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Richard S. Beam

69       Observations About Omaha, Mostly

9/19/2016

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Well, it’s been about two and a third years since I retired, and just over two since Bonnie and I moved to Omaha (a move which surprised me a great deal).  I had figured, when contemplating retirement, that we’d stay in the North Carolina Mountains for a while, probably about a year.  We had already pretty much decided that we would be moving to Omaha, NE, to be closer to Maggi (and to get back to a somewhat more “urban” environment), but there didn’t seem to be any real pressure to move quickly.  My thought was that we’d use this “down” time to: 1.) sort the stuff we really wanted to keep from that which wasn’t really necessary any more, i.e. books (did I really need all the duplicates and earlier editions I had, especially of textbooks?), old stuff we just hadn’t gotten around to throwing out (older clothes, various bits of hardware, kitchen stuff we really didn’t need for a family of two, etc.); and, 2.) take some time to select a place to move to in Omaha, with no real rush….
 
Obviously, it didn’t happen that way.  About as soon as we actually started looking at houses in the Omaha area (even just online), we realized that the real estate market here was quite different from that in the Sylva/Cullowhee area.  Things move VERY quickly here.  I don’t know the local unemployment rate, but all types of businesses seem to be hiring constantly and it’s not uncommon for houses to turn over within a few days to a week. 
 
So, when we came out to visit Maggi right after the end of the school year in 2014, we figured that it might make sense to do a little “house-looking.”  We quickly discovered that at least half of the houses we had wanted to look at had sold before we got here, so the “looking” became a bit more serious rather quickly.  But there was still no GREAT pressure to make a decision, especially since we had some rather firm “must-haves” on our list of what we wanted.  For example, (knowing that we are getting older) we wanted a ranch or a “story and a half” so we COULD just live on the main floor, if necessary, but really wanted space for each of us to have an “office” and for Bonnie to have space to work on sewing and other craft stuff.  I wanted space for my books (fiction and academic), as I am still interested in theatre, generally, and Shakespeare related, specifically.  And I have a long-standing interest in mysteries, especially Sherlock Holmes, although I read a lot of mystery authors, especially now that I have a good-sized public library system and (probably more importantly) time to do that.  I digress, however.
 
Having looked at a fair number of houses in a short, few days, we finally got to see one which seemed pretty close to ideal.  It looks like -
Picture
So, we bought it, before someone else did!  And ended up closing in early July and moving late in August.  Probably a “much too fast” move.  Certainly, it was faster than I had contemplated at the beginning of that summer.
 
I confess that I’m still not completely sold on the paint color (it hasn’t been repainted yet), but it’s not a bad choice, and I haven’t come up with a color scheme I like better (besides, I’d have to convince Bonnie).  The house faces East, so the winter snow tends to melt fairly quickly (we really wanted a house which faced South, but that was not to be).  The Master (with bath) is behind the window on the right, the formal dining room (not used too often) is beyond the front porch (where Bonnie sits in the early morning when the weather is nice) and the guest bedroom is above the front porch.  The living room (with fireplace) overlooks the back yard and the kitchen is large with good space for an “everyday” table and chairs.
 
Bonnie has a couple of smallish bedrooms upstairs which are her office and craft room and I have a sizable part of the finished basement as my office and most of the rest of the finished space is a sort of family room (although it’s mostly used by us as a place to watch “special” TV shows or the occasional movie).  Finally, there is a smaller room which serves as the “audio/video stacks,” and a big alcove for my books.  All things considered, a really nice place.  It’s probably bigger than it should be, but it feels comfortable, if you know what I mean.
 
Bonnie and I are both “urban babies,” of course, having grown up in the Chicago suburbs, so it was nice to get back into an environment which feels somewhat more “normal” than Jackson County ever did, although we had a lot of good years there.  There are no views of mountainsides, of course, although Omaha is much more rolling than I had thought it was and it is nice to see the open sky.  I do miss the mountains some, but I’m enjoying the longer view of the sky.  Besides, the cats enjoy watching the squirrels and birds on the back deck. 
 
There is, obviously, more traffic in Omaha than in Sylva (the Sylva “rush minute” is more like a real “rush hour” here, but then, there’s more places to go to, this being a city of about 410 thousand (in the city proper according to the census of 2010).  That’s (roughly) a quarter of the population of the entire state!  Quite a change from Sylva/Cullowhee!
 
There seem to be a lot more Catholics and Lutherans (percentage-wise) here than other Christian denominations, although most major religions are represented in the Omaha area (various Christian groups, Unitarian/Universalist, Sikh, Muslim, Jewish, various Pagan groups and on, and on).  What I have learned, however, is that the TRUE religion of Nebraskans is Husker Football.  Maybe it was growing up thinking about Northwestern (not, at least in those days, a powerhouse football school), attending Indiana (another non-powerhouse football school, most of the time), then working at Western for 43 years where football fans were a lot like Chicago Cubs fans (…just wait until next year!  Well, okay, this year may be a Cubs year again!), but I’m not used to absolutely rabid fan support and expectations of a season which brings not just a victory, (or two, if you are lucky), but a heavily winning season.  Championships are simply a matter of expectation.
 
The best time to go shopping (in the fall) is during game time, as there tend to be fewer people in the stores than any other time during the week.  Many, perhaps MOST, people wear “Husker Red” on game days, so one really stands out in a crowd if you don’t.  The largest cities in Nebraska are Omaha (about 410,000), Lincoln (about 250,000) and Bellevue (about 50,000), followed by Grand Island (about 48,500) EXCEPT on home game days, when Memorial Stadium (official seating capacity just over 86,000 thousand, actual capacity ≈ 90,000) becomes the third largest city in the state because the stadium sells out for every home game and has since 1962!  Now that’s probably just a fluke of being a mostly rural state without too many big towns, but it did surprise me a bit when I first heard it, so I did some checking, and it’s true.
 
There’s undoubtedly more crime in Omaha than in Sylva, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone.  Still, it’s not what I’d call a major problem, at least where we live.  Like most urban areas, there are places where one needs to be a bit careful, especially after dark, but that was true in parts of Evanston when I was growing up in the 1950s. 
 
Being the biggest city around has some major advantages, too.  There are three local TV stations, a good art museum, a GREAT zoo, a good general museum, a very attractive botanical garden, lots of theatrical opportunities, a symphony orchestra, a lot of road shows and concerts (serious and pop), several universities, with all that they bring to a cultural scene, and a myriad of children’s opportunities.
 
All things considered, I can’t really find any big reason not to like it here, at least for us at this stage of our lives.  Yes, winters can be pretty cold and summers can be pretty hot, but those can be managed, and much of the year it’s pretty pleasant.  There’s even a breeze most days (occasionally a real blow, but not too often).  So, even the weather isn’t too bad, especially when you don’t really HAVE to go out in it, if you don’t want to.
 
All things considered, while the move was quicker than I expected it to be (more time would, perhaps, have been beneficial), I’m not sorry that we were able to move here while we are still in good enough health to enjoy it for a while.  And when our health declines (as it, eventually, will), the University of Nebraska Medial Center is here, as are a wealth of other medical facilities serving the surrounding area, so medical care is really quite good.  That can wait, however (knock wood).  Our health is holding up pretty well (for “old folks”), so other than fairly routine stuff, we haven’t needed a lot of medical care and hope not to any time soon.
 
Basically, while I think we could be happy in many locales, Omaha is a nice place to be, especially since our daughter, Maggi, live just across town, so we can see her fairly often.  All things considered, I recommend it!
 
LLAP

 
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68       Some Thoughts About the First Folio

9/1/2016

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I bought myself a copy of Shakespeare's First Folio the other day.  Not, of course, an original (I don't have that kind of money), but the facsimile published by Applause Books in 1995 which was prepared and introduced by Doug Moston.  I happened to stop by my local used bookstore and a copy was just sitting on the shelf, waiting for me to pick it up, so I did.
 
This (probably rather frivolous) purchase was probably incited, in part, by the recent touring exhibition of some of the actual First Folios from the Folger Shakespeare Library as a part of their "Wonder of Will" celebration in honor of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death which came to Omaha's Durham Museum last spring.  I HAD seen another original before, as there is one on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which I saw when I was there in 2009.  And I MAY have seen others, which I just don’t remember.  That's not really the point, though.  
 
I have read enough about the FF to know that it's probably the closest we will ever come to knowing what Shakespeare actually wrote in the plays the FF contains (almost all of the works in the accepted canon).  Yes, it's not easy to read.  The spelling and typography can be hard to follow, the punctuation and spelling is odd to modern eyes, etc.  There are also, almost certainly, a good many mistakes made in transcribing the written words into type for printing.  Printers are, after all, human, so mistakes were made.  Some of these were, evidently, corrected while the printing of the FF was in progress, so some (more knowledgeable scholars than I) have suggested that no two surviving copies of the Folio are exactly identical and there have been studies regarding how many people actually set the type for the FF.  
 
Still, while Shakespeare didn't live long enough to edit the final copy, it was (if we believe the evidence printed in the book and the records from the time) prepared by two people (John Heminge and Henry Condell) who worked closely with Will when the plays were actually presented at the Globe and the Blackfriars, and who had been his friends and fellow members of the Lord Chamberlain's and King's Men acting company.  The exact source of the scripts they used is not known, but there would appear to be every reason to believe that these scripts were at least pretty close to the plays as they had produced and performed them while Shakespeare was alive.  Can we prove that?  No, but they said that the plays in the folio they helped create contained Shakespeare’s plays "…now offer'd to your view cured, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he conceived them."  In short, they claimed that the copies in the folio were absolutely correct.
 
Could this be true?  I would suggest that this is probably not a completely factual statement, although it is possible.  After all, spelling in English was not standardized until a good while after the period of publication and it would appear that a good deal of spelling was more a matter of how a word was pronounced at the time.  Some suggest that this may help to explain the variant spellings of the same words in the FF and has led some to try to identify a number of different compositors (who actually set the type for the FF) since different typesetters might well have used different spellings. 
Now, typesetting this book would have been a very large task for a book of this size (remember the type would have been hand set), so it’s entirely reasonable that more than one person would have been engaged in this process for the FF.  It also could help to explain the number of seeming errors in setting the type for this many pages, especially if different people set different pages for a given sheet of paper, which seems probable.
 
It’s probably worth noting that the editions of these plays which we read today have been, in every case I know of, “corrected,” at least to some extent, by more recent editors.  That is, spelling and punctuation have, generally, been at least somewhat “modernized,” some of the apparently awkward spacings and line divisions in the FF have been altered to make them more “correct,” etc.  Many modern editions are also compiled from various Folios (there were four by 1685) and/or the quartos previously published of some of the plays.  This helps to explain why there are so many, slightly different, versions of the plays available for modern audiences to use in reading or production.  Certainly, an additional reason for this variety is that modern editions also generally contain unique editorial “Notes” intended to help us understand language which is a bit different from that of the present day. 
 
To my mind, the most obvious (and perhaps the most dangerous) version of such “Notes” is the fairly recent practice of providing (usually on facing pages) the “original” text (which, of course, means some “standard” edition of the text, which almost certainly is NOT taken directly from an identified source) facing a version of the text “translated into modern language” (which means that some, usually unidentified, editor[s] has decided what the words mean and used that in the “translation.”)  That CAN be a help, of course, but it suggests, at least to me, that some nameless editor(s) have the “true” insight into what Shakespeare meant and can “translate” it in such a way as to suggest that there is no doubt about its accuracy .  I beg to differ.
 
I’m very much afraid that this helps perpetuate the notion that there is (somewhere out there) some definitive notion of the meaning of these plays and that, if we can only discover it (with the help, of course, of these nameless editors) we will be ushered into a state of some sort of Shakespearean bliss.  As I discussed briefly in my post #52, I find this unlikely, if only because of the fact is that language (words) don’t always just have a single meaning in the present, nor did they in Shakespeare’s time. 
 
To me, an obvious example of that is the famous reference to a “nunnery” in Act III, sc. 1, of Hamlet, the “Get thee to a nunnery” scene.  The notes in many standard editions of the play define “nunnery” as “convent,” although a few also include the notion that “nunnery” was also a term used to refer to a brothel.  To me, that poses something of a problem because Hamlet saying that to Ophelia could be suggesting that he doesn’t wish her to come to harm, but to avoid the corruption he sees around the Danish court by entering a convent for safety; OR, he could be suggesting that she is, in fact, a part of the corruption and has behaved little better than a whore.  Now, these are rather different ideas, but either, or both, COULD be being implied here.  So, which is right? 
 
I don’t know.  However, as Harley Granville-Barker points out in his Preface to Hamlet, (pp.78-79) there is a distinct change in tone in the scene immediately after Hamlet asks Ophelia “Where is your father?” to which she replies, “At home, my lord” (a fact which we know she knows to be untrue).  Hamlet uses the word “nunnery” a total of five times in this scene, three of them AFTER this exchange.  My belief is that the first two times he uses the word, he probably means something different from the third and fourth time he does.  To me, this makes a good deal of sense, if one buys into Granville-Barker’s idea that something happens just before the “Where’s your father?” line which convinces Hamlet that they are being watched and that Ophelia probably knows that.  I haven’t decided about the final time he says “nunnery.”  I think the meaning is ambiguous in that case and might be interpreted either way depending on actor/director choice.
 
My point here is that whether we rely on “Notes” or modern “translations” (Note: most scholars would agree, I think, that any translation from any language into any other language never captures all of the nuances of the original), the original meaning, assuming that there WAS a specific, original meaning, was expressed by Shakespeare in this way, so that it’s wise to be aware of the language, punctuation, etc. which he actually used, where possible.  I would also suggest that Early English and contemporary usage of the English language are different enough so that the converting of one to the other really is a “translation.”  But, I’m getting distracted from my original point.
 
While visiting the “Wonder of Will” exhibit, I also acquired a copy of a companion book, Foliomania, which was published by the Folger Shakespeare Library containing an essay entitled: The Shakespeare First Folio: The Actors Text by Don Weingust.  He suggests that it is at least possible that some of the “inaccuracies” in the FF were not, in fact, inaccuracies, but were actually intended by Shakespeare (or possibly Heminge and Condell) to provide insight into the performance of the plays, so the “corrections” by editors after the fact of the First Folio might, in fact, be the real inaccuracies.  That is, unusual spacing could have been deliberately used as an indication that some piece of important stage business filled the rest of the “space” of a line.  Or, an unusual spelling (perhaps a change of spelling within a single speech) indicated a change in pronunciation or emphasis, and one of the “odd” appearances of capitalization could have been intended to mark the need for greater emphasis on a particular word.  I confess that I found this a fascinating idea, which accounts for at least some of my interest in acquiring a First Folio for my own use.
 
I would contend that Weingust’s essay offers some interesting possibilities for consideration.  The American Shakespeare Center in Virginia and Shakespeare’s Globe in London are, perhaps, the best-known sources of “original practices” productions, although they are far from alone in looking at these ideas.  I confess that I haven’t really studied my own copy of the First Folio (or even any of the individual plays) with production clearly in mind, and it’s possible that I never will.  After all, the possibility of my actually directing any more of Shakespeare’s plays at this stage of my life seems fairly slim, and I hadn’t been exposed to these ideas for the productions I have directed. 
 
Still, even without further study, I find these ideas pretty fascinating.  After all, while we may think of Shakespeare primarily as a writer today (it’s that English teacher influence again), he WAS, in fact, a known (apparently pretty well-known) actor during his life and the First Folio was, in fact, assembled by John Heminge and Henry Condell, who were also actors and fellow members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later the King’s men, along with Shakespeare.  Since it can be established that plays (and the rights to them) were sold outright to acting companies during this time, it seems quite reasonable that they could have had access to the scripts owned by the company and that they were the ones used in the creation of the FF.  IF Shakespeare had used various techniques to provide performance clues in creating the scripts (certainly a possibility), then it is also possible that at least some of those clues were preserved in the First Folio.
 
I think that makes it reasonable to suggest that anyone producing one of Shakespeare’s plays might be wise to carefully consider making a close reading of that play in the First Folio to consider if there are clues there to a deeper understanding of the script or the characters.  I confess I wish that I had the opportunity to justify expending that sort of energy on a study of that sort.  Who knows, I just might do it in any case, at least with a play, or two.
 
In any event, I don’t believe that it could hurt, and it just might be helpful.  I think that might well be worth the effort.
 
LLAP
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    Just personal comments about things which interest me (and might interest others).

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