rant

Ok those of you who've been with me in Lit classes over the years know that I'm not a great Shakespeare fan; I have no feel for the abstruse figures of speech, the convoluted characters, the plot, the great tragic flaws, and so on. But no doubt through the Merchant of Venice, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra (just a tiny sampling of his plays), I think I've gained at least a respect for the richness of meaning that can be coaxed out of his words, if you try hard enough. I'd be the first to admit that I find Shakespeare boring and inaccessible at times (I fell asleep in a performance of Macbeth when we were on the UK-Paris trip), but at the same time I respect him for the boldness and imagination of his creative vision. English would be far poorer, far drier without Shakespeare and great poets and playwrights like him.

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So I was at Borders at Parkway, searching for a gift for someone. I ended up in the poetry section, right next to Shakespeare and Lit Crit. I spent ages browsing through all kinds of stuff; TS Eliot, Billy Collins, John Betjeman, a bit of The Rape of the Lock which I had no patience to read properly... and generally getting lost in words, when these two airheaded twats started dissing Shakespeare next to me.

What stung me most was how flippant and trite their comments to each other were. They started with milder stuff like "my sister did Romeo & Juliet once and I couldn't really understand it" (fair enough, maybe she hadn't tried), but as they progressed and connected, they started a race to the bottom; it seemed as though each was trying to outdo the other in bimbo quotient. Once they got serious their main grouses were "it's not a storybook leh" and "haha the words are so weird". And as they went on they started picking up random plays and flipping to the middle to browse and giggle. 

I wasn't in the mood to give a response so I shut it, flipping through more and more volumes of poetry, just letting my distaste build up slowly. Eventually they tired of it and went to the chick lit, where they were way more at home. Obviously their education hasn't done them much good.

Girls these days! ^^ pfft.