2b? Nt2b? ???

(lovely picture courtesy of Maven--yes, that is a giant lizard)

Maybe someday there'll be a non-library related post, but today is not that day. Today brings a tale of fresh horror (or amazing innovation, depending on your point of view.) Apparently, a British cell phone service will soon begin offering great works of classic literature to cell service subscribers in text-message-speak. In the spirit of granting greater intellectual access to the assembled body of human knowledge I want to say rock on! \m/ But the best I can do is: uh, okay, whatever. I always thought part of the deal with reading Shakespeare was, you know, the English language. The insults alone have more literary merit than than the average 200 page novel published today:
* Thou hath more hair than wit, and more faults than hairs, and more wealth than faults.
* Truly thou art damned, like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side.
* You starvelling, you eel-skin, you dried neat's-tongue, you bull's-pizzle, you stock-fish--O for breath to utter what is like thee!-you tailor's-yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck!

In my optimism I will try not to see this as yet another way for students to pass exams without really learning; that this isn't really just Cliff Notes for the cellular age. Really, what this will do is allow anyone with a cellphone to tap into the collective cultural consciousness that Shakespeare has helped create. Having fingertip access to plots and quotations that unlock jokes and leitmotifs from the Simpsons and Seinfeld and basically everything else in English-based culture is a good thing--it creates more common ground and greater understanding among peoples, because then more of us will 'get it,' and we won't have to plow through King Lear to do so. But is 'getting it' the whole point of reading great works of literature? The intellectual snob in me says no.

At any rate, here's the Lady Macbeth speech that whacked me on the side of the head in 10th grade English class and made me realize how bitchin' Shakespeare really was (don't ask me why, I'd have to be 15 again to answer you...)

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts! unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top full
Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, ‘Hold, hold!’

(insults courtesy of the Shakespearean Insulter, excerpt of Macbeth courtsey of the Internet Public Library)