Film Friday
In today’s post I write about my favorite film, one that pulls me into the world of a child’s imagination like no other artistic work. The film is Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive (Espíritu de la colmena), which came out in 1973.
The film is set during or immediately after the Spanish Civil War [...]
Teaching a course in British Fantasy has given me a new perspective on Midsummer Night’s Dream, our first work. The course could be called (borrowing from Bruno Bettelheim) “the uses of enchantment” because our focus is on how and why people turn to fantasy. In our class discussion, we decided that Shakespeare uses his green [...]
Jason Blake’s guest column this week is on the issue of plagiarism. Jason’s experience matches my own: it takes more work to produce a successful plagiarism than to write an acceptable essay. Plagiarism is generally so obvious that the plagiarist resembles Tom Sawyer in the episode involving memorized Bible verses. As you may recall, students [...]
Marilynne Robinson
I’ve been meaning to write for a while on Marilynne Robinson’s mesmerizing 2006 novel Gilead. I learned recently that it is one of Barack Obama’s favorite novels, which gives me an opportunity to explore how a work of literature impacts someone that we all have a stake in.
This isn’t meant to be a review [...]
Here’s a special Labor Day post for the workers of the world—those who have jobs and those who don’t, those who are overworked and those who are underemployed, those who are treated fairly and those who are exploited, those who are just starting out and those who have been working for a long time, those [...]
Elena Flerova, “Rosh Hashanah”
Spiritual Sunday
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is a time of year when Jews do a spiritual self assessment and take upon themselves responsibility for the sins of the world. As the “days of awe” commence this coming Wednesday, I went looking for a good Rosh Hashanah poem. I found an excellent [...]
second only to the Dominican Republic in providing active Latin American players to the major leagues? (There are over 200 currently playing.) Among the greats have been Orlando Cepeda, Pudge Rodriguez, and the Alomar family (Sandy, Sandy Jr., and Roberto).
I’ve asked Israel, who is a poet, to keep an eye out for Latino baseball poetry. [...]
Jolie as Grendel’s Mother
Film Friday
I’m teaching Beowulf at the moment and of course my class wants to know what I think of the movie, by which they mean Robert Zemeckis’s animated 2007 version rather than the 2005 Swedish film Beowulf and Grendel. Neither is very good but it’s interesting to see what each does with [...]
Larry Burrows photo, 1966
Continuing on with connections between Barack Obama’s reading list and the winding down of American involvement in Iraq, I notice that there are a number of Philip Roth novels. As the list is from when the president was in his twenties (for the most part), it is missing a more recent Roth [...]
Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now
As I listened to the president talk last night about the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, I found myself thinking of a book on his reading list, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. (See last Thursday’s post for the entire list.) In his talk, Obama mentioned how he had disagreed with [...]
