Writing is a slow and a difficult process mentally. How you physically render the words onto a screen or a page doesn’t help you. I’ll give you this example. When words had to be carved into stone, with a chisel, you got the Ten Commandments. When the quill pen had been invented and you had to chase a goose around the yard and sharpen the pen and boil some ink and so on, you got Shakespeare. When the fountain pen came along, you got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, you got Jack Kerouac. And now that we have the computer, we have Facebook. Are you seeing a trend here?
P.J. O’Rourke, “P.J. O’Rourke: ‘Very Little That Gets Blogged Is Of Very Much Worth'”, John Brown’s Notes and Essays, 2010-07-23
July 25, 2010
QotD: Writing
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April 29, 2010
All the Senate’s a stage, and Goldman Sachs merely a player
Although in this case, it’s the Senators as walking shadows, poor players that strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then (if we’re lucky) are heard no more. Megan McArdle isn’t impressed:
The statements from the Senators make it clear that they are not holding this hearing in order to find out what happened; that’s the SEC’s job. They’re holding this hearing in order to be televised yelling at investment bankers. Claire McCaskill’s rant was particularly irrelevant to the actual question at hand, but all of them are mostly trying to express outrage, not make any coherent assessment of the strengths of the SEC’s case.
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April 12, 2010
Updating Romeo & Juliet for the YouTube/Twitter generation
The Guardian looks at a new Royal Shakespeare Company production of Romeo and Juliet:
But soft! What tweet through yonder iPhone breaks? It is the east, and @julietcap16 is the sun.
Actually, Juliet Capulet is probably offline at the moment: being only 16, she has to go to school even on her birthday, where to her indignation Twitter is banned. She’ll be back. And there’s a big party planned tonight that could change all their lives: does any of this sound at all familiar?
The Royal Shakespeare Company today joined with the cross-platform production firm Mudlark and Channel 4’s digital investment fund, 4iP, to launch Such Tweet Sorrow, a drama in real time and 4,000 tweets, very roughly based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
The Bard of Avon’s 1597 tragedy of flirty, street-fighting teenagers disastrously caught up in the double trauma of real love and their parents’ murderous small-town rivalries is already one of the most adapted of his works. It has been continuously reinvented as an opera, a ballet, a musical, a lesbian love story, a geriatric love story and even an ice show.
This time, Juliet is the daughter of a successful property developer. Her mother died in a car driven by the artist Montague; her father will no longer tolerate any of his works in the house, much less his son. Her brother Tybalt is well on his way to being expelled from his latest boarding school, and their older sister Jess, nicknamed Nurse, keeps well out of the way of their new stepmother.
I’m usually pretty conservative about “re-imagining” Shakespeare, but this sounds like an interesting performance.
Update, 13 April: Full story so far here.
