Clearly I am not all that good at keeping a blog updated. I have the best of intentions, I assure you. The sad fact is that intentions don’t get blog posts written.

Things continue much as they always have. Spring briefly came — rather, it’s fighting Summer over the thermostat and no winner has yet been declared. Temperatures hit 90 degrees this weekend, though they’ll be back down to the high 60s in the middle of the week. After this, I’ll be writing a strongly worded letter to Al Gore re: the effect of global warming on the now-crispy herb seedlings I planted in late March. My ivy was fortuitiously returned to my air-conditioned workspace a week or two ago, after thoroughly enjoying its repotting and recuperation, and thus escaped the hot death that visited the seedlings.

In the past six weeks I’ve had many an excellent weekend sleep-in and late breakfast; read many a post from other, more prolific bloggers; and taken not all that many photos of my cats, considering. (The effort of getting photos from the camera to my Flickr is frequently too much to bear. Sometimes the camera is even in another room. Also the cats are attuned to the whirr of the lens opening and, when they hear it, will stop whatever photogenic mischief they’d been up to.)

I do hope my life begins to settle out a bit in the next six weeks. I can’t seem to stay satisfied with much of anything: how I write, where I write it, what the desk is like, how I’m connecting to the internet, much less what I write. Instead I am grumpified by everyone’s need to pick their Top 5 random anything and post their choices on Facebook. I am made cranky by the proliferation of transcriptless videos in place of blog posts, posts that have images for the sake of including an image (I’m looking at you, personal finance blogs; you’re collectively lucky that I use AdBlock or I’d wish a plague on all of you), and mini-icons that some blogs feel the need to include on every post.

Public Service Announcement
I am NOT on any of the following linksharing services and/or social networking sites: Bebo, del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Kaboodle, MySpace, Meebo, Newsvine, Slashdot, RadiusIM, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Twitter, Yahoo Buzz, Yahoo 360 or Connect or whatever they’re calling it now, or Windows Live. I am here at lastsyllable.net, reluctantly on AIM, and in Gmail. Needless to say, I have my own antiquated methods of passing on a link I happened to enjoy, and I do not appreciate the visual clutter of all this various bullshit begging me to click and send a link to each and every one of my friends. Even less do I appreciate the bigger icons that expand to a list of all these sites (and more!) on a hapless mouseover. I hardly even use tags, by Ovetchkin’s skates! And in my wee corner of the intertubes, such frippery will not be tolerated.

Also get off my lawn.

I took myself out to Barnes & Noble today for a floofy coffee drink and the pleasure of wandering around a bookstore.

I stumbled on Greenblatt’s Will in the World, and talked myself out of buying it because I’ve recently read one biography of Shakespeare and I’m only partway into a second. I flipped through it anyway and read the preface. I also stumbled on Shakespeare by Michael Wood, and sat down with my grande java chip to read through his chapter on 1605 and the Gunpowder Plot.

As an American, I have only the dimmest understanding of the Gunpowder Plot, and much of my information comes from V for Vendetta. I also didn’t realize that, as Wood outlines, King Lear was completed after November 1605, and Macbeth was written in 1606, which I imagine felt much like 2002 did for Americans. Wood placed Macbeth in the midst of “Gunpowder Plays”, which were popular at the time, and pointed out allusions to three of the plotters in the Porter’s speech: the tailor, the equivocator, and the farmer each have contemporary references. The witches, of course, also played to James I’s obsession with witchcraft. In this light, Macbeth is an incredibly topical play. Wood also speculates that the play as we have it is only part of what Shakespeare wrote, because it’s so short and it lacks the usual parallel plot.

I didn’t buy the book and didn’t take any notes on the chapter, so that’s all the info I have on the subject. Both Will in the World and Shakespeare are now on my wish list, the former because Greenblatt wrote it and the latter for the Gunpowder Plot chapter and its glossy color pictures.

I just finished chapter 13, “A Gentleman of Means”, in Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life.

First, I still have amazingly high reading comprehension while nearly asleep — I blame procrastination and LITR 416. If one can read and understand literary theory in that state, one can read and understand anything.

Second, who owned New Place in Stratford and when and how the building was changed and what evidence supports these conclusions is all mind-numbingly dull. I’m sure the information is worthwhile, but — wow. I should have focused my reading comprehension skills on the book’s title.

Actually, the other chapters have been interesting, but nothing if not thorough. The book is describing exactly what I wanted to know, and that is Shakespeare’s life; through no fault of the writer does biography not dwell on literary criticism.

In my reading — the titles I’ve mentioned so far, as well as Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (S. Schoenbaum) — one striking feature is the discussion between scholars as to particular details. Some, such as the size of the theatre’s stage or the existence of a curtained inner stage, are clearly in contention, whereas my previous education on the point implied, by omission or uncorrected misperception, that they were settled. I thought it pertinent (or at least amusing) to post a few of those glossed-over dustups:

• All of Shakespeare’s plays were performed at the Globe.
• Any reference to or description of bear-baiting is theoretical; this was not actually done.
• The period in which Shakespeare wrote was politically and religiously stable.
• Shakespeare thought of himself as a playwright.
• Not much is known about Shakespeare’s parents, siblings, spouse, or children.
• Shakespeare wrote everything attributed to him, and no one has ever questioned that.
• We have plenty of information about Shakespeare’s life, such as birth and death dates and his education.
• Shakespeare was ridiculously smart compared to other people who lived at the same time.
• Shakespeare was one of a very few people who wrote plays at the time.

For the sake of Google-savvy students with deadlines and poor comprehension skills, I must emphasize that the list above contains misperceptions, that is, items that are largely wrong.

Got any favorites to add?

Sometimes I wish I could sit down and just read a book. Just one book, by itself, with no research or note-taking or conversation or reviews. Just the book.

I haven’t gotten much further in McAlindon because I haven’t finished the background reading. The book studies Henry IV parts 1 and 2, so I thought I’d just read the SparkNotes to get myself up to speed. Then I thought, he’s going to go into more detail than the SparkNotes do, and I haven’t read the plays, so I should do that too.

I’ve wound up with about 12 hours of reading to understand a 200-page study. And I had to quit there because it’d be better to read the tetralogy (Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V) for the full context, but the McAlindon book has to go back to the library on November 4 and I haven’t yet touched the other books I borrowed.

Shakespeare’s plays really do not lend themselves to New Criticism. Then again, much as I like New Criticism, that’s one of the things I love about Shakespeare.