Continuing on the music theme this week we have Lady Gaga Wrote Shakespeare’s Works from the American Shakespeare Center. I suppose you have to at least be familiar with who this chick is, to appreciate the funny.  Put it this way, 10 years ago I’m sure somebody wrote this exact article about Britney Spears.  Exact same idea.  Only here it’s all about “Poker Face”, the only real song of hers that anybody knows. Bonus points for recognizing the other music reference in my title :).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/may/03/classics.news Articles like this make me sad.  I don’t know the celebrity in question – Carol Vorderman? – but apparently she made a bit of a spectacle of herself on a television quiz show by missing a Shakespeare question and proclaiming him “dull as ditchwater.” Yawn. The points are all the same – what came first, his greatness or our worship of him? Is it all self-fulfilling?  And blah and blah and Harold Bloom and so on.  “The best Shakespeare is the Shakespeare we understand best,” the author writes. I like that line. Couple of interesting points, though, cheered me up: * The author noting that to decide for yourself whether Shakespeare is in fact dull, ideally you would have to know the plays in the first place.  Good point indeed, since this woman (the one on the tv show) failed her question.  Does that mean that she’s proclaiming Shakespeare dull from the position of someone who’s actually read him?  Or someone who has not? * “Toby Belch, as the name indicates, really is a pig; Shakespeare could as well have called him Fart.”  I love that the article’s not afraid to go there. 🙂 * “In my department, I’m happy to say, you won’t graduate unless you know all 39 well enough to take a six-hour exam on them.”  That could be fun.  Not sure I’d pass, but it’d be cool to live the life where I actually had an opportunity to try it. * “400 years on, no one will be watching reruns of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire…but will they still be performing and studying Shakespeare?  Nothing is more certain.” Damn straight. There’s also a pretty good Shakespeare test at the bottom, that I’m happy to report I got an average score (27 out of 55) on, just off the top of my head.  It’s somewhat unfair to we U.S.-bound (this being a UK article), as the final question is about modern English politics.

Ok, this one’s a little silly but I couldn’t resist. Whenever Cracked.com puts up an article that might have anything even remotely to do with Shakespeare, I go have a look.  Such is the case with “7 Books We Lost to History That Would Have Changed The World”.   No, there’s no Coriolanus or anything that (the list is primarily science and religion books). However, I did find a reference that made me laugh out loud for the timing of it:

Ever heard of that Coen Brothers movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? What about James Joyce’s Ulysses? Or Cold Mountain? Or 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or William Shakespeare or Bob Dylan? They were all influenced by The Iliad and The Odyssey, and we could easily go on.

I used to mistakenly refer to such moments as “serendipitous”, but that’s not the right use of that word.  Instead I now call them “small universe” moments.   For an even more esoteric one that nobody but me could possibly get, I’ll tell you the story of reading Julius Caesar in…I want to say ninth grade English class.  We had a writing assignment which was to mimic a newspaper article reporting on the death of Caesar.  Well it just so happens that I was taking Latin as my foreign language requirement, and in studying ancient Rome I’d learned that their version of “A.D / B.C” for calendars counted from something called “Ab Urbe Condite”, which if I remember translates roughly as “From the founding of the city”.  So, I put that on my paper as part of the byline:  “Rome – March 15, 175 A.U.C”.  Nobody knew what it meant, and I had to explain it. ANYWAY, like I was saying … it’s the name of the #2 book on the Cracked list. 🙂

Ok, the music thing seems popular, and coincidentally it’s come up again, this time with a completely different friend.  I mentioned in passing that I was going through some Police music, and just didn’t find it that interesting to my taste.  Conjures up memories of hanging out at the pizza place in the mall during high school, but nothing really special about it. “I’m a bit surprised to hear you say that,” he says.  “Some of his [Sting’s] Police stuff has good lyrics for a literary snob like yourself.” We both agreed that Sting’s solo work is full of such things (such as an entire album entitled “Nothing Like The Sun”, from Sonnet 130).  But the Police as a group were also sneaking in literature references? Somebody enlighten me.  What have I missed? UPDATE: Janefan found this article that pretty much tackles this very topic.  Sting’s apparently just a bit too smart for some of us.  Thanks Jane!

🙁 I see an article entitled “Five People Suggest Five Books” in my Shakespeare feeds and I think, “Oh cool, they walked up to people on the street, asked what they’re reading, and at least somebody mentioned Shakespeare.”  I like stuff like that.  Ever better is that it’s not from New York or Cambridge or something, it’s from Des Moines.   I’m perfectly happy with the idea that you can wander down Main Street in some Iowa city, ask somebody what books they’ve read lately, and have them bust out a Shakespeare reference. Sure enough the first guy has Harold Bloom on his list.  Impressive, although I think I was hoping for something a little bit more accessible. But then … I read the bios.  Their “five people who live in the Des Moines metro” are: the marketing manager for the public library, a book store owner, the librarian, a college professor, and .. the dude who recommended Shakespeare?  Yeah, he’s the frickin director of the Iowa Shakespeare Experience. I swear, I cannot fathom how this article came to be written without somebody saying, “Well you know, random people on the street don’t really know about books, so no problem, we’ll just go and get people who work with books for a living.”  Yeah, that’s so very useful.  Thanks for that.