巴勃果夫. C ‘ Little Nurse’ 1962
When you are dying, would you want a former English major caring for you?
You would want Sarah Tennant Simmons, a former student of mine who is now a hospice care nurse. Sarah dropped by for lunch this past Monday and told me about the [...]
Midsummer Night’s Dream provides good instruction for the parents of teenagers. First of all, don’t think that you can tyrannically dictate your children’s choices (say, by threatening them with execution). On the other hand, they need guidelines and guidance. There’s no telling how they’ll behave once they are set loose in the forest of their [...]
Francois Boucher, mid 18th-century
As June is the month for weddings (Julia and I were married June 8), I will be looking at a wedding poem and a wedding play this week: Edmund Spenser’s gorgeous Epithalamion and Shakespeare’s magical Midsummer Night’s Dream. Writing about his own upcoming wedding, Spenser is so exuberant that he could be [...]
John Isner
Sports Saturday –
“It’s incredible! You could not write a script like this!”
So proclaimed the announcer in the U. S. – Algeria World Cup match when Landon Donovan netted a stoppage time goal to avoid elimination and send the Americans forward to the next round.
In other words, a sports announcer’s ultimate compliment is that narrative [...]
Film Friday
There were no good adult movies in town last weekend so Julia and I went to see Toy Story III. Any superlatives thrown Pixar’s ways are well deserved. Toy Story III is a gem.
Like any good children’s story, it articulates a number of basic childhood fears, especially that of being abandoned, and then creates an [...]
I am writing today about an image that gripped me as a child and that has proved a comfort to me since losing my oldest son ten years ago. I encountered it in The Princess and Curdie, a Victorian children’s fantasy novel by George MacDonald. I use it differently than the author does but it [...]
Jules Breton, Song of the Lark
St. Mary’s College of Maryland is very excited by our new president, Joseph Urgo, who joins us this week. Among other things, Professor Urgo is a national authority on William Faulkner and Willa Cather. I share with you here an excerpt from his program notes for the College’s Summer River [...]
As it turns out, I am not the only person looking to literature in order to get my mind around the recent oil disaster. Randy Kennedy has written a superb article in the New York Times that points out parallels between the Gulf oil spill and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Kennedy says that, in the 19th century, [...]
