Nina Zero

Nina Zero is holed away in a hotel with her new identity, and she sees her story in the news, the airport bombing, though no one knows she has anything to do with it, except for the bad guys of course.

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The anchorman recapped the story. Fire trucks raced across the screen, firemen mopped up after the blaze, a guy with blood on his face walked toward an ambulance. What was starting to seem like a dream was made real by television. I felt bad about what happened, didn’t like to see people hurt. But there was this voice in my head said, You did that, what you did is live on television, millions of people are watching, millions are wondering who you are and why you did it. I flipped through the channels, saw Jay Leno talking to Goldie Hawn, Arsenio Hall grinning, Humphrey Bogart coming through a door with a gun. I was up there with the stars. Problem was, I didn’t know better than anybody else why it happened.

-- “Shooting Elvis” by Robert M. Eversz

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Cooler Mornings

Morning walk. We may still be in the middle of our hundred-degree days, but the mornings already have a distinct coolness in the air. I didn't even need to take a shower when I returned home, but I did shower last night, which helps.

Hamlet

One of the big critical questions asked of "Hamlet" is why does the prince delay in his revenge. Here we have a good push-back on that response.

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In the nineties, in a brilliant essay called “Hamlet’s Dull Revenge,” the writer René Girard faulted critics for writing as though “no more was needed than some ghost to ask for it, and the average professor of literature would massacre his entire household without batting an eyelash.” Our response to “Hamlet,” he thought, said more about our bloodlust (and about the roots of theatre in religious sacrifice) than it did about Shakespeare. Some critics have brought gender into the discussion: most “Hamlet” criticism has been written by men, and perhaps they’ve yearned for a manly, decisive killer-hero.

-- Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker

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Perhaps Shakespeare's "Hamlet" bespeaks our more modern conceptions of civility and violence, a leading indicator of our gentler, more doubtful age.

Celebrities and Stuff

"Can white people say nigger ?" (Watch on YouTube)

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