Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,

Are of imagination all compact:

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,

That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination,

That, if it would but apprehend some joy,

It comprehends some bringer of that joy;

Or in the night, imagining some fear,

How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!

My wife and I drove down to Atlanta last night to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Atlanta’s New American Shakespeare Tavern. Almost too much fun. I was weary of laughing by the end.

The play seemed to end before it truly ended. In fact since Act V is mostly a poorly written tragedy performed by buffons who have “never labour’d in their minds till now,” it’s appropriate to have only a weak connection to the rest of the story. In that act, the silliness wore on me–well done and the crowd was roaring, but my laughter softened a bit. Maybe it was the lateness of the night.

It was a great play, though. I’ll see it again sometime.

Frank Wilson points out a call for humor suggestions by Scott Stein. “What’s So Funny?” is the title of a course Mr. Stein will be teaching this fall at University of Pennsylvania. He says, “I would welcome suggestions about what to include on the reading list. . . . No choice is too obvious. After all, somehow I never got around to reading P.G. Wodehouse until this year.”

I don’t see James Thurber on the list yet. I think his grammar guide is hilarious, and I’ve been meaning to read Is Sex Necessary? or, Why You Feel The Way You Do for a while.

1. There are two types of people in the world: those who divide people into two types and those who don’t. (attributed to Robert Benchley)

2. “There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.” (Mark Twain)

3. There are two types of people in the world: those whom we are happy to see again and those whom we are happy to see go away.

4. There are three types of people in the world: those who can count and those who can’t.

old jokes