Thanks to Martin Luther King, I stumbled across this long lost audio clip of my son – at 2 and a half years old – doing his best to recite a bit of Sonnet 18.
I have a similar clip of my daughters, at 3 and 5, doing the same bit. But every time I’ve needed to cite these, I could never remember where I’d put the clip of my son. Yay!
(* Thanks to MLK because, if you’ll follow the link, you’ll see that I’d tagged the post “The Dream Fulfilled” and then made an MLK reference. So today while looking to see if I’d used that MLK on Shakespeare quote previously, this turned up!)
Author: duane
Martin Luther King on Shakespeare, and Street Sweeping
If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.
Happy Martin Luther King Day, everybody.
Zombie Hamlet
Not quite sure what to do with this story [first spotted on Reddit.com] about Zombie Hamlet. At first I thought, “Ok, big deal, somebody’s ripping off Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead,” which has been around for over 2 years and I think pretty much started the “zombie Shakespeare” thing.
But then I checked out the IMDB page for kicks. Jason Mewes, the stoner guy from all those Kevin Smith movies? Shelley Long from Cheers? John Amos, the dad from Good Times? June Lockhart, the Lost In Space mom? Does the Zombie part refer to the plot, or the cast? I thought a few of those people were dead!
Then I checked out the director’s page. From the man who brought you Santa With Muscles, ranked in IMDB’s 100 Worst Movies Of All Time comes….Zombie Hamlet. Yeah, that fits.
Romantic Quotes for Valentine's Day
Want to write something romantic on that Valentine’s Day card for a change? You can’t go wrong with Shakespeare. The man wrote this stuff four hundred years ago and we’re still repeating it. You’ve probably already forgotten what you wrote on last year’s card.
First let’s have a list of some of his best. We’ll talk in a minute about what to do with them.
To you I give myself, for I am yours.I will swear I love thee infinitely.For where thou art, there is the world itself.I love thee; none but thee; and thou deservest it.O, how I love thee! How I dote on thee!I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes.My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep.
The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.I would not wish any companion in the world but you.My heart is ever at your service.Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized.I do love nothing in the world so well as you. Is not that strange?
See anything you like? Yes, it’s true, centuries ago people said “thee” and “thou” a lot. If that’s not your style, though, you can always improvise it a bit. Shakespeare’s not going to mind. What about “I swear, I love you infinitely,” or “I will live in your heart, die in your lap, and be buried in your eyes.”
Don’t go crazy, though, or you risk losing the whole spirit. “Wherever you are, that’s my world.” Easier to say, maybe…but poetic? Not so much.
Enjoy. What you write and where you write it are up to you. Have it put on the card that comes with the flowers you had delivered. Write it yourself in the card you hand to her, so you can see her expression. Or, knock it out of the park by looking your romantic partner straight in the eye and reciting it out loud. They always say, Shakespeare was meant to be performed. So take a deep breath, keep a straight face, and go for it.
(The above material condensed from Hear My Soul Speak : Wedding Quotations from Shakespeare , by Duane Morin. Available now in digital download format for Kindle, iPad, Nook and all e-book readers.)
BONUS! Often confused with Shakespeare, the following quote actually comes from Bayard Taylor’s Bedouin Song:
I love thee, I love but thee
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold
And the stars grow old.
One of my personal favorites. Try dropping that bad boy on your significant other out of the clear blue sky the next time she says “What’s new?”
Your Quotes. Give Dem To Me.
I’ve decided a few things, after staring blankly at a number of word processors over the past few weeks. Why a number of word processors? Because I’m one of those procrastinators that blames the tool and thinks “If only I had a different application, the words would flow freely to paper.” Yeah, doesn’t happen like that.
What I’ve learned from my book publishing experience is that I’m not so great with the blank slate approach to writing, where every word and all the structure is my own. It’s too big a project for my attention span to fully comprehend. What I am good at, I think, is compiling and doing the value-add thing – hit and run style, almost. What project finally got me to publish a book? Collecting a bunch of quotes on the subject of weddings, and then adding value. I can do that.
So I’d like to put that theory to the test, a bit. My next project, should this work, will be a free ebook on the subject of Shakespeare and productivity, time management, procrastination…etc. I haven’t decided yet. The idea remains the same – compile, organize, add value. I want to make this one free, mostly because I think it’s been done before and I don’t want to push my luck, but primarily because I want to start building up value around my name as an author. I think that people searching for ebooks will be more likely to find time management books than wedding books, and they’re certainly more likely to try out free books than $$ books. But if people *do* try out my free book and they like it, then maybe they click on that author link Amazon provides and say “I like this guy’s style, what else has he written?” My goal for 2011 is to get a handful of titles attached to my name to see if I can make that happen.
So then, tell me – what are your favorite quotes on that broad subject? I can google “Shakespeare and time” all day long, and have been. And, just like with the wedding project, it’s been easy to see that a handful of quotes shows up over and over again – better three hours too soon than a minute late, I have wasted time and now time doth waste me, and so on. Just like the wedding project, I’d like to hit somewhere between those – I don’t think there’s value in a dry and boring collection of the 5000 times Shakespeare used the words “time” or “minute” or “hour”. But I think there’s far more than half a dozen good quotes on the subject. I bet we could find closer to 100 or more if we tried.
Got anything for me?