On Raccoons and Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince

By Robin Bates | Published: August 9, 2026

Monday

One of the things that stood out to me as I was reading The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny was how life in India—at least as described in Kiran Desai’s novel—is constantly interacting with nature. Bandicoots in Goa steal bars of soap, and when one is taking a shower, tree frogs whiz “from wall to ceiling all over the bathroom, joyous in the wet.” Sonia must check her night water glass before drinking because she never knows if a moth will be found therein, and a few mosquitoes always find their way through the netting. Meanwhile, mold blossoms on walls during the monsoon season and leaks in roofs ruin books. Accustomed as many Americans are to sealing themselves off from nature, the difference is noticeable. 

Not that I myself have been feeling all that sealed. For a while we had woodpeckers attacking our house (they were after carpenter bees, we discovered), and squirrels were eating the siding. Periodically, there’s a power outage because squirrels have found a way into power boxes, and a rainy summer has meant that suddenly our kitchen is being invaded by tiny ants. In addition, twice a year hordes of Japanese ladybugs visit our house (I vacuum them up, sometimes forty or fifty at a time), which local farmers have imported to attack aphids.

The animal that is most attracting my attention, however, is a raccoon that has found its way into our supposedly raccoon-proof bird feeders. For years we’ve been feeding nuthatches, titmice, chickadees, five different varieties of woodpeckers, purple finches, grosbeaks, goldfinches, cowbirds, and cardinals, and I was proud that I had found feeders that would frustrate squirrels. Racoons, however, are an entirely different matter.

Demonstrating a combination of cleverness and acrobatic agility, these critters have frustrated every attempt to fend them off. At one point, after I had used wires to keep the feeders out of reach, they broke the wires. It appears that I will have to leave off feeding the birds—all but the hummingbirds—because the raccoons will not be denied. 

A recent Annie Lowrey article in The Atlantic helps me better understand the problem. The raccoons, she explains, 

are intelligent, having long memories and a knack for problem-solving. “If you give them a puzzle and change the rules, they go with it,” Lauren Stanton, a cognitive ecologist at UC Berkeley, told me. “They have this creativity.” On top of that, they are dexterous enough to shuck oysters, unscrew jars, unlatch gates, and pick knots.

Unlike other animals, raccoons tolerate close proximity to humans (I’ve noticed this with our raccoon), and in addition to birdseed and suet they love human food. They are also, according to a raccoon biologist interviewed for the article, “incredibly destructive”:

“They’re so smart compared to cats and dogs—wildly, wildly intelligent—and because of that, they are very, very hard to keep entertained.” Captive raccoons require specially designed, large enclosures and “puzzle after puzzle” to work on, she said. “They like textures, they like to pick at things, they like to tear things apart, and it’s fun for them.”

The article notes that, while they are half-domesticated already, they can never be fully domesticated. The idea of a domesticated raccoon made me think of a passage in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. The prince is looking for a friend and approaches a fox, who informs him that they can only be friends if it is tamed:

“What does that mean– ‘tame’?”

“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. It means to establish ties.”

“‘To establish ties’?”

“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…”

The fox then explains how it will benefit from being tamed:

“My life is very monotonous,” the fox said. “I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat…”

Now, I am not interested in taming or domesticating this raccoon—I just want it to leave our feeders alone—nor do I think that the relationship we have developed is helping it move on beyond boredom. I now wonder, however, if the elaborate mechanisms I have set up to keep it at bay are a source of entertainment. Maybe it’s not only after the food.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

George Herbert: Joseph Story Prefigures Jesus

By Robin Bates | Published: August 8, 2026
Ottavio Vannini, Joseph and His Brothers

Sunday

Today in church I get to read the story of Joseph sold into slavery by his brothers. When I first read it over, I was startled to discover that the passage as it appears in the New Revised Standard Version says nothing about a coat of many colors, changing it to “a long robe with sleeves.” The other Old Testament option for Episcopal churches today contains a similar shock, changing the “still small voice” through which Elijah hears God to “a sound of sheer silence.” Even if both translations are more accurate, I miss the poetry of the King James Bible.

The coat, given to Joseph because his father loves him best, is only one of the reasons his brothers determine to kill him before choosing instead to sell him into slavery. The other is Joseph’s dream, later to be borne out, that his brothers will one day bow down before him. Below are the passages that indicate the father’s preference and what the brothers do:

Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he had made him a long robe with sleeves. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably to him….

So Joseph went after his brothers, and found them at Dothan. They saw him from a distance, and before he came near to them, they conspired to kill him. They said to one another, “Here comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams.” But when Reuben heard it, he delivered him out of their hands, saying, “Let us not take his life.” Reuben said to them, “Shed no blood; throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, but lay no hand on him” —that he might rescue him out of their hand and restore him to his father. So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the long robe with sleeves that he wore; and they took him and threw him into a pit. The pit was empty; there was no water in it. 

Then they sat down to eat; and looking up they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, with their camels carrying gum, balm, and resin, on their way to carry it down to Egypt. Then Judah said to his brothers, “What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not lay our hands on him, for he is our brother, our own flesh.” And his brothers agreed. When some Midianite traders passed by, they drew Joseph up, lifting him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. And they took Joseph to Egypt.

In his almost-sonnet “Joseph’s Coat” (almost because one line doesn’t rhyme), George Herbert identifies with Joseph, seeing his own illnesses casting him into a metaphorical pit. This is hitting hard at the moment as one of my dearest friends is currently fighting for his life with a severe heart condition, complicated by a MRSA infection. His lovely wife is asking us all to pray. As she texted me recently, “I keep saying over & over again, ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart & lean not upon your own understanding.’”

This is where Herbert arrives as well. As he sees it, the Joseph story prefigures the Jesus story, with a loving father losing his son to humanity but with that son returning unexpectedly to save us all. That is why the poet can say, “Wounded I sing, tormented I indite [write],/ Thrown down I fall into a bed, and rest.” Because he trusts in God he is able to write, “Sorrow hath chang’d its note: such is his will/ Who changeth all things, as him pleaseth best.”

Scholars have noted that Herbert could have easily found a word to rhyme with “indite,” such as “right” or “might.” “Will,” however, has a richer resonance for Herbert. Perhaps he’s thinking of Jesus at Gethsemane: “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” By breaking with the rhyme expectation, Herbert calls attention to his choice. “Right” and “might” emphasize God’s power while “will” shows the power more responsive to our needs.

God could have ended his life before this, Herbert goes on to say, but “he hath spoil’d the race, and giv’n to anguish/ One of Joy’s coats.” It is as if, in his sickness, the poet has received the coat of many colors from his loving father and that coat is Joy. With it, he experiences relief, knowing that God is with him. If he has been granted life a little longer, it is so that he can linger and languish in God’s love. Whereas once his joys were turned to weeping, now his grief modulates into song.

Joseph’s Coat

Wounded I sing, tormented I indite,
Thrown down I fall into a bed, and rest:
Sorrow hath chang’d its note: such is his will
Who changeth all things, as him pleaseth best.
For well he knows, if but one grief and smart
Among my many had his full career,
Sure it would carry with it ev’n my heart,
And both would run until they found a bier
To fetch the body; both being due to grief.
But he hath spoil’d the race; and giv’n to anguish
One of Joy’s coats, ‘ticing it with relief
To linger in me, and together languish.
I live to shew his power, who once did bring
My joys to weep, and now my griefs to sing.

I dedicate today’s post to my friend and his wife. I love and feel for you both.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Dr. Seuss and Escalating AI

By Robin Bates | Published: August 7, 2026
Dr. Seuss, illus. from Butter Battle Book

Friday

My English professor son, who like many in academe is grappling with AI, has found the right book to capture one pressing issue: Dr. Seuss’s Butter Battle Book.

Alongside an illustration from the book, Tobias Wilson-Bates posted on Bluesky,

The solution to AI cheating in the classroom cannot be buying into deeply flawed AI detection tools marketed by the same companies selling the AI being used for cheating in the first place.

The situation reminds me of an even more disturbing one imagined by Margaret Atwood in her dystopia Oryx and Crake. In it giant, unregulated pharmaceutical companies release deadly viruses into the population, which can only be cured by drugs they themselves are selling. Buy the drug or die. 

The Seuss illustration provided by Toby is of two weapons of war in an ongoing war between the Yooks and the Zooks. The Yook weapon hurls rocks while the Zook weapon catches them.

The rivalry stems from disagreements over which side of the toast should be buttered. As “Grandpa,” a former member of the Zook-Watching Border Patrol, explains to his grandson,

“But we Yooks, as you know,
when we breakfast or sup,
spread our bread,” Grandpa said,
“with the butter side up.
That’s the right, honest way!”
Grandpa gritted his teeth.
“So you can’t trust a Zook
who spreads bread underneath!
Every Zook must be watched!
He has kinks in his soul!”

Those familiar with Gulliver’s Travels may see an echo here of the Big Endians and Small Endians, who fight endless wars over which is the proper way to break an egg. Swift has in mind the bloody rivalries between Catholics and Protestants. According to Wikipedia, Seuss also drew inspiration from the Pope-related battles in medieval Italy between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, where one side was accustomed to cutting their apples horizontally and the other vertically.

Seuss’s Yook-Zook rivalry is a reference to the decades-long U.S.-Soviet Union arms race, with Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense shield being the latest entry in that contest. I recall a 1960s column by political satirist Art Buchwald about missiles, anti-missiles, anti-anti-missiles, and anti-anti-anti-missiles in which one of these projectiles, becoming confused, shoots itself down.

So the AI that enables students to write papers that are not their own will be countered by AI that detects them doing so. Next we can anticipate programs that will evade detection systems, followed by programs designed to expose the evaders. The developers, meanwhile, make money each step of the way.

My son believes that we can’t look for technological fixes to this technological development and is increasingly having his students do much of their writing in class. For his part, my tennis partner and Sewanee Review editor Adam Ross has his creative writing classes write about work published in the Review, to which AI has been denied access.

Butter Battle imagines a different outcome, with each side developing technology so powerful that it will end all human life, the Bitsy Big-Boy-Boomeroo. As the two escalating forces approach each other, we get this warning in the book’s open conclusion:

 “Grandpa! I shouted. “Be careful!
Oh, gee!
Who’s going to drop it?
Will you . . . ? Or will he . . . ?
“Be patient,” said Grandpa. “We’ll see.
We will see . . . “

Will AI end learning as we know it? Will the massive AI centers swallow up all our personal information, even as they empty our aquifers and dramatically increase carbon pollution, thereby hastening climate change? Will AI change what it means to be human? We’ll see, we will see.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

On Pompeii, Hiroshima, and an Uncertain Future

By Robin Bates | Published: August 5, 2026
Pompeii imagined

Thursday

On this day 81 years ago, the United States destroyed Hiroshima and then, three days later, Nagasaki.  For years it seemed only a matter of time before other populations would be decimated as the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and (unofficially) Israel acquired the weapon.

Despite scares in the early 1960s and then again in the early 1980s, the world has been fortunate to escape a repeat. While we can’t be entirely sure that Trump will back down from his April threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” even he appears unwilling to go this far. For its part, Iran may figure that it doesn’t need nuclear weaponry now that it knows it can hold the world hostage by closing down the Strait of Hormuz.

To ward off complacency, however, we need artists reminding us of humanity’s ability to usher in the apocalypse by one push of a button. One of my favorite Hirsoshima poems is by Richard Tillinghast, whom I vaguely remember as a child when he was a student at Sewanee. It was written in August of 1962 as the Soviet Union was moving missiles into Cuba. triggering what would become known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. My father included it in his anthology Poems of War Resistance, published during the Vietnam War in 1969.

In the poem the poet is visiting Pompeii, which experienced its own apocalyptic annihilation in 79 A.D.  Looking out through the ruined portico of the Jupiter temple at blackberry vines as he thinks of Hiroshima, he perceives “a semblance of cycle”:

…in the wreck of the past,
In the dead fusion of marble and lava, the seed
Of new greenness begins.

The promise of this greenness, however, is mocked by a world that is threatened with nuclear warheads. Hope dies on the vine, as it were, with the poet reporting,

But the berries sour on my mouth.
Hot wind and cinder sun have frayed
The vines and wizened the sweetness of the berries’ growth…

The poem ends with an ominous allusion to Yeats’s rough beast stalking towards Jerusalem. In “The Second Coming,” we are waked from stony sleep while in Tillinghast’s poem, “all of Europe seems/To drowse here, dazed in the sun towards death.” There also may be an allusion to Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita after witnessing the first test explosion: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Of as Tillinghast puts it, 

A new sun blots Vesuvius—
Of earth and sky, the old but the new destroyer.

When Trump recently promised Saudi Arabia nuclear technology in exchange for family favors, he threatened to undo the efforts of both Democratic and Republican administrations to reverse nuclear proliferation. “Ruins of the human mind,” the poet writes, “are tangled with stunted fruit of the future.”

It’s a grim warning but a necessary one.

A Poem on the Nuclear War, from Pompeii
By Richard Tillinghast

The August blackberries harden and sour.
Their vines rattle at a breath of volcanic dust
Through the portico of Jupiter Sator.

Plucked juicy from broken stone, the fruits suggest
A semblance of cycle. The principle could not be
More apparent; in the wreck of the past,

In the dead fusion of marble and lava, the seed
Of new greenness begins. But the berries sour on my mouth.
Hot wind and cinder sun have frayed

The vines and wizened the sweetness of the berries’ growth
Not only Pompeii, but all of Europe seems
To drowse here, dazed in the sun towards death.

It is a time of stopped time, when ruins
Of the human mind are tangled with stunted fruit
Of the future. A new sun blots Vesuvius—
Of earth and sky, the old but the new destroyer.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Recognize Anyone in García Márquez’s Dictator?

By Robin Bates | Published: August 4, 2026

Wednesday

A Gabriel García Márquez passage shared by someone on Bluesky has sent me back to a novel I haven’t read since the 1980s but that suddenly seems disturbingly relevant. The dictator in Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) may be based on a compilation of South and Central American strongmen (Venezuela’s Juan Vincente Gómez, Haiti’s François Duvalier, Colombia’s Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza, and the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo), but it disturbingly brings our own wannabe dictator to mind. Although DJT has not cooked up the body of one of his generals as a meal for those around him—not literally, at any rate— the general’s imprisoning 2000 innocent children lest they expose his fraudulent lottery scheme is closer to our reality than I would have thought possible ten years ago. (He then sinks them in a concrete barge.)

As a practitioner of magical realism, García Márquez can invent scenarios that, despite being fantastical, ring true. The dictator has been in power for 100 years, and with sentences that go on for pages, the novel reads like an unending fever dream—which is how Americans like me are experiencing DJT.  In debt to a United States that is propping up his regime, the unnamed dictator at one point must sell the Caribbean Sea, which the United States then imports to Arizona, leaving behind a desert waste. How different is this to Trump selling our national parks and coastlines to oil companies, which in turn are hastening catastrophic climate change. The America in Autumn of the Patriarch, meanwhile, reminds us of how our president salivates over Greenland, Venezuela and Cuba. 

As consolation for the loss of the sea, America provides Marquez’s dictator with large fans, which mimic the absent trade winds. As one review of the novel notes, “The ruler can counterfeit weather, but he cannot restore the world his power has emptied. The landscape becomes an inventory of political theft rather than a neutral setting.”

I turn to the novel’s last two pages, which capture the hollowness of absolute power. As with previous posts in which I have compared Trump to literary figures (especially to Lear), I must caution that García Márquez’s general is more complex and reflective than Trump so that he has some insight into the source of his sadness. Nevertheless, like Trump he thrashes around in unhappiness and lashes out in anger.

Also like Trump, the general has never known love, which he tries to compensate for by accumulating power and basking in the adulation of adoring crowds and of sycophants that use him while assuring him he will never die. In the following passage, I think the image of being the victim of his own sect may refer to his dependence on the cult he has fostered, which in its worship denies him his humanity (an “infinite holocaust”). The “little glass ball” may be an allusion to the snow globe of Citizen Kane, another character who never finds love: 

…he had learned of his incapacity for love in the enigma of the palm of his mute hands [fortune tellers] and in the invisible code of the [Tarot] cards and he had tried to compensate for that infamous fate with the burning cultivation of the solitary vice of power, he had made himself victim of his own sect to be immolated on the flames of that infinite holocaust, he had fed on fallacy and crime, he had flourished in impiety and dishonor and he had put himself above his feverish avarice and his congenital fear [of death] only to keep up until the end of time the little glass ball in his hand without knowing that it was an endless vice the satiety of which generated its own appetite until the end of all times general sir, he had known since his beginnings that they deceived him in order to please him, that they collected from him by fawning on him, that they recruited by force of arms the dense crowds along his route with shouts of jubilation and venal signs of eternal life to the magnificent one who is more ancient than his age, but he learned to live with those and all the miseries of glory as he discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth [my emphasis], he had arrived without surprise at the ignominious fiction of commanding without power, of being exalted without glory and of being obeyed without authority when he became convinced in the trail of yellow leaves of his autumn that he had never been master of all his power, that he was condemned not to know life except in reverse, condemned to decipher the seams and straighten the threads of the woof and the warp of the tapestry of illusions of reality without suspecting  even too late that the one livable life was one of show, …

As opposed to a life of show that is his only option, the rest of us live real lives. And even though this life may have aging (yellow leaves), misfortune, and death, there are also “ungraspable instants of happiness” and real love:

…the one [life] we saw from this side which wasn’t his general sir, this poor people’s side with the trail of yellow leaves of our uncountable years of misfortune and our ungraspable instants of happiness, where love was contaminated by the seeds of death but was all love, general sir… 

Back to the general, who has been reduced to the tiny glimpses people get of him:

…where you yourself were only an uncertain vision of pitiful eyes through the dusty peepholes of the window of a train, only the tremor of some taciturn lips, the fugitive wave of a velvet glove on the no man’s hand of an old man with no destiny with our never knowing who he was, or what he was like, or even if he was only a figment of the imagination, a comic tyrant who never knew where the reverse side was and where the right of this life which we loved with an insatiable passion that you never dared even to imagine out of the fear of knowing what we knew only too well that it was arduous and ephemeral but there wasn’t any other, general, because we knew who we were while he was left never knowing it forever…

As this man flies through “the dark sound of the last frozen leaves of his autumn toward the homeland of shadows of the truth of oblivion, clinging to his fear of the rotting cloth of death’s hooded cassock,” he is, for one final time, cut off from human joy. In this case, it is joy over his death and jubilation over a return to freedom:

…a dead old man cut off at the roots by the slash of death, flying and alien to the clamor of the frantic crowds who took to the streets singing hymns of joy at the jubilant news of his death and alien forevermore to the music of liberation and the rockets of jubilation and the bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end.

It’s a reminder that our present reality, whether through death or election cycle, will also come to an end. Perhaps accompanied by rockets of jubilation and bells of glory. 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Sonia and Sunny Meet the U.S. Caste System

By Robin Bates | Published: August 3, 2026

Tuesday

In October I’ll be teaching “Post-Colonial Literature” at the University of Ljubljana, and it was in preparing for it that I stumbled across Kiran Desai’s magnificent novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, shortlisted last year for the Man Booker Prize. I haven’t finished it yet but already am seeing how my students will benefit from watching the two protagonists negotiate the identity confusion caused by living between India and the United States.

I’ll have more to say about Loneliness in future posts, but I focus today on how it clarifies one issue that interests me. Liberals have long assumed that, as the United States moves towards becoming a majority-minority nation—which is to say, one where no race or ethnicity constitutes over 50% of the population—Democrats will benefit. After all, we are the party that openly embraces the idea of a multicultural democracy. To be sure, we should have anticipated that conservative whites would not accept this quietly, that there would be an uptick in racism. What has come as a shock, however, is how certain members of minority communities are determined to identify as white. Many of these signaled this desire in the 2024 election by voting for Trump.

Isabel Wilkerson lays out the significance of whiteness is her brilliant book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). Since slavery, she contends, America has had a caste system, and although we tried to undo it—first with the Civil War and then with Civil Rights legislation–it remains engrained in the psyches of many Americans. Since our founding, immigrants have recognized this caste system and many have attempted to buy into it.

In their efforts to pass themselves off as white, they became at least as prejudiced as those whose ranks they hoped to join. Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White is one study of the phenomenon, but it is not limited to people who are white. Immigrants from Central America, South America, Asia (south, southeast and east), and various Caribbean and African nations have convinced themselves that they can be accepted as “white” rather than as “people of color.”

We see Sunny’s Indian mother thinking this way when she visits him in New York. Having brought up her son to aspire to study in America and even to marry a white woman and to become American, she is distressed when she finds him living in the minority community of Jackson Heights. First, however, she visits the apartment of an Indian friend who married her Columbia thesis advisor and is startled by how the Black doorman regards her:

Meanwhile she was shaken by the hostile manner of the doorman. Babita thought she was upper class and he was lower class. She thought black people were lower than brown people. She remembered that Sunny had informed her upon her last visit that if she dared make racist remarks in the United States, he would never, ever concede to meet her here again. This was after she had been jostled in a sweaty street fair celebrating Cinco de Mayo and exclaimed, “Can you imagine what will happen when this bunch takes over?” The comment revealed that she also thought Hispanic brown people were lower than Indian brown people.  

Bigoted though she may be, however, it’s not like the society she is viewing is any better. Sometimes it takes an outsider to reveal to us who we are. While white conservatives may contend that they “don’t see color,” in Sunny’s eyes, America is obsessed with race:

And when was it that Sunny had learned the United States was about only one thing? In the morning when he turned on public radio it began: race, race, race. When he unfolded the newspaper: race, race, race. The economy, the environment, the journalism, the art, the sport, the war, the water, the wealth gap, the class divide, the summer camp, the prison, the school, the homeless person, the adoption, the birding, the diabetes, the real estate, the mortality rate, the election, the Starbucks restroom, the seat on the plane, the police, the murder, the judge—the conversation came down in a hammer blow: Race!

This presents Sunny with his own identity dilemma:

When exactly had Sunny switched from believing that calling himself “a person of color” would mean allowing himself to be boxed in by a term he could not abide and had begun to believe that not calling himself “a person of color” was letting white people swallow him whole?

Reading this, I think of my mixed-race grandchildren, with their very white father and their Trinidadian mother. How they see themselves will be influenced to some degree by how strangers see them, and if these strangers are obsessed with race, race, race—if skin color is a marker for perceived superiority or inferiority—then my grandchildren can’t pretend that American caste distinctions don’t exist.

Reading novels like Sharon Draper’s Blended—as my 14-year-old and 10-year-old already have—and (when they are older) The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny will prepare them for the treacherous waters they are entering.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Feminists Rethinking The Odyssey

By Robin Bates | Published: August 2, 2026
Wright Barker, Circe

Monday

Daniel Mendelsohn, Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books and recent Odyssey translator, has a free podcast where he discusses Christopher Nolan’s film. While generally open to artists riffing off Homer—they’ve been doing so for at least as far back as Euripides–he is critical of the way that the director has radically altered the character of the protagonist. Because Nolan focuses on men haunted by how they have unleashed destruction upon the world–think Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb in Nolan’s previous film—the director passes over Odysseus’s wit and his charm. Matt Damon’s Odysseus is a guilt stricken man.

Mendelsohn also notes that Nolan doesn’t handle women well in any of his films, including this one. As a result, we have one-dimensional depictions of Circe, Penelope, and especially Kalypso, who in Homer voices one of early literature’s greatest protests against the gods as she seeks to hold on to Odysseus. To help rectify this imbalance, I share how women writers have rethought Circe and Penelope.

In the past I’ve written posts on feminist treatments of Circe by Margaret Atwood and Madeline Miller (here) and of Penelope by Atwood and one of my former students (here). I share today two Circe poems by Nobel laureate Louise Glück and a Penelope poem by Britain’s former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy.

In Glück’s “Circe’s Power,” the sorceress makes a point that Nolan’s Circe also makes, that she didn’t turn the men into pigs but just made them “look like pigs.” “Your men weren’t bad men,” she explains. “Undisciplined life did that to them.” Indeed, “under the care of me and my ladies, they sweetened right up.”

As for her tears about Odysseus leaving, she shows greatness of mind in understanding her limitations. Having seen the essence of Odysseus’s men, she adds that “nobody sees essence who can’t/ Face limitation.” The limitation is that she can’t hold Odysseus if he wants to leave. She could “hold you prisoner” but chooses not to:

Circe’s Power
By Louise Glück

I never turned anyone into a pig.
Some people are pigs; I make them
Look like pigs. 

I’m sick of your world
That lets the outside disguise the inside. Your men weren’t bad men;
Undisciplined life
Did that to them. As pigs,
 
Under the care of
Me and my ladies, they
Sweetened right up.

Then I reversed the spell, showing you my goodness
As well as my power. I saw 

We could be happy here,
As men and women are
When their needs are simple. In the same breath,
 
I foresaw your departure,
Your men with my help braving
The crying and pounding sea. You think
 
A few tears upset me? My friend,
Every sorceress is
A pragmatist at heart; nobody sees essence who can’t
Face limitation. If I wanted only to hold you
 
I could hold you prisoner.

“Circe’s Grief,” meanwhile, is a warning to men who cheat on their wives (and probably vice versa). Even if the husband (or wife) has left the lover and returned home pretending nothing has happened, the spouse knows. It is as though the abandoned lover has goddess-like powers. “If I am in her head forever,” Circe says ominously, “I am in your life forever.”

Circe’s Grief
By Louise Glück

In the end, I made myself
Known to your wife as
A god would, in her own house, in
Ithaca, a voice
Without a body: she
Paused in her weaving, her head turning
First to the right, then left
Though it was hopeless of course
To trace that sound to any
Objective source: I doubt
She will return to her loom
With what she knows now. When
You see her again, tell her
This is how a god says goodbye:
If I am in her head forever
I am in your life forever.

Duffy has a different take. Penelope may have taken up weaving to occupy her time while waiting for Odysseus to return, but in the end the weaving has become her main interest. Upon her loom she depicts “the smile of a woman at the center/ of this world, self-contained, absorbed, content.” When her needle’s “leaping fish” creates a river, it is a river that doesn’t need to reach the sea.

Penelope
By Carol Ann Duffy

At first, I looked along the road
hoping to see him saunter home
among the olive trees,
a whistle for the dog
who mourned him with his warm head on my knees.
Six months of this
and then i noticed that whole days had passed
without my noticing.
I sorted cloth and scissors, needle, thread,

thinking to amuse myself,
but found a lifetime’s industry instead.
I sewed a girl
under a single star—cross-stitch, silver silk—
running after childhood’s bouncing ball.
I chose between three greens for the grass;
a smoky pink, a shadow’s grey
to show a snapdragon gargling a bee
I threaded walnut brown for a tree,

my thimble like an acorn
pushing up through umber soil.
Beneath the shade
I wrapped a maiden in a deep embrace
with heroism’s boy
and lost myself completely
in a wild embroidery of love, lust, lessons learnt;
then watched him sail away
into the loose gold stitching of the sun.

And when the others came to take his place,
disturb my peace,
I played for time.
I wore a widow’s face, kept my head down,
did my work by day, at night unpicked it.
I knew which hour of the dark the moon
would start to fray,
I stitched it.
Grey threads and brown

pursued my needle’s leaping fish
to form a river that would never reach the sea.
I tried it. I was picking out
the smile of a woman at the center
of this world, self-contained, absorbed, content,
most certainly not waiting,
when I heard a far-too-late familiar tread outside the door.
I licked my scarlet thread
and aimed it surely at the middle of the needle’s eye once more.

When Odysseus walks through the door, she doesn’t miss a beat.

The poem reminds me of one of Atwood’s Circe poems that I discuss in the essay linked to above. Odysseus is so obsessed with movement—Atwood could have Tennyson’s Ulysses in mind here as well—he doesn’t appreciate the here and now. As Circe’s Atwood puts it:

There must be more for you to do
than permit yourself to be shoved
by the wind from coast
to coast to coast, boot on the boat prow
to hold the wooden body
under, soul in control

And further:

Don’t you get tired of saying Onward?

Then she gives her own version of the peace that Duffy’s Penelope finds:

Ask at my temples
where the moon snakes, tongues of the dark
speak like bones unlocking, leaves falling
of a future you won’t believe in

Ask who keeps the wind
Ask what is sacred

Miller’s Circe discovers something similar:

I stepped into the woods and my life began.

I learned to braid my hair back, so it would not catch on every twig, and how to tie my skirt at the knee to keep the burrs off. I learned to recognize the different blooming vines and gaudy roses, to spot the shining dragonflies and coiling snakes. I climbed the peaks where the cypresses speared black into the sky, then clambered down to the orchards and vineyards where purple grapes grew thick as coral. I walked the hills, the buzzing meadows of thyme and lilac, and set my footprints across the yellow beaches. I searched out every cove and grotto, found the gentle bays, the harbor safe for ships. I heard the wolves howl, and the frogs cry from their mud. I stroked the glossy brown scorpions who braved me with their tails. Their poison was barely a pinch. I was drunk, as the wine and nectar in my father’s halls had never made me. No wonder I have been so slow, I thought. All this while I have been a weaver without wool, a ship without the sea. Yet now look where I sail.

…And when I did get lonely, … then there was always the forest. The lizards darted along the branches, the birds flashed their wings. The flowers, when they saw me, seemed to press forward like eager puppies, leaping and clamoring for my touch.

In his podcast, Mendelsohn thinks that Nolan could have spared himself the criticism of classicists like himself if he had titled his film An Odyssey rather than The Odyssey. An Odyssey would have signaled that he was going to create an Odysseus markedly different from Homer’s.

It’s clear what Atwood, Miller, Glück, and Duffy are up to. Faced with a seminal work in western civilization that has helped shape how men see women, they rewrite it to open up new possibilities.

None of this detracts from Homer’s original work. The Greeks were elastic with their gods, Mendelsohn writes, and works as great as The Odyssey stimulate artists for centuries afterwards.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Chaucer & Mary Oliver on Loaves and Fishes

By Robin Bates | Published: August 1, 2026
Attributed to Ambrosius Francken the Elder, The Feeding of the 5,000

Sunday

This week my monthly book group will be discussing Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, who does a wonderfully comic—and possibly blasphemous—take on today’s Gospel reading. Alisoun invokes the loaves and fishes story in a defense of her lusty nature.

After Chaucer I turn to Mary Oliver, whose take is more serious and yet, curiously, not altogether different.

Let’s start with the story as it appears in Matthew (14:13-21):

Jesus withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.” Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

Alisoun, who has had five husbands and is probably looking for a sixth on this pilgrimage to Canterbury, has spent her entire life being judged by men. Given a captive audience, she takes the opportunity to defend her sexual nature. While acknowledging that men prefer the purity of the Virgin Mary to lusty widows, she asks how anyone would be born if all women were virgins. “Are you telling me,” she asks her stunned audience, “that our ‘instruments’ were only made for urinating?” 

Then she changes tack, acknowledging that Christ was a virgin (not a normal way of describing him), as were many saints. She points out, however, that the world needs all kinds, both white bread virgins and barley bread wives like herself. This leads to the Biblical reference:

Christ was a maid, and yet shaped like a man,
And many a saint, since this old world began,
Yet has lived ever in perfect chastity.
I bear no malice to virginity;
Let such be bread of purest white wheat-seed,
And let us wives be called but barley bread;
And yet with barley bread (if Mark you scan)
Jesus Our Lord refreshed full many a man.
In such condition as God places us
I’ll persevere, I’m not fastidious.
In wifehood I will use my instrument
As freely as my Maker has it sent.
If I be niggardly, God give me sorrow!

In other words, she is like Christ, refreshing multitudes with her barley bread. Some of the pilgrims are scandalized while others are titillated and fully entertained. I put Chaucer in the latter category as I find Alisoun to be one of the most vibrant characters in all of literature, up there with Falstaff and Tom Jones.

Now to Mary Oliver, who has a compelling explanation for Jesus’s miracle. When we reflect upon the story, we should not worry “about what is reality, or what is plain, or what is mysterious.” If we had been part of that crowd, she says, “the felt ferocity” and “the felt necessity” of Jesus’s love for us would make anything seem possible: 

Logos 
By Mary Oliver

Why worry about the loaves and fishes?
If you say the right words, the wine expands.
If you say them with love
and the felt ferocity of that love
and the felt necessity of that love,
the fish explode into many.
Imagine him, speaking,
and don’t worry about what is reality,
or what is plain, or what is mysterious.
If you were there, it was all those things.
If you can imagine it, it is all those things.
Eat, drink, be happy.
Accept the miracle.
Accept, too, each spoken word
spoken with love.

Although the extroverted Wife of Bath and the introverted Oliver could not be further apart, each has the same passionate intensity for life. For Oliver, the feeding of the multitude becomes a kind of eucharist, where she experiences Jesus’s love as something sensuous: the eating and drinking are part of accepting Jesus’s vision of love.

This merging between eating and ecstatic communion is more clearly captured in Oliver’s death-and-resurrection poem about a fish she has caught (“The Fish”). After watching it die and then eating it, she writes,

                        Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.

While I know Chaucer is (at least here) a comic satirist while Oliver is more of a mystic, Alisoun’s vision of herself as sacramental barley bread now seems less outlandish. We will learn, from her tale, that she too is looking for love—for a man who will listen to her, respect her, and love her for who she is. She is the Samaritan woman at the well, and if men misinterpret her passionate search—well, that’s on them.

Jesus would speak to her with love.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Race Politics and the Greek Classics

By Robin Bates | Published: July 31, 2026
Lupita Nyong’o, cast as Helen of Troy

Friday

The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, responding to rightwing attacks on Christopher Nolan for casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, has written an excellent article on “The Fear of Black Greeks” (gifted). The African American journalist asserts that “white people don’t own the accomplishments of ancient Greece” and accuses them of “stolen valor” when they lay claim to them.

While not mentioning how the German Nazis too claimed to be descended from the ancient Greeks, whom they mimicked in their architecture, Serwer finds modern examples of fascist thinking. For instance:

“Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello,” Stephen Miller declared in a speech at the funeral for the assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk. “Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry.”

And:

[T]he right-wing podcaster Megyn Kelly bellowed for the refugees to “go back to fucking Haiti” and said, “We know our country’s better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic and our culture and our values. You being here only dilutes it for us, those who built it and live it.”

Observing that Miller was actually descended from “poor persecuted Jews from Eastern Europe, not ancient Roman senators,” Serwer writes,

But of course neither Kelly nor Miller “built this country,” and they have as much to do with, say, the writing of The Odyssey or the painting of the Sistine Chapel as I do—the fact that Kelly and Miller are white does not make these accomplishments theirs. People who espouse these views do not value the classics for what they can teach us about the ancient world or our own, but as bleached marble monuments to their own superiority.

Serwer’s article exposes the racial agenda that has always lain behind rightwing celebrations of western culture. When (as I reported yesterday) cultural conservatives in the early 1990s declared, “Jane Austen, not Alice Walker,” Walker, as a successful Black woman writer, had special resonance for them. Miller associating with the western heritage to establish his whiteness—and to whitewash his Jewishness—is a classic example of caste at work, as described in Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Although claiming a lineage and legacy back to Athens wouldn’t have saved Miller from the death camps in Nazi Germany—nor even convince certain American neo-Nazis today—he thinks he can join the privileged American white caste by demonizing people of color.

Similarly, there are Trump-supporting Latinos, Muslims, southeast Asians, and even some Black Africans—I was told, when dining with Ethiopian-American friends last spring, of a MAGA Ethiopian complaining about shiftless African Americans—who think that bashing other minorities is the way to acceptance and inclusion. Of course, Martin Niemöller’s “First they came” poem comes immediately to mind.

Setting aside America’s caste system, Serwer points out that the ancient Greeks were not in fact white in the way rightwing Americans believe . Greece, he notes, 

is not as far from Africa as the North American continent is, and the modern construct of race, a pseudoscientific product of the Atlantic slave trade, would not be invented until thousands of years after Homer. Black people are depicted in Greek art. Egypt, Libya, and “Aethiopia” are frequently referenced in ancient writings. As the Black classics scholar Frank Snowden Jr. wrote in the 1970s, at least one of the characters in The Odyssey, Eurybates, is specifically described as “black-skinned and woolly-haired.” As the Stanford classics professor Sarah Derbew notes in her book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, Black people are referenced in plays by Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. They also appear in the writings of Hesiod and Herodotus. One of the lost epic poems is The Aethiopis, in which Memnon, the Aethiopian king and an ally to Troy, plays a major role.

I particularly like how Serwer himself embraces 5th century Athens. He mentions attending Duke Ellington, the arts high school in Washington, D.C., which caught my attention as my 14-year-old grandson will be attending the school this coming fall. (Alban is a superb violin player and is thrilled he was accepted.) Serwer recalls encountering classic Greek plays 

as part of both my theater-history class and my English class. This being a public school in D.C., these classes were almost entirely Black, as were my teachers. My theater-history class was taught by Donal Leace, an actor and folk singer who made a tremendous impression on me. He taught us about the importance of these texts and how they shaped human storytelling, and I owe to him my lifelong appreciation for them. I have seen conservatives accuse liberals of dismissing the classics as the province of “dead white men,” but that was not what I was taught in the 1990s by Black teachers, in a Black school, in what was then a mostly Black city.

Serwer adds:

Shortly after graduating, I went to see Avery Brooks in The Oedipus Plays. I do not remember at the time interpreting his casting as an overt political statement, let alone thinking that anyone would consider these stories as the collective racial property of people born white thousands of years later, rather than as a form of sorcery allowing anyone in the present to speak to the past.

This is how literature, including the literature of the western canon, is supposed to work. People who use the classics to exclude others dishonor the very works they claim to uphold.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

  • Sign up for my weekly newsletter

  • Buy Now
  • Learn More
  • Buy Now
  • Learn More