Was Shakespeare a Feminist?

Female empowerment is much in the news today, from actor Maisie Williams calling out a sexist tweet to heads exploding over the idea that a major party has nominated a woman to run for president. (Yes, I'm going to keep mentioning this because it's important!) Over at the Bill/Shakespeare Project, they're asking the same question and they've enlisted actor Eleanor Matsura to discuss it, along with her role as Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream. (I love this play but for the life of me, I'm always having to check whether it's Suumer Night's or Summer's Night.) You can watch it here.

And if you're in a mood to binge-watch some Shakespeare, you'll want to check out their YouTube Channel. It's crammed with goodies from a production of King Lear with John Gielgud, Judi Dench (Goneril) and Kenneth Branagh to radio broadcasts of the plays and documentaries on subjects both Shakespearean and tangential (Who killed Cleopatra?)

The Bill/Shakespeare project is an absolute treasture trove.

Shakespeare Meme for Thursday

William Shakespeare was the original word snoot. 

When he couldn't find the perfect word...he made it up.

Are Gargoyles the New Vampires?

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That's what I'm hearing. The next "thing" in paranormal fantasy/romance is going to be gargoyles. I'm okay with that. I really liked Anton Strout's Alchemystic (A Spellmason Chronicle) and its sequels. I also am a HUGE fan of Strout's Simon Canderous novels. They're really first rate urban fantasy.

It really is time for something new and different in the paranormal world. I don't mind vampires--there's something primal about the whole vampire thing and I get it. But I've never been that crazy abotu werewolves, and when the whole "shifter" sub-genre exploded a few years ago--dragon shifters, bear shifters, dinosaur shifters--I was somewhat bemused. No one ever seems to get the whole thing about how an average sized woman can't transform into a cat without losing some mass in there somewhere.

I'm really curious to know what writers will come up with. And meanwhile--thank you Goodreads--there's this list of nearly 50 books featuring gargoyles in urban fantasy and paranormal romance.

Shakespeare and Politics

A surprising number of Shakespeare's plays are about politics. The history plays, of course, and Julius Caesar, the first play every kid in high school has to read, thus turning them off to Shakespeare for the rest of their lives. Coriolanus is a play that has a lot to say about today's political climate. But the polotical play everyone forgets about is Antony and Cleopatra. This is what Antony has to say when Cleopatra brings up his wife back in Rome:  Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch of the rang'd empire fall! 

We've all encountered politicians like that, politicians who are ready to throw everything under the bus in order to follow their own hearts. It did not end well for Cleopatra and Antony.

Finders Keepers by Mark Bowden...a review

I was talking about non-fiction writers I admire the other day and I somehow left Mark Bowden (Killing Pablo, Blackhawk Down) off my list. This is the review I did of his book Finders Keepers back in 2002.

In Mark Bowden’s FINDERS KEEPERS, a South Philly loser becomes a folk hero when he finds $1.2 million that fell off an armored car. In 1981, the economy in Philadelphia was like a Bruce Springsteen song—jobs that have sustained families for years have disappeared and they aren’t coming back.  That puts people like 28-year-old JOEY COYLE on the streets without too many options.  Joey never finished high school, but on the docks, he was respected for his almost supernatural knowledge of machinery.  Unemployed, he just another speed freak.  And he’s getting into a downward spiral—using all his money to buy meth and then borrowing from his dealers.

This story really is kind of irresistible.  Joey is a natural born loser, although he has charm to burn.  (There’s literally no one with a bad word for him, even when he’s at his most “hopped up” from the drug he calls ‘blow.”)  There are moments in this strange saga where we’re almost doubled over laughing—from his manic search to find a suitable hiding place for the money to his attempts to shove money into his clothes at the airport before resorting to donning panty hose.

Enjoy a good Cinderella story? Fashionista is Free this week!

Last year I kicked off a series of bite-size, modern retellings of fairy tales. Eventually there will be ten, including Hunter's Kiss (due out in two weeks), a retelling of Snow White, Hero's Kiss (a retelling of Beauty and the Beast), and The Unknown Road (East of the Sun, West of the Moon).

I have a soft spot for this book. Like Bride of the Midnight King, the heroine has an intriguing relationship with her youngest sister, one of the stepsisters. When I write little sisters, I tend to think of my own who was a complicated person I loved dearly, even when she drove me crazy. I miss her and she often shows up in my fiction in various guises.

Fashionista takes place in Chicago, a city one of my best friends now calls home. I had a good time playing around with the fairy tale and if you like that sort of thing, you might like this book. (Did I mention it's free for the next five days?) And if you like the book, would you say a few nice words about it?  Thanks.

History Has Been Made

I think that even if Hillary Clinton is not the nominee of your party or of your heart, you must still recognize what a momentous, hinge of history moment this is. Women have had the right to vote in this country since 1919. It's taken nearly a hundred years to have a woman run for president as the nominee of a major party.

Golda Meier became Prime Minister of Israel in 1969. Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister of India in 1966 (and is to date the only female Prime Minister the country has ever had.) Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979. Isabel Martinez de Peron became President of Peru in 1974. Vigdis Finnbogadottir became President of Iceland in 1980. Corazon Aquino became President of the Philippines in 1986. Park Geun-hye became President of South Korea in 2013. Angela Merkel became Germany's first woman Chancellor in 2009.

If you want to be stunned by just how far behind the U.S. is in giving women a voice in politics, just check out this Wikipedia listing of all the places who have elected or appointed a woman to lead.

Where are the Mer?

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“O, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note, to drown me in thy sister’s flood of tears.” --William Shakespeare, A Comedy of Errors

I have a fondness for mermaids.  I've written a couple of mermaid stories and I would love to do a series of epic fantasies set in a fabulous underwater kingdom. (The Dark Mer series.)  Everyone I know is telling me not to do it.  (The smart money right now is on Gargoyles being the next big paranormal "creature" and that's fine. I think there are a lot of possibilities in gargoyles. And also, if it means an end to the endless procession of "shifter" stories, I'm there. But mermaids...There need to be more mermaid stories. Chinese filmmaker Stephen Chow (whose hilarious The God of Cookery is must-viewing for any foodie) wrote and directed made half a billion dollars with his movie The Mermaid. there's also a lovely movie about a mermaid and France's Sun King that's stuck in development hell. I read it for a film market a few years ago and there was even a star attached, but it seems to have fallen off the grid. Maybe it's time to reboot Splash!

 

A message from the King--Stephen King, that is

Shakespeare's famous Butterfly Line

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Since we were speaking of butterflies, I went looking for a Shakespeare quote about butterflies. I found this from King Lear:  "We will laugh at gilded butterflies." I don't know King Lear as well as I should--I've only ever seen adaptations of it, like Uli Edel's King of Texas (with Patrick Stewart)--but the play is crammed full of gorgeous lines. "Come not between the dragon and his wrath!!"  Love that one.

TBR: The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison

Right now this book is number 1 in the mystery category over at Amazon. It is traditionally published and somehow I'd never heard of it until three days ago when I first spotted the cover. I'm not generally a fan of captive narratives, but this one sounds so off-the-wall intriguing that I'm going to have to check it out. It's got a 4.4 star rating on more than 2200 reviews.

Shakespeare in the Raw!

For a May 2016 staging of The Tempest in Central Park, according to production notes: The production uses semi- and full-nudity to celebrate body freedom and free expression and to dramatize the conflict between the visitors to Prospero's island and its inhabitants. 
You can read more about the production and see the pictures here. 
I just hope it was a warm night! 

Shakespeare's Prop Room: An inventory by John Leland and Alan Baragona

I don't know Alan or John but I wish I did because they are my kind of Shakespeare geeks. The idea of this book (inventorying every prop mentioned in dialogue, stage directions or implied in action. (Shakespeare was pretty sparing with stage directions. I only remember the most famous one, Exeunt, pursued by a bear, so I'm curious to know what they came up with. the book came out earlier this year and is available now, but at a price. (Even the Kindle version is nearly $35 which indicates a certain lack of clarity on the concept of digital copies.) The publisher is offering "early review" copies over at Library Thing this month so I signed up. But you know how Library Thing's things go...People click on everything, whether they want them or not. They're what a friend of mine calls "greedy grabbers." So wish me luck because I think it would be a ton of fun to leaf through this book.

And another book to be on the lookout for: Wolf Road by Beth Lewis

When you're marketing something, one of the things you aim for is "frequency" if you can manage it without driving people crazy. (There are those who claim that's actually not a bad thing either, but I disagree.)  The idea is that if you see something once, you might take notice of it, but you probably won't act. But if you see something THREE times, that interest turns to a click on a buy site.

I've seen something about Wolf Road three times now.  I know it was the title that first caught my attention because the cover is actually kind of meh. When I read the blurb, though, I was drawn in. It's 2020, a post-apocalyptic world, and a young girl begins to suspect that the man who calls himself her father is not only NOT her father, but a serial killer who plans to kill her next.  Yes, this book has three things I like:  a plucky young heroine, a dystopian future setting, and crime! the book will be out next month (July 5), so stay tuned!

BOLO: Ben Macintyre's Rogue Heroes

I have a writer crush on author Ben Macintyre. (I hope his wife, novelist/film critic  Kate Muir doesn't mind.) The first book of his I read was Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth. Worth was a fantastic, movie-worthy character and his greatest crime is actually motivated by passion (and not the murderous kind). Macintyre has a new book coming out in October and I cannot wait to read it. Rogue Heroes is a wartime story of Britain's SAS. I'm not necessarily one for war stories, but Macintyre's books Agent Zigzag and A Spy Among Friends, were enough to put me on his list of "followers" on Amazon. (And somehow I missed his Operation Mincemeat.  The subtitle is: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured Allied Victory.  Who is NOT going to read a book with that subtitle?)

Even if you prefer fiction to non-fiction, you owe it to yourself to sample Macintyre's work. He's on my list of best non-fiction writers working today. (Since you asked, some of the others are Sebastian Junger, Erik Larson, John McPhee, Joan Didion, Jon Krakauer, Susan Orlean, Barbara Ehrenreit, David McCullough, and Kathleen Norris.)

Shakespeare for the Soundtrack of Your Life

This is the Earl of Essex Galiard. The Earl of the title was Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, who was the politically ambitious nobleman known to be a "favorite" of Queen Elizabeth I.

Obscure Mysteries with Shakespeare Themes

I love mysteries. I've been reading them since I was a child and I love them all--cozies to Nordic noir and everything in between. If someone's getting murdered and someone's trying to find out why and who did it, I'm there. So it's fair to say that I've read a LOT of mysteries in my time. And yet--how can this be--I have never read a Shakespeare-themed mystery. Not one. So I turned to Goodreads, my source for all things listicle. The site did NOT let me down. (I find Goodreads a PITA to deal with in terms of uploading books and changing covers and things, but the readers are spectacular resources.)

There are 60 books on the list--one a day for the next two months!! And the one that caught my eye was Interred With Their Bones. It's set in modern day, themed to Hamlet, and features a character who goes on to headline a series. My kind of book. And bonus, it's available used for a penny and postage, so $4,