In a departure from custom, today’s post focuses on journal writing. Beatrix Potter may best be known as the author and illustrator of Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and other classics, but she was also a world-class naturalist who kept a fascinating journal. My colleague Kate Chandler, who teaches many of our college’s “ecoliterature” [...]
There has been a lot of complaining in recent years about the lack of civility in social discourse. The breakdown of common courtesy and mutual respect in town hall meetings, Congress, and other venues threatens (some believe) the very foundations of our society. In his article this week, Jason Blake talks about how the internet [...]
My colleague Jeff Coleman recently wrote the following poem about the stoning of women in places like Somalia, Iran, and Taliban-controlled regions of Afghanistan. He tells me the poem was triggered by an article in the New York Times about Iranian executions, but for me it brought to mind the Somalian stoning two years ago [...]
Spiritual Sunday I was teaching Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale on Friday and had a sudden insight: laughter, even blasphemous laughter, is not an enemy to spirituality. In fact, it can be a means of deepening our connection with the divine. I will make my case through Chaucer. The Miller’s Tale is about as bawdy as it [...]
Why do I find myself rooting for someone guilty of an abominable crime? And yet this Sunday, when the Philadelphia Eagles play the Jacksonville Jaguars, I will find myself cheering for Michael Vick. The stories of the dog fighting ring run by Vick will turn any stomach. He went to jail for it and now [...]
Film Friday I’ve spent many hours talking about film with my friend Jim Bershon, a retired dentist who loves movies. When my life became too busy a couple of years ago, Jim took over a monthly film series at a local senior center that I had started. He sent along the following introduction to his [...]
I seldom get sick but, when I do, I become a wimp. Generally my illnesses take the form of stabbing sinus pain, and I retreat into a cocoon of misery and imagine myself about to die. As is appropriate for my melodramatic self pity, my mind invariably fixates upon a literary scene composed during France’s [...]
My father is a master of light comic verse, a genre often not taken seriously by literature departments. The ability to lift the spirits, however, is a precious gift that should not be underestimated. The following poem, about a lover of reading, is a reference to Jesus’s instructions (in Mark 4:21-22) that we not [...]
John Kenneth Galbraith, noted economist and author of The Affluent Society, used to read Jane Austen before he sat down to write. He wanted to achieve the author’s light ironic touch in his own work. Yesterday another liberal economist had me thinking of Austen. Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate who writes for the New York [...]
Margaret Atwood’s most famous novel may be her futurist nightmare The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). In her two most recent novels, Atwood returns to the dystopian genre and paints a picture of a world in which unbridled capitalism, environmental devastation, urban decay, sexual license, runaway gene splicing, and extreme income disparity rule the earth. My book [...]
Spiritual Sunday This past Sunday in our Episcopal Church, the 23rd psalm, it seems, was everywhere. We read the psalm itself aloud and sang two or three hymns that were versions of it. The gospel lesson dealt with the parable of the lost sheep, a comforting passage given its assertion that “the good shepherd” loves [...]
Sports Saturday I bicycle virtually everyday to the college where I work, about a mile and a quarter from home. Unless it’s raining or snowing, motorists can see me pumping along, my pants tucked into my socks, my necktie blowing in the wind, my backpack weighed down with laptop, lunch, and the Longman Anthology of British [...]
Film Friday I have been recently writing about how Jane Austen’s 17-year-old heroine in Northanger Abbey uses gothic novels to negotiate the challenges of early 19th century life. Today I talk about how the greatest box office success in Hollywood history did the same for middle school girls in 1997. In fact, a major reason [...]
In his August 29 Washington Mall speech, rightwing television commentator Glenn Beck attacked (among other things) the notion that Christianity should be concerned with issues of social justice. He accused Barack Obama and liberation theology of distorting Jesus’s message. For the President, Beck said, it’s all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, [...]
W. H. Hunt, Eve of St. Agnes Sometimes I will discover that two different works start talking to each other simply because I happen to be teaching them both at the same time. This week Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (from my Jane Austen first year seminar) and John Keats’ Eve of St. Agnes (from my [...]
Muse of Comedy I’ve been thinking about how shallow and dishonest political speech has become in recent years. Then again, maybe it’s always been like this and I’m just noticing it more. When politics enter the picture, it appears that people start becoming stupid. Outlandish claims and ridiculous reasoning are either (1) accepted as factual [...]
M. Parrish, “Wynken, Blynken and Nod” From time to time I have reported on my friend Alan, who is dying of cancer but who continues to hold his head up and, to the amazement of us all, refuses to get depressed. We held another one of our salons in his honor this past Thursday. After [...]
“Yom Kippur” by Maurycy Gottlieb Spiritual Sunday This coming Friday, from sunset through nightfall of the following day, Judaism celebrates Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement, its holiest day. The ritual involves fasting and prayer, and even secular Jews will often spend the day in synagogue. I share with you today a wonderful Yom [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
