'lo bro

I know I am in heaven for I have been through hell. I loved samuel beckett's work, but part of the love was the refreshing notion that this was not my life, and part of the refreshment comes from being done with the book. So it is more than clean air I breathe when reading Shakespeare, it is sweet and airy. Like a pecan pie after a long supper of bones and marrow, The Tempest is my dessert.
The term though, is perhaps ill fitting- yet quite snug, and all cut from the same cloth. For language I find tastes like pie, but I know full well that it nourishes the body and soul like...wheat grass. But I find, or i have heard, for most people Shakespeare tastes like wheat-grass and does little more to nourish the soul than stick of butter.
In one of my classes the other day (I shall try to be anonymous even though i don't even know the names of the people in question) when we were beginning a section on Shakespeare's sonnets, I heard the following conversation (and this is verbatim):
bro gurl 1: I hate Shakespeare, this stuff is so stupid. It sucks
bro gurl 2: Me too, he really sucks especially these poems.
2: I know. I hate poetry, its like a complicated and dumb-fancy way of saying really simple stuff. HAHA!
1: I KNOOOW! (in a very bady accent) "me thinkiest me loveth thou. who art as pretty as a pretty rose" HAHA! this stuff just sucks, i mean i like some of his novels i guess but this poetry is-
2: really? I hate his novels! I mean I guess I haven't really read any besides Romeo and Juliette.
1: I never read that, I was supposed to for a class but I just watched the movie instead. I read King Lear though which was really weird, my teacher was soooo creepy.
2: HAHA! yeah, I mean I love the movies, but I just hate the books

I kid you not.
what is the acceptance rate at MSU again?...anyway this made me laugh more than it made me want to beat this very small freshman girls with a Shakespeare "novel". This really made me laugh when I remembered this movie that I saw, which ironically I first watched and thought it was a very bad 'low brow' movie, until i paid attention... if you haven't seen Orange County. do so. or just watch this brief clip about Shakespeare. This should make you laugh

But I digress. All these thoughts epiphanied me and I began to see the unraveling pattern that even in the lowest of the low, one can soar to the highest elevation. The inverse of this being equally true. Its all a matter of our approche, our perception and acception of what is at hand.

The Tempest will give you all the glory and radiance of prose and style that one should expect but, and for anyone who reads the play will realize, it gives you far more than fabulous production, it shows you the gears of the watch.The ropes and curtains of the set ("these our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air') It is a play of deception, it is an expression of and exultation of the lies we are told, it is the wiping away of tattooed tales. We must embrace both the tale told and the telling. Both emotions are canonized here with utmost eloquence, whether we see the clockworks and know, "we are such stuff as dreams are made of" or we wish to be spell-bound as I often do (and this is a soliloquy often turn to):

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments.
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices
That, if i then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.