This line ends up landing on my 40th Birthday. I find that, for perhaps the first time, I am filled with a sense of trepidation about my age. I have mostly embraced the shift from year to year before now (although truthfully the last two have had a twinge of a sneak preview of this age trepidation.)

There is nothing to be done about it. Age happens regardless of how we feel about it – but I am surprised at how much this feels like the passing of my youth. Within all of that though, is the anticipation of liberation. That in no longer being young, I might finally achieve some respect, might be able, for once and for all, release all hope of pleasing other people, of maintaining an illusion of trying to fit in. It’s as if I will go straight from maiden dresses to purple, as in When-I-am-an-Old-Lady-I-will-Wear-Whatever-the-Fuck-I-want-because-it-doesn’t-matter-any-more Purple.

I am entering middle age, see. That’s the trick. And in the archetypal structure, we go from maiden to mother to crone. But who are we, those who are not mothers? This space is a blank, almost. Maiden – SOMETHING – Crone. And I suspect this is why I imagine going straight to my I Shall Wear Purple Stage. Because there’s nothing in between. Which makes me feel as though I’m falling off the edge of the earth. Nay, that follows not.

It only occurs to me now what a non-sequiter this whole Jephthah sequence is. Polonius is talking about actors, about Roman writers and then suddenly Hamlet exclaims about Jephthah’s treasure?

It really is classic crazy-acting behavior. And if the first line is just an out of the blue exclamation to a biblical figure, then the second is clearly calling Polonius Jephthah. It’s a two-step crazy.

Take crazy to the gods for your initial exclamation! Like, “O, Diana, what a nice bow and arrow you had!”

Then go crazy direct as in, “Hey, Diana, I’m looking at you.”

Voila! Mission Accomplished in the Attempting to Appear Crazy Game.

There was an article about the effect of daughters on fathers.  It indicated that there was some evidence that having daughters turned fathers into better men. Or at least, more compassionate ones.
It’s funny, though, I read this article round about the same time that I heard this Freakonomics podcast which seemed to indicate that fathers who had daughters were many times more likely to divorce their wives than fathers with sons.
It would seem that these two bits of media might be in contradiction with one another. And looking at them side by side, I do feel my eyes cross a little. But in a way, they make sense together, the cultural preference for boys leads to both divorce and more enlightened fathers of daughters. If, of course, any of that is true.
Certainly the fathers in Shakespeare are mostly the fathers of daughters (Lord Montague, Gloucester, Henry IV, Macduff, Hamlet, Egeus of Syracuse, Belario excepted) and while some of them are improved by their daughters (Pericles, Cymbeline, Duke Senior, arguably Lear) a lot of them are right bastards about their girls (Egeus of Athens, Lord Capulet, Prospero, Leontes, Brabantio, Baptista) And the mothers that there are (Gertrude, Volumnia and the Abbess) are the mothers of boys. Ist possible that being single fathers magnifies the girl effect?

Actors arriving on a herd of donkeys is already an amusing image. I see a twelve person company just clump clumping up to the palace gates and they look gloriously ridiculous.

Even funnier is a group of actors arriving on their asses, like scooting across the ground on their butts, like a dog trying to scratch his behind. Or maybe on Toboggan type sleds, their hands on the reins, their legs bringing them scoot by scoot closer.

A game show buzzer.
A bee flying around the room.
A fella named Buzz who likes his burgers.
A chainsaw getting ready for work.
A little boy getting his haircut for the first time with electric clippers.
Someone calls kissing bussing but this time used a Z to give it more bite.
The sound of a crowd murmuring with anticipation.
A vibrator.
A new washing machine that makes a noise to let you know it’s done.
A cell phone set with a buzzing ringtone.
A faulty electrical outlet that sparks every time you plug something in.
Electroshock therapy.
The memory they implanted that mouse with.
The button that somebody got for Jacob that got pushed whenever he was being an asshole. It got pushed a lot and nobody enjoyed it more than Jacob. Jonathan eventually ran over it with the van.
Dragonflies’ wings sort of buzz too – when they fly real fast and right past you.

I looked Roscius up and the short version is essentially this line. It answers the questions pretty succinctly. Who was Roscius? An actor. Where did he live? In Rome. And just by virtue of the fact that he’s getting referenced in a Renaissance play, we can work out that he was a pretty famous actor.

The only extra details aren’t so significant to the content of this scene. They are, however, interesting as history of the form. Roscius was a famous actor but since the actors were slaves in Ancient Rome, he was also a slave. He was a famous actor in a much different way than Robert de Niro is a famous actor and even in a much different way than Will Kempe was a famous actor in Shakespeare’s time. I guess there was no aspiring to be on the stage if you lived in Ancient Rome.

I have always seen this line performed with an emphasis on You. It is definitely the most logical choice. But it’s funny, in looking at it – it is really just the same line repeated – Hamlet could repeat Polonius’ line exactly as he said it. He could mock him as he says it. He could say it simultaneously or a fraction of a second after as a means of demonstrating how predictable Polonius can be. He could say it to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern still in their private circle.

It’s always nice to have more than one choice – even if you end up doing it the same way everyone’s done it for centuries.

I love Hamlet lying. I love the Hamlet that acts just like the rest of us and comes up with something innocuous to say when trying to convince someone we weren’t just talking about him. I love that there’s really no choice for this line but to raise your voice a bit and say it conversationally.

There’s no mystery. No complexity.

We could go about wondering what might have happened on Monday morning but since it is a fiction, it doesn’t really matter. I love a line like this for its dailyness and that it lives in the same scene as “What a piece of work is a man.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about words. The latest is a title that I realize no longer has any power. I’ve been trying to work out how to shift the power back into a word that has lost it. I’m not sure it’s possible.

Somehow it makes me think about who owns the words – not that owning words is technically possible but there are those that own the pipelines for disseminating those words. For example, I thought of this list  of the awards given for literature in 2013. One of them is a woman. Women appear in a very tiny percentage of reviews in the New York Times. The various structures that were created to deal with the imbalance of who owns the words are periodically plagued with “Why do we still need a separate prize for women?” Oh, that we didn’t.

I asked a friend what books he’d read if he had the time. It was a long list of very well respected writers and not one woman was on it. I don’t blame him for that one bit. If you want to find a woman on the list of well-known and well-respected writers, you’re probably going to be reaching pretty far back into history.

This is not to say that there aren’t well-respected writers in the current moment. I can name ten right now off the top of my head (Jeannette Winterson, AS Byatt, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Tea Albrecht, Jennifer Egan, Amy Tan, Jeanette Walls, Sarah Waters, Erin Morgenstern, Diane Setterfield) Or well known (JK Rowling, Charlaine Harris, Sue Grafton, etc) but somehow the lady writers don’t tend to qualify as Literature. They’re not Thomas Pynchon or Dom Delillo. Ladies don’t own the words. We’re just renting them somehow.

I think a lot about The Alphabet versus The Goddess. It might be bullshit. But it’s very interesting bullshit. It’s Shlain’s sense that the invention of the alphabet killed the Goddess – that is that the development of the written language (a left brained activity) created an imbalance of masculine energy, an abundance of left-brained linearity and cultures around the world became more patriarchal as they adopted the written word.

As a lover of the written word (and the read word and the spoken word) I hate this idea a little bit. I’d like to think of this language as my own. But it might not be.

I’d like to find every instance of the sentence, “Check it” that occurs in hip-hop and replace it with Mark It. I wonder what it would sound like- if the Mark It would change the effect of the song or the songs, after a while, have an impact on Mark It.
I watched a clip that stacked instance upon instance of the phrase “You just don’t get it, do you?” in films. There was some slight variety – things like, “You STILL don’t get it do you?” but the cumulative effect was of hearing this one phrase over and over again was remarkable. It started to sound crazy – a concerto of You Just Don’t Get It, Do You? I’d like to hear Mark It in a series like that.