Month: January 2009

http://www.mahalo.com/member/shakespearegeek Don’t know if you’re heard about “Mahalo Answers” yet, but I’m having fun with it.  Much like Yahoo Answers it is a “human search engine” where people post questions, then answers are rated on quality to achieve a theoretical “best answer.”  Mahalo adds the twist of tipping (real money!) so if a question is important to you, you can offer a couple of bucks encouraging people to provide quality answers and not waste everybody’s time. When something like this crops up I almost always try to carve out a little ShakespeareGeek niche.  Never hurts to build brand.  I want to achieve a point where people associate “Shakespeare Geek” as an entity, and can type it into a search engine and find me. 🙂 There’s not much Shakespeare content in there, although they do have a section for Shakespeare questions.  Most of them, I think, are posed by me to drum up some conversation.  Stop by if you get a sec, it’s fun.

Hurray, I love book giveaways! My friends over at Harper Collins wrote to let me know that Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare : The World As Stage is now available in paperback and asked if I would like to review it. “Already did!” I happily responded.  “Loved it.  Recommend it to all my friends.  But I’ll happily give some away.” They agreed, and we came up with a contest.  Since I originally described the book as one of the few (only?) Shakespeare books that I have let non-Shakespearey friends borrow, I proposed a “One to keep, one to share” contest.  Three winners will be chosen at random to receive *TWO* copies of Bryson’s book, in paperback.  One for you, and one for you to giveaway to someone.    (You can also buy the book directly from these retailers if you really have to have it!) To enter, all you need to do is comment on this post and tell us who you’d give the book to, and why.  A friend, a relative?  Donate it to a school?  Something else?  BONUS!  Continuing on the sharing theme, let’s say that you get an entry in the drawing for the comment you leave, and also for any other friends you can get to come enter the contest and let us know who sent them.  Got that?  So let’s say that user catkins posts a comment and says “I’d donate a copy to the local library.”  And then Angela comes along and says, ‘”Catkins sent me.  I’d give a copy to my coworker Rebekah.”  Angela gets an entry for her comment, and Catkins gets two – one for his comment, one for introducing a friend to the contest. (Got it?  Too complicated?  You can do it, I have faith.  Don’t hate me for trying to draw some new traffic 😉 If I’ve left anything unclear in the rules please let me know ASAP so I can update this text, thanks!)   Contest ends Jan 31, so  you’ve got two weeks to get your friends to play along.  NOTE that in order to win I’ll need to a) reach you to let you know you’ve won, and b) get a mailing address where to send the book.  Certainly we can’t enforce that you really give away the second copy, that’s up to you.  Please also note that the books will be coming directly from the publisher, Harper Collins.   Thanks again to Danny from Harper Collins for the offer, and helping me work out the rules of the contest.  With that, let’s get started and spread some Shakespeare love around!

http://www.curriculum.org/app/searchEval.tcl?BID5=8342&SID5=2000658&COMP5=&SELF5=&rawSearch2=&searchListType=fullrecord&lang=0&dev=&grade=G3&subject_code=all&age=all&resource_type=Classroom%20Resource&resOrigin=TDR My freshman year in college (engineering school, no less) I was taking a humanities course, final quarter, and the professor told us that we had to go and see a play at New Voices, the amateur festival put on by the college.  New Voices, at the time #6, was a week long opportunity for the students to write, direct, produce and star in original plays.  I had a great time. Something about the experience stuck with me, and I started writing plays.  No training, and I’m not a theatre major either.  But I did have plays in NV#7, 9, 10 and 11.  So that brings me back to the link above, to a classroom resource ebook entitled Move Over Shakespeare and appears to be for teaching students how to write a play.  In general I don’t love Shakespeare being lumped in with every other playwright in the known universe, but I can live with it.

http://www.shmoop.com/events/literature/william-shakespeare/the-tempest.html Something about the URL caught my eye.  This is just one of many “no fear” type of sites that summarize the plays, but I particularly liked their style.  It’s very introductory, but that’s my thing – I’d much rather introduce kids to a light and fluffy version of the story to hook them, and then show them the real thing later.  It’s tough to strike a balance between “trust me, this is fun, look at all the jokes and comedy” and “No, seriously, you are reading what many people consider to be the greatest literature ever written, genuflect whenever you turn the page.”  But I thought from a quick skim that this site did a fair job at it. Note what I said, though – kids.  Younguns.  What I hate and have always hated is when older kids (nay, adults) use sites like this as their one and only exposure to Shakespeare, figuring that if they just get the plot and characters then it’ll be enough to pass the test or hold a conversation at a party.  That’s the logic I use with my children.  My 4yr old knows plot and character, don’t be getting all proud of yourself. What if you’re an adult with no exposure to Shakespeare?  That troubles me, but I realize it’s a legit question.  Any adult that comes up to me and says, “I’ve never read Shakespeare before, where should I start?” automatically wins points for *wanting* to learn, when they don’t have to.  Those are not the folks who are going to say “Ok, cool, I read the Cliff Notes now I’m all set.”  I’m perfectly happy to direct those folks to a summary/paraphrasing of the work, with the strong suggestion that they see the show and read the original as well.

Last night my 2yr old son and I were playing a game I think I’ll call “Human iPod.”  That is when, to get him to go to sleep, he says the name of a song, you sing it, and then this repeats until he says, “That’s it.”  You are then free to leave the room. He repeats a regular sequence – Baa Baa Black Sheep, ABC, Doe-A-Deer, “Here’s the Story” (yes, the Brady Bunch theme song), Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and Frosty the Snowman.  At any given time he may start singing along, and often in the car you can hear him do some of the shorter ones start to finish all by himself. Last night he stuck a new one in there on me:  Shall I Compare Thee.  I said, “Really?”"  He said, “Yeah.”  So I proudly sang Sonnet 18 to my 2yr old son. I hope he asks for it every night.  If I catch him singing it to himself on car rides I am taking that show on the road. 🙂