As the ice (or “iron rind”) starts dissolving from the ponds, we may dream of “ferns and flowers and new leaves unfolding.” But the transition from winter to spring is a much grittier affair, characterized less by sweetness and more by lurid smells emerging from chilling mud. The real harbinger of spring may not be the bluebird but the skunk cabbage, celebrated by Mary Oliver in a powerful poem.
The Republic, The Art of War, The Social Contract, The Prince, and the Tao Te Ching gave me a way of understanding the broader implications of the business choices I was making. They helped me look beyond the immediate challenges to find a greater purpose. My individual efforts seemed part of a legacy of thinkers and doers who had come before.
Posted in Plato, Tao Te Ching | Tagged Art of War, Business, Darien Bates, Education, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Liberal Arts, Machiavelli, Plato, Prince, Republic, Social Contract, Sun Tzu, Tao Te Ching |
Yesterday a New York Times blog addressed an issue I have been wrestling with as well: whether literature is up to the string of disasters we are encountering. Sam Tanenhaus asserts that “one of the enduring paradoxes of great apocalyptic writing is that it consoles even as it alarms.” To my mind, Tanenhaus’s most interesting point is about why poetry seems to be better at responding to catastrophe than narrative prose.
Dr. Joseph Urgo wove William Faulkner into his inauguration speech as the new president of St. Mary’s College. Above all, Urgo said, “St. Mary’s exists in the public trust, offering the love of liberal learning–an impassioned, dedicated, humanistic endeavor—to all segments of society.”
My friend Alan Paskow is finally dying. The poem that comes to mind is Mary Oliver’s “Universal Hospital, Boston.” All around nature is thriving, a contrast with the clean antiseptic rooms within the hospital. The contrast shows up as well in the patient’s eyes, which “are sometimes green and sometimes gray,/and sometimes full of humor, but often not.”
Sports Saturday Even though it happened a week ago, I am still shaking my head at one of the most bizarre endings I have ever witnessed to a sports event. The University of Pittsburgh, ranked one in its region, and Butler University, last year’s tournament darling and eventual runner-up, were in the final seconds of [...]
Film Friday Last Friday I wrote about my deep distress over the season 4 finale of Dexter. (Read no further if you want don’t want the suspense ruined for you.) My friend Rachel Kranz, who introduced me to the show, wrote me the following response examining why people, men especially, find the show so captivating. [...]
Suddenly everyone is interested in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and not only because tomorrow is the tragedy’s 100th anniversary. As the Wisconsin state legislature rolls back the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers, questions of worker protection are once again in headlines. The best poem I know that mentions the fire is “Shirt,” [...]
The news has been so grim recently that I offer up a bit of comic verse at midweek to give you a breather. Think of it as a celebration of the stench of spring—which is to say, of the fertilizer that the farmers are spreading on their fields as the season of growth begins. The [...]
First Muammar Gaddafi, Guernica-like, bombed his people. Now the United States and several western countries are bombing Gaddafi. As this Carl Sandburg poem makes clear, the nightmare has no end: Gaddafi jeering and Allied responding go on and on (if not in Libya, then elsewhere) as America enters its third war in ten years. Gargoyle [...]
As I wrote last year when the earthquake hit Haiti, all human language, even literature, comes up short when faced with disaster and death. Literature is language by humans about humans, and destruction on this scale seems to laugh narrative and image to scorn. Nevertheless, being human, we try to bring even apocalyptic disasters into a [...]
Spiritual Sunday Several times over the past few months I have rhapsodized over Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, feeling a little bit like Keats upon first reading Chapman’s Homer. “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into its ken,” the poet writes, perfectly capturing the experience. One reason I [...]
Sports Saturday March Madness begins this weekend. Actually, to be exact, it begins for the big schools. Division III colleges are in the final week of their tournament. I know because my college was one step away from making the final four. For the first time ever, St. Mary’s College of Maryland sent a team [...]
Film Friday Today, in a slight departure, I am writing on a television series rather than a film, one that has gripped me for months. My love affair came to a crashing end last week, however, and I have resolved never to watch another episode. Since I tell my students that negative viewing experiences are [...]
Yesterday I wrote about my colleague Karen Anderson entering into a poetic dialogue with cookbooks, particularly The Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook (or “the Big Red Cookbook,” as it is frequently called). She particularly hones in on the star recipes and examines the way that we may look to them as an escape from a life [...]
My colleague Karen Anderson, who teaches poetry in many of our creative writing classes, recently gave a fascinating talk to the faculty on her poetic dialogue with cookbooks, especially the Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook (commonly knows as the “Big Red Cookbook”). I asked for her lecture notes so that I could reconstruct her argument for [...]
David Lodge’s Small World is the funniest novel I know about international academic conferences. Among the more bizarre scenes is an American Jane Austen scholar, once a New Critic and now a reborn deconstructionist, who against his will is pulled into the bondage and domination games of an Italian feminist poststructuralist. As described by our [...]
“Nature, be thou my goddess,” exclaims Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester in King Lear as he prepares to embark on a course of action that, before he is stopped, results in the disinheritance of his legitimate brother, the blinding and banishment of his father, the poisoning of one sister by another, and the execution [...]
Spiritual Sunday Jackie Paskow, a former colleague from the Foreign Language Department, recently mentioned to me a Flannery O’Connor story that had made an impact on her. We normally visit the Paskows on Sunday evenings—Alan is my friend who has cancer—but as we are out of town for the week, I thought I’d send her, [...]
Sports Saturday I’m written out this week so do yourself a favor and hie thee to some of the best writing about poker that I know. You don’t have to play the game to enjoy the writing of my novelist friend Rachel Kranz, who I’ve mentioned numerous times Her website is called Adventures in Poker, [...]
Film Friday The Western, Hollywood’s quintessential genre, can tell us a lot about race relations. I was reminded of this on Wednesday when I taught John Ford’s The Searchers in my American Film class. Rewatching the movie got me thinking about the Congressional hearings on “Muslim American Radicalization,” which began yesterday. I will have more [...]
As I watch Muammar Qaddafi turn his air force against his own people, I am trying to imagine conditions on the ground. I asked my father for literature describing the experience, he having once undergone a bombing himself. It occurred in 1944, a couple of weeks after the D Day invasion of Normandy, when the [...]
My son Darien and I were interviewed by Boomer Alley Radio yesterday—I’ve posted the listening times below in case any of you live out west or want to check out the podcast—and while I wish I’d gotten a bit more specific about how Shakespeare applies to business, it was fun. Everything I said on the [...]
Later today I’m going to be interviewed, along with my son Darien, by Boomer Alley Radio. As producer Sharon Glassman described it to me, this is “a weekly hour-long show of upbeat, useful information that airs on the CBS news affiliate in LA, across Colorado and nationally via podcast.” Finding a post I had written [...]
I am in awe of the protesters in Tunisia and Bahrain and Egypt and Libya and Iran and Yemen and the Sudan and elsewhere in the Middle East. Their yearning for freedom is so great that, day after day, they put their lives on the line. I pray particularly for those in Libya and [...]
Spiritual Sunday Last week I wrote about how my friend Alan, beset with cancer, has beenexploring the meaning of love as his health fails. Here’s a beautiful George Herbert poem that captures Alan’s love for creation, his sadness that he must leave it, and (perhaps) his sense that his love may transcend death. Even though [...]
Film Friday In a 2006 commencement address to the University of Richmond Law School, John Douglass outlined how The Wizard of Oz can serve as a guide for lawyers. His brother Brent, husband of Carter Douglass whose children-in church poem I published two weeks ago, alerted me to it, and since it fits this blog [...]
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” Franklin Roosevelt memorably told a nation in the midst of its greatest economic crisis. As I look at America today, I see a lot of our politics dictated by fear. It is as though the unscrupulous and the irresponsible are stampeding us into extreme positions. Some want [...]
I have to give the American far right an award for chutzpa: somehow they have managed to turn every one of their failures into an attack point. A schizophrenic student buys a glock and turns it on a Congresswoman, a child, and others in a shopping mall? Use this as an argument that we need [...]
From time to time I bring you updates about my friend Alan Paskow, currently failing because of cancer. Julia and I visit the Paskows every Sunday night. Julia administers a Reiki massage to Jackie while Alan and I converse. In our recent visits, Alan is always in bed when I talk to him. Our conversation [...]
