The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
This puts a whole new spin on The Merchant of Venice: According to this Associated Press article, Shakespeare wasn’t just English literature’s foremost creative visionary; he was also a hardhearted grain merchant who sometimes landed in legal trouble for his unethical business practices.
...moreGoogle is nixing their RSS reader in July, but at least we still have this fun demo of real-time collaborative Google docs.
“See what it’s like to collaborate with famous storytellers,” says the blurb on the side of the page.
...moreWhom do we have to thank for the line “I’ll teach you how to flow”? LL Cool J? Method Man? Actually, it’s Antonio, Prospero’s villainous brother in The Tempest.
HTMLGiant collects this and other Shakespeare quotes that sound like 1990s hip-hop lyrics.
...moreRichard III, whom Shakespeare portrayed as deformed and murderous, has been dug up not in a cathedral or mausoleum but underneath a parking lot.
The BBC reports that after extensive research and DNA testing, archaeologists are sure “beyond reasonable doubt” that the remains belong to the fifteenth-century king.
...moreAs the amount of digital data in the world balloons, so do the costs of storing that data.
Some scientists are experimenting with ways to save data on a “device” much older—but also much more efficient—than hard drives: DNA itself.
The first thing they encoded on a double helix of nucleotides?
...moreLocated, according to its profile, in Stratford-upon-Internet, Twitter account @pentametron finds random users’ everyday tweets that happen to be in iambic pentameter and retweets them as rhyming couplets.
It’s unclear whether the account is a bot or a human with computer assistance or what, but the results are golden.
...moreIf you’ve ever felt like reading good literature gives you more comfort and insight than any self-help book ever could, you’re probably onto something.
Scientists at the University of Liverpool recently conducted a study indicating that the brain “lights up” bigger and brighter when grappling with Shakespeare and Wordsworth than when taking in ordinary prose.
...moreJazz musician Pete Levin has provided a quick and easy way to verbally shatter any foe with Ye Olde Official Shakespearean Insult Kit.
Users are given four fields – an introductory phrase field and three adjective fields – with which they can weld a sentence long verbal dagger.
...moreHappy Sunday! I’m in upstate New York at my sister’s college graduation. She’s really smart, like Phi Beta Kappa smart. However, she’s insisting that I play drinking games with her, which I haven’t done for like ten years, so posts might be light today.
...moreWhy do so many of us, as readers or maybe as a society, assume that originality springs forth out of nothing, although at the same time we understand that every idea, every story, has a precedent?
...moreHere’s some interesting reading from the world of poetry this week.
Michael Schaub at HTMLGIANT picks up where the Poetry Foundation left off a little while ago about martinis and poets. You’ll like their entries.
This is a little dated by internet standards, but it’s still worth looking at: Calvin Trillin versifies about the Roman Polanski apologists.
...moreThe Book of William — the new book chronicling the fortunes of Shakespeare’s First Folio, by regular Rumpus contributor Paul Collins — gets a nice brief writeup in the “Nonfiction Chronicle” feature of the NYT Sunday Book Review:
“Part antiquarian-book primer, part chronicle of literary curiosities, The Book of William is divided into five acts, each evoking a significant place and time in the First Folio’s colorful history…
“Weaved throughout are accounts of Collins’s amusing efforts to examine a handful of the 230 First Folios known to exist; he writes of the mixture of horror and delight he felt on discovering that ‘some Jacobean brat’ had doodled in a Folio’s margins.
...more