O.J. Simpson is not Othello

It's been 20 years since Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were murdered in Los Angeles. Nicole's ex-husband, football star-turned actor/pitchman O.J. Simpson was accused of the crime and the ensuing eight month trial became a media circus that, among other things, first brought the name 'kardashian" to public awareness. (The now-deceased K clan patriarch, Robert, was Simpson's good friend and attorney.)

Shakespeare Noir Mi Corazon

  MI CORAZON

 

By Katherine Tomlinson

 

 

You’re with Raimundo on K-ESE Los Angeles and it’s time for the news.

 

A clash between Montagues and Capulets left five dead as gang violence spilled over in Verona this afternoon. Responding to pressure from residents of the small suburb of East Los Angeles, the Verona police chief announced a new zero tolerance policy that would implement the death penalty for any gang member caught breaking the law.

 

Bigstock Images

The first time Romeo Montague saw Julieta Capulet he forgot all about Rosa, the Capulet cousin he’d been boning in order to get intel on the Capulet gang. Rosa had invited Romeo to her cousin’s quinceanera on a dare and to her surprise, Romeo and his compadre Mer-Q had shown up.

Romeo was chowing down on home-made tamales when Julieta appeared on the dance floor wearing a turquoise dress he wanted to rip off like wrapping paper. Some little nerd of a Capulet cousin was dancing with Julieta when Romeo stepped up to claim her, right there in front of her father and everyone else. “I don’t know you,” Julieta had said as he danced her backwards around the room.

“You have always known me,” Romeo said in Spanish so that it wouldn’t sound cheesy. “My name is Romeo Montague.”

Shakespeare in 144 characters

Photo courtesy of Bigstock

I think if Shakespeare were alive, he'd have embraced social media. "All the world's a stage," he wrote and isn't it thrilling to contemplate what he would have done with a global stage like the Internet? It's already amazing enough that his work remains potent nearly half a millennium after he was born.  And when we reach the stars, somewhere we will take Shakespeare with us. Because he is alive and well on social media.

There is a Facebook group devoted to Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who many believe was the "real Shakespeare." There is a group devoted to Kill Shakespeare, a comic book in which Shakespeare's greatest heroes are pitted against his most menacing villains (more on that later in the summer.) Goodreads has a Shakespeare Fans group that has more than a thousand members. There are study groups and reading clubs and appreciation circles all over the place, including the Michigan-based Oberon's Shakespeare Study Group, which is particularly interested in the authorship question.

Shakespeare is vibrantly alive on Twitter.

I follow a lot of Tweeps who tweet Shakespeare. Here in L.A. there are a number of Shakespeare-centric drama groups and theater companies that I keep up with (like Theatricum Botanicum) and it's a way of making sure I don't miss their special events. There's @ShakespearePost who has more than 32,000 followers and is following nearly 27K.  Not quite George Takei numbers, but if it were really Bill S posting, I bet he would have gotten to 1 million followers at least as fast as Anderson Cooper. Mostly this account tweets quotes from the plays and sonnets but every once in a while, there's something else, like a link to an article about very unfortunate tattoos that was quite entertaining.

If you're on Twitter and want to find more Shakespeare-friendly folk, all you have to do is type the bard's  name in the search bar. There are a lot of us out there.

Coming Soon...Bride of the Midnight King

In my spare time I write for fun and profit. I use my own name for my crime fiction and horror, but I use my pseudonym, Kat Parrish for the fantasy stories. I've been writing more and more fantasy lately, and one of the results is a series of reimagined fairy tales I refer to as "Grimm Blood Tales" because they involve vampies.
Yes, I know. The world is full of vampire stories.
the world is also full of fairy tales and at some point, fairy tales and vampire stories just had to collide. (Probably already have, actually, I'm not arrogant enough to think I'm the first to think of it.)
I found myself thinking of different ways fairy tales could be woven into vampire stories and the first result is this novella, a Cinderella story in which a mortal girl becomes the bride of a vampire king.
I'm already plotting the next story in the series, Midnight's Daughter, which is a Sleeping Beauty story.
The cover for Bride of the Midnight King was created by Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services. The book will be out at the end of June.

Ryan Gosling and Shakespeare. You're welcome.

Shakespeare's Perfume...for the summer of Shakespeare reading list

I ran across this description for a book called Shakespeare's Perfume and was intrigued.

Drawing on theology, alchemy, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary criticism, Shakespeare's Perfume explores how the history of aesthetics and the history of sexuality are fundamentally connected.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for free

Tom Stoppard wrote the script for Shakespeare in Love and co-wrote the script for Brazil, but before he was famous for his screenwriting, he was a noted playwright whose plays were filled with witty wordplay and what Wikipedia calls "intellectual playfulness" with diverse and literate topics woven into his stories. I've seen most of his major plays but my favorite remains Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, his intriguing vision of Hamlet told from the point of view of two doomed minor characters. I discovered that the movie version, starring Tim Roth and Gary Oldman and directed by Stoppard. is playing on YouTube. It's divvied up into 12 parts. so you'll need some patience, but if you've never seen it, it's well worth your time.