Shakespeare

Much like for my favorite movies, here is a list of my Top 25 favorite writers.

1. Vladimir Nabokov
2. Ray Bradbury
3. JRR Tolkien
4. Kurt Vonnegut
5. Douglas Adams
6. Mark Twain

The rest in alphabetical order by last name:

• Robert Benchley
• Charlotte Brontë
• Emily Brontë
• Albert Camus
• Raymond Chandler
• Umberto Eco
• William Gibson
• Spalding Gray
• Franz Kafka
• Jack Kerouac
• Milan Kundera
• George Orwell
• Dorothy Parker
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Muriel Spark
• Bram Stoker
• Jules Verne
• Edith Wharton
• HG Wells

Honorable Mentions

• Jane Austen
• Jorge Luis Borges
• George Carlin
• Philip K Dick
• James Ellroy
• Ernest Hemingway
• Ursula K Le Guin
• James Joyce
• Stephen King
• Herman Melville
• Flannery O’Connor
• William Shakespeare
• Mary Shelley
• Neal Stephenson
• John Steinbeck
• Hunter S Thompson
• Virginia Woolf
• Oscar Wilde
• PG Wodehouse
• Emile Zola

So late last night, Denyse and I caught the 1936 filmed version of “As You Like It” with Laurence Oliver as Orlando.

I wondered absently if actor Orlando Bloom were named for the character.

(And of course one of Bloom’s most famous roles came in the various Pirates of the Caribbean movies, based on a theme park ride you can visit in Orlando, Florida.)

Looking it up today, he was actually named for English (Tudor/Jacobean period) composer/organist Orlando Gibbons.

According to Wikipedia,

Gibbons was the “favorite composer” of the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. “Ever since my teen-age years his music has moved me more deeply than any other sound experience I can think of.”

Colm Feore, who played Gould in “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould”, was early in his career a noted Shakespearian actor at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada.

Kenneth Branagh’s 2006 “As You Like It” starred Kevin Klein who was, in the early 80s, a Shakespearian actor, and,

Dubbed “the American Olivier” by New York Times theater critic Frank Rich for his stage acting…

Branagh himself was, of course, both praised and panned by the English theatre critics. Like this one for his portrayal of Hamlet in the late 80s,

Critic Milton Shulman for the Evening Standard wrote: “On the positive side Branagh has the vitality of Olivier, the passion of Gielgud, the assurance of Guinness, to mention but three famous actors who have essayed the role. On the negative side, he has not got the magnetism of Olivier, nor the mellifluous voice quality of Gielgud nor the intelligence of Guinness.”

Kelsey Grammer (of Dr. Frasier Crane fame) played in “As You Like It” at the Globe Theatre in San Diego. Grammer was in the 1996 movie “Down Periscope” featuring, amongst others, a submarine called the USS Orlando.

UPDATE: Via LA Now, the Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga is coincidentally performing “As You Like It” starting today. Details here.

Ten arbitrary and somewhat random favorites (click to view at Amazon):

• Tron
• Trainspotting and Trainspotting #2
• Blade Runner
• Passion: The Last Temptation of Christ
• Romeo+Juliet
• The Royal Tenenbaums
• The Terminator
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show
• Run Lola Run
• Thirty two short films about Glenn Gould

Honorable Mentions:

1. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (no album ever released, but an awesome set of songs).
2. Twin Peaks (Angelo Badalamenti, TV).
3. Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, San Andreas, and IV.

Back in the days of NeXT, there was a bundled application called Digital Librarian. And as AppleInsider describes in this article, “Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Dictionary 2.0”,

Included with the system were the complete works of Shakespeare, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus.

With the new Dictionary.app, you have the ability to view other dictionaries, as well as all of Wikipedia — I’ve already been using this capability a ton. Combined with using the keyboard shortcuts under the “Search” menu, searching multiple places is very easy and quick.

An item that might go overlooked is in the “Go” menu — “Front/Back Matter.” Choosing that while the Dictionary is selected reveals various meta items like the people associated with making the included New Oxford American Dictionary, prefaces, introductions, etc. But there’s actually a massive amount of additional resources here. Check it out:

• American Voices by William A.Kretzschmar, Jr.
• How to Read an Etymology by Anatoly Liberman
• Key to the Pronunciations
• Key to the Abbreviations

Ready Reference

• Language Guide
  • Rules of English: Understanding Grammar
  • Guide to Spelling
  • Guide to Capitalization and Punctuation
  • Words: Making the Right Choices
  • Clichés
  • Proofreader’s Marks
• The History of English
  • Timeline
• States of the United States of America
• Presidents of the United States of America
• Declaration of Independence
• Constitution of the United States of America
• Countries of the World
• Chemical Elements
• Standard Weights and Measures with Metric Equivalents and Conversions
• Metric Weights and Measures with Standard Equivalents and Conversions
• Alphabets

Of course, in our always-online culture nowadays, all of this stuff is available via your favorite web browser. But if you happen to be offline (horror of horrors), these could be very useful.

April 23rd is shared as a birthday by several people of importance to me, one of whom is of the greatest importance of all. :)

First up, in 1564, a certain William Shakespeare who wrote, amongst other famous works, a sonnet which was read at Denyse’s and my wedding:

CXVI
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
  If this be error and upon me prov'd,
  I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

Next up, in 1899, Vladimir Nabokov — my favorite writer. He wrote this:

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

And finally — Denyse, my amazing wife. Our 10th wedding anniversary is coming up in June, and it feels simultaneously like it went by in a flash and like we’ve been together forever. Happy birthday and much love to you, D!