Ok, this one’s a little silly but I couldn’t resist. Whenever Cracked.com puts up an article that might have anything even remotely to do with Shakespeare, I go have a look. Such is the case with “7 Books We Lost to History That Would Have Changed The World”. No, there’s no Coriolanus or anything that (the list is primarily science and religion books). However, I did find a reference that made me laugh out loud for the timing of it:
Ever heard of that Coen Brothers movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? What about James Joyce’s Ulysses? Or Cold Mountain? Or 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or William Shakespeare or Bob Dylan? They were all influenced by The Iliad and The Odyssey, and we could easily go on.
I used to mistakenly refer to such moments as “serendipitous”, but that’s not the right use of that word. Instead I now call them “small universe” moments. For an even more esoteric one that nobody but me could possibly get, I’ll tell you the story of reading Julius Caesar in…I want to say ninth grade English class. We had a writing assignment which was to mimic a newspaper article reporting on the death of Caesar. Well it just so happens that I was taking Latin as my foreign language requirement, and in studying ancient Rome I’d learned that their version of “A.D / B.C” for calendars counted from something called “Ab Urbe Condite”, which if I remember translates roughly as “From the founding of the city”. So, I put that on my paper as part of the byline: “Rome – March 15, 175 A.U.C”. Nobody knew what it meant, and I had to explain it. ANYWAY, like I was saying … it’s the name of the #2 book on the Cracked list. 🙂