The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Happy Sunday! I’m in upstate New York at my sister’s college graduation. She’s really smart, like Phi Beta Kappa smart. However, she’s insisting that I play drinking games with her, which I haven’t...
View ArticleWard Off Your Enemies With Shakespearean Verve
Jazz musician Pete Levin has provided a quick and easy way to verbally shatter any foe with Ye Olde Official Shakespearean Insult Kit.Users are given four fields – an introductory phrase field and...
View ArticleBetter Books, Better Brains
If you’ve ever felt like reading good literature gives you more comfort and insight than any self-help book ever could, you’re probably onto something.Scientists at the University of Liverpool recently...
View ArticleA Twitter Bot That Knows Its Poetry
Located, according to its profile, in Stratford-upon-Internet, Twitter account @pentametron finds random users’ everyday tweets that happen to be in iambic pentameter and retweets them as rhyming...
View ArticleThou Art More Lovely and More Efficient
As the amount of digital data in the world balloons, so do the costs of storing that data.Some scientists are experimenting with ways to save data on a “device” much older—but also much more...
View ArticleMy Kingdom for a Better Burial Site
Richard III, whom Shakespeare portrayed as deformed and murderous, has been dug up not in a cathedral or mausoleum but underneath a parking lot.The BBC reports that after extensive research and DNA...
View ArticleStraight Outta Stratford
Whom do we have to thank for the line “I’ll teach you how to flow”? LL Cool J? Method Man? Actually, it’s Antonio, Prospero’s villainous brother in The Tempest.HTMLGiant collects this and other...
View ArticleCoauthor a Book with Charles Dickens, Sort of
Google is nixing their RSS reader in July, but at least we still have this fun demo of real-time collaborative Google docs.“See what it’s like to collaborate with famous storytellers,” says the blurb...
View ArticleShakespeare: Poetic Genius and Capitalist Monster
This puts a whole new spin on The Merchant of Venice: According to this Associated Press article, Shakespeare wasn’t just English literature’s foremost creative visionary; he was also a hardhearted...
View ArticleShakespeare’s Plays: Fact or Fiction?
Has Shakespeare become so intertwined with our culture that we find it hard to separate myth from reality?Dan Jones at the Telegraph writes about how many of Shakespeare’s historical portraits are...
View ArticleThe Ancient Art of the Book Blurb
Book blurbs—and the controversies surrounding them—go back as far as Thomas More, who gathered a bouquet of them for Utopia.Ben Jonson blurbed Shakespeare. Ralph Waldo Emerson blurbed Walt Whitman. But...
View ArticleShakespeare As It Was Meant to Be Heard
Via 22 Words, here’s a video demonstrating how Shakespeare plays sound when performed in their original pronunciation.That’s right: the sonorous received pronunciation we associate with Shakespeare...
View ArticleF. Scott Fitzgerald Does Othello
In honor of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday a couple days ago, the Paris Review posted some audio clips of him reading passages from Keats and Shakespeare.“While he may not recite like a trained...
View ArticleShakespeare’s Women
In honor of the Bard’s 450th birthday, The Millions presents us with an analysis of Women Making Shakespeare, a new anthology from The Arden Shakespeare series edited by Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen...
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Folk Talk: fish story
Related Posts:Women Who Run with the Wolves (and Pandas and Gorillas and Whales)What’s So Great about Relatability?Privilege vs. PrivilegeAn Agnostic,...
View ArticleAn Agnostic, Chortling Freelance Space-Yahoo
Amid all the meanings and uses that give a word its weight, it’s easy to forget that language is ultimately a system of arbitrary signs. Lexicographer Paul Dickson’s new book “Authorisms—Words Wrought...
View ArticlePrivilege vs. Privilege
In an excerpt from her book The Shelf, Phyllis Rose illustrates the systematic dismissal of women writers through the imagined figure of Prospero’s Daughter: wealthy and educated yet burdened by the...
View ArticleWhat’s So Great about Relatability?
In the wake of a tweet by Ira Glass that called Shakespeare’s plays unrelatable, Rebecca Mead explores why we care so much about whether we can relate to a play, story or work of art. She admits...
View ArticleDoes Shakespeare Suck?
In a response to Ira Glass’s “Shakespeare sucks” tweet, John Pistelli, at The Millions, wonders if the radio host’s social media outrage—specifically, that the characters in King Lear aren’t...
View ArticleCrouching Tiger, Hidden Hamlet
Shakespeare is invading China. The first complete Chinese translation of the works of Shakespeare wasn’t released until 1967, but Britain’s number one dramatist is now starting to catch the attention...
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