Monthly Archives: May 2018

For Roth, People Were Always Complex

The late Philip Roth’s novel “Human Stain” reenforced for me that humans are always more complex than ideological caricatures of them.

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Reflections on Internet Trolling

Internet trolling is not contributing to discourse but poisoning it.

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What Is America’s Favorite Novel?

NPR has compiled a list of 100 books to determine America’s favorite novel. It’s often an infuriating list but the exercise is worthwhile all the same.

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Mourning the Mouthless Dead

Charles Hamilton Sorley, killed early in World War I, penned anti-war poetry that anticipated Wilfred Owen.

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A New Isaiah Walks the City Streets

In David Gascoyne’s 1932 poem “New Isaiah,” the poet uses Isaiah imagery to prophesy the decline of the west.

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Murakami and Repressed Anger’s Toxicity

Murakami’s novels cast light on a recent Japanese football incident where a player was instructed to take out the other team’s quarterback.

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My Three Book Projects

In which I share my first three sabbatical–I mean retirement–book projects.

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I Weep Like a Child for the Past

Returning to my childhood home, I thought of one of the great poems about nostalgia, D. H. Lawrence’s “Piano.”

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Retiring to the Garden of Eden

Stepping out of our U-Haul truck and into my mother’s wood, I felt I had entered Milton’s Garden of Eden.

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