Tales from Shakespeare
During class, freshmen, I mentioned Tales from Shakespeare by Charles Lamb and his sister, Mary, a children’s book that distills the Bill’s comedies and tragedies to a manageable form for kids. You can read an illustrated version at the University of Florida’s Digital Collections.
In it is contained, of course, our current drama Romeo and Juliet. It’s worth a look, maybe have a read for clarification purposes. It’s pretty simple, but it’s at least better than Cliff’s or Spark’s Notes.
Podcasts
Marie C. was inquiring after podcasts today after I mentioned that I listen to the Online NewsHour’s daily podcast, among many others. Another I listen to is Philosophy Bites, and this week’s discussion about the relationship of philosophy to literature and rhetoric was especially interesting. I recommend you give it a listen.
What’s great about many podcasts it that they’re free and plnety are downloadable through iTunes (you can grab a feed’s link, click “Subscribe to Podcast” under the Advanced, and paste the link in the box that appears, and you’re set). You can find all types of stuff if you look around the iTunes Podcast directory: daily podcasts produced by print and online periodicals, college lectures, documentary programs, and plenty more to keep you occupied and learning. In fact, here’s a link to a former podcast of the BBC’s In Our Time about a subject near and dear to many of you juniors and seniors.
You can find links to some of the podcasts I listen to regularly in the sidebar near the bottom of this page. I recommend them all to help you increase your awareness of the events that have shaped and are shaping our world.
Haikus Are Easy…
Here’s a link Brennan K. found and sent our way: “Haikus are easy…”
Gotta haiku you wanna share? Post it as a comment by clicking the link above.
Irony
Don’t know if I can find a more recent, better example of the title-word of this post: “Actor playing Brutus stabs himself”. What more to say?
What’s Your Line?
Here’s piece from NPR on the Bulwer-Lytton Ficton Contest, “Honoring the Very Best of the Worst in Fiction”. This contest honors Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who famously began his novel Paul Clifford with the iconic “It was a dark and stormy night”. Contestants compete to pen the silliest opening lines to their non-existent stories; here’s a list of winners from years past.
Got an opening line for your story?
Jane Austen, Still Hot after 200 Years
If you’re like me, you can’t get enough Jane Austen! (Sarcasm.) Actually, it seems the world, particularly America, can’t get enough of the author either. David Gates asseses Jane Austen’s appeal to American audiences,
[She] caters to Americans’ perennial Anglophilia—as does that odd preoccupation with the royals. With that, she offers Regency variants of the Cinderella story—the oldest work of chick lit, and the central fable about class, and about marriage [. . . .] The motor of all her books—courtship leading up to marriage—has a strong resonance in the socially conservative 2000s, when young women who might once have been feminists aspire to be Bridezillas, starting their marriages $20,000 in debt. Still more creepy, a version of Austen’s world has become the American Dream—at least as dreamed by advertisers and the entertainment industry. Her “charming” country villages, in which even the most financially precarious upper-class people amuse themselves while surviving on the labor of invisible servants, look like our aspirational world of guilt-free leisure and nonstop entertainment, with illegal immigrants mowing the lawn and building the new deck.
Oh, snap! Really, this may seem harsh, although Gates is actually kind and complementary—if not effusively apologetic—to Austen-the-novelist in her important place in world literature. I’d tend to agree with his assertion though, that Jane Austen, ”literary fashion accessory” and writer of (in my opinion) the most popularly over-read, over-analyzed book in the Western English canon, Pride & Prejudice, ”seems to offer middlebrow entertainment with an upmarket sheen”.
What think you? Leave a comment by clicking the link above. And for some deadly serious Austen scholarship, check out the Jane Austen Society of North America.