Martin Scorcese’s “Hugo” pays homage to fantasist Georges Méliès and the history of the movies.
Poet Ralph Hodgson compares time to a caravan that will not stop for us.
Two wonderfully light poems give readers a chance to test their knowledge of cultural history.
Posted in Bensley (Connie) | Tagged " sexuality, Albert Einstein, Bloomsbury group, Connie Bensley, Gertrude Stein, Humor, Jacob Epstein, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf |
“We shall walk in velvet shoes,” writes poet Elinor Wylie, describing the experience of walking in snow.
How well did Sherlock Holmes anticipate future studies of the brain? Not very well.
A Scott Bates version of the “Holly and Ivy” carol shows how multiple religious traditions blend seamlessly in Christmas rituals.
GOP members of the House were citing “Braveheart” in their recent battle with the Senate, but “It’s a Wonderful Life” is the movie we should be talking about at this time of year.
Charles Dickens helped solidify the idea of Christmas in the minds of 19th century England by his descriptions in “The Pickwick Papers.”
Scott Bates’s “The Night before Christmas on the Moon” delightfully sets Clement Moore’s beloved poem in a lunar landscape.
The Sea Voyager, temporary home to St. Mary’s students after we were hit with a bad mold problem, left campus on Sunday, bringing to mind an Alfred, Lord Tennyson poem.
Even in his final days, Christopher Hitchens was having active discussions about novels, poems and plays. He understood how much was at stake in literature.
As Madeleine L’Engle writes, “Had Mary been filled with reason/There’d been no room for the child.”
Comparing the Japanese film “Departures” with “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” give special insight into the meaning of Christmas.
To update Jane Austen, my class took eight of her characters from “Sense and Sensibility” and put them in Facebook conversation with each other.
The “New Yorker’s” Hendrik Herzberg has a perfect Anatole France quotation for Republican plans to pay for extending the payroll tax exemption.
Race, as we learned from watching a play based on student experiences with the subject, is more painful when we avoid it than we we confront it head-on.
Here’s a non-Christmas tree poem by Scott Bates for friends of the environment.
In “Vineyard Stories” poet Anne Higgins combines three of Jesus’s parables to imagine a vineyard where all can come and feast.
It stands to reason the beat author Jack Kerouac would be a fan of Harpo Marx’s anarchistic energies.
Should we dismiss all the rhetoric coming from the Republican presidential candidates as the gryphon in “Alice in Wonderland” dismisses the “off with their heads” commands of the Queen of Hearts?
Economics teacher Steve Ziliak uses Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” to teach the human side of microeconomics.
Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” allows us to see some of the dynamics that the tough new anti-immigration law in Alabama has set into play.
Newt Gingrich’s proposal that poor children be allowed to serve as janitors in their schools calls for a Dickensian response.
A Rilke poem captures the spirit of Advent when he describes his life as “the rest between two notes.”
Ernesto Cardenal poem “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe” sees the actress sacrificed on the altar of our own longings.
In “The Fascination of What’s Difficult,” William Butler Yeats gives us a poem that will help get us through end-of-the-year workplace fatigue.
