This evening I will be moderating a Leonardtown Library conversation about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. It’s an enjoyable novel that is perfect for book discussion groups since it’s about a book discussion group.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is set up during the [...]
Two weeks ago I was honored to participate in two conversations with high school classes about the Tim O’Brien Vietnam War novel The Things They Carried. Carl Rosin, an English high school teacher and regular reader of this blog, set up the occasion.
I have taught O’Brien’s marvelous work in our College’s 20th century English-Language Literature [...]
Boeldieu and Rauffenstein in La Grande Illusion
Film Friday
I wrote Tuesday and Wednesday about Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” and the fences that divide us, both externally and internally. Today I write about one of the great humanistic films about dividing lines: Jean Renoir’s 1937 classic La Grande Illusion.
The final scene of the film reminds me [...]
Memorial Day
Today we honor our soldiers killed in the line of duty. Many of them were idealistic, most of them were young. I offer up today an enigmatic poem by A.E. Housman that captures, in an understated way, the tragedy of their deaths.
The poem is unusual in that it talks about soldiers having a choice. Technically, [...]
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Spiritual Sunday
What would attract the father of the nuclear bomb to a devotional poet like George Herbert?
That J. Robert Oppenheimer was drawn to the 17th-century Anglican rector I learn from American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, written by Kai Bird (a former Carleton classmate of mine) and Martin J. [...]
Film Friday
I owe my love of film to my father, who for years ran the “Cinema Guild” at the University of the South/Sewanee. When I wrote two weeks ago about Meet Me in St. Louis, my father talked about seeing the film as a G. I. in Europe. “We saw the film as directed at [...]
Jeremy Renner
Film Friday
I taught Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker in my film genre course earlier this week. The film both impressed and depressed me.
I have been teaching action adventure films and how our culture uses this genre to sort through male identity issues. Drawing on a very useful book by Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, [...]
Steppe Eagle
I share today a poem by my father Scott Bates, who is an ardent birdwatcher as well as poet. The poem reminds us of an ongoing war that too often we want to push out of our minds.
Through contrasting the natural world with the disasters created by humans, my father expresses his longing for [...]
As the president addressed the nation Tuesday night about his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, I found myself impressed with his seriousness and depressed over the situation. I know that he has no good options. I can’t tell whether his decision is the right one.
Literature, as I’ve periodically noted on this blog, isn’t [...]
Wayne Karlin
In honor of Veterans Day, I attended a fascinating talk by novelist Wayne Karlin on his new book Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead the Living in Viet Nam (Nation Books, 2009). In addition to being a top-flight writer, Wayne, a neighbor and friend, is a Vietnam vet who regularly journeys to Vietnam to [...]
