"It is a tale told by an idiot..."

I actually have a couple of interesting things to post about this week. The weather was quite nice today (45 degrees!), so there will be no complaining about that. Once a year, our school offers various seminars in place of our normal afternoon curriculum. These seminars are part of the medical humanities curriculum our school boasts of - the sole purpose of which is to ensure that we don't become dicks to our patients. Basically, we get to choose from a variety of arts and humanities courses in some way related to medicine so we can learn to deal with the "human condition." This is a fancy way of making sure we know how to deal with nuances and problems without obvious answers. I loved my seminar last year, and it turned out to be the only class other than neuro that I actually enjoyed. I wrote a paper comparing the portrayal of humanity and its values in the 1950s version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "Pan's Labyrinth." Yeah, I love this shit...

On the list of courses this year, I saw one on Medicine and Macbeth. I haven't read Shakespeare in forever and I love his work, so I signed up for this course. For once, it's actually better than I imagined. Our instructor is OBSESSED with blood (you'd like her, Sami), which proves to be handy for this play. She made us go around and introduce ourselves last week, but we also had to give one fact about blood. She then proceeded to educate us on the 16th-17th century theories of how the body created blood - it made the blood directly from the food you ate, so eating a lot meant you had a hell of a lot of blood, thus the keen interest in blood-letting - and the natural state of the body formed from the various humours. This was possibly the most interesting physiology lecture I've ever had. Sigh. 

Anyway, we went to see a live production of Macbeth this afternoon at Navy Pier. All of us were literally blown away by the adaptation. None of us had been to this theater, and we honestly thought it would be a crappy little production for tourists visiting Chicago. Apparently, Chicago Shakespeare Theater is a world-renowned theater group. It really was impressive. The theater was small and built in the model of The Globe, but on a smaller, more comfortable scale. It had similar tiers and the stage jutted out into the audience and was on a similar level as the crowd. There really wasn't a bad seat in the house. 

They created a modern adaptation, so the soldiers wore camouflage fatigues and carried guns. It was super bloody and violent. They show Macbeth literally cutting a dude in half at the very beginning. The witches show up as part of the media following Macbeth, and later on Macbeth finds them in a fetish strip club. Lady Macbeth, who famously prays to be unsexed, was pretty much running around naked the whole time. And she was super crazy, which was fun/disturbing to see live. Everything was just done so well. It was great to be able to sit and watch something so rich with nuance and meaning. Every movement, every direction meant something. I really need to make sure I go again at some point.

I also watched a modern movie adaptation by the BBC. James McAvoy was Macbeth, and it was oddly great. I say 'oddly' because Macbeth is the head chef of a restaurant and Duncan is the restaurant's owner. It works really well though. I think my new favorite line ever is "There are pigs landing on my head!" ... I think you all need to see it to understand (it's on Netflix's instant watch under Shakespeare Retold). 

 

So yeah, that's all. I'm going to NYC next week, which I am super excited about. Dude, look at me being excited about things! Yay!