Month: August 2007

http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules/2007/08/only-the-bad-ne.html Forbes magazine offers, via Jerry Bowyer, the “Much Ado About Nothing Analytical Tool” for reading the business news.  It goes like this:

1. Make two columns on your piece of paper.
2. For everything you find that is factual, like “Hero is faithful”, write it in the left column.
3. For everything that is more about feelings and perceptions, like “Claudio thinks Hero is not faithful”, write it in the right column.
4. Then when you’re done, read the columns separately.

Extended out to the business news, the left shows you a picture of how the world really is, while the right shows you how the people perceive it.  Bonus points to the article for recognizing that it’s a matter of time for the right to catch up with the left.  In other words, eventually the facts do come out and people stop fooling themselves.  At least, about that set :).  By that time, a whole new set of facts has emerged for people to fool themselves.

http://bookology.wordpress.com/2007/08/24/starring-mr-rogers-as-macbeth/ The above post has so much Shakespeare goodness that I don’t have the time to summarize it all.  Go read.  Right on the money that Shakespeare may be a master, but that doesn’t mean that he’s above a little poking fun.  I have not yet checked out the media files, but as they say in the geek circles, “dugg for the Branagh reference at the end.” 🙂  Enjoy!

http://sarsaparillablog.net/?p=592 Ages ago, I remember it well, I was a front end manager at the neighborhood supermarket during my freshman year of college.  The woman who worked the night shift me was a retired English professor.  We got to talking about Shakespeare (shows how long my geekery goes back, I guess) and King Lear came up.  She said, and it’s always stuck with me:  “If the entirety of human civilization were to die out tomorrow, all evidence of its existence erased save one thing, that one thing should be King Lear.”  I found it a powerful endorsement, to say the least. Allison Croggon’s review of Peter Brooks’ King lear is damned near art all by itself:  “…it seems to me that when I say something is a masterpiece, I mean that its achievement is not that it rises into some lofty empyrean sphere where history no longer exists. It’s a masterpiece because it does the opposite: because it makes a gesture so potent that it seems to draw all human experience into its gravity, because it reaches deep into individual and collective memory and hauls experience, naked and bloody, into the present.”   Go read the whole thing, you won’t regret it. 

[I just realized that this story from the other day ended up on my other blog…] The other day I blogged about how bringing home a Shakespeare action figure kicked off a whole round of telling my 3 and 5 yr olds stories from Shakespeare. Yesterday I hear my 3yr old playing and she says, “The girl was on the island, and then the witch threw her in the dungeon.” “What’s the witch’s name?” I ask, nodding at my wife to “Watch this…” “Sycorax,” says my daughter. Love it. The best part is how she knows about Sycorax (the witch from The Tempest, by the way) in the first place is even better.  I don’t tell them about her, because she’s not really crucial to the main storyline.  “Daddy,” asks my 5 year old, “How many girls are in this story?” “Just one.  Miranda is the only girl.” “But in my book, I saw somebody else with long hair, and I think it’s another girl.”  I may have mentioned that I have a comic book version of The Tempest kicking around. “That’s probably one of the pirates,” I tell her. “I don’t think so,” she says, and goes to get the book. Sure enough, she’s looking at a picture of Sycorax.  So I have to explain how that’s the witch Sycorax, who ruled the island until Prospero came and kicked her off. And how she was Caliban’s mom, and mean to Ariel and put her in a tree, until Prospero rescued her.

“Paradox” merits a link just for the magnitude of the task she’s set herself (as an independent study, no less).  She’s writing a Shakespearean style play about the Bard’s life, based on the connections between his life and his works.  She’s got the dynamics of his marriage from Richard III, and now she’s on Merchant of Venice having seen a book entitled “Shylock and Shakespeare.” She then launches into a comparison of Portia to women in the church of Latter Day Saints, and a lengthy discussion of her own thoughts on her (someday) LDS marriage.  Quite an intriguing post. Good luck!