Antony and Cleopatra--1

Read Act One of Antony and Cleopatra today. It's good. I feel like I offer that comment on most of the plays. It's a strange play, though. Bloom says that all the characters in this play are performing all the time. I think that's true. At least, I think that might explain why it's hard to really get inside any of the characters. There aren't any soliloquies in Act One and there aren't really any private conversations, either. There's always a group onstage.

I think it must be kind of tough to write characters this big. In Julius Caesar, Caesar has a relatively small role and Antony is still young--still becoming the Antony of legend. That probably makes him a little bit easier to work with.

Basically, Antony is lolling around Egypt, having sex and fighting with Cleopatra, who must be kind of old, since we know that she also had sex Julius Caesar and Pompey. Eventually, Octavius (now Caesar and soon to be Augustus) asks Antony for help in fighting Antony's wife, who is leading an army nominally on Antony's behalf. Antony is too busy with Cleopatra to respond. His wife dies. Antony and Octavius (hereafter Caesar) meet up to make up.

I have more pressing concerns on my mind tonight, though. Today a guy came into the bookstore where I "work," immediately yelling. He's crazy. He says "Ok, say you and your friend have something going on. And it's private business, you know? And it's a secret. And then he goes and tells your girl, and before you know it, they've put you up for dope!"

This is not a story that could go anywhere. This is a story that has already been anywhere. What is the private business? It sounds like sex, but if it isn't dope, the story doesn't seem to make sense. Twenty minutes later, he dropped on me that this friend had sent him to prison to twenty years for dope. This because his friend was part of a secret Milwaukee city government conspiracy that shuttles $8 billion of coke every year to South Milwaukee. But when the victim was a paralegal, he discovered a clause that all minorities get money at 3% interest to improve their neighborhoods. So, all kinds of corporations invested in his name. So, now he's a millionaire, but can't get the money, because it's in bonds and the computers won't let him have it. The government is offering to pay him off for his silence, but that would implicate him when they do get investigated. Oh, and the corporations are involved.

Don't worry, though, dear reader, they daren't kill him off. I forget why this is.

And apparently I get paid just over minimum wage to listen to this guy and sell him a John Grisham book, which he told me the corporations were trying to keep from him. Every time he goes to Borders, the computers say that there are no copies left in print. And this somehow costs the corporations $14 billion dollars a day on the stock market. The book: Playing for Pizza.

You say, it sounds like fun to listen to this crazy person. Yes, but you forget, my store was robbed at gunpoint not long ago and I'm still a little edgey, even though I was at lunch when it happened. On the whole, I'd prefer that men larger than me act sane while in the store.

But, I've said too much. If this blog is shut down and I mysteriously die at an abandoned construction site over the next few days, then you'll know that the conspiracy is true.

Hamlet begins next week, so that it's done before Ash Wednesday, when certain essentials for reading the melancholy prince may no longer be available.