Mel Gibson in Braveheart
Film Friday
Mel Gibson is in the news again with recorded rants against his girlfriend that are so vicious that even his ardent supporters are backing away. (You can learn about, and even listen to, the rants here but I advise caution.) I’ve never been a Gibson fan and this website ran an article critical [...]
I interrupt my Jane Austen series in honor of the soldiers killed by the army psychologist at Ford Hood. Facts are sketchy as I write this, but Beowulf, particularly the monster Grendel, may give us some insights into the tragedy.
Think of Grendel as a warrior that goes bad. In the epic, Grendel lives on the [...]
When I think of contemporary writers who focus on violence the way that the Beowulf poet does, novelist Cormac McCarthy comes to mind. One novel of his you may know because it was made into an Oscar winning film is No Country for Old Men (2005).
This novel features a Latino villain named Chigurh who appears [...]
Odin’s Valhalla, Dwelling Place of the Einherrar, artist unknown
While the major focus of this blog and website is looking to literature to see if it can provide solutions to life’s problems, at times I wonder if I am just engaging in wishful thinking. What if there are no solutions and literature is just whistling in [...]
We have a Grendel problem in today’s United States. The troll that invades our special halls has many different names—Scott Roeder, who killed Dr. George Tiller; James W. von Brunn, the Holocaust Museum attacker; Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad, who killed an army recruitment officer; gun lover Richard Poplawski, who shot three Philadelphia police officers; Jim David Adkisson, who [...]
