Oxford’s Torment: The Latest Chapter in the Shakespeare Mystery.

If the rose were a pose, how sweet would that smell?

If the rose were a pose, how sweet would that smell?

The enduring mystery of William Shakespeare, poet and playwright, has become a little less mysterious.

It may be that we can never fully plumb the genius of our ever-living Bard, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t muck around in the basement. You never know what you’ll find down there.

Witness: We now have in our possession the long hypothesized ‘lost works’ of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Oxford has been regarded by heretics and assorted lunatics as the true author of the works of Shakespeare. This myth can finally be laid to rest.

Marvel at the genius of Shakespeare! Defenders of the Swan of Avon have always been hard put to explain how a glove-maker’s son from a provincial back-water – a man who may not even have known how to read – could have written the sublime corpus we know as The Works of William Shakespeare. What life experiences led the glove-maker’s son to his subject matter? What intensive education lent him his deep erudition? How can the paired and parallel sonnet cycles be reconciled with his seemingly mundane life history?

Literary scholars almost always attempt to excavate (more…)

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Can’t get your baby what she wants for #ValentinesDay? Give her #poetry instead.

This is what she really wants. This is masculine leadership, and this is evangelizing egoism, both because this is egoism in action.

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Mahna Mahna and the narrative power of mothertongue.

This is brilliant farce every way I look at it, a clinic on comic film-making. It uses almost no words to tell you the same joke again and again and makes you laugh every time.

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Start the day dancing: No Myth by Michael Penn.

What if I were Romeo in black jeans…?

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When I start a band, I’m going to call it…

Taster’s Choice.

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Start the day dancing: Thunder Road by Melissa Etheridge with Bruce Springsteen

We’re ridin’ out tonight to case the promised land…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOaFZo9taog#t=3m03s&w=640&h=480]

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Start the day dancing: Searching For A Heart by Warren Zevon.

You can’t start it like a car, you can’t stop it with a gun…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3GbUwD5PEo&w=640&h=480]

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Start the day dancing: Makin’ Whoopee/My Funny Valentine by Michelle Pfeiffer

Start the New Year dancing…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0IFrc7-3nw&w=640&h=480]

Me from BloodhoundBlog:

This is my all-time favorite New Year’s movie (Netflix link):

More than you know
More than you know
Man of my heart, I love you so
Lately I find
You’re on my mind
More than you know

Whether you’re right
Whether you’re wrong
Man of my heart, I’ll string along
You need me so
More than you’ll ever know

That’s Michelle Pfeiffer’s opening song from The Fabulous Baker Boys, (here is a clip of her singing it) and it rapturously encapsulates the very best of four distinct art forms. It’s gripping film-making, with great performances by all three principal players, Beau Bridges, Jeff Bridges and Pfeiffer. The piano, portrayed by Jeff Bridges, and and the song, actually sung by Pfeiffer, are very effective together. But the song itself exhibits in a very simple fashion the essence of lyrical song-writing: From the first verse to the second we change from ‘I need you’ to ‘you need me.’ And that in turn, like a page torn from Sophocles himself, provides the argument for the entire drama. This is what integrity means in art: Every different thing is the same one thing.

And the whole film is done brilliantly. It’s easy to get lost in Pfeiffer’s sultry performance, but I (more…)

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Celebrating humanity for the New Year: You are as large as you want to be, as good as you choose to be.

TheStarsAtNightMy observation for the New Year, left as a comment at The Atlantic. It’s plausible to me that my remarks will incite ugly displays of self-loathing, but that’s what I get for speaking up there.

Here is my note, a reaction to the obvious observation that there are many more stars than we can see with the naked eye:

I’m having a hard time discerning what your point might be. Are you celebrating your self-ascribed irrelevance? Absolving yourself of your undoubted sins? Masturbating in public?

You are as large as you want to be, as good as you choose to be.

You are what you are, regardless of what anything else is.

The remarkable thing about the stars is not them, but you. They are just an accident of physics, where you are the product of billions of self-initiated choices, most of them invisible to all other observers.

If you can’t be proud of this fact, it’s because you’re looking in the wrong direction.

The world is at war with your self, and this post at The Atlantic is just one paper bullet aimed at your mind, nothing more than a belch of undigested cultural presuppositions.

But the war is real. The bombs and bullets are erupting all around (more…)

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When I start a band, it’s going to be called…

Perpetual Orgasm.

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