Today is April 23, the day we celebrate as William Shakespeare’s birthday - though this date is derived by counting backwards from his known christening date, so his actual date of birth is uncertain. Every year at this time, periodicals across the country feel compelled to revisit the issue of whether Shakespeare really wrote the plays and poetry attributed to him, and they do this for good reason: everyone loves conspiracy theories, no matter how absurd they may be.
It is this very absurdity and the accompanying cloudy thought that make the question extremely important to all of us, because the “debate,” itself, is rooted in a very dangerous and destructive human trait: the tendency to decide what is true based on little or no evidence, and then to seek only evidence to support one’s ill-conceived position while ignoring evidence – even overwhelming evidence — to the contrary. In other words, the tale of the Shakespeare conspiracy theorists is a tale of the anti-science that lives in all of us, and its ramifications for all of us. Full Story »
I’ve never been an early adopter of technology. I, like most people, come in at wave two or three, but well before grandmas finally get that machine everyone else had for a decade. So ordering a Kindle 2 the day it was announced by Bezo goes against the grain. I’ve had it for a day, and let me tell you it’s going to change the world.
I’m not talking about the sleek design, the high price tag, or the status symbol of carting around the next hot gadget. This, as has been said before, is the iPod of the book world, and its effect will be just as profound. Full Story »
If you pay attention to my music entries, you may have noticed a recurrent theme. It seems a lot of the bands I hear these days, many of which I really like, remind me of bands from the past. Like The Mary Onettes:
I recently tripped across one such example, Sweden’s The Mary Onettes. They can’t seem to make up their minds whether they want to be The Church, Echo & the Bunnymen, or maybe something along the Joy Division/New Order continuum.
Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.
Wendy Redal
Hermann Hesse, especially for Narcissus & Goldmund: His study of the tension between reason and emotion as told through the 14th century lives of these two protagonists has served as a backdrop for my enduring awareness of this often troubling juxtaposition — throughout culture and in my own life. I grew up as cool Narcissus — a means to cope with a childhood fraught by chaos — and have been wrestling ever since with how to handle my inner Goldmund. Full Story »
Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.
Denny Wilkins
I wrote and edited news and commentary for a living for 20 years. I, as they say, “pumped out lots of copy” in two decades. That necessarily had as much of an impact on my progress and perspective as a writer as reading the well-regarded and much-honored fiction and non-fiction of others. Those people with whom we personally engage as mentor and mentee often play critical roles in our development as writers. Full Story »
Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.
J.S. O’Brien
The most influential writer and book of my life didn’t influence my writing style one bit (thank God!), but he and his book changed completely changed my life. Most deeply rural, Southern kids back in the day were exposed to no ideas outside the generally accepted ones of their fiercely insular society. Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land was my first look at American social institutions and mores from outside the mainstream, and it instilled in me a voracious appetite for moving my frame of reference outside the superego to get a wider, and extremely useful, perspective. Full Story »
Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.
Lex
As a reader of mostly non-fiction, with its division by subject rather than author, this is kind of a tough one for me. It forces me pretty far back, and hence sounds cliched to me…but here goes.
Conrad and Dostoevsky for their examination of the dark recess of the human psyche. Dickens for teaching me that it’s okay to laugh at starving orphans. Melville (Billy Budd) and Conrad (Heart of Darkness) have always impressed me enough to reread and reread for the admirable ability to get whole novels into very short works. I’ve been through Billy Budd looking up and writing down every word that I couldn’t define and would probably have to look words up if I read it again tomorrow; that impresses me. Moby Dick needed an editor. Full Story »
The new season of PBS’s long running series Masterpiece Theatre, now known simply as Masterpiece, kicked off last Sunday with a new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s brilliant examination of gender relations and cultural mores, Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
The production is first rate. The actors, young and earnest as they are, seem to have a clear grasp of the key issues of the novel, quaint as they may seem to sophisticated Post-Sexual Revolution viewers. I can recommend it without reservation, something I couldn’t do for last year’s Complete Jane Austen.
In fact, a useful question for us to consider is whether it makes sense for Masterpiece to offer such a production of Tess. Who would get an exploration of the double standard in these times? Full Story »
When we created the new WordsDay graphic above a few weeks back we challenged everybody to name all the authors. Some of you took a shot, and I think the best set of guesses got about 10 of 15 right.
So, for those of you who have been dying of curiosity, here are the answers. Left to right:
I got home from running a few errands today and the numeral “1″ was flashing red on the answering machine. The message was for me — and it was from Caroline Kennedy.
“Hey, Pat,” said a cheery voice. My heart stuttered. “It’s me: CK!” As if I hadn’t known instantly.
CK. That’s what I used to call her 30 years ago, when she and I used to perch on stools at our favorite bar every night but Sunday, down doubles of tequila, and feed quarters into the jukebox to listen to Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, and Marvin Gaye. Ah, the clink of the shot glasses, the splashes of tequila on the bar, the salt on the back of the hand, the lemon wedges, the neon beer signs in the window reflecting in her bloodshot eyes as I stared into them while the whole room spun — it all comes back to me now through a mescal haze. Full Story »
I’m reading Marty Beckerman’s Dumbocracy (Disinformation, 2008). Beckerman, who proudly boasts that Hunter Thompson called him a “morbid little bastard,” is an engaging, sharp, equal-opportunity ballbuster who revels in taking to task extremists of the “loony left” and ”rabid right” infecting American sociopolitics. Armed with factoids, anecdotes and amusing personal experiences (such as his brief encounter with Rev. Jerry Falwell), he gleefully skewers self-righteous ignoramuses on both sides from his perch in the middle. While his distracting sexual braggadocio and gratuitous profanities betray his age (he’s in his mid-20’s), he’s clearly on his way to becoming a top satirist. One to watch. His official site: Marty Beckerman. Full Story »
It has been alleged that Scholars & Rogues is not, strictly speaking, a political blog. Sure, we write about overtly political issues and devote our share of time to things like media policy, energy and the environment, business and the economy, and international dynamics. Yes, we were credentialed to cover the DNC, but we don’t really do hard, insider, by god politics. Daily Kos is a political blog. Firedoglake is a political blog. Little Green Footballs, The Agonist, Politico, The Seminal - these are real poliblogs.
S&R, on the other hand, writes about music. About literature and poetry. About art. Education. Sports. Culture and popular culture. The Ramsey case and what it tells us about the state of media. And now that the election is over, S&R is writing about politics less than ever.
We have a new WordsDay graphic because somebody *cough* Mackowski *cough* insisted that we needed one. So here it is.
Now, a little fun. The first S&R reader to accurately identify the 15 authors shown, in order from left to right, wins … well, our enduring admiration. It ain’t much, but what do you want for nothing?
For a guy who’s been dead for nearly four hundred years, it’s pretty amazing that Shakespeare is still cranking out the hits.
And I’m not talking about great productions of his classic plays. I’m not talking about recently discovered “lost manuscripts.” I’m talking brand-spanking-new plays.
That’s what John Reed has cooked up in All the World’s a Grave, a new tragedy by William Shakespeare.
With all the cleverness of Touchstone and the mischievousness of Puck, Reed has boldly reimagined the Bard by cutting, pasting, puzzling, and rearranging Shakespeare’s own words and characters into an entirely new play.
“I’m interested in what motivates you, and how you understand the world.” He glanced sideways at her. “Rausch tells me you’ve written about music.”
“Sixties garage bands. I started writing about them when I was still in the Curfew.”"Were they an inspiration?”
She was watching a fourteen-inch display on the Maybach’s dash, the red cursor that was the car proceeding along the green line that was Sunset. She looked up at him. “Not in any linear way, musically. They were my favorite bands. Are,” she corrected herself.
If you are what you read, it is indeed evident that our cast of characters is composed of both scholars and rogues. . .
Chris Mackowski:
All the World’s a Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare by John Reed (Plume, 2008). Take all the best plot ingredients from Shakespeare’s greatest plays, cut and paste the Bard’s own language, keep all the insights into human behavior, and mix creatively — the result is Reed’s invigorating re-envisioning of Shakespeare, written by Shakespeare himself. Full Story »
A couple weeks I go I offered up part one in a series on poetry vs. lyrics, noting from firsthand experience the differences between the two. In brief, I’ve always felt like it was wrong to call rock stars poets - even if their words are fantastic, as they often are, the very nature of bending words to suit a song structure makes what they do a very different thing from what poets do.
In that piece, I looked at the song version of “Hegemony,” which I penned for Fiction 8’s most recent CD, Project Phoenix. “Hegemony” was adapted for music from an existing poem, which I wrote for my most recent book, Chained to the Gates of Heaven (a book that is in search of a publisher, by the way - so if you know somebody….)
by Lara Amber
If you pay attention to my music entries, you may have noticed a recurrent theme. It seems a lot of the bands I hear these days, many of which I really like, remind me of bands from the past. Like 
Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.
It has been alleged that Scholars & Rogues is not, strictly speaking, a political blog. Sure, we write about overtly political issues and devote our share of time to things like media policy, energy and the environment, business and the economy, and international dynamics. Yes, we were credentialed to 
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