Category: Books & Reviews

Literature, culture, fiction, non-fiction, writers, authors and the craft of writing.

Musings on the Complete Works

Books & Reviews / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / ShakespeareOne Comment

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When the Arden Shakespeare: Complete Works arrived this week (an early birthday gift from my wife who might have wanted to hide it until the actual date… oops… I saw the postie arrive…), I thought it might be time to put together a spreadsheet identifying some of the key differences between the various versions of the “complete works” in my library, and among those other editions I don’t own (but may in the future). This is meant to help me select which version I might want to read from at any time. In fact, it’s my goal to read ALL ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Shakespearean Apocrypha

Shakespeare / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

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When the First Folio was published in 1623, it had 36 of the Bard’s plays, listed in three categories: histories, tragedies, and comedies (it didn’t include his longer poems, or the sonnets)*. And even then, these were not all of his plays. Several were not included, although they were known to the folio’s compilers. For reasons unknown, there were several plays missing from the original canon, including Pericles, Prince of Tyre; The Two Noble Kinsmen; Edward III;  The Book of Sir Thomas More; Cardenio; and Love’s Labour’s Won. The latter two are “lost” (more on that, later); the rest are ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Aesop and Local Politics

Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Council / Philosophy / Politics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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I’ve always liked reading “wisdom tales”; I still read and delight in those Zen Buddhist stories that Paul Reps recounted in his book, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, which I first encountered in the late 1960s. Not long after that, I discovered the many tales of the Mulla Nasrudin retold by Idries Shah, and the stories of the Wise Men of Chelm, the imaginary city of fools in Jewish folklore. Decades later, I still have most of these books. I suspect, however, little of the implied wisdom in them has rubbed off on me, yet I persist in reading them. Around ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Montaigne’s Cannibals

Books & Reviews / Philosophy / ShakespeareOne Comment

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Montaigne’s essay On Cannibals contributed at least some of the content and ideas in Shakespeare’s late play, The Tempest. A speech by the recently-shipwrecked counsellor Gonzalo in Act 2, Sc.1 about creating a utopian community on the island is lifted almost word-for-word from this essay.* Montaigne’s other essays might have added to other of The Bard’s plays as well, although we can’t be sure when he read the Essays. If it was at the time he was writing The Tempest, by then (1611) Shakespeare was not writing as much and his time with the theatre was coming to an end ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Shakespeare’s Anachronisms

Language & Grammar / Meaning of words / ShakespeareLeave a comment

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When the clock struck three in Julius Caesar, you probably scratched your head, knowing that striking clocks didn’t exist two millennia ago in the play’s setting. In Caesar’s time, people checked sundials or water clocks (clepsydra), neither of which — inconveniently for the Bard — chimed. It would be almost 1,300 years after Caesar that the first “weight-driven mechanical clock was recorded in England” (in1283). It’s just one of several well-known anachronisms in Shakespeare’s plays. Roman timekeeping by sundial also meant that hours varied from 45 to 75 minutes long, depending on the season, and no one could use one ……… click below for more ↓

A Conspiracy So Immense

Books & Reviews / Politics / US Politics2 Comments

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It’s a common theme in today’s political analysis to argue that Donald Trump broke America. Looking at the ongoing dumpster fire that is the Repugnican Party, the rise of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, anti-science, pro-disease, misogynist, pseudo-religious, and anti-justice groups into the centre of the party’s power seems clear evidence of Trump’s deleterious effect on both the party and democracy. It’s difficult to argue convincingly America isn’t broken these days, and that Trump isn’t the reason.  But as damaging as Trump continues to be, he didn’t start the downhill slide. The party was broken decades before Trump ever thought of entering ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Shakespeare’s Goodbye

Books & Reviews / Shakespeare2 Comments

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Prospero’s words in Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, have long been thought to have been Shakespeare’s own goodbye to the theatrical world, assuming, of course, you are reading the play or at least these speeches as autobiographical. After all, The Tempest was the last play The Bard wrote by himself. He did, of course, work in collaboration for at least two more plays (Pericles and All is True aka Henry VIII). No one can be quite sure of this order because dating the plays is inexact, records have been lost, and scholarly arguments over who collaborated on what sections of these ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Cats and Philosophers

Books & Reviews / Cancer / PhilosophyLeave a comment

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British philosopher John Gray thinks cats can “often teach us much more about living the good life than philosophy ever could.” As a lifetime cat owner, I can vouch for cats serving as metaphors for all sorts of things, but not usually as philosophers outside some children’s books. That statement intrigued me because my prior association with cats and philosophers had been mostly limited to Michel de Montaigne‘s musing about animal consciousness and the thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat. Gray was interviewed on the CBC, recently about his new book Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life,  in which ……… click below for more ↓

More Musings on Shakespeare

Literature / Shakespeare / ShakespeareOne Comment

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The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (edited by Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, Penguin Books, 2002) has a short but insightful essay on the texts of Shakespeare that illustrates the choices editors have made when dealing with the texts they want to present their version to the public. It uses a single, well-known verse from Romeo and Juliet (Act 2, Sc.2, lines 40-44 in the Pelican and many other editions) in which Juliet speaks: What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What’s in ……… click below for more ↓

Musing on the Authorship Question Again

Books & Reviews / Shakespeare / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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The “authorship question” — who wrote Shakespeare’s works, aside that is, from Shakespeare himself — is a conspiracy that seems a metaphor for modern society.  It contains the seeds of many popular conspiracies within it: pseudoscience, suspicions about authority, declarations of revelation, blind faith, angry defences, opinions and interpretations, Youtube quacks, amateurs posing as researchers, wild claims, and the paranoia we find on social media. You can find its counterparts in alien abductions, chemtrails, Pizzagate, Trump’s election victory, pro-disease/anti-vaccination protests, astrology, creationism,  Bigfoot, Atlantis, and Elvis is still alive: a whole passel of piffle seems born from it. And it ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Downsizing Shakespeare

Books & Reviews / Daily life / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / Shakespeare2 Comments

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While downsizing my library earlier this spring (25-30 boxes of books already removed from the shelves and some titles still left to cull), I had to think about what books to keep. This was tough for me, what with my passion for books and reading, parting with any book, especially one I’ve had for decades, can be like losing a child or a pet.  But I persevered with my purge (with Susan making sure I did…). I looked at every shelf to first decide which titles no longer served a need (used previously for my work, but now I’ve retired ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on Viruses and Evolution

Books & Reviews / Creationism / Evolution & Paleontology / Science & TechnologyLeave a comment

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One has to wonder how creationists can maintain their beliefs during a pandemic where the virus is clearly evolving to improve its ability to infect people and avoid immune system responses. It’s like watching Darwin in action every day. What sort of cognitive dissonance is necessary to believe in creationism while reading the headlines about COVID variants emerging all over the world? Or maybe they don’t read the news to avoid being confronted by such inconvenient truths. Although viruses evolve mostly through mutations of their genetic code (DNA or RNA in the case of COVID-19), it is still Darwin’s natural ……… click below for more ↓

When Did I Become My Parents?

Humour & Satire / My Writing / PoetryLeave a comment

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When Did I Become My Parents? When did I stop listening to new music, and change the dial to something familiar: oldies, classic rock; comfortable tunes? When did I stop driving a standard, shifting gears with practiced precision, and buy an automatic, with power windows, and heated seats? When did I stop riding a motorcycle? When did I stop remembering what’s on the grocery list?

Killing Commendatore

Books & Reviews / Literature / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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I’ve been a fan of Haruki Murakami’s novels for several, recent years, and have read nine or ten of them already. Those I’ve read have all fit into the category of “magical realism”; a style of fiction that was made famous by Latin American authors like Gabriel García Márquez (you would have encountered this in his bestselling book, 100 years of Solitude).* It’s a technique of writing where the imagined, or the fantastic enters the mundane world and is treated as natural. Or as Britannica notes: … the matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction. I ……… click below for more ↓

Why Master Sun Matters Today

Books & Reviews / Classics / Culture / Philosophy / Politics / Quotes & Mis-quotes / Translations & translatingOne Comment

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Master Sun was a wise man. So wise that his famous treatise, The Art of War (aka The Art of Warfare), has been read, written about, critiqued, and discussed for roughly 2,400 years. It has been used as a model of strategy and leadership for the military, for business, romance, sports, and for politics. And, like Machiavelli’s The Prince, it has often been misused, misunderstood, and misinterpreted for those purposes.* It’s a short book: a mere 13 chapters written in generally brief aphorisms. And, very much like The Prince, it’s one of the most often-quoted and referred-to of unread books, ……… click below for more ↓

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