What everyone knows about Harper Lee, born on this day, April 28th in 1926, is that she wrote only one book, To Kill a Mockingbird, and that, although still living in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, she has declined to speak about it for the past forty-five years
In the current Literary Review, University of Liverpool professor Philip Davis, author of Shakespeare Thinking, describes his ongoing collaborations with neuroscientists to study The Bard’s syntax and one of his favorite linguistic tricks: the functional shift. One kind of functional shift is the “verbing” of a noun — for example, “parenting our children.” Shakespeare frequently verbed nouns to great effect and Davis wanted to find out if the literary device could be understood with neuroscience. So he and his colleagues are using EEG and other methods to measure the brain’s response to Shakespearian functional shifts.
It’s no secret that the James Joyce estate has been ridiculously overprotective when it comes to Joyce’s copyright. Of course, a lot of Joyce’s works are quickly approaching the public domain in various places (and some are already there), and so the estate may be losing its control. Still, it’s nice to see that the estate finally “agreed” to one usage. Glyn Moody points us to the news that after an astounding 22 years of asking, singer Kate Bush has finally been allowed to use Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy from Ulysses as lyrics for a song. She had first asked in 1989… and was denied. She wrote different lyrics instead, but kept asking the estate. Perhaps realizing that (in the UK) the work was going into the public domain next year, the estate finally relented.
