Somehow I've managed to land myself in a deluge of Shakespeare this month. This week and weekend in particular I will be reading four(!) plays for various grad-and-high-school-related undertakings. Othello and Macbeth will be (or have recently been) taught to the kiddles, and The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream have some strikingly tenable threads binding them to James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, which I will attempt to unpack and elucidate in a competent (or at least coherent) fashion by the beginning of December (sidebar: if anyone out there is a scholar of the Venetian Jew and has insights on the character of Shylock demanding to be shot in my general direction, they should not feel compelled to quell said impulses...). You'd think that the upcoming break from school would be a perfect time to immerse myself in this project, but the same days I should spend in academic seclusion happen to be the ones on which everyone will be home and ready to play. I think there used to be a version of me who was a pretty deft time-budgeter. We shall see if she's still in there somewhere.