Every now and then, my husband (a bartender) muses about opening a strip club and naming it "Ilium" -- discount admission to firsttimers who get the joke...

Also with BDSM elements (though it's really more anti-domestic violence), Book 1, Elegy 7:

Bind fast my hands, they have deserved chains

And for polyamorists, Book 2, Elegy 10:

Groecinus (well I wot) thou told'st me once,
I could not be in love with two at once,
By thee deceived, by thee surprised am I,
For now I love two women equally

And that one has one of the funniest (IMO) closing couplets of a poem I've read in a long time. It's an old joke (I don't want to spoil it for those who haven't yet read the poem), but I hadn't realized just how old.

A few days ago at the library, I was flipping through some of Harold Bloom's essays on Shakespeare & Marlowe. Normally, I can't stand Bloom -- I think he's a pompous stuffed-shirt who does more harm for appreciation of Shakespeare than good -- but I noticed he edited a book of essays on Marlowe and I skimmed his introduction.

Much to my surprise, he appears to prefer Barabas to Shylock, and writes:

I cannot envision the late Groucho Marx playing Shylock, but I sometimes read through The Jew of Malta, mentally casting Groucho as Barabas.

I'll confess--some of my admiration was writergeeking over the first-person omniscient unreliable narrator.

That's like doing triple axels just to prove you can. *g*

Showoff.

I thought his Kit was a bit of a whiner, though.

I think it suffers from the problem that many historical novels do--it suffers as a narrative arc because Burgess had a hard time separating the story from the list of facts and conjectures. It's a weird kind of flaw, because I still think the book is brilliant in many ways--

--but it's definitely the kind of flaw that leaves the story 'feeling' 'lopsided'

I think that's exactly the same thing I'm saying, in different words: attempting to find a tidyness between the history, the work, and the fictionalized biogrqaphy.

And you'd think writers would know better than to subscribe to that particular myth. *g*

I have the advantage that, even though I'm obsessed with Kit, two of my works relating to him ("This Tragic Glass" and The Stratford Man) take place after his death, and the other one, (The Cobbler's Boy [of which I am only part patron: it was a collaboration]) takes place when he was rather young. I'd not attempt a book where the conflict revolved around the protagonists biography; I'm reasonably certain that it's beyond me.

That said, Burgess' narrative technique and his work with the first-person omniscient POV in Dead Man still blew me away. Amazing, amazing stuff.

Come on in!

Oh, you had to alert the Universal Webmind to the possibility.