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.

So I’ve been sharing my writing lately with a friend.  He’s not the literature type, he’s more of a music geek.  Here’s what he wrote me back:

I kind of group Shakespeare with Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan has written some incredible songs, yet to listen to him sing them turns many people off, when other artists cover the material, you really get the depth of the lyrics  and  think of Shakespeare in that same realm, where because the language is so dense if you will, that people are turned off and don’t see the real beauty of the stories being told.

I can see his point. There are Dylan people who know every word the man ever spoke, who hunt down every scrap he may have written a note upon. Then there are those who know a couple of his tunes, and he doesn’t really do it for them.  But then there’s a huge group in the middle who’ve probably heard a Dylan-penned tune and loved it, without ever realizing it was Dylan. (I could probably take it farther and say, “If you told them it was Dylan before they listened to it, they wouldn’t like it….”) The television series “Band of Brothers” was quite popular.  Yet I’m continually surprised that people don’t know this is a Henry V reference.  I wonder if I started like that – “Hey, did you see that HBO war series that’s named for Shakespeare’s Henry V?” – if people would like it as much?

http://www.tonic.com/article/happy-birthday-sherlock-holmes/ I’ve read a few Sherlock Holmes stories, but they’re not really my thing.  I never got to the ending and thought, “Wow, that’s brilliant!” it was always more like “Oh, he strung together a random set of trivia in a way that happens to work in this particular instance.” But when I spot a Shakespeare reference I look closer.  Who knew that January 6 was Sherlock Holmes’ birthday, and that Shakespeare was responsible for it?

According to an article in the New York Times’ City Room blog last year, there are multiple theories as to why January 6 was chosen as his birthday, one that’s celebrated by his fans over at Sherlockian.net. Paul Singleton, a Sherlockian scholar, said that Christopher Morley (who helped found the Baker Street Irregulars, a group dedicated to the study of Doyle) came to his theory based on the fact that Holmes, who quotes Shakespeare often, only quoted one Shakespeare play twice — that being Twelfth Night, and therefore, Holmes was born on the 12th night of Christmas, i.e. January 6.