“But maybe stories and poetry can help open our minds to possibilities that are very real but extremely hard to see; and in that sense, they can be very practical.” – Rachel Kranz in a response to yesterday’s post I love the two responses to yesterday’s post (from the two major women in my life) [...]
Posted in Behbahani (Simin), Nafisi (Azar), Stowe (Harriet Beecher), Tennyson (Alfred Lord) | Tagged Alfred Lord Tennyson, Azar Nafisi, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herbert Marcuse, Martin Luther King, politics, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Simin Belbahani, Ulysses, Uncle Tom's Cabin |
As protest roils Tehran’s streets, even in the face of a brutal crackdown, poetry is making itself heard. This past Saturday National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition interviewed poet Simin Behbahani, known as the “lioness of Iran,” who read a poem she had composed about the tyrannny of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The NPR website also [...]
Okay, here is a second post on poems about small winged pests, written in honor of President Obama’s cool and cold-blooded killing of a fly. When I was a child, I used to enjoy the poem about “the funny old lady who swallowed a fly.” It is one of those repetition poems, with a new [...]
Posted in Dickinson (Emily), Donne (John), Golding (William), Grimm Brothers, Swift (Jonathan) | Tagged death and dying, Emily Dickinson, Gulliver's Travels, Hansel and Gretel, I heard a fly buzz when I died, John Donne, Jonathan Swift, Lord of the Flies, The Flea, There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly, William Golding |
Georges de La Tour, Woman Catching a Flea, c. 1638. Oil on canvas. In case you haven’t heard, the news media was buzzing last week over a CBS interview with President Obama where he nailed a fly that was bothering him. I thought I’d have fun in today’s entry and talk about the symbolic use [...]
Children, when they start developing a sense of self, discover that there is a preset gender program they are expected to conform to. For some this is not a problem, but others feel constrained by their assigned designation. It’s not always that girls want to be boys and boys girls. Sometimes they just want to [...]
After reading my post on how we can examine our favorite children’s classics to gain self insight, my colleague Barbara Beliveau in the St. Mary’s economics department mentioned how much she enjoyed L. Frank Baum’s second Oz book, entitled The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), when she was growing up. This was always my [...]
After a week of discussing how literature can help us handle anger and violence, I return to Twelfth Night and the slippery issue of gender identity. This too is grabbing national headlines these days (what a time we find ourselves in!) as Americans battle over same sex marriage, “don’t ask don’t tell,” and other concerns [...]
When we say that our safety trumps all other considerations, we lose touch with something that is far more meaningful. Sometimes we need a novel as grim and stark as Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” to be clear what is at stake.
Odin’s Valhalla, Dwelling Place of the Einherrar, artist unknown While the major focus of this blog and website is looking to literature to see if it can provide solutions to life’s problems, at times I wonder if I am just engaging in wishful thinking. What if there are no solutions and literature is just whistling [...]
My wife (who is currently out of town) has just responded to my last post with a story that expands my conversation about the Beowulf approach to societal rage. In the story related in Julia’s post, a woman takes a principled and courageous stand in an ugly situation and finds herself, against all expectation, making [...]
If Grendel rage is on the rampage in America, do we have a Beowulf who can defeat it? And what would defeating it look like? In a recent New York Times piece, liberal columnist Frank Rich talks about how irresponsible talk from political commentators and politicians essentially enable those committing hate crimes, even though these [...]
We have a Grendel problem in today’s United States. The troll that invades our special halls has many different names—Scott Roeder, who killed Dr. George Tiller; James W. von Brunn, the Holocaust Museum attacker; Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad, who killed an army recruitment officer; gun lover Richard Poplawski, who shot three Philadelphia police officers; Jim David Adkisson, [...]
I’m going to put off my follow-up post to Twelfth Night until Monday because I just came across an interesting article that invites a timely response. As a tennis player and fan of Roger Federer, I am still vibrating over his having won at the French Open this past Sunday. After his archrival Rafa Nadal [...]
When I was a child, I was fascinated by works containing characters of ambiguous gender. Specifically, I was drawn to images of boys who either looked like girls or who were, unbeknownst to them, actually girls. I was also drawn to images of girls (and women) who passed themselves off as guys. The prevailing culture [...]
I’ve had fun discussing the reading of Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas over the last couple of days, and while I’ve come up dry on further posts about the Supreme Court and literature, it has given me the idea of periodically dipping into reading stories of other political figures. I’ll start a list here, beginning [...]
Posted in Alexander (Elizabeth), Angelou (Maya), Bible, Camus (Albert), Carle (Eric), Dickey (James), Fleming (Ian), Frost (Robert), Marquez (Gabriel Garcia), Morrison (Toni), O'Neill (Joseph), Robinson (Edward Arlington), Service (Robert), Sheridan (Richard), Stendahl, Tolstoy (Leo), Twain (Mark) | Tagged Abraham Lincoln, Al Gore, Albert Camus, Barack Obama, Bible, Bill Clinton, Book of Job, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Cremation of Sam McGee, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Edward Arlington Robinson, Elizabeth Alexander, Eric Carle, From Russia with Love, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George W. Bush, George Washington, Ian Fleming, James Dickey, John Kennedy, Joseph O'Neill, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, Mr. Flood's Party, Netherworld, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Proverbs, Richard Corey, Richard Nixon, Richard Sheridan, Robert Frost, Ronald Reagan, School for Scandal, Shooting of Dan McGrew, Song of Solomon, Stendahl, Teddy Roosevelt, The Red and the Black, The Stranger, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Toni Morrison |
The focus in this week’s posts is on Supreme Court justices and literature. I notice that, in his New York Times column today, moderate conservative David Brooks endorses Sonia Sotomayor for just that restrained balance that we discussed yesterday as we explored her early love for Nancy Drew novels. Today I’m going to talk about [...]
Posted in Rand (Ayn), Wright (Richard) | Tagged Ayn Rand, Clarence Thomas, Eldridge Cleaver, Everybody's Protest Novel, James Baldwin, Nancy Drew, Native Son, politics, Richard Wright, Sonia Sotomayor, Soul on Ice, The Fountainhead |
This week, with Sonia Sotomayor still in the news (although the firestorm that greeted her nomination has gone into temporary remission), I thought I’d devote my posts to supreme court justices and literature. This was inspired in part by an excellent New York Times article over the weekend on Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas (in which [...]
Posted in Asimov (Isaac), Delaney (Samuel), Dixon (Franklin), Keene (Carolyn), Stratemeyer (Edward) | Tagged Carolyn Keene, children's classics, Clarence Thomas, detective fiction, Edward Stratemeyer, Franklin Dixon, Hardy Boys, Hillary Clinton, Issac Asimov, John Roberts, Laura Bush, Meghan O'Rourke, Nancy Drew, Native Son, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Samuel Delaney, Sandra Day O'Connor, Sonia Sotomayor |
In my last entry I mentioned the key role that books can play in the lives of children. I’d like to follow that up here, officially adding the category of “children’s classics” to the “great literature” to which this website is devoted. There is artistry to many of the children’s stories that we remember fondly. [...]
Posted in Dr. Seuss, Sendak (Maurice) | Tagged children's classics, Dr. Seuss, Go Dog Go, Green Eggs and Ham, Hand Hand Fingers Thumb, In the Night Kitchen, Maurice Sendak, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, reading to childrens, Sendak, Sigmund Freud |
I can’t recommend enough the value of writing your reading history. It will reveal to you sides of yourself you didn’t know you had.
Posted in Angelou (Maya), Blume (Judy), Clifton (Lucille), Dr. Seuss, Morrison (Toni), Silverstein (Shel), Waber (Bernard), Walker (Alice) | Tagged Alice Walker, Bernard Waber, Bluest Eye, Blume, Book of Light, Cat in the Hat, Clifton, Color Purple, Dr. Seuss, Freckle Juice, Go Ask Alice, I Know Why the Caged Burn Sings, Ira Sleeps Over, Judy Blume, Lucille Clifton, Maya Angelou, Missing Piece, Norman Holland, reading histories, Shel Silverstein, Toni Morrison |
I return for one last time to Swift, who provides invaluable perspectives for understanding contemporary politics. Swift was a shrewd student of political dynamics. His satire is often an allegorical depiction of real life people and incidents, and if one knows one’s history, one can read parts of Gulliver’s Travels as a roman à clé, [...]
For a website devoted to whether and how literature can change lives, satire presents a special case. That’s because satire seems to have changing lives as its goal. Because of this apparent agenda, it fell out of favor with the high culture crowd in the heyday of the New Criticism. The New Critics, who [...]
William Hogarth, The Fourth Stage of Cruelty There are a number of images of cutting up human bodies in Swift’s satire. In this post I am going to explore why. In Book I of Gulliver’s Travels, the Lilliputians, when they want to punish Gulliver for his “traitorous” decision not to obliterate Blefescu, consider starving him [...]
