This is really rather silly.

An Al-Qaeda website has said that, um, they endorse John McCain for American president. Apparently, it'll be easier to bring down the 'evil US empire', or something. Who knew endorsements were so vital to terrorist organisations?

In other news, my companies are doing well, despite the downturn: Google and Apple have surpassed expectations, bringing some cheer to beleaguered markets. And I read this really fun essay in the NYT a couple days ago, arguing that following the prescribes of great literature might not work out so well in real life.

Nobel Prize Catfight

I've been following with great amusement the catfight of sorts that has broken out between the Nobel prize committee on one hand and spurned American literary critics on the other. Ever since permanent secretary to the committee, Horace Engdahl, gave this interview to AP saying that Americans were too ignorant and insular to be given the Nobel prize, the literary world has been in turmoil, with one rejoinder following another. To the extent that even the announcement of the award is being seen in the context of this debate.

I think Engdahl was speaking rubbish. And I do believe that these guys, Adam Kirsch in Slate and Charles McGrath in NYT are quite right. But this is so much fun! LA Times has weighed in also, so has the Guardian (well, people in those papers have weighed in, anyway). And here's the Telegraph UK on it, and then Washington Post.

I'm a little worried about my ability to be sarky right now. This was tailor-made, but I'm inclined to just let it pass without much in the way of wisecracking.

The World from a Stage

Yeah, yeah, I'm Trying to be clever but kinda not really succeeding. Anyway, I have just finished reading what is perhaps my favorite book by Bill Bryson, his biography of Shakespeare. I am a Shakespeare obsessive, and the idea of Bryson writing a book on him was very exciting and I have been wanting to get my hands on a copy since I read the first review. But this has surpassed all expectations. It is a slim book, about 200 pages, but there's so much information packed into it. Not only did I learn about Shakespeare, and how little we really know about him, but also about the times in which he lived.

Some things were awe-inspiring - like where we are now with communication technology and printing as compared to Shakespearan times and how much genius and how much luck it took for those plays to survive 400 - odd years. There are other things too, when Bryson describes life in Elizabethan London, some passages could almost be talking about Delhi. That got me thinking about the dichotomy of the times we live in. Most of us have indoor plumbing but this country still has to deal with a citizenry with perhaps the same level of awareness that masses in London in the 16th century had. It's a tough line to toe and maybe explains several of our problems.

Coming back to William Shakespeare, Bryson addresses the thorny question of authorship and builds a very convincing argument for the plays having been written by precisely who we think it was written by. Personally, I believe he is right - in my very uninformed opinion of course. I'm no literary detective. The biography is a gem, even if you're not in the least bit interested in Shakespeare. Bryson's Shakespeare is sort of a guide to life in the 16th and 17th centuries in England. It makes for fascinating reading, especially the popularity of the theatrein those times, and interesting facts, like that in Shakespeare's day, 40% of women got pregnant before they got married. Shakespeare is almost a bonus. He is in the book as in life (as Bryson puts so beautifully) "the literary equivalent of an electron, forever there and not there."