Quotations Weblog

I just finished reading Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart. I’m always amazed at how many good quotes I can get from some authors and how few from others. It’s like some people write to be quoted and others don’t, somehow.

Sean Stewart writes like a man who should be quoted. I’ve taken all of these tidbits from his book to whet your appetite:

You can see my full review of the Perfect Circle on Pick Me! It was a great book for me to read and a glimpse into my life if I had gone the SLC Punk route instead of the one I’m on now.

• Pick Me! – Perfect Circle

Every few years someone comes up with another idea of who (if not Shakespeare) may have written the plays attributed to him, since our knowledge of Shakespeare himself is sketchy. The usual suspects include Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon.

Now, in an upcoming book, Brenda James and William Rubinstein propose that the real author of the plays was Sir Henry Neville, an English nobleman. They claim Neville was a relative of Shakespeare and hired him to direct and act as “front man” for the plays, to keep Neville himself out of the limelight.

• Unmasked: The “real Shakespeare” (article by David Keys)

Their evidence includes similarities with Neville’s political situations and locations, similar writing styles, a page of notes written by Neville that might have been used for Henry VIII, and, amusingly, a document found in 1867 which allegedly shows 17 attempts by Neville to forge William Shakespeare’s signature.

Then again, according to this article by Tom Veal, Brenda James began her research by “deciphering a hidden message” in the dedication to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Sounds a bit Bible Code to me.

I doubt we’ll ever know the whole truth about Shakespeare, but it’s certainly fun to speculate. [via MetaFilter]

Groucho Marx, born Julius Henry Marx in 1890, was an american comedian and the best known of his family comedy troupe, the Marx Brothers. He started performing comedy in vaudeville and moved to radio and television as the world changed. See Wikipedia’s biography of Groucho Marx for more.

Continuing the my favorite quotations series, here are my favorite quotes from Groucho Marx.

• See All of our Groucho Marx quotes
• Groucho Marx books at Amazon.com

We are living in a time when music is more available to us than it has ever been before. Not only does music play across the radio waves every couple of hours (between commercials and non-sensical DJs), we can purchase music easily from iTunes or Yahoo! Music. With the advent of the Creative Commons Copyright phenomenon, we can download free music from a wide variety of sites. We truly are lucky.

Little Miss George Eliot would be so happy right now. I can just imagine her now, downloading tunes and ripping CDs. I wonder if she would have been so literary if she had as much music to distract her as we do.

Some Creative Commons Music Resources:

• Opsound: Open Sound Resource – copyleft music and sound

• Magnatune: MP3 music and music licensing (royalty free music and license music).

• dmusic.com | Your Digital Music Oasis

• SoundClick – Free MP3 music download and much, much more.

I don’t know how I know this, but I do know that Jane Austen hates the town of Bath. She portrays it as a petty city that is only good for gossip and parties and balls. After reading all her works, I can most assuredly say that Jane Austen hates Bath.

I searched the entire catalog of Jane Austen novels using The Literature Page in search of a quotation to prove my supposition. There were 197 uses of the word “Bath” in her complete works. Discounting the “sea-bathing” and the “she took a bath” entries, I found a great many quotes pertaining to Bath:

These quotes are said by women that we should know are unwise.

The only clues that I have that Jane hates Bath are these few quotes:

All of Jane’s heroines love the country life, so this quote tells me that life in the country is decidedly better than it is in Bath.

This is probably the main reason I think that Jane Austen hates Bath. My favorite character from my favorite of her novels hates Bath. Jane must also.

Sadly, one perfect quote from Jane Austen saying her true feelings about Bath does not exist and I have to pick and gather to prove my point. I’ve heard it’s a nice place to live now, however.