If we have dark fantasies that we are ashamed of, one response is to turn them into art.
Sophocles and Homer present compelling cases for granting full funeral rights to the Boston Marathon bomber.
The David Petraeus affair–is it 19th century melodrama or high tragedy?
Also posted in Hugo (Victor), Shakespeare (William), Tolstoy (Leo) | Tagged Anna Karenina, Antony and Cleopatra, David Petraeus, Leo Tolstoy, Macbeth, Notre Dame de Paris, Othello, Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare |
Literature as therapy, Greek tragedy as soap opera: assorted articles about lit and life.
The lessons of the Sophocles play “Oedipus” can be applied to disgraced Penn State coach Joe Paterno.
Roger Clemens tried to bully his Congressional interrogators the way that Oedipus bullies witnesses. To say that he should have handled himself differently is to say that he should have been a different man.
Having just turned 60, I’ve been thinking of Teiresias. Wise though the blind seer may be, his advice doesn’t help others that much. Aging, in other words, appears to require humility.
Also posted in Eliot (T.S.), Euripides, Johnson (Samuel), Yeats (William Butler) | Tagged Aging, Bacchae, Carl Jung, Euripides, Homer, Odyssey, Oedipus, Sophocles, T. S. Eliot, Wasteland |
Watch out for political purists and dogmatic idealists. They can do a lot of damage. A writer who delivers this warning is Milan Kundera, a Czech novelist who owes his insights to his experience with communism and the 1968 Soviet invasion. Expect to encounter regular posts from me about Kundera because I am mentoring a [...]
