One night in Blogwatch and the world’s your oyster…

Amy Welborn, spurred by this Jonah Goldberg piece on “Groundhog Day,” is asking readers to suggest movies that are shallow on the outside, deep on the inside. Interesting suggestions, plus this moving comment: “I had no idea until I read Goldberg’s various comments on Groundhog Day that [it] is considered to have spiritual meaning. I am no expert on philosophy or theology. At the time it came out, however, and I saw the film, I felt like it described my dull, run-of-the-mill empty, single, career-chasing life [and not actively Catholic]. I got up and did the same thing every day, went to bed and did it all over again. The movie hit me like a ton of bricks. I told people that was my life.”

The Old Oligarch has a great, rambly post on conversion. I can’t summarize it; you have to go look.

Relapsed Catholic has a new book!

And my “New Penguin Shakespeare” post below has already gotten two responses.

RA: On my front cover of Hamlet would be:

For in the fatness of these pursy times,

Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg.

Clio: Antony and Cleopatra: I would I had thy inches: thou should’st know/there were a heart in Egypt.

(I did not understand the full meaning of this line until I walked into a gas station on the highway, many years after I first read it, and saw a biker magazine with a picture of a ruler on the cover, with the caption, “Harley bitches get more inches”….But Cleopatra’s line is more than simply vulgar. And similar sentiments were uttered by Elizabeth I, who said, “Had I, my lords, been born crested not cloven, you had not treated me thus!”)

Hamlet: They say that the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. God be at your table.

(Refers to one of the Golden Legends, I think, which told how Jesus turned a stingy baker’s daughter, who cried, Oh Oh Oh when her mother gave bread to the disciples, into an owl. “As thou hast spoken, so be thou, child of the night,” he said, and she flapped away into the woods. I know all this thanks to Walter de la Mare’s Come Hither, one of the best anthologies of poetry ever written, I think.)

King Lear: The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us./The dark and vicious place where thee he got/cost him his eyes.

(Not nice, but thunderous and dramatic.)

Midsummer Night’s Dream: When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,/Neighing in likeness of a filly foal…

OR

Jack shall have Jill,/Naught shall go ill:/The man shall have his mare again,/And all shall go well.

Richard III: Richard loves Richard:/that is, I am I.

Cymbeline: Hang there like fruit, my soul, till the tree die!

I’m not sure how accurate all of these are, as if I stopped to look them all up, I’d be at it all day.