You really got me.

A while ago I mentioned this conference coming up in October in VA honoring Andrew Gurr. Well, today got the news. My paper, Falstaff at the Garter: The 1602 Merry wives of Windsor as City Comedy, was accepted. For non-Shakespeareans, I won't bore you with an extended summary. Just suffice it to say that the status of this printed version of the play has been part of a major and on-going debate within Shakespearean studies for more than a hundred years about the nature of play texts and their status as authetntic authorial documents.

I call out her name.

In the toughest title battle yet, The Thermals emerge champs as usually happens: 'cuz when you're hot, you're smokin'. They took down an extremely quality field: The Clash, "What's My Name," Guided by Voices, "Your Name Is Wild," The Kinks, "Did You See His Name","Lynyrd Skynyrd, "What's Your Name", Terence Trent D'Arby, "Sign Your Name," The Velvet Underground, "I Heard Her Call My Name," and The White Stripes, "Sister, Do You Know My Name?"

Q: What's this all about then?
A: My "second" book was to have been called “WHAT’S IN A NAME?”: IDENTITY, PROPERTY, AND THE EARLY MODERN NAMING FUNCTION 1485–1832 and should have been entering post-production about now. This book project modeled on David Cressy's magisterial Birth, Marriage & Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England was at once much more focused in topic while also diachronically much wider in scope. The book concept spun out of an unpublished essay entitled “Tom, Dick, and Francis”; or, The Trouble with Harry: Status Anxiety amongst the Gentry in Early Modern England. This essay itself served as a bridge away from dissertation work on alehouses and theaters. We still visit the world of the Boar's Head Tavern in the second tetralogy but more with an eye to Hal and his many concerns about class, status, and patrilineage. Following from a seemingly toss-away neologism, "Tom, Dick and Francis" we ask the Hitchcockian question of Hal just what is The Trouble with Harry?

Central to the answer was my theorization after Foucault of an early modern naming function. And that's why this post exists at all. My "first" book is still in the works. My own academic status is rather ambiguous, but I continue to be a publishing scholar.



My latest work in collaboration with Bryan Reynolds is a melding of my "naming function" with his transversal poetics providing we hope through "investigative-expansive modes"

to show that certain signature theoretical contributions of structuralism and poststructuralism have definite precursors in the early modern English understanding of the proper name with respect both to semiotic-semantic systems and subject formation. Moreover, another aim of this book is to establish more explicitly the historical trajectory of this book . . . between the premodern and the modern . . . to graph the various lines of critical inquiry into subjects, subjectivity, and subject matters. (51)

So we pursue a basic question, "What's in a name?"

One of my very smartest friends asked "what is your naming function?" And he is not alone, though many of my grad school buddies already hipped to the Foucaultplay at work in my neologism. In short from our "Glossary of Transversal Terms":

the naming-function replaces the problematic term "name" to emphasize the many uses of proper naming. . . . The naming-function reveals that proper naming need not operate simply in one direction, from sociopolitical conductors of state power to subjects, but also in reverse, differently, multi-directionally, and multi-dimensionally. (280)

Focusing on a class bias "the naming-function encodes, eludes, and scrambles power relationships among the aristocracy, much as the the author-function admits ownership of texts, yet obscures the state's punishment of their transgressions" (61). For more, read the book. Thanks!

Thus we come to my Declaration of Scholarly Principles (with a wink of the eye to CFK and JL).

1) I promise never to follow a trend out of a desire for publication or advancement. In fact, I steadfastly promise to actively ignore trends in my own work regardless of the affects on my so-called career.

2) I vow to continue doing cutting edge interdisciplinary work in both the fields of early modern studies and popular culture of the twentieth century. I shall follow the questions and interesting bugaboos wherever they lead me: be it to the creation of 90s noise rock as a non-generic cultural phenomenon, the role of hops in the production of English national identity, a minor neologism which tinkers with a common adage but plainly hides deeper cultural anxieties about status, a re-reading and re-reading of the phrase "Out of sack" until every possible meaning has been parsed and squeezed from the literary shepherd's bag or The Mekon's interest in traditional country, disavowal of Alt-Country, and creation of a more politicized "Insurgent Country."

3) I vow to use theory as it was intended as a useful explanatory tool not as a system for living or some kind of ideological purity test.

4) I vow to write in clear and concise modern English that attempts to be both witty and wise.

5) I vow to live the life of the mind to the full, joyously and with all the vigor I can produce.

Desunt nonulla.

Works Cited

Bryan Reynolds et al., Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Where is my mind?

Been a very busy pre-Father's Day week what with a lot of projects just starting up. Here''s tidbits and links on some stuff I'm doing now.

Perfect Sound Forever
As always, my Kevin Shields interview is in the latest issue. I've got a really long interview with Robert Ellis Orrall forthcoming maybe next issue maybe the one after. I'm working on pieces on Sonny Boy Williamson II myths and truths, the Dust-to-Digital label, and most intriguingly a new label Bifrost Arts founded by a former student of mine, now an RUF minister at UConn.

Pop Matters
I'm writing a few things specifically for this online zine. More about them later perhaps.

Mississippi Musicians
I'm pitching in to help Nancy Jacobs with this labor of love site by updating some of the web pages (Garrison Starr and Blind Melon should be up by the end of the week) & writing some new pages esp. for blues artists like Eddie Cusic and Willie McTell as well as a brand new page for Starkville's own composer, Albert Oppenheimer, a recent graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music!

Beer and The Bard
That whole book project is rewriting itself as we speak. But seriously major rethink and revision on-going. Thanks to Tom and Bryan for four extra eyes and three and a half extra brains!

Inside out/outside in; or, hold on i'm comin'.

So I got the following CFP on Wed, 6 May 2009 14:25:54 -0400:

Dear Colleagues,

The American Shakespeare Center, in partnership with Shakespeare's Globe in London, will host its fifth Blackfriars Conference, "Inside Out/Outside In," in honor of Andy Gurr in Staunton, Virginia, from 20-25 October 2009. Registration fee includes tickets to the ASC productions of 1 Henry IV, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Titus Andronicus, Much Ado about Nothing, and The Rehearsal by George Villiers (et al); opening and closing banquets; a special presentation by the ASC actors honoring the work of Andy Gurr; and Paul Menzer's Shakespeare on Ice, a play and cocktail party.

We are inviting proposals for papers on topics to do with early modern drama in performance, including but not restricted to the staging, texts, design, repertory, personnel, and the business of plays in early modern England. Paper presentations are limited to 10 minutes (presentation without actors) and to 13 minutes (presentations with ASC actors). Presenters should be aware that they will hear the sound of a thundersheet when two minutes remain and will exit pursed by a bear when time is out.

Submit a 300 word abstract and a short bio to Sarah Enloe, Director of Education, by May 30, 2009. Please include a brief statement saying whether or not you would be interested in having your work in a volume of Blackfriars Conference essays.

Now Andrew Gurr is one of my absolute cultural heroes, even if all he had EVER done was write this. But THEN he also wrote this and helped uncover this for good matter plus a lot else to boot. Quite a career indeed!

It just so happens I had a handy piece about staging one version of The Merry Wives of Windsor! So I sent in the following:


Falstaff at the Garter:
The 1602 Merry Wives of Windsor Quarto as City Comedy

The Merry Wives of Windsor exists in two distinct versions: its first Quarto (1602) and the First Folio (1623). Specifically, the Quarto takes place either in London or an unnamed provincial town, while the Folio version is resolutely located in the royal village of Windsor, hard by the castle. Ironically, the later Folio version might represent the original version of the play as written for the Feast of the Garter in 1597. Sometime later perhaps, Shakespeare might have reworked the play for the commercial stage, hoping to capitalize on the rage for city comedy, which had been developing since the late 1590s. I focus on the Quarto version of the play, which highlights the connections to city comedy, and which I take to be closer to the version performed on the London stage.

Throughout the play Falstaff operates as a prototypical gallant: he wears peculiar dress, makes passionate love to assorted women, is a notorious gamester, and resides at the Garter. But Shakespeare inverts the typical gallant situation by having Falstaff, his urban gallant, gulled by the commercial classes of the town. I also connect Falstaff's character to gender considerations. From such gender considerations, we see the underlying metadramatic concerns of The Merry Wives of Windsor, a play very much concerned with contemporary London theatrical practices whatever town it supposedly occurs in. The Quarto's "location" allows Shakespeare to comment upon the class tensions at once central to theatrical alehouses as illustrated by the pairs Sly and the Lord and Hal and Francis and important to the burgeoning contemporary city comedy, a genre which directly links the alehouse scenes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the coffeehouse scenes of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Short Bio

G.E. Light received his PhD from Stanford in 1994. He was Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State University from 1996-2003. His publications include "Beer and The Bard" (1996), "All Hopped Up: Beer, Cultivated National Identity, and Anglo-Dutch Relations, 1525–1624” (1998), "Falstaff’s Cups of Sack: New Readings of Henry V II.iii.25" (2002), reviews in Albion, Renaissance Quarterly, and Text, and a "virtual" dialogue with Bryan Reynolds on "the naming-function" in chapter one of Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida (2009), published today! Currently he blogs The Nevermind Aesthetic and is a freelance journalist focusing primarily on music and publishing in a variety of venues including Dusted Magazine, Stylus Magazine, and Perfect Sound Forever, and a DJ at WMSV. He produces record reviews, was a columnist writing about "Seconds-Perfect Moments in Pop", has done artist interviews with Marshall Grant, Kevin Shields, Plastic People of the Universe, Robert Ellis Orrall, and written some longer think pieces about such topics as the hidden history of Southern urban blues and 90s Noise Rock.

King dork.

One of the most charming things about Frank Portman's fantastic young adult novel, King Dork, is the running joke about Tom aka Sheepie aka Chi-Mo's continually non-existent band composed of his few buddies, which changes names and logos seemingly weekly like a fictional version of one of Bob Pollard's 4-disc box sets with 103 songs each attributed to a different band with hilarious names like Bottoms Up! (You Fantastic Bastard), Resin Cabin, Turbo Boy, Unshaven Bird, Marching 100, A Good Circuitry Soldier or Mars: The Bringer of War. But a perceptive fan named Hez did point out this truth:

I brought Frank Portman's book King Dork on my trip. I read the thing in two days. It was really good. In the book, the main character makes up a band with his best friend. They change the band name every week. Baby Batter was one such name...while going through my dad's records I was surprised to see that it was a real album!

Pretty much anyone with a serious interest in pop/rock music has fantasized about being in a band and created a back story or a Behind The Music career arc. Ten years ago here's the one I came up with:

A fragment of

The Maximal Bard;

Or,

Shakespearean Society and The Spectacle:



Some Ruminations by G. E. Light

[Page Break]


For the Young and Young at Heart


© Copyright by George Evans Light 1997
All Rights Reserved

[Page Break]


Contents


I. Shakescult/Bardcrit 1

II. The Profession 6

III. Acting Up 10

IV. Detritus 15

V. Prologemena for a New Edition ?

VI. Textual Note(s) ?


[Page Break]

III.5
Pop Music and Shakespeare

Mr. Malone, Hey Nonny Nonny this. If I had a band, its name would most definitely be “This happy breed of men” and it would play loud dour guitar music somewhere between The Mission of Burma and My Bloody Valentine. Several song titles already come to mind: “Pursued by a Bear,” “The very naked name of love,” “Seen the Spider,” “Gazer Joy,” “Because my name is George,” and “The muzzle of restraint.” For good measure our set would end with a Jonsonian encore of the punky “Turd i’ your teeth” followed by three covers: a cover of This Mortal Coil’s cover of the Chris Bell tune “I am the Cosmos,” Guided by Voices' “Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox,” and a frenzied finale of The Weddoes’ “Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft” in full Albini effect.



That’s the harmony in MY head; such is the stuff dreams are made on. (p. 13)

For you.

Princess cards she sends me with her regards
Barroom eyes shine vacancy, to see her you gotta look hard
Wounded deep in battle, I stand stuffed like some soldier undaunted
To her Cheshire smile, I'll stand on file, she's all I ever wanted
But you let your blue walls get in the way of these facts
Honey, get your carpetbaggers off my back
You wouldn't even give me time to cover my tracks
You said, "Here's your mirror and your ball and jacks"
But they're not what I came for, and I'm sure you see that too
--Bruce Springsteen, "For You," Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ (1973)

To conclude: 5 very special mix tapes I didn't make



The Romantic Shakespeare Tapes compiled by Jeff Erickson

Jeffrey Paul Erickson was my cohortmate and best friend and procurer of two of "my favorite things"—an official Warner Bros. Marvin Martian "tea" mug and an inflatable Munch's The Scream figurine doll— during 10 glorious years in the Bay Area. We made it through grad school, travelled far and wide together from Santa Cruz through Sutter Creek to Volcano stopping at many highbrow joints along the way like Ken's Wagon Wheel in Mountain View, the late Alain Rondelli in the Inner Richmond, Boulevard under the shadow of the Bay Bridge, and Perko's Koffe Kup just outside Stockton on California 88 just off US 99 and south of Lodi for all the CCR fans out there—Jeff never met a breakfast he couldn't eat "Night and Day"!— and from the side of Mt. Shasta through the Rogue River Gulch past Crater Lake by Ashland and on to Eugene returning via Mendocino, and Boonville and so forth, were joint founding members of the Guttersnipes bowling team, saw Solti conduct the Cleveland Orchestra at Davies Symphony Hall, and shared a profound love for the Oakland Athletics (my "other" American League team not currently World Champions: PSYCHE! You can take the Boy outta Boston, but you can't take Boston et cetera). We've been out of touch too long.



Romantic Shakespeare I: Overtures/Incidental Music 10/5/89

Side A
Berlioz:
King Lear Overture
Sir Colin Davis
London Symphony
********************
Tchaikovsky:
Romeo and Juliet
Riccardo Muti
Philadelphia Orch.
********************
Tchaikovsky:
Hamlet Overture
Geoffrey Simon
London Symphony

Side B
Mendelssohn:
A Midsummer Night's
Dream:
Overture; Scherzo
Intermezzo; Nocturne
Finale
James Levine
Chicago Symphony
*******************
Dvorak:
Othello Overture
Vernon Handley
Ulster Orchestra



Romantic Shakespeare II: ROMEO AND JULIET symphony/ballet

Side A
Berlioz, Romeo et Juliette:
Introduction
Romeo alone/the Ball
Departure
Love Scene
Queen Mab Scherzo

Riccardo Muti
Phildelpphia Orchestra

Side B
Prokofiev, Romeo and Juliet:
I.ii Dance of the Knights'Mercurtio
Balcony Scene
II.iii Tybalt & Mercutio
Mercutio Dies
Death of Tybalt

III.i. Introduction
Morning Serenade
Juliet's Funeral
Death of Juliet

Lorin Maazel
Cleveland Orchestra



the tape of GEL compiled by Joey Pensak

Side A
idaho-a sound awake
sparklehorse-pig
kelly wingate-awake (demo)

[Joey was the drummer for Starkville's sole slowcore band Kelly Wingate, as it's a rare demo we won't make a snide comment about compiling yourself]

red house painters-shock me/sundays and holidays
belle + sebastian-expectations
those bastard souls-dirty looks
jeff buckley-so real
galaxie 500-forth of july

[double bonus points to Joey a late 90s era pupil for discovering my college classmates' band!]

natalie merchant-special oddity
red house painters-three legged cat

Side B
bjork-army of me/hyperballad
lisa germano-victoria's secret
hooverphonic-battersea
massive attack-teardrop
jsbx-bellbottoms
gbv-a salty salute

[Long Live Rockathon!]

tortoise-glass museum
morphine-the night

[I once stood in a queue outside the Great American Music Hall for a benefit performance of A Live Supreme by a host of Bay Area saxophone giants right next to Dana Colley; he was a pleasant fellow]

moby-porcelain





selected $WINGIN' UTTER$ compiler: Dane Johnson

Side A
from The streets of SF
Teenage Genoice
Storybook Disease
tied down, spit on
catatstrophe
MR BELIEVER
no place in the run
No Eager Men
JUST LIKE THEM
Soldier Boy
LAST CHANCE
All Laced Up
Expletive deleted
* + * + * + * + * +

Bonus Tracks

Side B
from A juvenile product of the working class
Windspitting Punk
no time to play
Nowhere Fast
KEEP RUNNING
Sustain
One in All
Sign it Away
Almost Brave
Londo Drunk
The Black Pint
Bigot's Barrel
a stop to go
The Next in Line
time tells time
* + * + * + * + * +

Bonus Tracks



Bulb's Light bulb on the water Zipede Doo Dah/The Glowbugs Uncle remos mix tape compilers: The Redondo children (Chris and Rachel) with production assistance from Donna J. Lee

Donna was a former student of mine who became a close friend after graduation. Following a lifelong interest in working with children—she partially paid for law school by working at the campus day care center—she spent one summer babysitting some kids. They wanted to make a "mix tape" for me; now of course they probably have virtual iTunes playlists. Still, The children are our future. This is by far the shortest mix tape discussed, but in many ways it is the truest to the ethos of cassette culture—totally homemade and completely unexpected, arriving out of the blue in the mail. It's also one of the few cassette letters I have ever received and certainly the nicest.

Side A
Intro-"Hello G.E. I've got an idea let's do 'Lightbulb on the water'"
The Glowbugs (aka Rachel and Chris)-Lightbulb on the water

[track sung Karaoke-style to the tune "Candle on the Water" from Pete's Dragon]

The Glowbugs-Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, Song of the South

[1947 Academy Award for Best Original Song]

Chopsticks on synthesizer interlude
Personal message and farewell

Side B
30:00 (of tape hum, buzz, and assorted other "white noises")

[A precocious homage to John Cage]

Here endeth the "Nine Lessons and Carols" on the Art of the Mix/Cassette Culture!

The kids are alright.

Just back from Tuscaloosa and day one of the Strode Symposium: Les Enfants Terribles, a meeting of the supposedly six best Shakespearean drama scholars under 40. At least I knew two of them and one of those is a good good friend, Bryan Reynolds of UC Irvine and "transversal poetics" fame.We first hung out at the Ritz Carlton Buckhead! You see the annual Shakespeare Association Meeting was always booked by this rich female professor from Vanderbilt, Ann Jennalie Cook, and she went for the best hotel or at least an old grand dame in each town (We did the Drake in Chicago par example). Anyway Bryan and I sat at the same table for the big boring lunch and hung out at the bar for much of the remainder of he conference. My favorite memory of our yearly SAA meetings was the ride from Albuquerque to Sante Fe and the rooftop lunch at Mark Miller's Coyote Cafe, featuring Baja pescado soft corn tacos.

Last fall I got to visit with Bryan, his wife (a former student! but she came back to school at like 30 after a lengthy modeling career), and newborn baby on his home turf. He was the host for the annual group on Early Modern Cultural Studies which met at the Newport Beach Marriott on the Pacific bluffs right across the street from Fashion Island! That's for all you OC fans out there. We even survived the massive wildfires and managed to return back to Starkvegas on schedule.

He's a cool cat, and I was extremely pleased he was honored by Gary Taylor and The Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies for his accomplishments. We had a good time quaffing an ale at Egan's Bar across University Blvd from the egregious Houndstooth sports bar. Lunch at Bento's which used to be the Thai place on University Boulevard above Subway.

Now as to the conference:

9:30
Carla Mazzio (University of Chicago)
"'The History of Air': Shakespeare and the Evaporating Self"

10:30
Bryan Reynolds (University of California, Irvine)
"Transversal Theater: Subjunctivity and Intelligence to Hamlet Beyond Baboons".

11:30 lunch (any interested faculty invited)

1:00
Starting a Career: six really successful young academics under 40 talk and answer questions about research, teaching, mentors, conferences, job searches, networking, technology, panic, grants, etc.

2:00
Tiffany Stern (Brookes University, Oxford, England)
"Watching as Reading -- the Audience and Text in the Early Modern Playhouse"

It was fun to be around a group of really smart people with an intense interest in an area I know a little something about. I could have extended conversations on the following kinds of topics without anybody looking at me like I'm a wierdo:

air as constitutive medium for communication
humoral psychology and consciousness
aqueous versus non-aqueous "vapors"
whether or not "fatwood" was a current usage in renaissance English
Baboons and "Machiavellian intelligence"
4 plus kinds of "plot" in renaissance stage materialism but primarily the kind of plot or argument attached to a play as brief precis
The failure of the star system in improving higher education as evidenced by the utter inanity of Helen Vendler's Sonnets books (she spent nine years on a vanity project which doesn't forward scholarship one iota but somehow she still managed to win nine major fellowships to a tune of probably $3/4 million, money which would have been better spent on a wide array of other projects which were actually expanding our knowledge base. The Euroskeptic contingent also bitched about the fact she was arrogant enough to read the sonnets herself on the accompanying CD-rom. I don't buy the argument that they must be read by a man even if historically it's probably accurate (re: the circulation of MS culture between a coeterie of male aristocrats, sprezaturra, and all that). Still, her book on Keats' Odes remains essential reading for romanticists everywhere.

I won't be able to attend tomorrow's session as I prepare for another 119 Edgewood blowout, but here's the schedule:

10:00
Lukas Erne (University of Neuchatel, Switzerland)
"Biography and Criticism: The Modern Reception of the Early Modern Author"

11:00
Karen Britland (Keele University, England)
"'Music to all eyes'": the spectacle of Harmony in Tempe Restored"

12:00
Lunch for six speakers with Strode graduate students

2:00
Ewan Fernie (Royal Holloway University of London, England)
"Shakespeare and Agency"

3:00
A 45-minute panel on "The Future of Renaissance Drama Studies" featuring all six speakers

Fernie is an especially interesting and challenging oppositional thinker in the best British tradition. His first book was about Shame in Shakespeare.

Rock you like a hurricane.

Beer and the Bard or how Dutch hops made the English English

Shillingsburg made me do it

Funny I was good enough for Oxford University Press

Jonesin' in USA Today

Being for the benefit of Mr. Peel

Wire at the Double Door in Chicago

The Fieldstones, Memphis Blues Today!: You simply must buy this record

Perhaps My Favorite Song of All Time

Thanks, Eric!