The past few weeks I'd been feeling slightly disconnected from all that was happening around me; this was the period when I was hooked on to lots of other people's blogs. It's over now, but it made me wonder whether that feeling of disconnect wasn't linked to the excessive blog reading. There was lesser need to invest time, energy and attention to the people and happenings around me because I had sort of begun to believe that the blog/virtual world was the real one and so i was more connected via site and email to people than by conversing and catching up physically with colleagues, family and friends. Strange but probably true?! I'm glad that's over, then!
Rafiki has begun reading for Hamlet with IFA's Anmol Vellani. Vellani has been insistent that we read the play for the first time in its entireity, together, as a group. As the reading (just Act One) progressed, Shakespeare's magic began to work, gradually at first, and then slowly collecting us all together and overwhelming us with typically incisive character sketches and black humour.
Hamlet is so many people I know. Young angst-filled teenagers whose parents remarry causing them to feel pangs of jealousy and betrayal, and adopt the injured 'I'm all alone in this cruel world' posture. But with his dead father's ghost approaching, Hamlet suddenly took on overtones of Harry Potter and the Simoqin Prophecies - I'm not kidding. All that about connecting with a dead father and finding a sort of solace and guidance from an inspiring paternal figure! Hamlet is the kid who slams his bedroom door and listens to deafening heavy metal. I think.
There's this one bit where Hamlet launches into a bitter indictment of the fate that's befallen him, being particularly hard on his mother who has just married his dead father's brother; his uncle. "This bit where he's talking to himself..." someone began, asking a question. Anmol then interrupted to say Shakespeare was unlikely to have intended Hamlet to talk to himself since "talking to yourself is a very modern, post-Freud phenomemon"! Bet you never thought of that!
Thirdly, I just watched an excellent BBC special on the story behind Michelangelo's David. And saw why good TV is so incredibly special. There was nothing in the story which could make audiences sit back and say, "Now the detail you could have got if that was in print..." It could only have been a TV story. Old footage from the 40s showing how Fascist forces appropriated the David's symbols of powerful masculinity to serve their purposes, close ups to show how it was physically transported one entire kilometre, personal testimonies, other images - wow. It could only have been a TV story; it wasn't just a read-out script!
