This is rich coming from Hamlet.
Is Claudius really better than Polonius?
Pretty much in status only.
I mean, we don’t know – maybe Polonius also killed a king? Or plotted to kill a prince?
But odds are, as slippery as Polonius might be – he is, morally speaking, a better man than Claudius.
Given how Hamlet feels about Claudius, this feels like a double slam – after killing the man, Hamlet calls him names, including someone worse than a murderer. Up to a wee bit of victim blaming, are we, Hamlet?

What a eulogy!
Goodbye, Polonius! I’m always sad to see you go when you die in this play. Whether you are, indeed a fool or too clever for your own good, I enjoy your presence immensely – if only as a foil for the hero, an opportunity for him to mess with you.
You may be entirely misguided – you may do such questionable things as send someone to spy on your son while he’s away at school or make your daughter break up with her boyfriend but you often add a sense of levity to this place, which can otherwise get kind of heavy.
I rather wish he’d been true to his word and gone off to farm with his horse and carters.

I have an idea of what I want to write here but I cannot make it connect up. I had some thought of being, like, cute – and writing a list of questions, the answers to which would all be, “Ay, lady, it was my word.”
But that went nowhere fast.
I don’t have a list of times that my word kept me honest or involved in something. My word is pretty solid but it isn’t rigid. I don’t hold it up as some shining example so I can’t think of any time wherein it was particularly hard to keep it.
I was after a more expansive sense of my word – maybe my words – and how it was my leaning into my writing that did something or other. But there is no magic there. There isn’t a good story about how my writing saved me. It did. It does. But it does it everyday so it’s not terribly dramatic.
It would be like a story in which the heroine was saved by breathing every day – of course she was – as we all are – but it’s not a particularly unusual tale.
Every day she breathed air, ate food, drank water and she wrote and so she was saved.
The end.

She is archvillain Gertrudis – King Killer, Brother Seducer.
It’s hard to get this sort of archvillain reputation going – there aren’t THAT many kings one can marry and kill – or kill and then marry – or any combination of the two. The best bet would be to marry the 1st born of a family of 12 – that way you could work your way through the lot of them and it would be ages until you ran out of brothers.
I picture her all in green – glittering jewels encrust her gown and cloak. She gets up to some really dramatic make-up and wears snakeskin shoes. Like a crocodile – all tears. Green tears. When she needs to read a brotherly love note, she puts on green teardrop glasses.
She has a very good archvillain laugh – one that rings out each times she kills a king. You don’t want to mess with her.

The day this line comes up in my writing practice, it is the 14th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It feels apt. That was an extraordinary bloody deed – though blood, somehow, wasn’t the dominant image. Destruction on that scale becomes less about blood and more about fire and ash.
There was blood, certainly.
And so much blood was volunteered that the Red Cross let us know they didn’t need anymore.
There was a surplus of blood
A surplus of blood offered to help
There was more blood on the constructive side
Than on the destructive side –
Which really does help with the feeling of horror – to know that while humans can do terrible things like fly planes into buildings, they can also turn up en masse to give literally of themselves.
It helps to know that so many people wanted to help that they had to be asked to stop.

Despite the fact that so few countries have kings anymore – the idea of Kings is still so powerful. Every child understands what a king is and why you might want to be one. Sometimes even why you might NOT want to be one.
Kings are now (mostly) archetypal figures rather than actual rulers. This is probably a good thing. Kings as playing cards or checkers or chess pieces or puppets or stuffed toys or cartoon characters or literary figures or fairy tale villains or fairy tale heroes or rewards for fairy tale heroes or rewards for mythical heroes.
Probably we play with kings as children because almost all children are potential tyrants. We play at being king to see what it’s like to be at the top of the heap, to indulge all of our wildest desires or most arbitrary rule-making.
“I’m the king. I say everyone gets candy at 2:03 every day.”
But pretty much every group of subjects will eventually push back, no matter how docile or obedient. It’s never as fun as it seems at first. I picture a child given a new toy figure and this as his first question, “Is it the King?”

In Greek, the word for yes sounds a lot like “Nay” and in Greece, people say it a lot. It keeps feeling like they’re being vehemently negative but then you realize that they’re being vehemently positive instead. It can turn your whole perception upside down.

I hardly ever heard anyone say “No” in Greek (it’s “oxi”) and it made me wonder if the extra syllable of the word discouraged people from using it. Does the language help these folks tilt toward the positive?

How influential is language on the personality of the speakers?

English has an unusual number of monosyllabic words – does that make us inclined to be briefer -shorter – more succinct?

I know not.

A friend and colleague was interested in making a puppet show based on Notes of a Ratcatcher – an historical text about the craft of ratcatching. In it, the Ratcatcher lays out many of the tricks of his trade as well as how much money he could make per rat or bag of rats. Depending on who was paying him, he might deliver the rats dead or alive. It is a fascinating document for a lot of reasons – not least for what it reveals about the historical period.
I don’t know if my friend ever developed this piece – he moved on to other things and moved back to his native land – but this line makes me think of that document. Like, Hamlet is assuming the role of a Ratcatcher here and killing a rat in the expectation of the ducat he might receive for doing it.
Because a dead rat was worth a lot more to the one trying to get rid of it than a live one.

In the Natural History Museum of Iraklion, we saw a little rodent, native to Greece. It looked a bit too much like a rat to me, though it wasn’t one. My mom thought it was cute. But then, she doesn’t have the rodent phobia that I do.

This room also featured quite a few snakes so it was chock full of things that give me the willies, even when they are behind glass.

It’s interesting to be in a room full of things I am afraid of with my mother. I think she doesn’t know how twitchy I get with snakes and rodents – because they do not bother her and we have my whole lifetime of her trying to show me not to be afraid.

But my boyfriend is highly attuned to how much a rat or a snake would be something I’d wish to avoid. It’s funny.

Rats are not funny, though. Not at all.
Not mice, either. Or snakes.
Unless they’re all cartoons, in case, fine –
Funny as hell.

We always give these two words equal weight when we say them.
But what would happen if we weighted the How? Or even more heavily the Now?
There’s a way that these are usually said that makes them seem like “huh?”
Like a two syllable “huh?”
What could be done with how now that might be more than stalling words?