Because making Dr. Horrible icons is the most productive way that a grad student can spend their time, I swear. They looked better without words, but the words were too good to leave off. Conundrum! Severals of minutes were spent wrestling with this issue. Speaking of issues, the latest Entertainment Weekly (surprised?) features Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, revealing among other things that the DVD will have singing commentary and that planned audio language tracks include a)Spanish b)French c)Japanese badly translated back into English d)classical Latin and e)panther noises. Good times! Speaking of which, I think this trumps owning a Jayne hat as a reason for choosing a Halloween costume. Of course, being me, I'm going to see if I can swing the red version. Red ones go faster.

The NEH institute is drawing to a close, which I'm ok with at this point. It's been an enormous time-suck, and although it was both enjoyable and educational, those bits could have probably been condensed into a day or three. Mostly it was sitting around watching people take a crash course in the same stuff I've been learning in detail over the last year. And the guest scholar list, while illustrious, was carefully constructed so as to provide as little new information as possible. It's like Blackfriars Greatest Hits - all the academia that you love, but only the really popular stuff that everyone hears when they first get into the genre. That's my theory, anyway. On the other hand, Alan Dessen was the impressive, and Jeremy Lopez spent so much time talking about my less-probable thesis idea that he managed to link it to my more-probable thesis idea. Thank you, Dr. Lopez!

On a final note: Alan Dessen was discussing the existence and loss of the early modern dramatic vocabulary. Basically, since actors were putting on shows with minimal rehearsal, there's a possibility that the stage directions we have are so sparse because everyone knew what that meant. For example, "Enter as to a jail" means put one guy in manacles, and give another a giant ring of keys. That's a simple one. Slightly more complicated is the disappearance of the ghost in Hamlet - since the actor has to leave the stage like everyone else does, the "ZOMG it vanished" has to be hard-coded into a sort of "standard disappearance maneuver." Looking at the spot where it suddenly went invisible, ignoring the exit, a bit of flailing, and etc. Dessen pointed out that there's indication of the ghost opening its arms before almost speaking to Horatio. So maybe the accepted convention for disappearing, at least in that moment, involved closing the arms.

To put it another way: Big-time Shakespearean scholar Alan Dessen suggested that undead creatures cross their arms over their chests to go invisible. How cool is that?