I’m very excited to have another short story published by Gravel, the online magazine from U Arkansas.
Please check out the story through this link!
As you may have guessed from the title, it’s a story about a priest, rabbi and reverend at an atheist’s bar.
Strange coincidence: there is another writer with the same last name as me published in this issue. I’m not sure what that says about the writing community etc etc, but surely someone could draw a moral here.
This article is an interesting look from the folks at the Wheeler Centre of the challenges and successes of bookshops in the ebook age. If you’d like to see a different point of view, check out my interview with Paul from Brookline Booksmith here.
As if poor old King Richard III didn’t have a bad enough reputation thanks to Shakespeare! Researchers have just confirmed that they found parasitic worm eggs around the deceased king’s pelvis under the parking lot in Leicester last year.
In an online journal post from Lancet, experts suggest that this points to a roundworm infection during the king’s life. While this would have been an inconvenience, these worms would not have been life threatening for a well-fed English Monarch.
However, they may have made themselves known at an inappropriate time:
As the Register Guard points out –
“It’s also possible Richard’s worms made a gruesome appearance when he died on the battlefield in 1485 as the last English king killed in war. In adults infected with roundworm, traumatic events like car crashes can cause the worms to pop out of peoples’ noses and ears.
‘“The worms get shocked and they move quickly,” said Simon Brooker, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who was not part of the study.”
I bet Shakespeare couldn’t have thought that one up, even if he did have Richard born with teeth in his play.
In conclusion
Hamlet: “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king”
And that king apparently was Richard III.
“I’m interested in showing how the human mind can transform a word of text into a tangible color,” says British artist Jaz Parkinson.
Click on the photo to see more of Parkinson’s book covers based on the color schemes of the stories inside!
I’m sure it has become abundantly clear to anyone that has read this blog that I am a literature nerd. So you may not believe me when I say that “Contested Will,” written by Columbia University Professor James Shapiro, is a phenomenal page turner. But I’m also sure that you must innately know that any book with a Shakespeare pun in its very title must be good. And this book is no exception.
“Contested Will” looks at the origin of the Shakespeare authorship debate (whether Shakespeare himself wrote the plays, whether he was a frontman for another author, or even just a pseudonym that happened to match a current actor’s name). Shapiro mostly focuses on how this debate started, who its main contenders are, and what its implications could be for the idea of “the author.”
Here are the main arguments for and against:
Arguments against Shakespeare:
In Shakespeare’s corner:
While Shapiro does treat some of the more outlandish claimants with more respect than I could personally muster, I believe the real success of this book is how it shows that the authorship debate has shifted based on the changing view of “the author” since Shakespeare’s time. Shapiro does a fantastic job of connecting the different stages of the debate with the different literary theories of the time; for example, how the works of Higher Criticism (that brought down the idea of Homer as a blind poet and instead proved that the works attributed to him were likely a conglomeration of many different poets) influenced Delia Bacon’s thinking as she became the first to attack Shakespeare as “the author.” How the invention of Morse code and cyphers led many to begin reading Shakespeare’s plays as autobiographical and wrought with hidden meaning. Or how Mark Twain’s doubts stemmed from a type of Realism, as Shapiro states, “For Twain, the notion that great writing had to be drawn from life – rather than from what an author heard, read, or simply imagined – was an article of faith, at the heart of his conception of how serious writers worked.”
Shapiro, of course, concludes that Shakespeare did in fact write the plays. I commend him greatly on keeping from snickering or cringing at some of the arguments made against the Bard (although on the more elitist arguments, even I began to crave some finger-pointing). The book was so easy to read that no amount of Lit courses would be necessary to follow its arguments, and the anecdotes that Shapiro includes are priceless. If there is one non-fiction book that you ever read on Shakespeare, I hope it is this one.
And as my nerdiness for the day concludes, I will leave you with one anecdote of my own:
In 2011, I was with friends at the Boston Commons to see a performance of Othello. We were chatting with a couple seated next to us, and when I told the woman that I studied Shakespeare at university, she leaned in closer. “You know,” she said, “he didn’t actually write the plays.” “Oh?” I answered. She nodded, looking terribly serious. “Mhmm. Queen Elizabeth actually wrote them, and Shakespeare was her bastard son, so she gave them to him to publish!” I stopped talking to her after this, but I couldn’t help but notice how very much she enjoyed the play – laughing at Bianca and crying for Desdemona. And even though she didn’t believe in the Bard, I suppose he still had his victory that night.
In the course of my studies for the Lit Subject Test (working through 18/19th C America right now), I came across this recording of James Earl Jones reading “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe. Will anyone ever have a voice more suited to this poem? Quoth the raven, nevermore.
As I pondered very weary o’er a volume long and dreary –
For the plot was void of interest – t’was that Postal Guide, in fact,
There I learnt the true location, distance, size, and population
Of each township, town, and village in the radius of the Act….
But my languid mood forsook me, when I found a name that took me,
Quite by chance I came across it – ‘Come-by-Chance’ was what I read;
No location was assigned it, not a thing to help one find it,
Just an ‘N’ which stood for northward, and the rest was all unsaid.
I shall leave my home, and forthward wander stoutly to the northward
Till I come by chance across it, and I’ll straightway settle down,
For there can’t be any hurry, nor the slightest cause for worry
Where the telegraph don’t reach you nor the railways run to town.
And one’s letters and exchanges come by chance across the ranges,
Where a wiry young Australian leads a pack horse once a week,
And the good news grows by keeping, and you’re spared the pain of weeping
Over bad news when the mailman drops the letters in the creek.
But I fear, and more’s the pity, that there’s really no such city,
For there’s not a man can find it of the shrewdest folk I know,
‘Come-by-Chance’, be sure it never means a land of fierce endeavor,
It is just the careless country where the dreamers only go…
All the happy times entrancing, days of sport and nights of dancing,
Moonlit rides and stolen kisses, pouting lips and loving glance:
When you think of these be certain you have looked behind the curtain,
You have had the luck to linger just a while in ‘Come-by-Chance’.
“Come-By-Chance”
Banjo Patterson, Australian poet (1864-1941)
You might think that because this is the shortest of Thomas Pynchon’s novellas, its little fists would have less of an effect on your face. This is an untrue assumption.
“The Crying of Lot 49” is a philosophical muddle of theories that lead nowhere and paranoia that leads everywhere. It can only be described as a book that confuses and astounds with one of the most magnificent crescendos I’ve seen in modern literature.
Sound chaotic? That’s because it is. This book follows Oedipa Maas (read into the name what you will) on a journey to discover whether the US Postal Service isn’t quite as benign as we all think.
Sound strange? That’s because it is. While the story line is far clearer than other Pynchon novels, this book is still a melting pot of genres that looks to detect meaning through a fantasy that may actually be reality; a hazy meditation on communication focusing intently on a muted trumpet.
“I came,” [Oedipa] said, “hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy.”
“Cherish it!” cried Hilarious, fiercely. “What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”
This unruly novel is well worth a read. If you’ve never tried Pynchon before, I absolutely recommend starting here. It is not an easy book and you will not understand it the first, or second, or maybe even third time you read it (I certainly didn’t), but even understanding 1/4 of it still leaves this book a very solid 4 out of 5.
52 BOOKS IN 52 WEEKS! Do-able? Let’s find out!
Here is my list of the first 26 books I’m going to read. I’m a bit behind already, but I have some time to catch up.
Anything in blue I’ve already read. You’ll notice quite a few Australian books on here. I figure since I’m in a UNESCO City of Literature, I should certainly be reading some of that literature.
Are there any of your favorite books on here? Any that you’re sure I’m going to hate and should immediately take off this list?
Wish me luck!
If any of you know the college scramble to sign up for courses – waiting until the exact moment when your ID number unlocks, signing up for three extra courses to decide later which prof has better ratings on ratemyprofessor.com, to thinking you’re stuck with two classes that overlap 15 minutes until someone drops out of a coveted spot after the first day of class – then you’ll understand how this book came to sit on my shelf.
Three years ago, I had the unlucky accident of being in the last group to sign up for classes at uni. I was stuck with two classes that overlapped: one of which I would perpetually leave early, the other I would perpetually arrive late. Finally, someone dropped from a different Lit course and I snuck on in, still stuck with the books I had bought for my original class, World Literature.
Playing in the Light, by Zoe Wicomb, was the only book I could not return to Barnes and Nobles. For three years, it sat on my shelf in LA – alone and forgotten. Until I moved to Melbourne. I couldn’t fathom moving without any books to read before I scouted out my first bookshop, and since I was determined to fit everything into one suitcase, I needed paperbacks.
Here is where this book walks back in. Being one of the only paperbacks I hadn’t read, and having a very interesting cover design, I decided to take this book. I’m glad I did.
“Playing in the Light” is a book about paradoxes. It is set in a 1990s South Africa that has moved past Apartheid, but that doesn’t know what the implications of their country’s new politics means in everyday life. It is about a travel agent who doesn’t like traveling. About a white child who is really “black.” About a story being told only to find out that the teller never actually knew the story.
This was a well written, beautifully simple book about a subject that had only ever existed in history books for me. I really enjoyed Wicomb’s writing, and think that her use of “light” throughout the book was masterful. At its heart, like many books before and I’m sure quite a few books after, this is a story about what heritage (specifically racial heritage) means:
“If the whiteness they pursue is cool and haughty and blank, history is uncool, reaches out gawkily for affinities, asserts itself boldly, threatens to mark, to break through and stain the primed white canvas that is their life.”
While I did enjoy this book, it was not without issues. At one point, we are given an entire chapter written from the perspective of the long-dead mother filled with information that no other character has and which has little to do with their development because of that. The ending was meant to be profound, I’m sure, but after the beauty of the previous prose, it was just choppy and stunted.
If you like literature, I would recommend this book. If you want a fun read, skip it.
ESSAY HELP:
Freshman essay: What does race mean in a modern world? What makes someone a certain race?
Sophomore essay: Analyze the importance of travel in the novel. Why is it necessary that Marion leaves Cape Town at the climax of the book?
Junior essay: How did the politics of the past manifest themselves in the “present-day” of Wicomb’s 1990s Cape Town? Is the political world of the novel an accurate representation of historical post-Apartheid South Africa?
Senior essay: Analyze race relations between Wicomb’s “Playing in the Light” and her previous novel “David’s Story.” What does “light” as a signifier do to change the treatment of race in these two books?
J A Hirsch 