Was Oedipus Deserving of a Red Card?

By Robin Bates | Published: July 8, 2026
David Beckham receives a red card in the 1998 World Cup

Thursday

I thought I could concentrate only on grandchildren and the World Cup this week, avoiding politics altogether, but then he who will not be named pressured FIFA to suspend the Folarin Balogun red card (see my post on the incident here, and, well, so much for that wish. At least the incident, and soccer refereeing in general, has yielded some great humor, including literary jokes from my English professor son. 

Driving home to Georgia after visiting us in Tennessee, he and the kids listened to a dramatized version of The Hobbit, leading to this Bluesky tweet (Tobias Wilson-Bates@phdhurtbrain@bsky.social) about soccer’s video review system:

The ref is coming back from the review station and it doesn’t look good. He’s shaking his head and I’m afraid it’s what we predicted. After VAR review “what have I got in my pocket?” is NOT a valid riddle and Bilbo is going to have to concede being eaten.

This was followed up with a Sophocles reference:

The ref is coming back from the sideline and, OH MY GOD, he’s telling Oedipus that Jocasta is his MOTHER! Goodness, VAR saves him from yet another bad call.

There were a couple of good responses, including this from one Antonio Barros:

Such a good VAR intervention! How come the ref Tiresias didn’t not see this? Is he blind? 

And this from johnw60.bsky.social:

Deus ex machinvar

After an England player picked up a red card for a studs-up tackle, Toby tweeted:

Really hope England splurged for the retractable red card insurance before the tournament 🤞🤞

The red cards made him think of the Cruciatus or torture curse (a.k.a. the Crucio) in Harry Potter:

Red cards are so wild. The closest thing in professional sports to a magical curse or hex.

Toby then elaborated:

You have crossed the football gods and must now be BANISHED from the land of foot

After commenting on the World Cup games, Toby then considered applying them to his teaching. For instance:

Going to start calling the last ten minutes of class “stoppage time” to get my students more invested in learning

To which Bluesky’s Eric Rauchway responded,

I’m gonna go further and tell them the class will be only forty minutes unless there are any fouls in which case it will be lengthened by stoppage time

Toby again:

Will occasionally drop to the ground grabbing my face for several minutes to keep them on their toes

There was also was this fantasy of a system for calling fouls on students for not paying attention: 

“Please refer to the syllabus” = Penalty 
“We covered this in class” = Yellow Card
“Per my last email” = Red Card

And then there’s this from one who has clearly attended many faculty meetings:

Much respect to Messi the middle aged king for knowing you only need to pay attention for the final 10 minutes of the meeting

Humor aside, Toby had the following thoughtful reflection on the tournament, in which chance often determines who wins:

Almost every World Cup the eventual winner needs to win at least one match along the way via penalties which means we’re less determining the best team than some alignment of the team w the best play, best draw, and best penalty luck.

To me this is part of the beauty of the World Cup. It’s rarely a meditation on dominance, and much more often an extended experience of global equality and the randomness of joy and beauty.

Years ago I remember someone remarking that the occasional randomness and element of chance in soccer were one reason why it would never catch on in the United States, where we want to believe we have power over what happens to us. Other cultures are more fatalistic, resigned to the idea that sometimes unfair things happen. 

The most spectacular soccer example is Maradona’s “hand of God” goal in a 1986 quarter final victory, but there have been countless other bad or missed calls over the years. While people may never accept what has happened—ask any Brit who was around for the Maradona game—one of the lessons learned is that we can be victimized by things outside our control.

Hmm, now that’s something Sophocles understood.

With video review, it’s as though the world has tried to Americanize the game, letting technology replace human limitations. Now we are seeing goals negated because a player’s toe was offside, and France was awarded its game-winning penalty against Paraguay because VAR picked up a clear foul that the referee missed. FIFA has made it appear that it can remove uncertainty from the game.

But the Balogun red card, which may have been awarded because the foul looked worse in slow motion than it actually was, calls that into question. Rather than removing all doubt, now there are debates over whether the technology has been properly used, with Egypt especially arguing that its goal-of-the-tournament should not have been negated because of a VAR-detected foul at the other end of the field. Things get particularly murky when the technology is used to determine motive: was a player actually tripped in the penalty area or was he deliberately diving?

All of which argues for literature and the humanities, which teach us that that life, including the games we play, can never be reduced to technological engineering. That may frustrate some, but the endless debates that ensue can lead to social bonding as strangers have things to talk about. The great books teach us that human reality is never simple but always shifting, and we leave ourselves vulnerable when we forget that.

Other recent Toby literary tweets:

—Full respect to Brontë and Faulkner, but I’m reading a Wilkie Collins’ novel where FOUR characters have the same name so far and I don’t think he’s done yet

—Middlemarch, written 155 years ago, is in part about the unbearable cultural inertia that blocks simple affordable housing and healthcare reform.

—More things in life need to operate like the Pizza Hut Book-It challenge that used to give kids personal pizzas for reading books.

If I read Brothers Karamazov, I think that should pay my mortgage for the month is all I’m saying

Followed by:

—Since I’m a professor, in a sense it does fairly literally pay my mortgage 🤔 but I think everyone should have access to this option

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Children as Devouring Mice?!

By Robin Bates | Published: July 7, 2026
Longfellow’s daughters

Wednesday

I am updating a post I wrote six years ago to apply to a visit over the weekend from our four grandchildren. As we cavorted around in the lake by our house, I once again recalled Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Children’s Hour.” I’ve added some thoughts about devouring imagery in children’s literature.

The 1863 poem was one that, for decades, children were required to memorize. I encountered it first when my father read it to me as a child and later when I saw Don Martin’s Mad Magazine spoof of it. Martin, of course, took shots at its sentimentality.

But Mad wasn’t the first publication to question “The Children’s Hour.” Lillian Hellman in 1934 made ironic use of the poem by borrowing its title for her own play about a disaffected girl in a boarding school. In order to avoid being sent back to the school, she accuses two of her teachers of having a lesbian love affair, thereby destroying their lives. In other words, little girls are not as innocent as you think.

Sentimentalizing children doesn’t do justice to their full personhood. When one has rigid expectations of innocence, one doesn’t give children room to breathe. I use the analogy because of the images of devouring and imprisonment in the poem. If we trap children in angelic expectations, we have trouble handling those times when they are devils.

The Bishop of Bingen reference is to the folk tale of Bishop Hatto, who was eaten alive by the mice that invaded the tower where he was hoarding grain from the starving peasants. After feeling devoured by his children, Longfellow does his own version of devouring in return, imprisoning them in the fortress of his heart. Here’s the poem:

The Children’s Hour
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Between the dark and the daylight,
     When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,
     That is known as the Children’s Hour.

I hear in the chamber above me
     The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
     And voices soft and sweet.

From my study I see in the lamplight,
     Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
     And Edith with golden hair.

A whisper, and then a silence:
     Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
    To take me by surprise.

A sudden rush from the stairway,
     A sudden raid from the hall!
By three doors left unguarded
     They enter my castle wall!

They climb up into my turret
    O’er the arms and back of my chair;
If I try to escape, they surround me;
     They seem to be everywhere.

They almost devour me with kisses,
     Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
     In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!

Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti,
     Because you have scaled the wall,
Such an old mustache as I am
     Is not a match for you all!

I have you fast in my fortress,
     And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
     In the round-tower of my heart.

And there will I keep you forever,
     Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
     And molder in dust away!

Sentimental though the poem may be, I fully understand the emotions at play. My grandchildren and I hugged each other long and hard as they were leaving. I wanted to swallow them up in my love and for a few moments they basked in the feeling, even as I was attuned to the moment when they would want to wriggle free. Feelings of wanting to be loved and feelings of wanting to be independet toggled back and forth.

We see some of the same back and forth in the stories I read to my own children. In Maurice Sendak’s The Night Kitchen, Mickey is swallowed in the cake batter of the night cooks before breaking free to assert his independence: “I’m not the cake and the cake’s not me, I”m Mickey!” he crows before flying off in an airplane he has constructed out of the batter. 

In Helen Bannerman’s “Little Black Sambo,” the protagonist is threatened with devourment—“Little Black Sambo, I am going to eat you up,” threatens each of the tigers–only to have Sambo, somewhat like Anansi the Spider, use his wits to escape. In the end, through an unexpected plot twist, he devours them instead as they have churned themselves into butter, which his mother then uses for pancakes.

One other popular children’s book that includes includes emotional devouring is Margaret Wise Brown’s Runaway Bunny. No matter how much the bunny wants to break free of his mother’s loving embrace and establish his own identity, the mother assures him that she will always find him. The plot speaks both to the child’s desire for independence and the need  to be reminded that he or she always has emotional backup. That reassurance also come in Brown’s Goodnight, Moon. 

I saw the tension exhibited in each of my grandchildren over the weekend, with it working itself  differently for the teenager, the middle schooler, and the two in elementary school. It was a gift.

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U.S. Soccer and the Ancient Mariner’s Curse

By Robin Bates | Published: July 6, 2026
Balogun’s red card, later overturned following Trump’s intervention

Tuesday

Everything Trump touches turns to crap, and that goes for sports as well as for monuments, institutional norms, the rule of law, and Constitutional rights. His congratulations to the Olympic gold medal-winning men’s hockey team included denigration of the Olympic gold medal-winning women’s hockey team. He insisted on attending the New York Knicks game during their championship run, seeking to leech off the city’s joy and in the process ruining the traditional watch parties held outside the stadium. Then he went on to taint one of the feel good stories of the World Cup, the exciting U.S. men’s team (USMT). 

Fans from other nations who had been rooting for the U.S. turned against them after Trump  instructed persuaded the equally corrupt FIFA leadership to overturn a red card, something they never do. 

The ancient Greeks could have predicted what happened next. Even with the now unsuspended Folarin Balugon playing, the team lost in humiliating 4-1 fashion to Belgium. The goddess Nemesis, who punishes humans for their hubris, struck again.

For those fans who cared only to get Balugon back on the field and were fine with Trump’s intervention, I remind them of the fate of the crew in Rime of the Ancient Mariner. They are fine with the mariner killing the albatross when doing so appears to have cleared away the fog and mist but then outraged when all the breezes cease to blow and the ship is becalmed. At that point they hang the dead bird around the mariner’s neck, preferring to blame someone else rather than acknowledge that they have become complicit in the crime.

I don’t know whether the stain of Trump’s intervention hung around the necks of the USMT, but they didn’t appear to play with the same elan as in previous games. Of course, they were facing a Belgium team that was outraged at how the rules had been broken, which provided extra motivation. Whatever the cause of the U.S.’s lackluster performance, it felt like some kind of karmic justice had been served, even though the team and Balogun were themselves innocent.

And what about Trump? As usual, he pulled off his usual Tom and Daisy retreat:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

What next after messing with the World Cup and ruining the nation’s 250th anniversary? The 2028 Olympics will be held in Los Angeles during the final year of Trump’s presidency.

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Beowulf and “the Viking Row”

By Robin Bates | Published: July 5, 2026
Norwegian fans perform the Viking Row

Monday

One of the things that we will carry away from this year’s World Cup is “the Viking Row” of Norwegian fans, which they once more exhibited in Norway’s unexpected win yesterday over favored Brazil.

As Fox Sports describes it, the Viking Row

involves a group of people — in this case, Norway’s men’s national team and their fans — sitting down and moving their bodies back and forth in a rowing motion. Fans will do it at any time of the game, with a drummer setting the rhythm. Every two beats, the crowd shouts, “ROW!” and the chant commences.

The article explains that the exercise celebrates that time in history—between 800 and 1050 AD— when Vikings ventured around the world, sometimes raiding, sometimes trading. England, whose thrilling victory over Mexico I’ve just watched, could take the celebration personally since the Vikings attacked their own shores.

This was also the period that produced Beowulf, and there are dramatic images of Scandinavian rowers in the poem, although the Geats were from modern day Sweden rather than Norway. Also, unlike the soccer team, they come in peace.

Imagine that Erling Haaland, Norway’s extraordinary striker, is Beowulf. The Geat hero has shown up in the Danish court—Denmark is the reigning power in the region— claiming that he can perform miracles, which would be like someone striding into the White House from a tiny country (let’s say Trinidad) and making a similar claim. In other words, he appears to be in above his head. 

This is how some have viewed Norway, which (in stark contrast  to Brazil) has only qualified for the World Cup four times, the last time in 1998. In fact, one of King Hrothgar’s retainers is outraged at Beowulf’s effrontery. 

Beowulf, however, exudes absolute confidence, as though he belongs. Here he is landing in Denmark with his handpicked crew of young men:

When he heard about Grendel, Hygelac’s thanewas on home ground, over in Geatland.
There was no one else like him alive.In his day, he was the mightiest man on earth,
high-born and powerful. He ordered a boat
that would ply the waves. He announced his plan:
to sail the swan’s road and search out that king,
the famous prince who needed defenders.
Nobody tried to keep him from going,
no elder denied him, dear as he was to them.
Instead, they inspected omens and spurred
his ambition to go, whilst he moved about
like the leader he was, enlisting men,
the best he could find; with fourteen others
the warrior boarded the boat as captain,
a canny pilot along coast and currents.
Time went by, the boat was on water,
in close under the cliffs.

At this point the men begin engaging in the Viking Row:

Men climbed eagerly up the gangplank,
sand churned in surf, warriors loaded
a cargo of weapons, shining war-gear
in the vessel’s hold, then heaved out,
away with a will in their wood-wreathed ship.
Over the waves, with the wind behind her
and foam at her neck, she flew like a bird
until her curved prow had covered the distance
and on the following day, at the due hour,
those seafarers sighted land,
sunlit cliffs, sheer crags
and looming headlands, the landfall they sought.

Arriving like the Norwegian team in America, the Geats disembark with all their gear:

It was the end of their voyage and the Geats vaulted
over the side, out on to the sand,
and moored their ship. There was a clash of mail
and a thresh of gear. They thanked God
for that easy crossing on a calm sea.

The herald, on the outlook for sea invaders, is impressed by the confidence of the Geats:

Never before has a force under arms
disembarked so openly—not bothering to ask
if the sentries allowed them safe passage
or the clan had consented. Nor have I seen
a mightier man-at-arms on this earth
than the one standing here: unless I am mistaken,
he is truly noble. This is no mere
hanger-on in a hero’s armor.

Having satisfied the sentry, the Geats make their way to the stadium king’s hall::

So they went on their way. The ship rode the water,
broad-beamed, bound by its hawser
and anchored fast. Boar-shapes flashed
above their cheek-guards, the brightly forged
work of goldsmiths, watching over
those stern-faced men. They marched in step,
hurrying on till the timbered hall
rose before them, radiant with gold.
Nobody on earth knew of another
building like it. Majesty lodged there,
its light shone over many lands.

In the end, of course, Beowulf—a decided underdog—emerges triumphant. As, buoyed by the Viking Row, did his Scandinavian descendants.

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Finding Deep Rest in a Still Room

By Robin Bates | Published: July 4, 2026
Granger, Quaker Meeting Room, 1790

Sunday

My friend Rebecca Adams, who organizes our weekly lectio divina group, this past week shared an excerpt from John Greenleaf Whittier’s “The Meeting.” The Quaker poet is exploring how best to open oneself to God, and, though he wouldn’t have been familiar with Emily Dickinson’s “Some keep the Sabbath going to church,” he appears to be making a counter argument.

Dickinson’s poem opens,

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –

Whittier’s friend, meanwhile, makes a similar arguments against meeting houses and church ritual:

“What part or lot have you,” he said,
“In these dull rites of drowsy-head?
Is silence worship? Seek it where
It soothes with dreams the summer air;
Not in this close and rude-benched hall,
But where soft lights and shadows fall,
And all the slow, sleep-walking hours
Glide soundless over grass and flowers!
From time and place and form apart,
Its holy ground the human heart,
Nor ritual-bound nor templeward
Walks the free spirit of the Lord!

Whitman’s response is basically that Nature is too populated and too noisy:

Dream not, O friend, because I seek
This quiet shelter twice a week,
I better deem its pine-laid floor
Than breezy hill or sea-sung, shore;
But nature is not solitude;
She crowds us with her thronging wood;
Her many hands reach out to us,
Her many tongues are garrulous;
Perpetual riddles of surprise
She offers to our ears and eyes;
She will not leave our senses still,
But drags them captive at her will;
And, making earth too great for heaven,
She hides the Giver in the given.

Then comes the excerpt Rebecca shared, which is a lovely argument, not only for quiet Quaker worship, but for communal worship in general:

And so I find it well to come
For deeper rest to this still room,
For here the habit of the soul
Feels less the outer world’s control;
The strength of mutual purpose pleads
More earnestly our common needs;
And from the silence multiplied
By these still forms on either side,
The world that time and sense have known
Falls off and leaves us God alone.

There are many who argue that they are spiritual but not religious and so reject church attendance altogether. While I’m sympathetic, Whitman makes the case that communal worship offers something special, even when (as can happen in Quaker gatherings) everyone is silent. The “still forms on either side” multiply the silence so that the world of time and sense falls away.

In the end, we are left one on one with the numinous. Which is what, after all, we seek.

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My Early Literary Civics Lessons

By Robin Bates | Published: July 3, 2026
John Trumball, The Signing of the Declaration of Independence

Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 40th Installment

Tomorrow we celebrate the 250th anniversary of an Enlightenment manifesto that galvanized the world when it came out, including many people that the signers didn’t want to be galvanized (i.e., women, slaves, the wretched refuse of various teeming shores). “The Declaration of Independence” is testimony to the power of rhetoric to shape history, and while it took almost a century and the bloodiest war of the 19th century to include slaves in the ranks of “all men”; another century for them to be guaranteed voting rights in the south; and a century and a half before women could vote, the document spoke to the world’s dreamers. Dreaming has always been one of America’s defining characteristics.

Who knew that this anniversary would feel more like a “celebration of a life” such as one encounters at memorial services? Because the multicultural democratic ideal is not altogether dead, however, perhaps we should see the occasion rather as a renewal of marriage vows. Now that see clearly the threats to the American experiment, we can recommit to defending it with renewed energy. 

That’s what another American called for us to do 163 years ago. Then, too, people were wondering whether a nation “dedicated to the the proposition that all men are created equal” could “long endure.” This July 4th we can resolve that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Not  if we have any say in the matter.

In today’s memoir installment, I look at the role that literature played in shaping my identity as an American. As I think back on it, many of the novels and poems I read provided me with an on-going civics lesson.

Some of those works, interestingly enough, deified Abraham Lincoln. This may seem curious in the segregated south, but thanks to Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (1905) and the 1915 movie based on it (Birth of a Nation), the former Confederate states reappropriated Lincoln for their own purposes. For them, Lincoln was someone who wanted to keep the nation together, not someone who wanted all men to be treated equally. Ignoring the “Emancipation Proclamation,” they contended that if he had not been assassinated, he would have prevented radical Republicans would imposing tyrannical laws on the South, thereby rendering unnecessary the rise of the freedom-loving KKK.

I remember being given a choice, in seventh grade, of memorizing either Walt Whitman’s “Oh, Captain, My Captain” or Rosemary Benét’s poem about Lincoln’s mother. The latter uses a technique common in hagiography where the audience has access to special knowledge unavailable to the speaker. The poem also helped enshrine the populist myth of “log cabin to White House” :

Nancy Hanks
by Rosemary Benét

If Nancy Hanks
Came back as a ghost,
Seeking news
Of what she loved most,
She’d ask first
“Where’s my son?
What’s happened to Abe?
What’s he done?”

“Poor little Abe,
Left all alone
Except for Tom,
Who’s a rolling stone;
He was only nine
The year I died.
I remember still
How hard he cried.”

“Scraping along
In a little shack,
With hardly a shirt
To cover his back,
And a prairie wind
To blow him down,
Or pinching times
If he went to town.”

“You wouldn’t know
About my son?
Did he grow tall?
Did he have fun?
Did he learn to read?
Did he get to town?
Do you know his name?
Did he get on?”

As school children, we were also familiar with Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Concord Hymn.” For me there was also Lucy Fitch Perkins’s The American Twins of the Revolution—one of her popular twins series—in which we could see children our age acting heroically. Sally and Roger Priestly must keep secret the fact that their father is conveying money to George Washington and then help their mother smuggle the gold out of their house. The book has such passages as the following:

There was every reason for the fears which shook Mrs. Priestly and the children. They had a large sum of money concealed on their persons, money upon which the whole success of their country’s cause might depend. It was suspected by the enemy that the gold was in her possession, concealed in the bag of buckwheat. Already the house had been visited by a spy, who had seen the bag of buckwheat deposited in the storeroom. She had been quick-witted enough to thwart the attempt to enter the house and steal it in the night, and she had cleverly convinced the guard, with Sailor’s help, that she was leaving the house “taking nothing with her.” Yet she had in fact defied the British Commander-in-Chief and disobeyed his orders. If, upon searching the house, they should discover that the money was gone, and that she had eluded them, they would probably pursue her, and if overtaken she could expect no mercy for herself or her children.

Perkins doesn’t see any disconnect between the family’s revolutionary sympathies and the fact that they own slaves, so I can see how the novel was also socializing us into accepting racial hierarchies. (Going through my bookshelves, I see that Perkins also wrote “The Pickaninny Twins,” although I remember nothing about that one.) In other words, I can now see how our patriotism was racially inflected.

Along with the novels and poems, there were also the history books, which helped inculcate in us the American frontier myth. I belonged to the Landmark Book Club, which every month sent me a hardback history book, often about American “heroes” such as George Washington, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and (believe it or not) George Custer. Heroic pioneers were also celebrated in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House books.

And then there were the songs we sang, including “America the Beautiful,” “God Bless America,” “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” and “The Star Spangled Banner.” A civil religion such as that advocated by Jean Jacques Rousseau and promoted by the French Revolution was a fact of life when I was growing up, only it was intertwined with Christianity. To be a good American citizen and to be a Christian were seen as one and the same thing.

The turmoil of the Sixties can in some ways be seen as originating in a sense of betrayal. Racist violence and the Vietnam War were at odds with the idealized image of America we had been raised on. Like many teens and twenty-year-olds, I had a tough time with hypocrisy. I remembered enjoying a scribble I encountered on a bathroom wall:

I’m glad I am an American
Because that means I’m free—
Free to wish I were a dog
And Nixon were a tree.

My sense of betrayal led me to engage in protest marches, get arrested while blockading the Minneapolis induction center, explore Marxism, and a few years later travel to Yugoslavia to see whether “market socialism” was a viable alternative to American capitalism. The idealism of John F. Kennedy—“Ask now what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”—appeared to have been forever sullied.

While there were many things I admired in Yugoslavia, especially the respect accorded to the working class, I could also see the flaws. That year actually caused me to fall in love with America again. I realized that all countries that their dark and the light sides. To the conservatives who preached “My country, right or wrong,” the anti-war protesters had countered, “and when wrong, make it right,” and that I came to see as my continuing responsibility as an American.

We live in a country in which our foundational document, based on Enlightenment ideals, was chiefly penned by a slaveholder. Our rebellion against authoritarian rule was conducted in part by people prepared to exterminate native populations. American history, like most national histories, is riddled with contradictions.

This notion was unbearable to me when I was young. With age one learns that nations, like people, are complicated.

Past Installments of A Life Lived in Literature
A Life Lived in Literature: How It All Began (Sept. 5, 2025)
Early Reading Memories (Sept. 12, 2025)
Childhood Confusion: Reading to the Rescue (Sept. 19, 2025)
Confronting Segregation (Sept. 26, 2025)
School Reading vs. Real Reading (Oct. 10, 2025)
Childhood in Paris (Oct. 17, 2025)
My Time at Sewanee Military Academy (Oct. 24, 2025)
Existentialism for High School Seniors (Oct. 31, 2025)
Why I Majored in History, Not English (Nov. 7, 2025)
My College Search for Authenticity (Nov. 14, 2025)
On D. H. Lawrence and a Sexual Awakening (Nov. 21, 2025)
My Life as a Bildungsroman (Nov. 28, 2025)
Grad School: Literary Baptism by Fire (Dec. 5, 2025)
Early Scenes from a Marriage (Dec. 12, 2025)
Bringing Up Baby in Grad School (Dec. 19, 2025)
Grappling with Racism (Jan. 2, 2026)
Journal of a Young Teacher (Jan. 16, 2026)
Teaching and Reading in Yugoslavia (Jan. 23, 2026)
Life at 40: Barely Controlled Chaos (Jan 30, 2026)
From Secular Humanist to Christian Believer (Feb. 6 2025)
Looking Back at a Lifetime Together (Feb. 13, 2026)
To Ljubljana with Love (Feb. 20, 2026)
Forging a Separate Identity from My Father (Feb. 27, 2026)
“Better Living” Emerged from a Midnight Epiphany (March 6, 2026)
The Golden Years before Tragedy Struck (March 13, 2026) 
Using Lit to Grapple with a Death (March 20, 2026) 
Lit in the Year following Justin’s Death (March 27, 2026)
My Eldest Son, Named after a Keats Sonnet (April 3, 2026)
Sterne’s Uncle Toby and My Own Toby (April 10, 2026)
After the 2nd Death, a Book Project (April 17, 2026)
Making Lit Meaningful for Students (April 24, 2026) 
Horizons Broadened (May 1, 2026) 
Obama’s Election and a Blog Launched (May 8, 2026)
Expanding Outward at 60 (May 15, 2026) 
On Losing My Father (May 22, 2026)
Cavorting through Literature’s Wonderland (May 29, 2026) 
An Academic Life Sidetracked? (June 5, 2026)
Sports as a Spur to the Imagination (June 12, 2026)
Entering Retirement (June 26, 2026) 
My Early Literary Civics Lessons (July 3, 2026)

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Harry Kane as Henry V Redux

By Robin Bates | Published: July 1, 2026
Harry Kane celebrates after England’s World Cup win over the Republic of Congo

Thursday

Like much of the world, I have been enthralled by the World Cup. My favorite game so far has been England vs. the Republic of Congo, with England captain Harry Kane leading his team to a come-from-behind victory with two magnificent goals. The commentators had difficulty praising him enough, with Thierry Henry proposing he be referred to as Sir Harry Kane. They could also have compared him to Shakespeare’s Henry V.

Henry’s nickname is Harry, and in the play’s prologue we learn that a fiery muse is needed to announce the magnificence of this “warlike” king:

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars…

Things were looking very grim for England up until the final 20 minutes or so, and I like to think that Kane gave a version of the St. Crispin’s Day speech during the hydration break. “Once more into the breach dear friends,” I imagine him saying, “or close the wall up with our English dead.”  

Then he could have punctuated his speech with Henry’s rousing finale:

And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble luster in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’

The game really is afoot when it comes to soccer, with greyhound-fast players exploiting the tiniest of breaches. And in the end, like Harry at Agincourt, England prevailed.

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Reading Changes Us in Foundational Ways

By Robin Bates | Published: June 30, 2026
Walter Firle, Three Girls Reading

Wednesday

My librarian friend Valerie Hotchkiss sent me a book that she has been teaching in an online bibliotherapy class, which at one point I visited. Because Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World so directly coincides with my own interests, I share here a passage from the opening letter.

In it, Wolf looks at how she came to study the impact of screens on our brains. I love the passion with which she talks about her early reading experiences.

Excerpted from Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home

What we read, how we read, and why we read change how we think, changes that are continuing now at a faster pace. In a span of only six millennia reading became the transformative catalyst for intellectual development within individuals and within literature cultures. The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought, it is our best-known path to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species. There is much at stake in the development of the reading brain and in the quickening changes that now characterize its current, evolving iterations….

[W]hen I was a child learning to read, I did not think about reading. Like Alice, I simply jumped down reading’s hole into Wonderland and disappeared for most of my childhood. When I was a young woman, I did not think about reading. I simply became Elizabeth Bennet, Dorothea Brooke, and Isabel Archer at every opportunity. Sometimes I became men like Alyosha Karamazov, Hans Castorp, and Holden Caulfield. But always I was lifted to places very far from the little town of Eldorado, Illinois, and always I burned with emotions I could never otherwise have imagined.

Even when I was a graduate student of literature, I did not think very much about reading. Rather, I pored over every word, every encrypted meaning in the Duino Elegies by Rilke and novels by George Eliot and John Steinbeck, and felt myself bursting with sharpened perceptions of the world and anxious to fulfill my responsibilities within it.

I failed my first round at the latter miserably and memorably. With all the enthusiasm a young, flimsily prepared teacher can have, I began a Peace Corps-like stint in rural Hawaii along with a small and wonderful group of fellow would-be teachers. There I stood daily before twenty-four unutterably beautiful children. They looked at me with complete confidence, and we looked at each other with total, reciprocated affection. For a while those children and I were oblivious to the fact that I could change the circumstances of their life trajectories if I could help them become literate, unlike many in their families. Then, only then, did I begin to think seriously about what reading means. It changed the direction of my life.

With sudden and complete clarity I saw what would happen if those children could not learn the seemingly simple act of passage into a culture based on literacy. They would never fall down a hole and experience the exquisite joys of immersion in the reading life. They would never discover Dinotopia, Hogwarts, Middle Earth, or Pemberley. They would never wrestle through the night with ideas too large to fit within their smaller worlds. They would never experience the great shift that moves from reading about characters like the Lightning Thief and Matilda to believing they could become heroes and heroines themselves. And most important of all, they might never experience the infinite possibilities within their own thoughts that emerge whole cloth from each fresh encounter with worlds outside their own. I realized in a whiplash burst that those children, all mine for one year, might never reach their full potential as human beings if they never learned to read.

From that moment on, I began in earnest to think about reading’s capacity to change the course of an individual life.

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Read Novels Like a Victorian

By Robin Bates | Published: June 30, 2026
Alberto Pisa, Woman Reading

Tuesday

I’ve been thinking about the lament, in a Guardian article that came out earlier in the month, that our digital age is ruining our novel reading. “Surrounded by screens,” moans freelance writer Ioan Marc Jones, “I lost my ability to read some of the best books ever written.”

The article got me wondering whether screens are having any impact on my own novel reading since I now move constantly between different forms of  electronically delivered fiction, from Kindle to Guttenberg novels on my laptop to Libby novels an on my phone to audiobooks (Libby again). And while I still read two or three novels a week, it’s true that I no longer bury myself in them for hours at a time.

Jones uses his parents to depict the ideal reader:

My parents hail from the literary working class, a subsection of society that believes great works lead to a richer life. Reading for them was an inverted form of class snobbery. My dad could read as well as anyone. He’d prove it on package holidays, sitting on the balcony the entire time, head bowed, cigarette in hand, flicking through the pages of Jane Austen or Herman Melville.

Inspired by them, Jones too was once such a reader. In his late teens and early twenties, he says, he worked his way through the great works, especially falling in love with Middlemarch. (“I was a smart lad, prone to bad decisions, unsure of my place in the world. It is perhaps no surprise that I identified with Dorothea.”) Later he moved on to such contemporary authors as Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney, Elena Ferrante, Roddy Doyle, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Jones experienced his moment of self-doubt when he encountered the Guardian’s list of “the 100 greatest novels” (here’s my post about the list) and set out to read the 32 he hadn’t read. Suddenly he found himself impatient where once he had been engrossed. Dickens no longer captivated him, and he describes Our Mutual Friend as “complicated, the prose as heavy as the 900-page book.” With Dracula he struggled “with the glaring absurdity of the epistolary format.” Tristram Shandy, meanwhile, he found to be “inexcusable,” with the language “verbose,” the language “indecipherable,” and the detours “infuriating.” 

I should note, in Sterne’s defense, that he anticipated that readers would balk at his detours. We know this from his over-the-top praise of authorial digressions.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;——they are the life, the soul of reading!—take them out of this book, for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them;—one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;—he steps forth like a bridegroom,—bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Henry Fielding, whose Tom Jones I would have chosen over (or at least placed along side of) Tristram Shandy, also anticipates readers chafing at his self-reflective introductory chapters. “There may be no parts in this prodigious work,” he writes, 

which will give the reader less pleasure in the perusing, than those which have given the author the greatest pains in composing. Among these probably may be reckoned those initial essays which we have prefixed to the historical matter contained in every book; and which we have determined to be essentially necessary to this kind of writing, of which we have set ourselves at the head.

To eliminate these introductory chapters, however, would be like (to use a parallel I applied when teaching Tom Jones) removing the framing device from the movie Princess Bride: suddenly we would get a love story without the wonderful cosmopolitan irony. 

Novel reading can be compared to the slow food movement: the point is savoring the work as you go along, not simply filling your stomach with plot. Sterne, Dickens, and Fielding are all inviting us into a friendship that will grow over time. Having just listened to an audiobook of Our Mutual Friend, I found nothing at all heavy about it—but that was because I took my time. The same was true with Fanny Burney’s 900-page Cecilia, which I recently read for the first time. Each evening I would read twenty or thirty pages and, by the end, could understand why Jane Austen was a fan.

Another way to think of this is that authors are charismatic cult leaders, using their individual style to reprogram our minds. But we have to be willing participants in this reprogramming—we must suspend our disbelief—in order to experience what they are offering us. It can be a gradual process.

Jones comes to this realization in the course of writing his article. For instance, he quotes a senior lecturer in 19th-century literature at St Andrews, who

advocates the “Read like a Victorian” strategy: “Replicate the experience of reading Victorian classics in the serialised form in which they were originally published.” Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and plenty of others initially appeared in that format. Self-serialising slows us down, lets us linger on the text, and creates suspense. “Read one chapter per session and you’ll be better placed to appreciate the detail of these Victorian worlds – and their cliffhangers.”

A number of writers have observed that reading is like a muscle, which must be exercised over time. To this, Jones adds that good reading 

begets better reading. In The Novel: A Biography The Novel: a Biography, Michael Schmidt writes: “Reading is a cumulative act, adding skills, increasingly creative as it goes. To become a ‘good reader’ one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure.” The more you read, the richer the reading.

After getting those muscles working again, Jones reports returning to his early love of Dickens

I’ve adopted the “Read like a Victorian” strategy: I cover only a few chapters at a time and put the book down, with a thud, even if I want to continue. I am taking Our Mutual Friend slowly, without rushing towards a self-inflicted finish line. The digressions still bore me, but I’m learning to appreciate the arguments, the flurries (at least the good ones). I’m slowly getting used to the longer sentences, the shifts in register, the complicated syntax. My love of classics is creeping back.

While I’ve never lost this love, it’s true that the presence of electronic texts volleying and thundering to the left and right of me have disrupted my reading. Writing a literary essay a day has also eaten into my reading time. A few chapters in my down times, however, still offer up immense rewards.

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