Ahhh! I didn't see this yesterday and I gave a little scream this morning when I saw the headline. This was essentially the topic of my master's thesis, plus I also focused on Paulina in The Winter's Tale, who is also a badass who regularly tells off the king. It's been a decade since I wrote it, but I remember being amazed in my research by how much Emilia's role gets cut in productions, and by how little recognition she gets in general. The scene where she and Desdemona sing the willow song is one of the few depictions of female friendship that we get in Shakespeare. (Paulina doesn't get much recognition either, but neither does The Winter's Tale, in general). My research was pretty frustrating--there wasn't too much out there at the time. I remember the Petcher article from my research (and I'm retroactively mad at myself that I never came across the article from Shakespeare Quarterly. I could've used that!)

I had to do this in college too--mainly to amuse my English professor--and I can't for the life of me remember which characters I used. It's going to drive me crazy now! Too bad all my undergrad papers are on a 3X5 floppy disk somewhere.

I think it works, timeline-wise. Maxim is 42ish, and the book seems to take place in a time contemporary with its publication, so he would have been born somewhere in the 1890s.

I prefer to think this is du Maurier's way of informing the reader that Maxim is a serial killer, though.

This is perfect.

I've taught Rebecca many times, and a fun thing I noticed the last couple times around is that when Maxim recounts killing Rebecca he says "I'd forgotten that when you shot a person there was so much blood." Exactly how many people has Maxim shot? Good lord, man.

YES. This drives me up a tree. It sounds like the platonic ideal of breakfast, how are you not eating any of it? I am SUCH a breakfast person and this makes me viscerally angry every time I read it. Ugh! Goddammit, tuck in, woman!

My experience is not the same--it was my father who died--but this: "to think that you once held her hand and sat in the car with her and watched TV with her in the same room. It’s wild to you, literally incredible. You have trouble making yourself believe in it" resonates so, so much (just with genders reversed). My father died when I was eight, and my memories of him all seem like a sort of dream, or a hazy recollection of a past life. It's strange to think the girl in those memories was actually me.

Thank you for this. It was truly beautiful.

I'm fascinated too. I think a lot of my fascination comes from viewing the whole debacle through an adult lens--there is so much I misremembered, forgot, or just didn't grasp when it was all actually happening. I had just started high school when the verdict was announced (watched it on an old-school big-screen TV, which was in the library for some reason?). I don't think I began to understand the racial implications until that day in my lily-white Catholic school. Everyone was aghast at the verdict, except for a very, very small group of African-American girls--I can still hear their restrained cheer of "Yes!" and I can still see the dirty looks shot in their direction. I was a weird kid who followed the case pretty closely, and would watch all the OJ coverage when I came home from school, but there was so, so much I didn't understand back then. I mean, I know the Riots happened in 1992 and the murders happened in 1994, but it took the opening scene in the first episode for me to finally be like, "Oh. There is a connection here!" I think a lot of the humanity of the case was lost on me back then, which, to be fair, was lost on the media as well. I had no recollection of Nicole's children sleeping in the house when she was murdered, and that shot in the first episode just made me so sad that two people were brutally murdered and their lives were just sort of eclipsed by this whole circus.

On a lighter note, Schwimmer's various line readings of "Juice" are my favorite part of this whole thing, so when he came out with "Uncle Juice" I had to rewind because I snorted so loudly.

Lord of the Flies is a definite Jock book, if only because it is the ultimate favorite-book-choice of dudes who haven't read a book since high school. See also Catcher in the Rye, anything by Hemingway.

Every time I see the MLA list I am newly enraged. It's like something from the Eisenhower era.

I absolutely love the story he told on Conan about Matt Damon eating mysterious gelatinous cubes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1kcYdGyG0s