No Icicles left

Dear friends and family,

All the icicles are gone, some with help from Merwin, and the snow is slowly sublimating as well as melting. Sonia and I went for a short walk when she first arrived. Together we did some serious cooking and exercises, and on her own she did the wash and mending. Soon after Sonia left we had a visit from our delightful friend Anna, whom we seldom see these days since she has retired from NCC and moved to Southhold, a community on the North Shore of Eastern Long Island. What a joy to be with this beautiful woman who has carved a wonderful life for herself since her early retirement. She leads many bookgroups, Monday through Friday, and obviously does a lot of reading, with different books for each one. It's something like teaching English literature except no grading papers! And she now has a significant other. She is one happy person, and her happiness flowed through to us.

Yesterday, I mentioned a recipe in the NYT Mag. Jan. 10th issue. I am thinking about another piece in that issue, the Assange essay, aptly titled "The Man Who Kicked the Hornet's nest," a very long discussion by Bill Keller of his experience having access to the wikileaks material that Assange has decided to publish in three newspapers. The three writers from the three papers got the raw material and shaped it into something suitable for print. It's not just that they decided that some things should not be printed. They also decided how to make the mess into something literary, something worth reading (though I did not read any of it). This is the point I want to make: shaping is a creative act and makes something new and different from the raw material. The three newspapers are liberal, moderate and conservative, respectively. Each reporter saw a different way to make (shall we say) the messy raw materials into something that would fit the kind of newspaper they were writing for. There is no way to really know what the raw materials conveyed since they now have been filtered through the creative process of three (now more) different writers. There are other issues, of course, such as should these raw materials be published at all. I understand that undercover Afghans have been put at risk of execution because of their outing in the documents. I care about that, of course, but here I am concerned that Keller seems to think he is conveying originals, cleaned to be sure, but to my mind, shaping in creating. No two essays about a literary work, for example, will be the same.

Yesterday, a colleague wrote an email stating he was hurt that hamletworks had neglected to refer to his published work on Hamlet. I don't know what people think about our magical ability to scan every journal, every title, of the hundreds of works on Hamlet every single year! We do our best, often in a haphazard way. We depend on people to send us references to their essays. We have methodically gone through every major edition of the play since 1603 and many minor ones, and we have captured data from lots of book-length critical essays. We've had student helpers on occasion who have scanned the main Shakespeare journals for us, brought relevant articles to our attention, and even written valuable summaries, but I have had no money (from grants) for such helpers for a while. Right now, since library work is impossible for me, I am working on Shakespeare books I own that we have not yet scanned and looking for material on Hamlet in TLS, which sometimes has something worthwhile on Hamlet (but thank goodness not too often). So please, dear folks, if you have published anything on Hamlet in any language, in any format, please please give us the bib info, send us the piece as a WORD.doc or pdf or jpeg file, summarize it for us, etc. My dear friend Joe P has kindly sent me individual commentary notes on lines (from his work in progress) and I have been more than delighted to place his ideas, always interesting, on the site. Others could do the same!

Thinking of the site, I better get back to work.
Love,
Bernice

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