July 30, 2005

No Fear Shakespeare

Images P 1586638440.01. Sclzzzzzzz In college, I had to read Shakespeare. On one of my papers, I complained that I didn't like the play because it was too hard to understand. My instructor wrote on my paper like, "So you only like ideas that are easy to come by, eh? Your loss!"

To this day, I don't like difficult writing. I do like challenging and thought-provoking ideas, but only if they're expressed in easy-to-understand terms. Maybe that's my loss, but I've learned to accept it.

A couple of months ago I found a series of inexpensive ($4.95) books called "No Fear Shakespeare." Each book has a complete Shakespeare play. The left facing page has the play written as Shakespeare wrote it, and the right-facing page is translated into easy-to-understand English. I read Hamlet and was surprised to find out how much I liked it. And I also enjoyed going back and forth to see how Shakespeare wrote his plays. I've learned to appreciate his use of language.

Here's a sample from Hamlet's famous soliloquy.

Shakespeare:
To be, or not to be? That is the question—
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them? To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished! To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.—Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia!—Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.

--Act III, Scene i, lines 57-91

Plain English
The question is: is it better to be alive or dead? Is it nobler to put up with all the nasty things that luck throws your way, or to fight against all those troubles by simply putting an end to them once and for all? Dying, sleeping—that’s all dying is—a sleep that ends all the heartache and shocks that life on earth gives us—that’s an achievement to wish for. To die, to sleep—to sleep, maybe to dream. Ah, but there’s the catch: in death’s sleep who knows what kind of dreams might come, after we’ve shaken off the flesh from our souls. That’s certainly something to worry about. That’s the consideration that makes us stretch out our sufferings so long. After all, who would put up with all life’s humiliations —the abuse from superiors, the insults of arrogant men, the pangs of unrequited love, the inefficiency of the legal system, the rudeness of people in office, and the mistreatment good people have to take from bad—when you could simply take out your knife and call it quits? Who would choose to grunt and sweat through an exhausting life, unless they were afraid of something dreadful after death, the undiscovered country from which no visitor returns, which we wonder about without getting any answers from and which makes us stick to the evils we know rather than rush off to seek the ones we don’t? Fear of death makes us all cowards, and our natural boldness becomes weak with too much thinking. Actions that should be carried out at once get misdirected, and stop being actions at all. But shh, here comes the beautiful Ophelia. Pretty lady, please remember me when you pray.

Link

July 28, 2005

The Week

Images P B000066622.01.Lzzzzzzz The Week is the only magazine I devour the instant I get it in the mail. It's a news weekly that summarizes what all the other news magazines and papers around the world have covered that week. What a fantastic idea. It's like having a friend who reads everything, from the New Republic to the National Review to the Beijing Times, and then tells you about it in a way that holds your interest. After reading it, I really feel as if I have a handle on world events. Best of all, it's actually fun to read. I consider it my one must-read magazine. Link

July 27, 2005

$1.49 Cartoon DVDs

Cheapcartoons Amazon sells DVD cartoon collections for $1.49. Each DVD has about ten cartoons on it, making it a pretty good deal. There's Betty Boop, Popeye, Little Lulu, lots of good stuff. The quality of the cartoons isn't fantabulous -- who knows where the company got them? -- but they're good enough not to be distracting. Whenever I have to take the kids on a long car or plane trip, I take these DVDs with me along with a portable DVD player. It works wonders -- like having on "off" switch on your kid. Buy from Amazon

July 26, 2005

The Clouds Above

Images P 1560976276.01. Sclzzzzzzz The Clouds Above is a beautiful 216-page, hardbound comic book for kids and grown-ups. It's about an elementary school kid who arrives late for school and winds up on a fantastic adventure in the sky. Each page is a single square panel. I finshed it in about 20 minutes then went back to savor the art, which reminds me a bit of Joe Matt's work. I see great things in Jordan Crane's future. (Here are some of Crane's self published books). Buy from Amazon

July 25, 2005

Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Dinosaurs

Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Dinosaurs Pop-up book designer Robert Sabuda is at the peak of his form here. Along with Matthew Reinhart (who illustrated the book and wrote the text), Sabuda has produced a book with six amazing two-page spreads, each containing one large dinosuar pop-up scene in the center and four pop-ups along the borders. The T-Rex skeleton is my favorite. The book is geared for K-3rd grade but I think older kids (and adults) would like it, too. Buy Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Dinosaurs on Amazon

July 23, 2005

The Secret Societies Handbook

Secret Societies Handbook I've been interested in secret societies for as long as I can remember. Part of the appeal of them is the mumbo jumbo and weird symbols they use. I particularly remember those ads for The Rosicrucians in Fate a paranormal magazine I loved as a kid. The other reason secret societies interest me is because they offer pat answers to troubling world events. Economy in a tailspin? Blame it on the Bilderbergs! President making backstage deals that result in deaths of thousands? Blame it on the Order of the Skull and Bones!

To my delight, I stumbled across The Secret Societies Handbook by Michael Bradley, at the bookstore a few says ago and couldn't put it down. The author reveals the histories of 21 secret societies, including Assasins, Bilderbergs, Bohemian Club, Club of Rome, Council on Foreign Relations, Essex Junto, Freemasonry, Golden Dawn, Illuminati, Knights Templar, Ku Klux Klan, Mafia, Majestic-12, Aviary, Aquarium, Mesur, Opus Dei, Order of the Skull and Bones, Priory of Sion, Rosicrucians, Round Table, Triads, and Trilateral Commission.

Some of the societies I'd never heard of. Bradley is not a conspiracy nut. In his introduction he writes, "I approached my research for The Secret Society Handbook with the same intellectual smugness with which I read stories about alien abductions or sightings of Elvis Presley ... How wrong I was. I know believe that Western history needs to be completely rewritten to tell the hidden story behind our true economic and political global hierarchy. The more I researched, the more alarming my discoveries have been."

I have to agree. Parts of this book were scary, like the fact that every US Presidential administration is larded with dozens of members of the Council on Foreign Relations which, Bradley asserts, controls the CIA and the State Department.

At just 144 pages, you can finish this eye opener in an evening. You might not be able to sleep very well after reading it though. My head was spinning. Buy it from Amazon

July 22, 2005

Happy Kitty Bunny Pony

Japan's Sanrio has a near monopoly on overly cute animal characters, but in earlier decades the United States ruled this lucrative industry. A new book called Happy Kitty Bunny Pony: A Saccharine Mouthful of Super Cute, by Charles S. Anderson Design Co. with text by Michael J. Nelson, provides ample evidence for my assertion.

This 176-page book, encased in a handsome clear vinyl slipcover as a sort of bib, features hundreds of retro images of fuzzy ducklings, Keane-eyed kittens, pink prancing ponies, friendly blue chipmunks, bashful panda cubs, coy baby donkeys, and the like. All the animals are gleeful -- they have the kind of look on their face you might imagine Bernie Ebbers would have if he were to wake up and realize the last four years were just a silly nightmare. Many of the animal characters have psychotic gleams in their eyes.

The stomach-churningly adorable illustrations are kept in check by perverse captions written by Michael J. Nelson (head writer and host of Mystery Science Theater 3000). For example, on a two page spread featuring drawings of bunnies dressed up in Mary Poppins style clothes, Nelson writes, "Step right up! See bunnies walking upright and wearing all manner of costumery! Yes, anthropomorphized rabbits with bulbous limbs in Victorian-era clothes! Step right -- What's that? You say you'd rather die than see that? Perhaps this isn't the place for you."

How can you go wrong with a book like this?. Buy it for $10.17 at Amazon.com.

Book review: Strange Angel, a Jack Parsons biography

Images P 015100997X.01. Sclzzzzzzz A few months ago, a writer named George Pendle emailed me, asking if I'd like a review copy of his book, Strange Angel : The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons.

I knew a bit about Parsons from reading Robert Anton Wilson's books, which occasionally references him. I knew Parsons was a pioneering rocket scientist from Pasadena who co-founded Jet Propulsion Laboratories, and that he was an avid follower of occultist Aleister Crowley. I also knew that he accidentally blew himself up with explosives. He seemed like an interesting but doomed and mentally ill man.

I hoped that Pendle's account of Parson's would go beyond the brief mentions I'd read in Wilson's books and online, and I wasn't disappointed. In fact, Strange Angel is the best book I've read so far this year. Pendle's telling of the story presents the dizzying roller coaster ride of Parsons' life within the well-researched context of the era in which Parson's lived. I loved Pendle's multi-pages forays into the history of Pasadena as a paradisical Eden for old money families from the mid-west and New England, and the crooked Los Angeles political machine of the 1930s. Pendle also provides the best short biography of English occultist Aleister Crowley I've ever read. L. Ron Hubbard figures prominently in the book, too: he lived in Parson's house in the 1940s before he founded Scientology. Pendle paints an unflattering portrait of Hubbard, claiming he swindled Parsons out of around $20,000 and swiped Parsons' girlfriend, to boot.

Pendle conducted interviews with people who knew Parsons, and scoured the archives of JPL, Cal Tech, Thelema Media (which publishes Crowley's books) to collect enough bits of factual history to construct a dimensional portrait of a man who heretofore has been presented as a cardboard cut out. Parson's life was far more interesting and sadder than I could have guessed. This would make a great movie. Link (Listen to George Pendle read an excerpt from Strange Angel.) ">Link