Parallels A friend: “Wanna do word association? I’ll say a sentence, and you say — quick, without thinking — which country I’m talking about. Okay?” Me: “Sure. Fire away.” He: “Okay, you ready? Here’s the sentence: ‘Without any proper rule of law, state-connected actors made billions gaming the system while ordinary citizens lost their savings in financial swindles.’” Me: “Um, Russia? . . . Oh, I see . . . ”
Swan of Avon April is of course the month of Shakespeare’s birthday, reminding many of us — most of us, I’d venture to guess — how shamefully unacquainted we are with much of the Bard’s work. I know the Tragedies pretty well, and could squeak through an exam on the Histories, I think; but the twelve Comedies and the four Romances — forget it. I’ve seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest performed. We “did” The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night in school, but I remember next to nothing of them except for the “quality of mercy” speech, which we all had to memorize. I’ve read a couple of the other Comedies/Romances out of curiosity, but without retaining much. Too late now, I suppose. The Shakespeare I’ve got will have to see me out.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ADVERTISEMENT
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
There are quite a lot of people named Shakespeare.
Here’s one; and I briefly worked alongside a different one in 1980s London. “Related to the Bard?” I asked him. (Note: I couldn’t say “Descended from . . . ?” as William Shakespeare had no
male issue that survived to adulthood.)
No, my colleague explained. In 19th-century England there was a pretty good supply of foundlings — orphans of unknown parentage — Oliver Twist being only the most famous one. They had to be named somehow. One system was to give a foundling some name of fame or distinction. Thus, most present-day Shakespeares have a foundling ancestor.
Oliver Twist was named on a different system, as Mr. Bumble explained:
We name our fondlings [sic] in alphabetical order. The last was a S, — Swubble, I named him. This was a T, — Twist, I named him. The next one comes will be Unwin, and the next Vilkins. I have got names ready made to the end of the alphabet, and all the way through it again, when we come to Z.
One indication that the world, at any rate the Western world, has actually improved somewhat is that the word “foundling” has pretty much fallen out of usage, to the disadvantage of no one but novelists. The mathematician Jean d’Alembert was a foundling, but I can’t think of any other famous examples (outside literature, which of course is thick with them because of the plot possibilites they offer).
Wordstar I thought Chris Buckley’s memoir of his father, at least the extract in the New York Times Magazine, was beautifully done. Our parent-child relationships have depths we are barely aware of — I still haven’t plumbed to the bottom of mine, though my own parents have been dead for 24 (Dad) and 10 (Mum) years. I’m not sure I could write about them coherently and at length, as Chris has done.
One little detail that caught my eye was Bill’s insistence on sticking with WordStar as his word processor of choice. I understand this perfectly. Once you’ve mastered a piece of software, why should you have to go to the trouble of ditching it to learn a new one? Bill actually out-conservatived me there. I am proud to tell anyone who asks that I write everything (including this diary) using KEDIT, a nifty text editor from the mid-1980s. KEDIT is modeled on XEDIT, which I used in my mainframe days in the early 1980s. I’m well into my third decade with KEDIT and see no reason to change. Still, KEDIT’s first release was 1983; WordStar was already five years old at that point.
That was Bill for you: Standing athwart software development yelling Stop!
