Last week a couple of readers questioned, quite rightly, my sympathetic posting of the following quotation by Polish poet and essayist Zbigniew Herbert:
History does not know a single example of art or an artist anywhere ever exerting a direct influence on the world’s destiny – and from this sad truth follows the conclusion that we [...]
Reader Farida Bag sent me a link to an article from the London Guardian about literature being used to rehabilitate prisoners in Texas. The program, called Changing Lives through Literature (here’s the link to their website) has been racking up impressive results:
Of the 597 who have completed the course in Brazoria County, Texas, between 1997 and [...]
Sarah Palin has been recently celebrating “Mama Grizzlies”—by which I think she means “women who are so mad that they’re not going to take it anymore.” But has anyone noticed that she advocates policies that make life a lot harder for actual grizzlies?
Whether through calling for drilling in the Alaskan National Reserve, denying the [...]
G. Dore, Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner
Spiritual Sunday
I’ve been thinking about why it’s sometimes hard to pray for help. Perhaps it’s because asking for help seems an affront to our prideful self sufficiency. Perhaps it’s because we fear that we are not worthy to receive it.
I think of how Coleridge’s ancient mariner is so filled with self-loathing that [...]
Michelangelo, La Pieta
Spiritual Sunday
I received some very confusing signals from the high school I attended. That’s because it was an Episcopalian military prep school. I remember hearing the phrase “church militant” and marching to church to the strains of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (“marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before”).
Years later [...]
When I was in middle school, I found myself in the midst of the South’s school desegregation battles. (I was born in 1951 and my family moved to Sewanee, Tennessee in 1954). Therefore, I experienced a disturbing sense of déjà vu when I saw Virginia governor Bob McDonnell two weeks ago declaring a special month [...]
Janet Leigh in Psycho
Film Friday
Last week when I was giving a series of lectures on “women and film” at the University of Ljubljana, I devoted one of my talks to (of all things) the slasher film. Below is a shortened version of that talk:
A key work in feminist approaches to film is Laura Mulvey’s Visual [...]
Ljubljana
I spent last week delivering a series of lectures in my adopted second home, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Ljubljana is the city where I spent two year-long Fulbright professorships. I have friends in the English and philosophy departments at the University of Ljubljana, as well as at the two international schools located within the Slovene school system. (My [...]
J. D. Salinger
In my Introduction to Literature classes, I used to poll my students about the books they had read in high school that had impacted them. One book above all made it to the top of list after list: J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. I mention this because Salinger died yesterday at [...]
Norman Rockwell, “Freedom from Want”
The gathering of the Miksches for Thanksgiving yesterday was a joyous affair. Given that I attended it with trepidation, I should learn to stop worrying. I was concerned about contentious debate, but the only political conversation I had was with my wife’s nephew, and that proved to be a substantive economic talk.
This time, [...]
