When You Suffer from Withdrawal and Need a Written Word Fix

It began like my Tuesdays generally do: with an open to close day at the bridal salon. Just tonight I was talking with a coworker, at my second job, that I never truly saw a need to dislike the general public until I began working retail. They can be an interesting amalgamation of personalities, but in the wedding industry, they are generally nosey, or "simply curious" is how they might phrase it. Figurative language at its finest, I assure you.

I talk about books and reading often at the bridal salon. That and what shows we are all watching on television. If I do not, I get to answer, "Are you seeing anyone?" or "Are you married?" multiple times a day, when I am not asking the necessary nuptial-oritented questions. Being a sales consultant affords me the ability to meet the people us readers only ever dream about. One of the brides I worked with is a manager at a B&N in the metro area. Another was having a literature themed wedding: she looking for something Roaring 20s, her groom to be decked in Regency attire. There is something satisfying about knowing all those Pinterest book lovers' wedding photographs are not staged and that such couples actually exist. It gives readers like me hope that a wedding registry at Barnes&Noble may, one day, become in-vogue or a trend worth initiating.

This particular Tuesday began with a series of text message exchanges between myself and a girlfriend I had not seen in over a month. Considering our fourteen minute commute between front doors, and the fact that I perceive Denver, Colorado to be "down the road," such extended absence is frowned upon. We were to grab coffee at the conclusion of my shift, presuming we closed on time, which almost never happens rolling into summer wedding season.

By her lunch break, we were calling for a second rain check. She felt bad. Someone had given her tickets to the Pens game that night and she wanted me to come with her. Puck dropped at 7pm. I reminded her I was not done until 7, but the Devil often controls quitting time. She would need to leave no later than 6 if she was to beat out traffic, maybe earlier for decent parking. I insisted she make arrangements with someone who actually had been to a hockey game before and we would have coffee another time.

She relented and I promptly moved up plans with a friend I was not to see until Thursday. We graduated high school together and, in Fall 2012, realized we had transferred to the same university back home after taking a seat in a Travel Writing class; she a Writing major, myself a History major. Since our December university graduation, and despite our seven minute door-to-door, it had been even longer since I had seen her. I had told her I was in need of a bookish fix. It followed in a similar series of texts recollected as such:

S: Hey! Plans have changed tonight. Still available to go book hunting?

A: Absolutely. I am always up for books.

S: Brilliant. My friend got tickets to a Pens game that starts when my shift is finished. I told her I would pass on attending.

A: Really? If given the choice is it not obvious: books? men wrestling on ice?

S: I will always choose books if given the choice, but I understand the allure of free tickets.

A: Taken. What time?

S: Done with work at 7 o'clock. Will confirm when we actually lock the shop door.

A: See you then.

Truly a magnificent alternate activity. I caught her up on my new, and rabid, love of Shakespeare brought on by the Hollow Crown. I explained to her the premise and the actors present: Ben Whishaw, Sir Patrick Stewart, Jeremy Irons, Tom Hiddleston, Clarence Posey, the actor who plays Argus Filch whose name always escapes me when I need it, and the awful villain of a business man in Sahara, among others. I then told her that Benedict Cumberbatch, whom she refers to a Fandom Fingers (an origin story I shall have to delight you with another time), is to be Richard III in the continuing Hollow Crown installments in 2016, after assuming Hamlet on the London stage in 2015.

Immediately, she declared me one of "those fans." Her insistence that Shakespeare characters are often flat followed us, from Best Buy to the Drama section of B&N, with the conclusion that Hamlet is her least favorite of the ones she has read because he is "a whiny, spoiled, complaining bitch of a prince who gets nearly everyone, including himself, killed." How her delivery, so matter of fact, often threatens to crush my rib cage in upon my lungs and heart.

I make no excuses about it, though. I experience explosive excitement when I know literature is being translated well. I can become excited about most things with minimal effort. If I am passionate about it or if it is particularly clever, I am hooked. And yet, she writes me off with chagrin when she is the one who admitted to me that she broke down and watched the Avengers for the same reason every fangirl on tumblr did: for Loki. One example of why I avoid tumblr like the modern day bubonic plague.

I am, most astutely, the kettle to her pot.

Despite the sharp contrasting views we may take in regards to the classics, there are things upon which we mutually agree:

1. Outside of J.K. Rowling, no author may have defined our childhood more than Brian Jacques, whose last name I will still pronounce as if I were in intermediate French class in school and not in the Western-PA butchered pronunciation of "Jakes." I can think of no other reason an English author would allow such lazy syllabic emphasis.

2. A night of books will always be a better option than hockey because I do not need to wear a coat inside a temperature controlled bookstore. And why would I bother going to a hockey game? I am going to sit there reading and be cold doing it, without access to Earl Grey or English Breakfast or Chai tea. As a tea and not a coffee drinker, this is threatening violence or silence.

Her points cannot really be argued with or, for me, I can think of no better counter arguments. I will leave that to someone who understands the hockey. My sports knowledge is limited to four things: soccer (because I played it), basketball (a lot of my friends played it), equestrian (I trained for it and had that one PC game that taught you all the rules), and tennis (my little brother was doubles champion one summer, after three hip surgeries). My friend is an addict right along with me and that is vastly important. It takes a reader to know a reader. To have someone willing to hold you accountable in a book shop and vice versa, not in the way your mothers do because you cannot dawdle, but in the "they close at nine, we cannot sleep here" kind of way.

You need to have that friend who will make you feel better by telling you something that speaks to you on a core level. Whether it is recommending an audio book you chewed through in under four days because it became compulsion or it is the announcement that J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf is being released after NINETY years and what wretched grinch could possibly have withheld it for so long. You will both mutually agree they are, in the most cliched sense, tyrants.

My friend is the kind of friend who will go with me to every midnight Hobbit and Lord of the Rings premiere until the end of time. She also told me that anyone that did not think Desolation and Benedict's, unfortunately for her, perfect embodiment of Smaug was not the most accurate and fantastical thing to be realized about childhood that I should promptly remove them from my friends circle, both in reality and by virtual association. No one deserves to have such negativity in their lives.

That is the kind of friend you need. The kind where the stress of life can be alleviated by saying one word: Books. No question mark. No explication. Just books and maybe, going through withdrawal and they will be all too happy to assist in getting you both a fix of the best possible thing to be made of paper and ink. They will be the friend that would not think it ridiculous to take the literary tours, to fly all the way to Paris just to see Shakespeare & Company, who think Half Priced Books is a marvel, and who insist the Tattered Cover, in Denver, is what your heaven will look like.

Sometimes the cure for going through withdrawal for the book worm in us, is to take one friend, get in the car, get in an argument over literature or listen to a live recording of David Sedaris at Carnegie Hall, and drive. To a book store. A Starbucks. No where and back.

After all, there are two choices when you believe the words are missing: to read them or to write them.

Alright, We Need to Have It Out

We need to have a rather, in my opinion, important discussion. I know it will ruffle feathers, but we must draw lines in the sand or find the overlap in the venn diagram.

I want to discuss this literary medium oft referred to as "audio books." There is an individual wall for them in my city's tragic excuse for a library. Whole websites like Audible.com serve the every whim of endless novel recitations for those whom public transportation makes up 98% of their daily work commute or the avid road trip-takers who can cover breaths of road in a day.

If you are anything like my mother, you love a good audio book. She ensures she has a neat little stack of romance and comedy or the ill-fated, often microwave spliced experiment of those two genres. She would never consider leaving our town's mere adequate selection untouched when a road trip presents itself.

Conversely, if you have ever road-tripped with anyone like my dear mum, you most likely hate audio books. Maybe it is solely because the things she chose are not your first choices. Maybe auditory is not your preferred learning paradigm; it is most definitely not mine. Even more, perhaps it is the often static voices audio books are read in that make them truly dreadful 'trapped in a car for hours' listening. 

Why am I asking you these questions? Wednesday brought about a sudden change of heart for me. 

Let me explain my philosophy, first. I find myself a purist when it comes to my books: hardcover over all else, trade paper is usually what things are run in from the off now, and mass markets are strictly airport fauna. My father, forevermore known as Captain to you, decided that I should be privy to the first incarnation of Amazon's Kindle. A dreadful mistake on his part, however jovial his intentions had been. I despise it with a hatred toward something containing literature like you would not believe. It has no backlight, because that is frightful news for your retinas, and was always a sucker punch trying to turn the page. I kept flipping the Kindle itself, not pressing the 'next page' button. As comical as that may be, I refuse to believe that publishing will ever cease to exist in physical form. I will not allow it. The blessed thing about books? They do not run out of battery. 

Audio books are about the only thing I dislike on near equal ground to my first generation Kindle. I do not like having a story read to me. Part of me screams at the narrator, "If you are not going to delineate characters by changing your voice, you should not bother at all." The majority of me simply gets frustrated and knows I can read the book faster reading it than hearing it. 

Until Wednesday. You must understand a crucial shift. I positively love radio theatre, especially out of Great Britain. If you have not listened to the comedy radio show, "Cabin Pressure," there is actually little I can do for you than tell you go drop fifty dollars and wait with baited breath for the final episode to come out like the rest of us. If you have not heard the Radio Theatre's recordings of Oliver Twist and the Screwtape Letters, especially, Amazon has become your best friend.

Yet, this turn out is something different entirely. I began listening to an audio book on Wednesday night and have not stopped since. I am utterly enraptured. Completely caught up in the story, like every reader should be when they crack the spine, as cringe worthy a sound as it is. The narrator is exquisite, the prose eloquent, the narrative itself is a mystery thriller during the French Revolution. There is a sprinkle of romance. An impressively renown actor lends his vocal talent to the storyline and each character is an individual. He and she talk, act, and move different from each other. It is like having my own mind read the story out loud.

It is something we all do as readers. We develop this notion of what a character ought to sound, look, and act like within our mind's eye. It is what makes the translation between page and film so treacherous. It is the difference between listening to an audio book and believing you are listening to radio theatre and audio drama. 

This is why we needed to have it out. I want to know where you fall on the audio book line. And if you love them infinitely more than I do, which is not a difficult task, then I would like you to share your favorite stories and the requisite narrators.

Wednesday began with my alma mater on every major news network, between here and the BBC, for a mass-stabbing and me, awaiting news from family friends, listening to ambulance sirens and helicopter blades beating the air in rapid succession. Wednesday ended with literature serving as a solace, as it does in all circumstances, when the ability to enter a new reality is at its most crucial.

It ended with me downloading the zip file, sent by a friend in an effort to lighten my heart, of Sally Gardner's "The Red Necklace" narrated by one Tom Hiddleston. And now, half way through disc four out of five, I can say that maybe, if all novels were read with the same vivre and pin ache, books on audio could find their place on my shelf or on my iPod. If the voice actors that bring them to life serve the dynamic, I will gladly hang my coat on the bandwagon of people that consume pages on the daily commute by having someone read to them the way a book should always be read.

ENTER Agonizing Trouble

Back in December, this space was meant to be a place where I chronicled my ascent towards regaining a cultural savvy in regards to literature. Something quite the reverse has happened: I began a tail spin and irrecoverable decent into more BBC television shows, listened to the final series of Cabin Pressure (a most brilliant comedy for Radio4) and now, presently find myself mentally ticking the days for an air date announcement regarding the forty-five minute special finale which was recorded back in February at RADA Studios in London. I have completed my insanity maze by landing in Shakespeare.

[Enter] Agonizing Trouble.
agony. n.  1. extreme mental or physical suffering.  2. severe struggle.
trouble. n.  1. difficulty or distress; vexation; affliction

I have been bamboozled.
Hit by a Pittsburgh city bus (which, as a side note, is an honest probability).
Failed to "Mind the Gap."

It is going to sound 100% ludicrous. It began with an innocent email message chain between two girlfriends and myself. They believed I needed more BBC and British actors in my life, mistake one, and proceeded to lay waste with a singular suggestion. The Hollow Crown.

I am telling you now it is a trap.
Diving down the rabbit hole.
Fingers crossed that Sherlock poisoned your Earl Grey.
That the worst thing you find taped to your hat is a lemon.
Loki'd. By Steve.

It is an enigma of the most seductive kind.
Charismatic. Charming.
Romantic. Revealing. Raw.
Masculine. Feminine.
Redefines love-hate relationship.

The Hollow Crown proved one glaring fact about my education: Shakespeare should never be met in a classroom. And never reading it. Not a first.

That sounds contradictory, does it not? Here I am saying I was going to keep record of the books I plan to read and I got side-lined by a mini-series. Amazon Prime is a huge problem. I had wiggle room in my tight monthly two part-time job budget. I have free two-day shipping. I consumed nine hours of Shakespeare drama in two and a half days. With subtitles. Around working twenty of those sixty hours.

I discovered many things because of it:

• I found the complete and collected works of Shakespeare in a thrift store. for free. on my birthday.
• It has been open to some page, currently Gaunt's soliloquy from Richard II, for two months.
• As Americans, we are insurmountably lazy about our eloquence.
• We would sound exponentially more attractive to the world if we stopped talking faster than our brain.
• I decided my pattern of speech was eminently dull. Developing from iambic pentameter would improve my cadence. I have begun reading Romeo & Juliet to one of my cats. Thus far, she remains unimpressed. Not surprising. I am nonsense at acting.
• My desire to consume theatre skyrocketed. There is a direct correlation.
• I can barely stop speaking about it. I want to know what people have read themselves, what they recommend, what context they can provide.
• The first thing I did after watching the Hollow Crown was check out a book about the Shakespeare folios and then proceed to have a heart attack when I saw a most glorious little video clip of several people, reading from a First Folio--one of the most expensive books in the world--and turning the pages without gloves! 

See, it is things like that, despite peoples' obvious reverence, that make me sound insane. But that book is several centuries old and you all are touching it with oil covered fingers. Ah!

That is the agonizing trouble part. I hear it everywhere now. I am starting to talk in metaphor more and more frequent. I just gifted the Hollow Crown to a friend and in her card had to reduce Sonnet CXVI to  200 characters. Jaguar's new British villains campaign released a new spot this last week. Famous actor aside, Richard II was playing on the radio and was quoted at the end, in conjunction with the roar of the engine. Those words were the only thing I could think about when I pulled along side one on Friday evening leaving my second shift. I have watched it a dozen times. It is helping me memorize portions of a monologue that I had only heard first by Sir Patrick Stewart. Now, I have to find Olivier. 

And Shakespeare's birthday is coming up and I am ill-prepared. Watching the Hollow Crown with subtitles does not actually count as having read the plays in full, so my Shakespeare count stands at a measly, official, three: Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night. I read a massive portion of King John for a dramaturgy, but did not complete it. I was a sophomore in high school, I barely liked Romeo and Juliet. I find myself, currently, in the throws of Cymbeline. It is one of which I had never heard, but whose character names I am eminently familiar. 

This is, therefore, what I have decided to do instead. Shakespeare has become this consuming passion of mine. It makes me stupid, truly, because when I listen to all these actors I have admired for years talk about their characters or the story or the author, I realize how clever he was. He understood the human mind and the human condition and this thing I have called agonizing trouble, the chasing something just out your reach. His characters do it all the time. And so shall I.

I was not born and raised in England. I will never have the foundation of Shakespearean study that I now desperately wish I had. I will, most likely, never study Shakespeare at the Royal Academy or London Academy. I cannot tell you if I will ever see the Globe or Stratford-Upon-Avon. I would like to think that when 2015 rolls around, my friends and I will board a plane for an extended weekend in London to partake of Hamlet, but there are little guarantees. 

But I want you to walk with me, if you like. Or running would be even better. Running through the park I frequent, reciting Shakespeare, sounds like a medium for impressive cardiovascular strength. It is alright if you look at me funny. I am already that girl you see in the Pittsburgh suburbs with her car windows down, volume all the way up, singing and dancing to every word of Sham Rock or the Foundations or Seal or Macklemore because I have to be able to rap to one thing and sound impressively ridiculous. I suffer little doubt there is footage of it somewhere in a stone that has yet to be over-turned. 

Regardless of how silly is makes us look, I want you to come. I want you to become this crazy and openly passionate lyricist. Let us bring back this idea that eloquence does not have to sound, for lack of a better word, American, but more than simply being English, to disprove an encounter between a butler and a nanny. 

Come with me.

Walk with me.

Run with me.

Dance and sing with me.

Be a child again.

If we cannot behold Shakespeare afresh with childlike wonder in his 450th year, we are lost.

Pull out the five year old inside yourself. Pull your Shakespeare off the shelf. Pin down your cat.

Shall we begin? Yes. Yes, I quite like this. What a glorious confrontation awaits.

[ENTER] Agonizing Trouble.