One of the many paths that forked off in a different direction from the life I am currently living was the Ph.D in Renaissance Literature that I never pursued. I had gone on a series of interviews at Berkeley, where famous Shakespeare scholars Stephens Booth and Greenblatt taught, and managed to impress the magnificently skeptical and crabby Booth, who wrote up a nice little letter to the admissions committee, and I was all set to get my references in order and write my essay when I considered the fact that I was already fearfully overeducated and by educating myself even more I'd lose what feeble grip I had on reality and no longer be able to communicate with anyone but other Ph.Ds. The idea of being confined to the suffocating hortus conclusus of universities for the rest of my life, condemned to throw around phrases such as "hortus conclusus" to continually reassert my right to belong -- made me toss my application into the trash and head off to Arkansas, where I learned to operate an arc welder, gig frogs and frame in drywall.

Nonetheless, I still love Shakespeare.

Now, it's true that I haven't read the entire article in the New Yorker with Adam Gopnick talking about Stephen Greenblatt talking about Shakespeare, but starts out promisingly, and I really do plan on reading it as soon as I am able to get home from work, which, it now being 11 PM on a Sunday evening seems a remoter and remoter likelihood, perhaps I will never not be in front of this computer and reading, you know, books again.

LINK | 11:05 PM | TB

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