Two Years Later and I've Got Something to Say

     I know.  It’s been forever and a day since I’ve written a piece for my “There Ain’t No Sanity Clause” blog.  The main reason for the hiatus was that I didn’t really have a purpose for it.  Skip to the end, 4 years later and I still don’t know if it’s worth posting my insights and musings.  Suffice to say I feel like posting now, so I hope that you find my post(s) entertaining and informative.   I would encourage you to read my Ben Franklin for President blog and give me your feedback on it.  I am also considering publishing what I call erotic Rand fiction (it’s erotic fiction for fans of Ayn Rand and basically it’s just a bunch of people jerking off, cause why should anyone help you get off, they owe you nothing!).  Did you find that joke funny?  Have you ever heard of an Ayn Rand sex joke?  If not then maybe there’s a market for the genre.  So this blog is just basically thoughts to page, brain to blog, blog to reader, reader to enlightenment, and fringe jokes.

     So now to the main event; I have seen lately several articles about a project to re-write Shakespeare’s plays into modern day English. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is commissioning 36 playwrights to modernize the text for the stage.  The main argument is that the Bard’s vocabulary is over four hundred years old and barely comprehensible to contemporary audiences.  There is no doubt that Elizabethan English can be difficult to understand, but for this to truly work you can’t just “modernize” the language.  You have to change archaic references from to modern, and there are all of the little innuendos and commentary on the society of that time, which have no relevance, so what happens to them?  There is a good possibility you risk losing more in the translation than you gain.  Modern adaptations of Shakespeare’s already exist.  “West Side Story” is “Romeo and Juliet”, the movie “Big Business” is “Comedy of Errors” Suffice to say it is an interesting experiment and an enormous endeavor, and I look forward to seeing the outcome. But let’s not go to far in lowering “bard” so to speak instead of underestimating an audience.  Given the world of “tweeting”, “Instagraming”, and emoticons, which erode our vocabulary and lexicon, a rich dose of “wherefores”, “yon”, and “anon’s” offer up a nice bulwark and remind us that language, poetry, and prose are worthy of our time.

You can read the NPR article here

http://www.npr.org/2015/10/17/449270557/o-romeo-romeo-what-the-heck-are-you-saying?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=2042