Install Theme

Inside a room on the third floor of the building, two men paced, deep in thought.  One, a wrinkled, portly man with a voice that gave the impression of a particularly intellectual whale, began to speak.

(From teen nostalgebraist sci-fi epic; I’m honestly not sure whether this was supposed to be funny or not)

Indeed David Bevington, the prominent Shakespearean editor, compared it to “New Coke,” to the fury of Gary Taylor, who resented comparison by “reactionaries” to “a sugary beverage.”

I know that one Lear scholar uses a classical Greek obscenity that translates as “goatsucker” to refer to another scholar.

So it’s unbearable joy, unbearable bleakness, or unbearable undecidability, depending on how one interprets Lear’s dying words in the Folio text.  Unbearable any way you see it.  Exit, pursued by an unbear, you might say.

Ron Rosenbaum makes a lot of corny jokes but this one was in a class of its own

sick burn of the day, 9/13/14

In 1599, James Shapiro follows Jones in arguing for the cut; arguing that the elimination of Hamlet’s last soliloquy was Shakespeare’s choice [ … ]

Shapiro tells us that the thirty-five-line final soliloquy belongs in Hamlet "only if we want to see the play as dark and existential.“  (Hamlet "dark and existential”?  Who could possibly want that?  Let’s have a Hamlet who becomes an action-film hero!)

(From Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars)

Ferris, now a professor of astrophysics at USC, had been the one to choose which one song would be put in the module to represent rock ‘n’ roll in the infinite depths of time and space (he chose Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”).

If so, these madness passages would have been added to the Quarto to increase the level of madness, rather than removed to tone it down.

“If A Theory is right, then something is happening right now to the Battle of Waterloo: it it becoming ‘more past,” he notes.

Most possible acausal interactions appear to be a sort of “folie a deux” where an eccentric entity arbitrarily chooses to focus on the possibility of another eccentric entity which arbitrarily chooses to focus on the possibility of an entity like the first - e.g. civilizations A and B, mentioned above.

The duration of the hug determines what happens next.