( Read more... )

I turn 44 in a few weeks. On the one hand, I am enjoying my mid-forties. On the other hand, one does become ever more conscious of how little time is left. Neither of my parents made it to 65. I visit cancer journals now and then, including that of a fellow writer in his fortiesLast night, I revisited my Penguin edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins's ( Read more... )

[As usual, the actual sermon was somewhat different than what's posted below, what with ad-libbing and on-the-fly tweaking, but the general gist is here.]

"The Poetry of Inconvenience"
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville
Earth Day sermon

( Today, April 22nd, 2007... )

For marymary, who was railing about The Taming of the Shrew a little over a year ago:

...the free will of a genuinely created character has a certain reality, which the writer will defy at his peril. It does sometimes happen that the plot requires from it characters certain behavior, which, when it comes to the point, no ingenuity on the author's ( Read more... )

A friend pointed to Irregular Webcomic #402...

Oh, oh dear.

Awwww...

marymary, there's a riff on Pericles!

catrinella: So much for Galadriel vs. Miss Piggy...

This one screams xochiquetzl to me. ;-)

I suspect half of my flist agrees with this one.

And this...

I'm sorry, but Lego-Draco resembles Newt Gingrich...

Whoa. Steve Irwin/Cthulhu/Potterverse crossover ( Read more... )

I didn't get there in time for the pre-show lion-dancing, but the Nashville Shakespeare Festival's production of Macbeth turned out to be quite good. In particular, both Macduff and Macbeth's reactions to the deaths of their wives were affecting, and the staging of the Weird Sisters was terrific -- they were in flowing backlit acid green robes ( ( Read more... )

( Long before Harry Potter and his cohorts emerged from J.K. Rowling's brain, and long after the current debates are rendered (mostly) moot by the end of the series, there was and will be no end to the debates... )

( On Shakespeare's Sonnets, and Why Gay Marriage Is Good For Business )

Today's New York Times quotes from letters written to Shakespeare's Juliet:

The sisters [compiling a selection of the letters for publication] found that during the nearly 70 years the letters have been arriving, they have become a reflection of the changing times. In 1970, a girl from Montana wrote, "Five years ago I met a Negro boy, William, at ( Read more... )

"On Shakespeare's Sonnets, and Why Gay Marriage Is Good For Business."
April 23 is often celebrated as Shakespeare's birthday; this year, it will also mark the 390th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. There has been considerable controversy over the centuries regarding Shakespeare's sexual orientation; in this service, we'll look at why it ( Read more... )