Reflecting for the Week (3)

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I pause from blogging this week, in order to reflect more on my other work: Theory of Algorithms and The Core Algorithm.

What do you need to reflect on, and how often should you do so?

Reflecting for the Week (2)

(image credit)

I pause from blogging this week, in order to reflect more on my other work: Theory of Algorithms and The Core Algorithm.

What do you need to reflect on, and how often should you do so?

Reflecting for the Week (1)

(image credit)

I pause from blogging this week, in order to reflect more on my other work: Theory of Algorithms and The Core Algorithm.

What do you need to reflect on, and how often should you do so?

Sonnet 66, by NY Shakespeare Exchange

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
     Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
     Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

Sonnet 66, from The Sonnet Project, by the New York Shakespeare Exchange.

I love the raw context of these sonnets, the ambient sounds and sights of people making for a relevant Shakespeare.  I see that love has the authority, the power, and the shamelessness to dominate, control and even ridicule a lover.  On the face of it, Michael Shattner contemplates suicide.  Maybe so.  But it may also be that romanticized longing for death as relief from an unrelenting, mean-spirited love.

Sonnet 140, by NY Shakespeare Exchange

Be wise as thou art cruel; do not press
My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain;
Lest sorrow lend me words, and words express
The manner of my pity-wanting pain.
If I might teach thee wit, better it were,
Though not to love, yet, love to tell me so;
As testy sick men, when their deaths be near,
No news but health from their physicians know;
For, if I should despair, I should grow mad,
And in my madness might speak ill of thee;
Now this ill-wresting world is grown so bad,
Mad slanderers by mad ears believed be.
     That I may not be so, nor thou belied,
     Bear thine eyes straight, though thy proud heart go wide.

Sonnet 140, from The Sonnet Project, by the New York Shakespeare Exchange.

Zillah Glory as the woman looking at photos of her and her friend, and making that unanswered call, may just be at the edge of coming out.  That is, as being in love with her friend, who senses that something more is underfoot and has begun an awkward distancing from her unexpected suitor.  It's flat out agonizing for Glory.

Sonnet 58, by NY Shakespeare Exchange

That god forbid, that made me first your slave,
I should in thought control your times of pleasure,
Or at your hand the account of hours to crave,
Being your vassal, bound to stay your leisure!
O! let me suffer, being at your beck,
The imprison'd absence of your liberty;
And patience, tame to sufferance, bide each check,
Without accusing you of injury.
Be where you list, your charter is so strong
That you yourself may privilege your time
To what you will; to you it doth belong
Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime.
     I am to wait, though waiting so be hell,
     Not blame your pleasure be it ill or well.

Sonnet 58, from The Sonnet Project, by the New York Shakespeare Exchange.

Sometimes love makes servitude of us, but for those of us, like Mary Ann Walsh as the bartender, who are in love and at once devoted, there is patience and there is understanding and there is endurance.  

Sonnet 118, by NY Shakespeare Exchange

Like as, to make our appetites more keen,
With eager compounds we our palate urge;
As, to prevent our maladies unseen,
We sicken to shun sickness when we purge;
Even so, being full of your ne'er-cloying sweetness,
To bitter sauces did I frame my feeding;
And, sick of welfare, found a kind of meetness
To be diseased, ere that there was true needing.
Thus policy in love, to anticipate
The ills that were not, grew to faults assured,
And brought to medicine a healthful state
Which, rank of goodness, would by ill be cured;
     But thence I learn and find the lesson true,
     Drugs poison him that so fell sick of you.

Sonnet 118, from The Sonnet Project, by the New York Shakespeare Exchange.

Wow, this piece by the Shakespeare Exchange makes me think of the film `Twelve, young men and women from wealthy families, wavering between boredom and ecstasy and in the end sidling tragically into violence and death.  They do so, because of some unrequited love.  That falling sick of you isn't the way that we Americans in modern may interpret it (i.e., as sick and tired of you).  Rather it is falling sick literally, then dying, because of some dsyfunctional, obsessive, and ultimately unrequited longing.

Sonnet 3, by NY Shakespeare Exchange

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
     But if thou live, remembered not to be,
     Die single and thine image dies with thee.

Sonnet 3, from The Sonnet Project, by the New York Shakespeare Exchange.

Oh, can modern day singles ever heed such deft, such lyrical dating advice?  At first I wondered if Ron Cohen as the bartender was the father of the young man in plaid.  Then, I saw that more likely the sonnet was about him, single all these years, facing the prospects of an empty legacy.

Still he is kind enough to advise the young man not to fall on the same childless tracks and instead go for it.  The fatherly advisor takes a turn, not quite as bawdy as the Nurse in `Romeo and Juliet, at egging the young man to have sex with that lady with black hair and impregnate her longing, virginal womb.

Sonnet 101, by NY Shakespeare Exchange

O truant Muse what shall be thy amends
For thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed?
Both truth and beauty on my love depends;
So dost thou too, and therein dignified.
Make answer Muse: wilt thou not haply say,
'Truth needs no colour, with his colour fixed;
Beauty no pencil, beauty's truth to lay;
But best is best, if never intermixed'?
Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
Excuse not silence so, for't lies in thee
To make him much outlive a gilded tomb
And to be praised of ages yet to be.
     Then do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how
     To make him seem, long hence, as he shows now.

Sonnet 101, from The Sonnet Project, by the New York Shakespeare Exchange.

At first listening and reading, I find myself focusing most on the sonnet itself - its words, meter and meaning.  In this respect, the speaker speaks with his Muse, that much is apparent.  But who is the he whom he speaks about?  It may be the speaker himself, who in turn may be Shakespeare who longs to be known and praised for ages.

Jennifer Lim is the lady here and obviously the speaker.  But the he must be Confucius, which makes for an extraordinarily provocative interpretation of the sonnet.

Sonnet 133, by NY Shakespeare Exchange

Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan
For that deep wound it gives my friend and me!
Is't not enough to torture me alone,
But slave to slavery my sweet'st friend must be?
Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken,
And my next self thou harder hast engrossed:
Of him, myself, and thee I am forsaken;
A torment thrice three-fold thus to be crossed.
Prison my heart in thy steel bosom's ward,
But then my friend's heart let my poor heart bail;
Whoe'er keeps me, let my heart be his guard;
Thou canst not then use rigour in my jail:
     And yet thou wilt; for I, being pent in thee,
     Perforce am thine, and all that is in me.

Sonnet 133, from The Sonnet Project, by the New York Shakespeare Exchange.

Wow, brilliant rendition of this sonnet. Sinister and foreboding, it definitely expands my notions of Shakespeare, especially concerning his sonnets.  They aren't just about love, not in the romantic sense, that is.  They're also about darkness and violence, even if understated.

Sonnet 64, by NY Shakespeare Exchange

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate
That Time will come and take my love away.
     This thought is as a death which cannot choose
     But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Sonnet 64, from The Sonnet Project, by the New York Shakespeare Exchange.

For a moment, maybe more than a moment, we wonder whether this gentleman's lover has already passed away and thus whether the final couplet is actually a memory.

Sonnet 147, by NY Shakespeare Exchange

My love is as a fever longing still,
For that which longer nurseth the disease;
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now Reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed;
     For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
     Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

Sonnet 147, from The Sonnet Project, by the New York Shakespeare Exchange.

This piece reminds me of a Martin Scorsese film, like `Taxi Driver: Raw and gritty, a kind of railing against beauty.  As it progresses, it reminds me of another film `Shutter Island: Nightmarish, psychotic.  In a kind of synchronicity, as I call it, I realize just now that this film, too, is by Scorsese.

Kudos to the New York Shakespeare Exchange for a brilliant effort!