didn’t laugh at all at this one, because I once paid a “wealth manager” who managed to take a chunk of my wealth for which I got a plastic folder with my papers sorted into it and a dot-matrix print-out of advice that reminded me of the computer astrology sold in the classifieds at the back of underground papers.
I thought, for instance, that I was single, but according to her expensive expert analysis, I was married to N/A, whose name appeared several times in the document.
On the other hand, today’s La Cucaracha about knocked me out of my chair, because I hadn’t thought about this in 58 years, almost to the day. But I remembered sitting in physics class watching the clock tick off the final minute of my senior year.
The clocks in our school would jump rather than flow to the next minute and had no second hand, so I think we were all staring at the wall waiting.
I imagine the faculty was just as eager for that minute hand to jump. Our class was the worst possible combination: Smart jocks.
I’ve said before that I got kicked out of English and became a professional writer. A friend got expelled from that physics class and ended up with the National Science Foundation.
We were a handful.
However, if we liked a teacher, we were capable of moving mountains. We had an English teacher in his first year who had us writing papers on authors way over our heads. I remember one of the guys wrote about Graham Greene, and I did my senior paper on Ulysses.
I read it again in college and that time I did so with a professor explaining things and a copy of Gilbert Stuart’s classic study of the novel. I got more out of it that time, but I’ve still got my high school paper and considering I waded into it alone, I think I really met him with pike hoses.
I picked up the Wake a few years after college and it took about two pages to remind me that I wasn’t in school anymore and I no longer had to do stuff like that. So I read At Swim Two Birds instead, which I highly recommend. As did Graham Greene.
It took me a while to realize that the companies that publish those magazines send free copies to anyone with the initials MD after their name, and the doctors just toss them into the waiting room unread, without realizing how they’re killing the souls of people who are thinking, “Well, glad you’re not pissing it all away on rent and groceries like the rest of us.”
There are exceptions: Growing up, our doctor used to take his vacation on reservations, doing free clinical work among the native population. I thought that was pretty cool of him and it wasn’t until much later that I realized his setting up practice in our little mining/mill town was the other half of his commitment to social justice.
A bit of a lag between selection of the pope and naming of the new Harry Potter cast, but I laughed because as little as the pope matters in this recovering Catholic’s life, the entire Hogwarts crew matters far less.
I don’t suppose the politics of the author matters if they don’t leak into the work, and I liked the series before she began shooting off her mouth. And I haven’t heard anyone say they refuse to drive a Ford because Henry was an antisemitic Nazi sympathizer.
But I did know a guy who said he wouldn’t buy Japanese cars. “They used to shoot at my airplane,” he explained.
I feel that way about Harry Potter.
Not gonna agree with this one. There are plenty of reasons to wish all zoos were better run, but I’ve worked with enough of them to know that the good ones recognize their faults and do what they can. Not everyone has the space and resources of San Diego’s Safari Park, but I’ve seen significant improvements in accommodations and in how zoos fulfill their educational mandate.
It’s a partnership of zoos with nature. The wild bison herds out West owe a debt to the Bronx Zoo, which furnished a significant part of their genetic rebirth, and the Denver Zoo works closely with preservationists in Mongolia to maintain Przewalski’s horses, once extinct except in zoos, and other endangered Mongolian wildlife.
The days of the “postage stamp zoos” that competed to have one of everything, stuffed into concrete-and-iron cages, are all but over. And while I admire the work of wildlife photographers and film-makers, the entire sensual presence cannot be captured on video. Being present makes a difference.
There’s something about seeing an animal in person that can inspire at least further interest if not entire lives and careers.
Not defending the dolphin places. That’s like defending circus elephants. But zoos and aquariums have a place in the ecosystem, and the challenge is to keep refining it.
Which can include reversing the process, and letting domestic animals assist beyond zoos and cages.
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