Businessman David Whyte turns to poetry to hold on to his soul in the corporate world.
Just as Rasselas questions Samuel Johnson’s Happy Valley, so do Penn State students find themselves questioning their own Happy Valley after the child abuse scandal. Coach Joe Paterno admired Aeneas, and many feel abandoned like Queen Dido.
Athena visiting Odysseus at a critical point in battle represents the sort of intuitive decisions that we associate with great athletes and geniuses.
Advent is a time for waiting and listening for a message from God. Jarman describes having once experienced it and feeling driven to find it again.
The Congressional Supercommittee failed to arrive at a plan to lower the deficit because the Republicans approached negotiations offering (like Michael Corleone) “not even the fee for the gaming license, which they’d appreciate if Democrats would put up personally.”
For a description of a luscious Thanksgiving feast, turn to the luncheon that Eve prepares for Archangel Raphael in Book V of “Paradise Lost.”
Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” has been adopted by a number of the Occupy Wall Street protesters but, according to one commentator, the story works as an ironic commentary on the movement.
Two Scott Bates animal fables cast a skeptical eye on idealists seeking a transcendent truth.
Readers often reread Jane Austen to reassure themselves that order can be found in a chaotic world.
By the end of “Paradise Lost,” John Milton has discovered a powerful response to suffering.
The scene in “Raiders of the Lost Arc” where Indiana Jones defeats a sword-twirling antagonist by shooting him articulates a fantasy that most of the Republican candidates for president are indulging in as they discuss Iran’s nuclear bomb ambitions.
A secret marriage entered into by my son Toby could have been taken straight out of Jane Austen’s “Emma.”
W. H. Auden’s chilling “Epitaph on a Tyrant” matter-of-factly shows the deadly but seductive simplicity that characterizes dictators like Qaddafi and Assad.
Charles Dickens has a character who resembles Mitt Romney when he states that he believes in American exceptionalism while Barack Obama doesn’t: John Podsnap in “Our Mutual Friend.”
Israeli author Amos Oz believes that literature can provide “a partial and limited immunity to fanaticism.”
Rather than lament the loss of the his eyesight–and therefore potentially his writing–in “On His Blindness” John Milton resolves to accept the new road laid out for him.
World War II vet Scott Bates remembers the war far differently from the images we have of it–not as heroic but as “people surrounded by dying men.”
Rick Perry’s “oops” moment in last night’s Republican debates brings to mind a passage in a Tom Stoppard play.
“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” warns us that we are in danger of becoming monsters ourselves if we don’t hold on to our humanity when responding to monsters like alleged child molester Jerry Sandusky, close associate of Coach Joe Paterno.
The blog “Hairpin” came up with the a series of book titles which, altered slightly, becomes delicious food puns.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Food, Puns |
A friend scrutinizing the language used in a conversation with her not-quite-boyfriend reminded me of the hypersensitive Faulkland in Richard Sheridan’s play “The Rivals.”
A recent Kinsey study reporting that men prefer cuddling and women prefer sex got me thinking about John Donne’s strange “you’ll be sorry” poem “The Apparition.”
Donne’s last question is whether God will forgive Donne’s lack of complete faith in Him.
Watching movies at home makes them something other than movies.
St. Louis’s improbable World Series victory corresponds to the mythos of comedy as described by Northrup Frye. Comedy’s improbably reversals symbolize the escape of life from the clutches of winter.
Nathaniel Philbrick describes “Moby Dick” as a “metaphysical survival manual” which helps us understand the nature of tyrants.
As Shakespeare understood with Macbeth and Richard III, narcissistic dictators like Qaddafi are so obsessed with control that they think they can stage manage their own deaths.
