London: Day 4

Oct 16 - Slept well until about 2:00 am, then read and played solitaire until 4:00 am. Damn jet lag.  Waking at 7:00 was difficult, but I had breakfast and dozed again until 9:00.

Well-rested, I took the tube to Waterloo Station and walked around in the light rain.  I made it all the way down to the Globe by 11:00 and took the tour.  Much better than expected. The tour guide had a light Scottish brogue and was really funny.  The other tours weren't roaring with laughter the way we were. Interesting things I learned: The soliloquies were originally addressed directly to the audience because back then, they could see the audience.  Also, the reason the plays had 5 acts was that when they performed indoors (not in open daylight), they had to put in new candles.  The candles didn't last long.

After wandering the museum, I walked (a long walk!) to the Old Vic Theatre where I saw Much Ado About Nothing with James Earl Jones as Benedick! Vanessa Redgrave was supposed to play Beatrice, but she was ill and her understudy performed quite well.  Great play set in WWII Britain.  Claudio, Conrad, Borrachio, Don John, and, of course, Benedick were members of the Tuskegee Airmen and were all black men played with American accents.  It worked great with that play and having Benedick and Beatrice played as much older worked better than I'd thought going in.  Good stuff!

The walk to the Old Vic was super rainy, so I broke down and bought an umbrella.  I think my phone suffered, as now it's sitting in rice and healing.  I hope.  The buttons work fine, but the screen doesn't respond to touch.  Bleah.  Hope it heals.

I'm back in the hotel with another bottle of Pinot Noir and some fruit and yogurt.  A fresh baguette (still warm) and more cheese to top it off.

Considering a tourist-y tour tomorrow, as it's supposed to be the only sunny day this week.

Happy Birthday to the Bard

I'm celebrating in my usual manner. I hope all of you are, as well.

Happy 543rd Birthday

Shakespeare turns 543 today and I celebrated with a reading of Hamlet and took the day off from work.

(Actually, I took the day off because I competed in a karate tournament in San Francisco yesterday and I am exhausted.)

So I plan to read a few articles, anticipate Bill Bryson's biography of the bard, and not get too hung up on what he might have looked like.

I hope you'll celebrate in your usual ways...

Stuff that has been sitting in my temp files

I haven't taken the time to post lately, but it seems I have had time to collect assorted musings and links, so here we go:

• William Shakespeare, da Bard
• Scott Esposito has a marvelous blog column about book reviews that is well thought-out and gives some good advice on writing reviews, as well as reading them with a critical eye. You can be sure I will be posting more reviews, as this article was enough to make me want to write them.
• The Villanelle is the Most Restrictive of all Sandwich Forms
• Serpents Upon a Wingèd Vessel

Happy Birthday, Will

I decided that April 23rd would be a good time to break my hiatus and start blogging again.

Today is William Shakespeare's 442nd birthday and I'm celebrating in my own quiet way (reading some of the plays). I wish I could celebrate in other ways, but alas...

I've been slowly making my way through Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt. I don't usually like to read biographies in general and I really don't much like reading about Shakespeare as much I like reading his actual works. But this is a very readable book with a lot of great insights. I love how Greenblatt takes the simple facts about Shakespeare's everyday life and childhood and links them to the content of his writing. It's fascinating and well-written and I would recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in Shakespeare or Elizabethan times.

A few morsels

January is definitely my busiest time of the year. After work, I just want to stay away from computers. So here are a few things I stumbled upon during my hiatus that I wanted to share:

• Hamlet by P.G. Wodehouse.
• And in the ever-lengthening list of books I want to read: Umberto Eco has a collection of essays - On Literature.
• Technology is amazing. Now you can download your own personal PDA. Okay... so it's a piece of paper. But it's a very cool piece of paper!

Have a good January. I hope to post before the month ends, but don't hold your breath.

miscellany

The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, Told Entirely in Emoticons

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And, for my amusement: Me. As rendered by Googlism.

mona is a fine person
mona island/planeta
mona is mocking me
mona island
mona is an ideal retreat for student travelers and groups
mona is not "busty" exactly
mona is practically flat top
mona is situated in a pleasant area of douglas just 40 yards from the promenade
mona is a truly unlikable and selfish character
mona is a murder mystery parody that doesn't have the gumption to go for the jugular
mona is the ultimate in luxury accommodation
mona is often compared to galápagos
mona is made into a useful object
mona is
mona is shown
mona is a logic
mona is located in downtown los angeles
mona is not confined to any particular project type
mona is seventeen and has nine brothers and sisters
mona is ambitious because she is smart enough to start a small delivery business to finance her pageant dues
mona is now played by minnie driver
mona is a well
mona is the most important technology in the book
mona is 5 percent
mona is a dancer and prostitute
mona is a pointless and horrific dark comedy
mona is rarely by herself
mona is dead in the water
mona is so relentlessly obnoxious she makes roseanne look like mary poppins
mona is approximately 742
mona is going to be one year old
mona is on the air
mona is going headfirst over a cliff
mona is fashion company
mona is largely due to ms
mona is no exception
mona is a solid
mona is never outrageous enough to make you fall into the sort of silly mood a film like this needs to
mona is only about 8
mona is at deirdre?s funeral
mona is the
mona is a substantial woman with an effervescent personality that pops out in loud bursts of joviality
mona is this
mona is drawn to the "glamorous" world of "little miss" beauty pageants
mona is posing near a former slaveholding fortress in west africa for a photo shoot
mona is my sister
mona is retiring and all the nannies are celebrating with her
mona is the only museum anywhere devoted exclusively to northwest art
mona is a pubescent kali on roller blades
mona is a deeply bad comedy
mona is temporarily replacing our secretary
mona is as pretty as a picture
mona is made up of 3 bunnies
mona is tickling herself" by lisa
mona is forced to run several odd jobs to pay off the fees for the pageant entries
mona is an active file system that cooperates with user processes to accomplish tasks
mona is singing and composing better than ever
mona is recognized as an ice environment and information technology specialist
mona is a woman of power
mona is a lot like watching an episode of wheel of fortune
mona is a team player
mona is a trojan horse which deletes files on drive a
mona is now shipping with drivers for windows 95/98/2000/xp/mac/wdm/asio/gsif
mona is somewhat troubled
mona is a divisive hierarchical clustering method
mona is a dark comedy parody of a whodunit
mona is the best tv sitcom i've ever paid seven bucks to see
mona is an adult shepherd mix
mona is merely a registered narcissist
mona is a faculty member at marywood university in scranton
mona is home to giant lizards that can be seen sunning themselves along the 200
mona is foremost the brainchild of bourgeau
mona is basically a very powerful add on similar to a very high end sound card that adds a whole load of flexibility to your studio
mona is the norse goddess of the moon after which monday was named
mona is that the midler character really doesn't act all that differently or all that more outrageously than anyone
mona is a novel approach to file system extensibility that provides heretofore unseen flexibility
mona is presented in a 1
mona is a detector array specialized to detect neutrons
mona is asking for help
mona is certainly self confident and is very much the terrier in personality
mona is a funny and entertaining

Some Shakespearean particles

Some tidbits on Shakespeare:

• Seems they want to dig up Will's body to see if he may have been murdered by his son-in-law.
• And there is yet another candidate in the "who really wrote Shakespeare's plays" debate. Frankly, I am in the "Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare" camp, but the debate is sometimes amusing, and there's one pretty good novel that came of it.
• And if anyone wants to get me a nice Christmas present...

more thought particles

A few rants, chuckles and a farewell:

• I have a few grammatical pet peeves that cause me to grind my teeth. The laziness of people to not figure out the difference between "lay" and "lie," for instance. Whenever I hear my co-worker tell her dog to "Lay down!" I have to bite my tongue. (It reminds me of the comic strip where the man tells his dog, "lay down" and the dog rolls onto its back. The man tells the dog, "speak" and the dog looks up at him and says, "that's lie down.") So when I listen to the radio, I expect a certain amount of proper word usage. I listened to Ed Gordon (an experienced interviewer and journalist) on NPR interviewing a woman about adoption, and imagine my gnashing of teeth when I hear him mis-use the word "reticent" in the phrase, "...people aren't as reticent to take in kids..." Reticent means "inclined to keep silent or uncommunicative. What he really means is reluctant, which means "struggling against; resisting." Ack.
• A chuckle from my favorite comic site: Shakespeare...
• The worst phrasebook ever written.
• And a farewell to John Fowles, dead at age 79. His book, The Magus, is still one of my all-time favorites, and I still get chills if I think about it too much.

Yet another biography...

It's no secret that I love Shakespeare's plays. What a lot of people don't undertand about my love of the work, however, is that it doesn't necessarily translate into a desire to read about Shakespeare himself. I do have a copy of Stephen Grenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare in my pile of books to be read. And some kind soul gave me a copy of Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Humana few years ago. (I am reluctant to admit I haven't picked it up.) But the truth is, I'd rather pick up a copy of a play and re-read it than read a biography or any treatise about his work.

But it seems that there are always new biographies coming out. I don't plan to read Peter Ackroyd's biography, despite the good press on it so far. But I am intrigued that Bill Bryson is working on his own Shakespeare bio. I adore Bryson's writing... I may have to get that one.

Unstable Particles

• In accordance with The Lynne Truss Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, the press is having a hard time deciding whether to go with the official version, or be grammatically correct.


• Shakespeare Was, Like, The Ultimate Rapper.


• Kit Weinert gives us Rules for Modern Poets to Live and Maybe Roast By, and he does it beautifully…


• “Really, rhyme or not rhyme isn’t the issue for a poem. What matters is whether a poem is good or not, true or not”

Particulate matter

Sorry for the silent period. I've been out of town visiting parents, in-laws and other wonderful people. Or I've been enjoying Reno in July (this really is a great town...!).

~~~~~~~
I've always loved reading a good book review. This, however, is the first book review that made me laugh hysterically and made me wonder about this ummm... book.

~~~~~~~
And a brief interview with poet Juliana Spahr brought a smile.

"I like poetry because it helps me think. It helps me resort data. It lets me list things and then think about the shape of the list. I am not sure I can make poetry do much more than this. I don't trust poetry when it tells me what to do without resorting the way I see things first. "

Check out her poems, too. Simply lovely, in my opinion...

~~~~~~~
And does anyone want to finance a year-long trip to Stratford for a poor accountant/blogger who happens to adore Shakespeare? Sir Ian McKellen as King Lear... Patrick Stewart in The Tempest... I think I may be salivating on the keyboard.

~~~~~~~

Bits of Shakespeare news

So, it appears that one of my favorite authors is writing a biography of Shakespeare. Quote from the English Heritage interview with Bill Bryson:

What are you working on next?

I'm doing two biographies - one on me, one on William Shakespeare.

I am not much on reading about Shakespeare as I am reading his actual works, but I am currently enjoying Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, despite the many reviews I've read stating it isn't very accurate, even for speculative work. And I won't miss Bryson's when it comes out, but just because I love the way he writes.


And the critics are not too keen on The Stratford Festival's mixture of As You Like It set in the US 1960s and a musical score featuring the Barenaked Ladies. Maybe you should go see another production.


A school in Utah has decided to cancel all Shakespeare courses. Apparently it "doesn't sufficiently advance the state core curriculum." And why do courses have to "boost students' chances for jobs, college, human development or improved test scores," to be worthwhile? And who decides what boosts human development? Apparently power-lifting doesn't either.

Not that you need to remind me...

But every once in a while it's nice to know others know just how great he is.

They ran out of Shakespeare?

Okay, it wasn't just me. Billy Collins really does do the same show everywhere. But I shouldn't be too harsh on the poor guy. At least he's packing 'em in and poetry is being had by all.

Which reminds me: there's a job opening I know I'm perfect for. Heh.

And our headline for today: The Royal Shakespeare Company isn't performing any Shakespeare. Ostensibly, the reason they are doing this is "to give audiences a break from the Bard before the company presents the whole canon of Shakespeare’s work in a year (2006-7)." The whole canon. Wow. Does someone feel like funding a trip to England? I promise to bring back a full report...

Ah, well.

A very special day

Currently reading: Hamlet

Okay. It’s something I do every April 23rd: I re-read Hamlet. I am not sure why that play in particular, but it’s become tradition.

Happy Birthday, Will.

Everyone else... celebrate as you usually do.

Fun with Amazon

Currently reading: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind

I read this book a few years ago and it horrified me. But it is so well written and well crafted, I had to re-read it. I highly recommend it, but not for the squeamish or faint of heart.

The reason I brought up this book was that it turned me on to a new feature on Amazon. Unfortunately, the feature isn’t there for all books, but I browsed through some old favorites and quickly became addicted.

This feature lists the 100 most used words in the book in question, and the number of occurrences of each one. It lists the number of words and characters in the book and the complexity of the words used (such as percentage of words with three or more syllables, average syllables per word and words per sentence). It also gives you the Flesch-Kincaid index (which shows the grade-level of readability of the book), and a fun stat that tells you the number of Words per Dollar and Words per Ounce. Heh.

Perfume has a Flesch-Kincaid index of 10.6, which means it is written at an approximately 10th grade reading level. The word “perfume” is used 252 times.

The coolest feature, however, is the SIP’s, or, Statistically Improbable Phrases. Amazon scans the contents of a book and finds phrases that are, amongst all books, statistically improbable (though not necessarily within the book), and shows us instances this phrase occurs in other books. It’s fun to see the connections.

For example, Perfume has a listing for the phrase “essence absolue,” which shows instances of the phrase in State of the Fantastic : Studies in the Theory and Practice of Fantastic Literature and Film (Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy) by Nicholas Ruddick and in Reap the Wind by IRIS JOHANSEN.

Some more fun stuff I found out:

Ulysses uses the word “said” 1207 times and has a Flesch-Kincaid index of 6.8!! And here I was still struggling to get through the book... And the phrase “met him pike hoses” appears in a book called The Flute Book: A Complete Guide for Students and Performers by Nancy Toff. Hmmm. Makes you wonder.

Hamlet has a readability level of 5.5. Please don’t tell me Shakespeare is hard to read... Heh.

One of my favorite books, Jitterbug Perfume, has a Flesch-Kincaid index of 8.6 and uses the word “beet” 161 times. The lists of SIPs is impressive and funny.

I’ll not bore you with more stats. But go explore. It’s addictive.