Tim Keller writes about his congregation sponsoring a full Shakespearean play improvised by the Improvised Shakespeare Company. For example:

The company takes a title or theme from the audience and then improvises a full Shakespearean play, complete with couplets, iambic pentameter, and the use of Shakespearean plot-lines. When asked for a title someone in the audience called out “Cat food for Breakfast.” The company proceeded to improvise a multi-act play based on that unifying theme, bringing it to a satisfying and hilarious conclusion. Most of the people in the audience I talked to afterwards said they couldn’t remember the last time they laughed so long and hard.

After the performance the director, Blaine Swen, shared how his Christian faith shaped his work as an actor and improv artist. He said “since Jesus has solved the big issues—he died on the cross for me—I am free to go on stage and have fun.” This is a powerful resource that all Christians have available for their work. We don’t go out on the stage or into the workplace trying to find ourselves, trying to justify our lives through our performance.

Angry at Thailand’s military dictatorship, protesters are taking to the streets in silence to be seen reading 1984 and other dystopian books.

Pimsiri [an activist] watched dejectedly as Thailand’s military moved in to seize power last week, for the 19th time in 80 years. Speaking on the phone the day after the second book protest, she says she feels what’s happening in her country now is frighteningly close to the fictional state of Oceania in Orwell’s novel, where independent thought is crushed and the Ruling Party is omnipresent.

“My friends told me when they read 1984 for the first time they could never imagine there would be a country like that, but it’s happening now in Thailand,” says Pimsiri. “People are really watching you, your computers are being monitored… and many people have been detained in undisclosed locations.”

Great Britain’s Minister of Education Michael Gove wants more British literature on the recommended list for middle and high school students, so he has cut some classic American works. To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, and The Crucible are the only dropped titles I’ve found so far.

The head of one British exam board said, “In the new syllabus 70-80% of the books are from the English canon.”

The Department of Education states it is not restricting any books or types of books. It is making their standards more rigorous. “It does ensure pupils will learn about a wide range of literature, including at least one Shakespeare play, a 19th-century novel written anywhere and post-1914 fiction or drama written in the British Isles.”

Oxford University professor John Carey said, “the idea of cutting out American books because they are not British is crazy.”

Elsewhere, kittens frolic in the grass.

Do you have a problem with this? I don’t, because I don’t think asking kids to read Dickens instead of Steinbeck will kill their spirits, and I wonder how many non-classics of the English language exist that will inspire just as many kids as the classics they replace.

I remember one of my English professors saying that new anthologies never added anything to their section on William Wordsworth. They just repeated the same poems with a couple seemingly random ones to make their selection look independent. The random ones stuck him as inferior to the standards. He didn’t say this directly, but I gathered that he believed Wordsworth is not the major poet his reputation suggests, but a minor one of significant place. So if the groupthink could be challenged a bit, Wordsworth could step back from the front line of English literature studies and give space to someone else in another period.

That’s where I go with the minister’s recommendations for British students. Is The Crucible so stinking awesome English-language students must, must, must read it? I doubt it. Let it have a rest and give another strong play its year in the sun. If that means more Shakespeare, Marlowe, or Harold Pinter, it’s probably time for it.

And now for something completely different. Clive Thompson shares his discovery of the moral outrage over playing chess that cropped up in the 1800s. He quotes from an interview with the authors of Bad for You: Exposing the War on Fun!, which is a book about the historic complaints over new and popular entertainments.

Cunningham: Just wait. Each new wave of fear over the latest technology that interests kids is just that: a wave. The wave comes, it crests, and then it crashes against the shore and fades away. That’s partly why we chose to create the timelines in the book, like Youth-a-Phobia or Fear of the New, to give a historical view of these hysterical reactions. But with the distance of time, all these panics start to look foolish and quaint..

Pyle: Especially that “pernicious excitement” of chess embraced by children “of very inferior character.”

Part of that outrage is recorded in Scientific American: “Persons engaged in sedentary occupations should never practice this cheerless game; they require out-door exercises for recreation — not the sort of mental gladiatorship. Those who are engaged in mental pursuits should avoid a chess-board as they would an adder’s nest, because chess misdirects and exhausts their intellectual energies. Rather let them dance, sing, play ball, perform gymnastics, roam in the woods or by the seashore, than play chess.”

Thompson points out that these complaints are not completely fruit-looped, even if they are overstated. Would that young people were taking up live steel combat instead of this or other games for so-called good, clean fun.

Jeffrey Overstreet notes that The Phantom Menace is 15 years old now, and it hasn’t aged well. “I look back on my original review of this film with some chagrin,” he says. “The big screen was starved for inspiration, and there was just enough in The Phantom Menace to make me grateful for its arrival.”

But he wasn’t so grateful he would give it passes on bad dialogue and annoying characters.

Video: Ceramic Masters at work. This is beautiful. What marvelous work.

A trope is a convention, sometimes a cliché, that may be used as a formula for a specific purpose in a story. The quest, foreshadowing, or the faithful sidekick could be considered tropes for their implementation within a story. James R. Harris has given us a periodic table of the information found on TVtroupes.org, weighting each item in kilowicks (thousands of links to the relevant page on the site). To give you a taste of this potential guard against clichés in your own stories, here are items organized under “Setting, laws, plots” with their popularity rating:

• An Aesop 3.0
• Serious Business 4.0
• The Masquerade 1.7
• Recycled IN SPACE 3.2
• X Meets Y 2.3
• Magic A Is Magic A 0.75
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism 1.6
• Status Quo Is God 2.0
• Call To Adventure 0.43
• Redemption Quest 0.20
• The Hero’s Journey 0.28
• Saving the World 0.38
• They Fight Crime .58

Of course, I picked the tame category. The plot device category has fun things like “Applied Phlebotinum“, an object or substance used to advance the plot. Here’s a good bit of dialogue as an example:

Nick Naylor: Cigarettes in space?

Jeff Megall: It’s the final frontier, Nick.

Nick Naylor: But wouldn’t they blow up in an all-oxygen environment?

Jeff Megall: (beat) Probably. But, you know, it’s an easy fix. One line of dialogue: ‘Thank God we created the, you know, whatever device.‘

— Thank You For Smoking

(via Fast CoDesign)

“Hype is an overrated and overused tool, but the power of compelling narrative endures, hence the sprouting of new Swedish literary agencies with names like Partners in Stories and Storytellers. They have an eye to lucrative film rights, of course, but few would deny the seductiveness of a good plot.”

The Swedish Book Review is out with several takes on books you may want to watch for. (via The Literary Saloon, the place to go for translated fiction.)