Something Funny Happened Along My Path

By Robin Bates | Published: June 5, 2026
Johannes Weiland, An Old Scholar

Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 37th Installment

Note: For the purposes of this on-going memoir I am revising an essay I wrote three years ago. It has to do with a tinge of regret, one I have never been entirely able to overcome, that I chose a slightly wrong academic path. Marlon Brando’s lament in On the Waterfront–“I could have been a contender”—sometimes nags at me when I think about not having made a name for myself in literary studies.

I actually had a “what could have been” thrown at me when I was still a student at Carleton College, although it was then connected with history rather than literature. “If you hadn’t been so involved in running the paper [the Carletonian],” my advisor Carl Weiner said to me shortly before graduation, “you could really have been something.” Rather than taking on a year-long history project, I had chosen the short essay that everyone else wrote (although mine wasn’t short). My committee gave it an honors designation but I see what he meant.

I share this rumination, not only because it is self-revealing (a major goal of this memoir), but because I suspect we all have had regrets that we blow out of proportion. My real issue, I now realize, is anxiety over not having been perfect. It’s a form of pride that plagues Sir Gawain in the 14th century romance, one of my all-time favorite works, leading the Green Knight to intervene and bring him down to earth. Sure, you screwed up, but you’re still impressive, he essentially tells our hero in the poem’s finale, and I hear him saying the same to me. I find absolution, along with a deep sense of relief, in his words:

You are so fully confessed, your failings made known,
And bear the plain penance of the point of my blade,
I hold you polished as a pearl, as pure and as bright
As you have lived free of fault since first you were born.

Why, after all, should I complain, having had a rich and fulfilling career teaching works that I love to students who came to care about them as well? The power of memoir writing, I’m discovering, is that one can dive into these thoughts and see them in an entirely new light. With that in mind, here’s that past post.

Reprinted from June 29, 2023 (slightly amended)

In his frequently quoted but often misunderstood “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost predicts that one day in the future he will look back at his life and regret a choice he made. (“I shall be telling this with a sigh/ Somewhere ages and ages hence…”) While the poem is often read as a triumphant assertion of having made an unconventional choice—I have heard it quoted in this vein at a couple of valedictory addresses—I read it rather as someone who foresees that he will be so upset at having made that choice that he predicts he will try to rationalize it away: he will convince himself that he took the daring path, not the path that most people walk. In point of fact, however, he acknowledges that there wasn’t that much difference between the two paths, that they were worn more or less the same. (But maybe he’s misremembering this as well.)

In other words, although he would like to think he will look back with a contented sigh, he fears he will look back with a regretful sigh. The poem, after all, is entitled, “The Road Not Taken,” not “The Road Less Traveled.”

Having reached an age (72) where one looks back, especially after having just attended one’s 50th college reunion, I use today’s post to sort through one of my own career regrets. You’ll have to excuse me if I descend into the weeds of my profession—what has bothered me may  will seem trivial to those in other walks of life.

I begin my self-examination with a professor that I mentioned in a PechaKucha talk I gave at the reunion. PechaKucha, of Japanese origin, allows the speaker 20 slides in just under seven minutes to make the presentation (20 seconds per slide, which change automatically so that the speaker can’t drone on). Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my subject, which was how Beowulf helps us negotiate our gun-happy society. I contended that if we are to stand up to resentment-crazed trolls and counteract dragon depression, we need to “be like Beowulf.” The talk outlined the ways how.

The first slide mentioned Phil Niles’s Medieval History I class, which introduced me to the idea that the monsters in Beowulf represented the forces that threatened the stability of 8th century Anglo-Saxon warrior society. In the social contract between warrior and king, warriors were to be loyal, giving all their winnings to their king, and kings were to be fair and generous, redistributing those winnings to the warriors. If either side broke that contract—if warriors behaved like resentful trolls or if kings became greedy dragons—society could disintegrate, with death or slavery the end result for all its members.

I vividly remember writing my essay for the course, which I entitled “The Social Role of Monsters in Barbarian Society.” Understanding came to me at around two or three in the morning in one of Carleton’s all-night study rooms. At that moment I grasped, in a deep way, that literature, including the literary fantasy that I loved, was not just for fun but articulated life and death issues. While I already knew the books I read were of immense importance to me, I now realized they were of immense importance to society as a whole. After all, Beowulf had served as a blueprint to Anglo-Saxon warriors on how to literally survive.

Socially conscious as we all were in those days, what with the Black, Chicano and Indian liberation movements, the anti-war protests, and the feminist revolution all in full sway, this view that my literature, my personal passion, could help change the world hit me with seismic force. I determined that I would become a literature teacher.

Majoring in history rather than in English was not the way to go about this, however. By my junior year, however, I feared that I was too far along in history to make the transition. Furthermore, none of the English courses I was taking spoke to this new-found revelation. Whereas my English professors seemed more interested in confining themselves to the works rather than linking them to anything going on in the world, my history teachers were introducing me to thinkers who argued that ideas could have a transformational impact.

These thinkers included Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Antonio Gramsci, and Georg Lukacs. In my French courses, meanwhile, I was reading Jean Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, who thought the same. I wrote my thesis on the absurdly broad topic (but undergraduates are allowed to go big) of whether the French Enlightenment caused the French Revolution. I concluded that works like Rousseau’s On Inequality and Diderot’s Letter on the Blind had changed the framework in which reality itself was seen. This new reality, I argued, undermined traditional monarchical beliefs.

It helped that, as I was writing my thesis, I was also taking Barry Casper’s “Revolutions in Physics” class. (I had put off this science requirement to the very last moment.) Casper introduced us to Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and I realized later that my thesis was essentially contending that the French Enlightenment had ushered in a significant paradigm shift.

But while my history major was speaking to issues that concerned me deeply, it wasn’t preparing me for graduate English programs. I was rejected by six of the nine schools I applied to, and I could understand why when I entered Emory University’s English program. After all, my fellow grad students could perform acts of literary interpretation that appeared magical to me. How were they detecting intricate image patterns beneath a work’s surface?

So was my first wrong path choosing to major in history rather than English? Actually, fearing that this was indeed a mistake, at the beginning of my junior year I planned to tell my history advisor Carl Weiner—a brilliant if somewhat obstreperous intellectual—that I wanted to change majors. At the last moment, however, I lost my nerve. Some cowardice entered into my decision making.

Then again, I would not have taken Phil Niles’s Medieval History class if I had changed majors, nor all those intellectual history classes. And I would probably have experienced, in further English classes, the same frustrations that had sent me to study history in the first place.

Despite having taken only six English courses, I was accepted into a good graduate program. It so happens that my Emory mentor had chosen me in part because of my history background. J. Paul Hunter, a giant in the field of 18thcentury British Literature, liked my interdisciplinary interests, and he and I saw eye to eye about the importance of history.

I was also fortunate that Emory’s Victorianist, Jerome Beaty, was interested in the emerging field of reader response theory. When, my first semester, I heard Beaty talk about how readers in 1847 would have responded to Jane Eyre, I felt a shock of recognition. I tracked him down after the talk and got the names of the theorists he was referencing, including the German theorist Hans Robert Jauss.

Jauss argues that great works of literature expand readers’ “horizon of expectations”—a paradigm shift, if you will—which was exactly what I wanted to believe. I wrote an essay that semester in Beaty’s “Early Dickens Novels” class about how Dickens challenged and expanded traditional notions of the family in Martin Chuzzlewit—with the effect that the novel was a flop when it came out (it was ahead of its time) but one of Dickens’s most popular novels by the end of his life (third after David Copperfield and Pickwick Papers). Dickens had expanded his readers’ horizons so that, despite their early dislike, they later came to see his novel with new eyes.

If you’re keeping track, my decision to major in history turns out not to have been a mistake after all. It got me into a graduate school where people considered history an important part of literary study—unusual for the time as New Historicism had not yet come into fashion—and my Emory PhD helped me find what was for me the perfect job: a state school with a mission to introduce a liberal arts education to (among others) first generation college students.

But wait, I’m not done yet with regrets. When, still in grad school, I was discussing a possible dissertation topic with Hunter, I said something to the effect of wanting to study how novels could change lives. Unfortunately, I narrowed my articulation too much. I thought that I needed to study satire, having the impression that satire was more effective at changing lives than other genres. He, hearing this, suggested that I take on the work of an under-appreciated satiric novelist (and former ship surgeon) Tobias Smollett and I dutifully did so.

This in spite of the fact that I can’t stand Smollett, largely because he is such a cranky writer. In fact, fellow novelist Laurence Sterne referred to him as “Smelfungus” for the way he complains all the time. While I dutifully wrote on Smollett, producing an acceptable dissertation (“Smollett’s Struggle for a New Mode of Expression”), I could never return to him later. As one’s dissertation often serves as the source of one’s early scholarly articles, I cut myself off from that opportunity.

The path I wish I had taken was choosing a topic that focused on reader response issues. Rather than selecting a single author, I could have chosen a theoretical focus and explored a range of 18th century texts. I could, for instance, have followed more closely the kind of research Hunter himself was doing. For instance, he had recently written a brilliant article entitled “The Loneliness of the Long Distant Reader,” in which he talked about how novels were disrupting social order by introducing a new kind of solitude. Wives, for instance, would sometimes distress their husbands by disappearing for days into Samuel Richardson’s million-word novel Clarissa.

Had I said, “I want to do the kind of research that you did in that article,” I would have written a very different dissertation. I would have dived into 18th century reading journals, letters in which books are mentioned, and other documents and other forms of evidence as to the impact of works. I would have built a career in reader response theory, then in its infancy, instead of jumping between multiple fields.

I also would have become the kind of scholar my father was. More on this in a moment.

Instead, having written a dissertation more from the intellect than from the heart, I turned away from writing literary scholarship altogether (at least for a while) and instead started analyzing films. After all, I could see vividly the impact that cinema had on audiences—why, for instance (to cite my most widely cited article) Citizen Kane shook 1941 viewers to the core. But I could have been doing the same with literature.

In short, I had committed a scholarly no-no: I left a field where I had considerable expertise to branch into something new.

Mentioning my father points to an Oedipal drama at work. Scott Bates, a French professor at the University of the South, was a world authority on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire. During a Fulbright year when I was a year old, he had uncovered source material at France’s national library that upended previous interpretations, and he continued to do so for decades afterward. For 15 years I considered myself an impostor because I wasn’t doing something comparable.

I should add that I worshipped my father, seeing in him everything I wanted to be. I was even proud when, in seventh grade, I began wearing glasses because he wore glasses. You see what I mean.

But instead of becoming a recognized scholar, I became what some contemptuously dismiss as a generalist. St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a small liberal arts college, allowed this so that, at any moment, I could be found teaching one of our three survey courses—everything from Beowulf to Margaret Atwood—or one of a wide assortment of theme courses. Over the years these included Minority Lit, African American Lit, Post-Colonial Lit, American Fantasy, British Fantasy, Magical Realism, American Film, Film Genre, Great Directors, Theories of the Reader, and The Existential Fantasies of Haruki Murakami. Although my two favorite courses were in my field (Restoration and 18th Century Couples Comedy and Jane Austen), ranging as widely as I did was not a recipe for scholarly achievement.

Where I went deep was in responding to student essays. Figuring that everyone had the potential to undercover meaningful literary insights, I spent hours helping students choose their topics, develop their proposals, and draft and polish their essays.

Even after 35 years, this never got old. I reached the point where I could detect—sometimes from no more than a phrase—the topic that would yield an essay where the student had “something at stake” (the phrase I used in my syllabus). I’ve shared a number of these student reading stories on this blog.

While I flourished as a teacher, however, my traditional scholarship was mostly missing. Although I was to publish twenty academic articles, deliver a score of scholarly presentations, and self-publish a book on Beowulf, it’s not a resumé that would earn tenure at a research university. The book I’m proudest of was published at a small press after I retired.

Arguably, my greatest achievement is this blog. My audience is not composed of specialists in the field, however.

As I look back at this career, my version of Frost’s regretful sigh is that I didn’t produce the work that I thought I was supposed to.

Could I have gone as far as those of my stellar Carleton classmates who have had brilliant scholarly careers? One of them heads the Emory Philosophy Department while another received a rave review in The New York Review of Books. Reunions can alert us to roads we haven’t taken.

And yet, to reverse course once again, I have had students tell me that my teaching impacted them in ways that were life-changing, and this blog has reached a wider readership than I ever could have hoped for from scholarly work. While it’s not what my father did nor what various of my professors hoped from me, in the end I fulfilled my main professional mission, which was to put people in contact with literature that bettered their lives. When my old regrets flair up, I remind myself of this.

And to do justice to our 50th class reunion, what I carried away was a sense, not of expectations unfulfilled, but of lives lived fully and meaningfully. Professional goals seem less important now that many of us have retired.

In his short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Jorge Luis Borges gives us an alternative to Frost’s yellow wood. Whereas the speaker in “Road Not Taken” agonizes over a single choice, Borges describes a garden where the choices are infinite. As a character tells the narrator,

The Garden of Forking Paths is a picture, incomplete yet not false, of the universe such as Ts’ui Pen conceived it to be. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words, but am an error, a phantom.

And further on:

Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures and in one of them I am your enemy.

This image shows me I have been too one-dimensional in thinking about my life trajectory. Life indeed has “innumerable futures,” which are too complex to chart. I’m especially struck by the thought that sometimes a path that seems to diverge will then later converge, and that a path that bifurcates into two will then see those two intersect. A history class that I wouldn’t have taken had I majored in English gave me the literary insight that has guided my life. The history major that kept me out of a number of graduate schools got me into one that gave me the thinkers that I needed and helped me land my dream job.

Frost’s poem, which jumps back and forth in time, tells me the same thing. Don’t fixate on a single narrative about a wrong or right decision—don’t spend time regretting that you took this path rather than that one—because the very story you tell yourself about that choosing will change over time.

Better for me to focus on the rich interactions with people that teaching literature has made possible, which is a far more interesting story than that of a hypothetical path not taken.

One further thought. I didn’t mention another life choice I made which, while it ran counter to the path of a traditional literary scholar, has added immeasurably to my life. In 1987, inspired by recent Hungarian films, I applied for a Fulbright to go study them, even though I didn’t know any Hungarian. Although I had experienced early academic success with an article on the Czech New Wave—how film played a major role in the Czech Spring of 1968–jumping to another country made no scholarly sense. 

In any event, the Hungary slot was not available so I ended up in Yugoslavia/Slovenia instead. This seemed like a worthy second choice since Yugoslavia itself was producing fascinating films. Unfortunately, those films were being produced in Serbia and Croatia, not Slovenia. My research plans fell through and, from outer appearances, the decision appeared to have been a bust.

Except that it wasn’t as I developed deep ties with people in the country. The relationship with Slovenia has led to some of the happiest moments of Julia’s and my life. We have been returning every two years for a six-week stint at the University of Ljubljana and recently received a special award from the university. We use these visits to refresh our many friendships. In addition, my understanding of literature grew immensely from this immersion in another country, enriching my stateside teaching. 

Would I trade all this for a straight-line scholar’s path? On reflection, I don’t think I would.

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)

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Shaq on Homer’s Basketball Lessons

By Robin Bates | Published: June 3, 2026
Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant

Thursday

With the NBA finals underway, I follow up the story, mentioned last week, about basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal writing “An Interdisciplinary Approach to Mentorship through the Lens of the Epic Poem The Odyssey.” The thesis was for LSU’s Sports Leadership program. Sadly, I don’t have more information so today’s post merely speculates about how he might have applied Homer’s poem.

Early in the poem we encounter two mentor figures, including Mentor himself (!), who are counseling young Telemachus. Actually, the mentors are Athena, who has taken the guise of first Mentes and then Mentor, but that’s the Greek way of saying that the two men are providing god-like advice. A 19-year-old rookie, Telemachus doesn’t know how to deal with his mother’s suitors, who have invaded the house and are squandering his inheritance. He botches his first confrontation with them—let’s call it his debut appearance on the basketball court—as they successfully threaten him and the sympathetic villagers after he calls a village council. At the end of the session, Telemachus cries in frustration.

Simply calling the council is a growth step for him, however, and Mentor seeks to build on this by essentially sending him to the B league. Figuring that he needs to practice leadership in an environment where he can succeed, Mentor advises him to gather a group of youngsters and take a somewhat challenging sea voyage. Telemachus passes the test and also gains confidence and inspiration after talking to two veterans, Nestor and Menelaus. Both confirm that he has promise, and he returns to Ithaka with a new stride in his step.

He also wins the reluctant admiration of the suitors, who have sent out a ship to intercept and kill him. “Friends,” says one of them,

face up to it;
that young pup Telemachus, has done it;
he made the round trip, though we said he could not.

Fortunately from him, his team has just acquired a superstar—his father—who takes over, pushing Telemachus into a secondary role. It’s what he needs, however, to develop his own talent. He recognizes this and embraces the occasion. 

Odysseus brings with him a lot of hard-won wisdom. If we think of his journey home as his previous basketball career, everything starts off well before going off the rails. The Aeolus gives him a bag of winds that take him to within sight of Ithaka, but because he has failed to communicate adequately with his teammates, they open up the bag and are blow back to the now-angry wind god.

In the subsequent journey, Odysseus’s desire to try new things, which is the source of his greatness, also gets him in trouble with the cannibalistic Laestrygonians and Polyphemus the cyclops. In both instances, his teammates just want to grab some loot and go but Odysseus’s curiosity pushes him further, getting a number of them killed.

Lessons abound. On the plus side, this same intelligence gets Odysseus out of tight spots (Polyphemus’s cave). On the negative, his cocky trash talk—boasting to Polyphemus about what he’s done—provides bulletin board material for the opposition. Suddenly Poseidon is on his case.

Life in the NBA offers players many of the temptations (drugs, sex, loot) that show up in the poem, where we watch Odysseus struggle to keep his team focused. The Lotus Eaters tempt with drugs and Circe tends with bestial appetites (she turns men into pigs), and the men are fortunate that they have a leader who keeps his eyes on the prize. This trait also saves Odysseus from the Sirens. (“They got some hungry women there and they really make a mess outa you,” as Bob Dylan would say.)

Odysseus knows how to accept coaching, which he gets from Teiresias in the Underworld and from Circe. This allows him to negotiate situations where there are no good options, a situation basketball teams know well. When the Knicks take on the Spurs, will they collapse down on 7’4” Victor Wenbanyama, thereby leaving themselves open to three-point shooters, or defend him with a single player, in which case they will give up easy baskets. Do they go man-to-man or play zone? There will be costs in both cases, but the goal is to win the game. Odysseus chooses to sacrifice six men to the monster Scylla rather than giving up his entire ship to the whirlpool Charybdis.

And then there’s that part of the season where you sink into mediocrity (Circe’s island) and all appears lost. Do you just give up, sitting around moping, or do you do something dramatic. Odysseus, buoyed by a divine sense of mission—Zeus has decreed he must return home—builds a raft and risks the treacherous seas.

Sometimes at such moments we see teams make daring trades, which sometimes work out (Odysseus, after many struggles, reaches the island of the Phaeacians, who endow him with gifts and send him home), and sometimes not (teams sometimes mortgage their future to acquire players that fail to save them from drowning).

Back home, Odysseus must now prepare for the big game. The odds are formidable as Odysseus can field no more than four men (unless one counts Athena) while there are 108 suitors. Nevertheless, despite his age, he possesses remarkable fighting skills, along with the element of surprise. Telemachus, meanwhile, proves a worthy second–Scotti Pippen to his father’s Michael Jordan—and the underdogs win.

While this post has been fun to write, I would much rather have reported on the actual content of Shaq’s thesis. He may have encountered the poem in the many hours of interdisciplinary course work his program required, and I can see how he came up with the idea. I would love to know the specific games, coaches, players, and situations it brought to mind.

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A Book Fair in War-Torn Ukraine

By Robin Bates | Published: June 2, 2026
First Lady Olena Zelenska visits Kyiv’s annual book fair in 2024

Wednesday

Why have a book festival in the middle of a war?
Why have a war in the middle of a book festival?

So begins an inspiring essay by historian Timothy Snyder on a Ukrainian book fair held in the face of ongoing Russian attacks. On May 24 alone, Snyder reports, Russia launched more than six hundred missiles and drones at the capital city of Kyiv and environs. Nevertheless, Book Arsenal, Kyiv’s annual festival, continued on.

Book publishing apparently is currently undergoing “an extraordinary renaissance” in Ukraine. Over 100 book publishers showed up for the fair and tens of thousands visited the 240 events. This year’s motto was “Bear your freedom.”

As for the missiles, Snyder’s contact informed him that one waits for them to pass and then goes on as usual:

Air raids are an interruption; when they are finished, participants in Book Arsenal go back to talking about books. People in Kyiv are frustrated by these interruptions, or angry, or sleepless; but after four years these Russian war crimes become a part of life, to which one adapts.

Snyder says that the danger can be judged and navigated thanks to apps and Telegram channels, which alert people to impending air raids. Nevertheless, four were killed and a hundred injured in the May 24 bombings. On June 1 another 18 died as Russia fired 700 missiles and drones at Dnipro and Kyiv.

Russia has particularly targeted cultural sites, publishing houses, archives, libraries, and museums. In occupied zones, Russians collect and burn Ukrainian books, and the 2024 Arsenal Festival featured an exhibit on “Books Destroyed by Russia.” “Genocide,” Snyder observes, “is about eliminating a people, and it includes the attempt to eliminate their ability to think for themselves, as themselves, in their own language.” Therefore, book publication is seen as self-defense and reading as a form of resistance. The historian states that

good books liberate us from the obvious and prepare us for the real. It might seem like, at the edge, where life meets death, we should put the books down; this is not what one sees in Ukraine. The last time I went to the front I rode with soldiers who were bringing books to other soldiers.

The Roman stoic philosopher Seneca is particularly popular at the moment, especially his essay “On the Shortness of Life.” In it he argues that life is long enough if we do what is important.

Along these lines, blogger Matt Labash recently alerted me to a poem about those who do what is important in the face of death. It takes a poem to do justice to these “Local Heroes” because, Labash says, poetry stands up “when prose fails to answer the call.” Author Thomas Lynch, who is a Michigan undertaker, has a particular perspective on “what matters and what doesn’t.” 

Local Heroes
By Thomas Lynch

Some days the worst that can happen happens.
The sky falls or weather overwhelms or
The world as we have come to know it turns
Towards the eventual apocalypse
Long prefigured in all the holy books —
The end times of floods and conflagrations
That bring us to the edge of our oblivions.
Still, maybe this is not the end at all,
Nor even the beginning of the end.
Rather, one more in a long list of sorrows,
To be added to the ones thus far endured,
Through what we have come to call our history:
Another in that bitter litany
That we will, if we survive it, have survived.
Lord, send us in our peril, local heroes,
Someone to listen, someone to watch,
Someone to search and wait and keep the careful count
Of the dead and missing, the dead and gone
But not forgotten. Sometimes all that can be done
Is to salvage one sadness from the mass of sadnesses,
To bear one body home, to lay the dead out
Among their people, organize the flowers
And casseroles, write the obits, meet the mourners at the door,
Drive the dark procession down through town
Toll the bell, dig the hole, tend the pyre.
It’s what we do. The daylong news is dire —
Full of true believers and politicos
Old talk of race and blame and photo ops.
But here brave men and women pick the pieces up.
They serve the living tending to the dead.
They bring them home, the missing and adrift,
They give them back to let them go again.
Like politics, all funerals are local.

Ukrainians undoubtedly know well what Lynch is talking about. Thousands of them are local heroes. 

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Death Eaters Have Seized the Ministry of Magic

By Robin Bates | Published: June 1, 2026
Fiennes as Voldemort

Tuesday

MSNOW legal commentator Barbara McQuade, the Michigan lawyer fired by DJT after successfully prosecuting the underwear bomber and a Detroit mayor, has just published The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government. In her interview about the book with Rachel Maddow, McQuade used a literary analogy to succinctly sum up what has happened to Trump’s Department of “Justice”: “The Death Eaters have taken over the Ministry of Magic.”

The allusion, of course, is to the final book in the Harry Potter series and captures how dire our situation has become. The Ministry of Magic is the governing body for the magical community, and while frequently inept and sometimes corrupt, it nevertheless provides some protection against the forces of evil. Harry, Dumbledore, and Hogwarts can wrestle with their immediate challenges without worrying about Voldemort seizing executive authority. Even Vernon Dursley, upon suddenly finding his family pulled into the wizards’ war, shares this view:

“I thought there was a Ministry of Magic?” asked Vernon Dursley abruptly.
“There is,” said Harry, surprised.
“Well then, why can’t they protect us? It seems to me that, as innocent victims, guilty of nothing more than harboring a marked man, we ought to qualify for government protection!”
Harry laughed: he could not help himself. It was so very typical of his uncle to put his hopes in the establishment, even within this world that he despised and mistrusted.
“You heard what Mr. Weasley and Kingsley said,” Harry replied. “We think the Ministry has been infiltrated.”

And so in fact it has. We learn in the opening chapter of Deathly Hallows that a Voldemort henchman has placed an Imperius Curse on Pius Thicknesse, the Ministry’s Head of the Department of Magical Law, thereby making him Voldemort’s puppet. The goal, now, is for Thicknesse to convert other ministers so that they can overthrow Minister Rufus Scrimgeour. Voldemort warns that the coup must be successful as “one failed attempt on the Minister’s life will set me back a long way.”

The signs of infiltration have been there for a while as Harry, the Weasleys, and others see Voldemort making inroads. “Harry,” Hermione says at one point as his scar begins giving him visions of Voldemort, “he’s taking over the Ministry and the newspapers and half the Wizarding world! Don’t let him inside your head too!” Still, the news comes as a thunderbolt, akin to America’s election night news on November 8, 2016 and again November 5, 2024: “The Ministry has fallen. Scrimgeour is dead. They are coming.”

Having already lost Dumbledore, now Harry, Hermione, and Ron have lost the protection of Hogwarts and are on their own as Voldemort seizes the instruments of governing. Putting it in our own terms, he now controls Congress, the judiciary, the media, and the military. Because Trump has made significant inroads into all four, we can relate to what life is like under Voldemort, which we learn when Neville reports on life at Hogwarts.

First of all, he tells them about Death Eaters who have joined the faculty. We can think of the Carrows as ICE agents with free use of the detention system:

The other teachers are all supposed to refer us to the Carrows if we do anything wrong….We supposed to practice the Cruciatus Curse on people who’ve earned detentions.

While Neville sustains a deep gash in his cheek for refusing to do so, the Carrows, like the Department of Homeland Security, find willing accomplices. “Some people are into it,” Neville notes. “Crabbe and Goyle love it. First time they’ve ever been top in anything, I expect.”  

Like many school systems in the American south, Hogwarts has also changed its curriculum, with “Defense Against the Dark Arts” becoming “the Dark Arts.” Meanwhile, now that the school is no longer constrained by DEI, Critical Race Theory, or Black History Month, Muggle Studies (i.e., the study of humans) is taught in a whole new way:

“We’ve all got to listen to [the teacher] explain how Muggles are like animals, stupid and dirty, and how they drove wizards into hiding by being vicious toward them, and how the natural order is being reestablished. I got this one,” [Neville] indicated another slash to his face, “for asking her how much Muggle blood she and her brother have got.”

When Ron worries that Neville is taking unnecessary chances, he replies with words that we’re hearing these days from protest leaders: “The thing is, it helps when people stand up to them, it gives everyone hope. I used to notice that when you did it, Harry.”

The Death Eaters even have a version of going after the immigrant parents of American citizens. Neville again:

The only people in real danger are the ones whose friends and relatives on the outside are giving trouble. They get taken hostage. Old Xeno Lovegood was getting a bit too outspoken in The Quibbler, so they dragged Luna off the train on the way back from Christmas.

For a while, the Hogwarts rebels resort to graffiti until it becomes too dangerous. “We used to sneak out at night and put graffiti on the walls: Dumbledore’s Army, Still Recruiting, stuff like that.” Now, they are in hiding, awaiting the best moment to strike. 

For years the American right has had fever dreams about a leftwing takeover, making movies like Red Dawn, complaining incessantly about big government, and pushing for increased accessibility to firearms. Who knew that, when they themselves took over, they would engage in wholesale roundups of brown people, extrajudicial killings without accountability, and a black helicopter attack on a Chicago tenement? The left may have “policed” racially insensitive speech, but “police” for them was only a metaphor, not actual militias with access to lethal weapons, pepper spray, armored vehicles, extrajudicial warrants, and virtually unlimited power to arrest, detain indefinitely, and sometimes send to foreign prisons. 

So yes, the Death Eaters have taken over the Ministry of Magic. But we can share Neville’s hope that resistance isn’t altogether futile and Rowling’s vision that Harry’s non-violent response to Voldemort will triumph in the end. The weapon that the Dark Lord hurls at Harry rebounds upon him so that he is brought down by his own machinations.

For that to happen, however, Harry must enter the dark wood and stand up to him. The King’s Cross episode shows Harry wrestling with his doubts—when all seems lost, should he continue on?—and his decision to return to action is the decision before us all. As the ghost of Dumbledore tells him in this netherworld,

By returning, you may ensure that fewer souls are maimed, fewer families are torn apart. If that seems to you a worthy goal, then we say good-bye for the present. 

In this moment, Potter also discovers that behind the face of evil is an unloved, whimpering toddler. Or put another way, the Great and Powerful Oz is a little man behind a curtain, even if his face and name are plastered all over Washington.

Keep the faith.

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“Parasite and Tool of a Proud Tyrant”

By Robin Bates | Published: May 31, 2026
Sol Eytinge, Jr., Mr Carker, the smiling sycophant from Dombey and Son

Monday

I’ve just finished listening to Dombey and Son, thereby completing my life list of Dickens novels. (I exempt the Mystery of Edwin Drood, which Dickens didn’t finish. And yes, I’ve read Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit.) While Dombey is far from the author’s best work, its depiction of a tyrannical boss and his smiling enabler pretty much captures what we’re seeing in the White House these days. 

Dombey is the proud and autocratic head of a thriving business. After his first wife dies, he essentially buys a second, a beautiful woman who is just as proud, and sparks fly when she refuses to cater to his whims. Not confident of handling her himself, he turns to his sycophantic manager to sort out matters. Imagine Dombey as Trump and James Carker as Todd Blanche, Kash Patel, or, well, pretty much anyone in his current administration:

“Now, Carker,” said Mr Dombey, “I do not hesitate to say to you that I will carry my point. I am not to be trifled with. Mrs Dombey must understand that my will is law, and that I cannot allow of one exception to the whole rule of my life. You will have the goodness to undertake this charge, which, coming from me, is not unacceptable to you, I hope, whatever regret you may politely profess—for which I am obliged to you on behalf of Mrs Dombey; and you will have the goodness, I am persuaded, to discharge it as exactly as any other commission.”
“You know,” said Mr Carker, “that you have only to command me.”
“I know,” said Mr Dombey, with a majestic indication of assent, “that I have only to command you.”

Dombey goes to complain that Edith does not adequately appreciate him for having elevated her to the eminent position of his wife:

“[A]t present I do not conceive that Mrs Dombey does that credit to it, to which it is entitled. There is a principle of opposition in Mrs Dombey that must be eradicated; that must be overcome: Mrs Dombey does not appear to understand,” said Mr Dombey, forcibly, “that the idea of opposition to Me is monstrous and absurd.”

Compare this to how Trump is prepared to punish those in his own party who do not fully acknowledge his importance (Tom Massie, Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn). The results, as we have seen, are cabinet meetings that function like North Korea-style groveling sessions.

But enough of Trump as I’m more interested in the Carkers of the world. The manger, whose “two unbroken rows of glistening teeth” are always “on parade,” gets more than a paycheck and prestige from his association with Dombey. Like Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and numerous others, he gets an opportunity to carry out his own sadistic fantasies.

In this instance, Dombey has instructed him to humble his wife, and Carker points out that his being employed as intermediary will itself be a form of humiliation as Edith detests him. When Dombey queries whether Carker will feel degraded in his role, the manager responds that degradation is impossible when he is carrying out his boss’ wishes. Dombey first:

“But I have not supposed, I confess, that any confidence I could entrust to you, would be likely to degrade you—”
“Oh! I degraded!” exclaimed Carker. “In your service!”
“—or to place you,” pursued Mr Dombey, “in a false position.”
“I in a false position!” exclaimed Carker. “I shall be proud—delighted—to execute your trust. I could have wished, I own, to have given the lady at whose feet I would lay my humble duty and devotion—for is she not your wife!—no new cause of dislike; but a wish from you is, of course, paramount to every other consideration on earth.” 

He goes on to assure Dombey that Edith is sure to be “converted from these little errors of judgment,” which I suspect has its modern equivalent in Trump’s sycophants assuring him that the public will be brought around to seeing that we are indeed enjoying the greatest economic boom in American history.

One wonders whether they also harbor Carker’s secret resentment: his assumption that everyone in the office is hypocritical when they express concern at Dombey falling from a horse reveals his own hypocrisy. Inwardly, he seethes over how Dombey makes him bow and scrape and is only sorry that his boss doesn’t die in the accident. He gets his revenge, or so he thinks, when he kisses Edith and persuades her to run away with him, thereby thoroughly humiliating her husband. His own side hustles, made without Dombey’s knowledge, have given him financial independence.

Many note that standing up to Trump is the best response, and it is an effective way to handle his enablers as well. In an immensely satisfying scene, Edith faces down Carker, putting him in his place at the very moment when he thinks he has achieved power over her. He thinks she has run away from Dombey to be with him, but she sets him right:

“In every vaunt you make,” she said, “I have my triumph. I single out in you the meanest man I know, the parasite and tool of the proud tyrant, that his wound may go the deeper, and may rankle more. Boast, and revenge me on him! You know how you came here tonight; you know how you stand cowering there; you see yourself in colors quite as despicable, if not as odious, as those in which I see you.”

Dickens tells us that if Edith had faltered for an instant, Carker would have pinioned her but that “she was as firm as rock, and her searching eyes never left him”:

He would have sold his soul to root her, in her beauty, to the floor, and make her arms drop at her sides, and have her at his mercy. But he could not look at her, and not be afraid of her. He saw a strength within her that was resistless.

Carker dies when a nightmarish train runs him down, and, given the staggering levels of corruption we are seeing, a metaphorical train may have our current crop of sycophants in its sights. Rick Wilson’s maxim—“ETTD: Everything Trump Touches Dies”—has proved wondrously predictive so far.

Further thought: A friend of mine told me that her mother, raised in a fundamentalist household, was a book that provided examples from David Copperfield to teach her How To Be a Christian Woman. While David’s Dora was held up as positive in that she is ultra feminine, she was critiqued as being too infantile so that one should aspire instead to be like the more mature —and even more nurturing and self-sacrificing–Agnes. Both women, however, resemble the “angel in the house” celebrated in the Coventry Patmore poem of that period.

In Dombey and Son, I found myself wincing at how Dickens celebrates sweet Florence for essentially being, unlike her (more interesting) stepmother, a self-sacrificing doormat. The cloying portrayal helps explain why Dombey is not more highly regarded.

That being noted, however, I did find myself cheering characters who choose morality and sacrifice over convenience and self-gratification. I thought of all those civil servants who went into government because they love their country and now are being pressured to pledge allegiance to Trump. Dickens reminds us of what integrity under fire looks like and how one can choose to respond. Fundamentalists may hold up Dickens women as exemplars, but Dickens’s Christianity resembles that of Texas Democrat James Talarico much more than that of Trump’s fundamentalist idolaters.

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Aslan’s Song of Creation

By Robin Bates | Published: May 30, 2026
Pauline Baynes, The Magician’s Nephew

Sunday

Last week I mentioned how versions of the Holy Spirit’s descent appear in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian. Today I turn to C.S. Lewis’s handling of the Genesis creation story, which is often read on the first Sunday after Pentecost. I turn for assistance to The Green Worlds of C.S. Lewis: The Ecology of Aslan’s Realm, written and just released by my friend and colleague John Gatta.

I’ve previously written about Gatta’s The Transfiguration of Christ and Creation and Green Gospel: Foundations of Ecotheology.  In both he challenges those who insist on human dominion over or even stewardship of nature because such framings separate humans from nature. Rather, animals, plants, and minerals are also involved in God’s unfolding creation. Such a vision, Gatta says, is to be found in The Magician’s Nephew, where Aslan sings Narnia into existence. I start with the well-known opening of Genesis:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good…

Through the use of magic rings Polly and Digory, along with several others, have been transported to a formless void of their own. Then Aslan appears:

In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it.

With the singing, stars begin to shine in the heavens, followed by much more:

The lion was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song. It was softer and more lilting than the song by which he had called up the stars and the sun; a gentle, rippling music. And as he walked and sang the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the Lion like a pool. It ran up the sides of the little hills like a wave. In a few minutes it was creeping up the lower slopes of the distant mountains, making that young world every moment softer. The light wind could now be heard ruffling the grass. Soon there were other things besides grass. The higher slopes grew dark with heather. Patches of rougher and more bristling green appeared in the valley. Digory did not know what they were until one began coming up quite close to him. It was a little, spiky thing that threw out dozens of arms and covered these arms with green and grew larger at the rate of about an inch every two seconds. There were dozens of these things all round him now. When they were nearly as tall as himself he saw what they were. “Trees!” he exclaimed.

And:

Can you imagine a stretch of grassy land bubbling like water in a pot? For that is really the best description of what was happening. In all directions it was swelling into humps. They were of very different sizes, some no bigger than mole-hills, some as big as wheelbarrows, two the size of cottages. And the humps moved and swelled till they burst, and the crumbled earth poured out of them, and from each hump there came out an animal…. The panthers, leopards and things of that sort, sat down at once to wash the loose earth off theirhind quarters and then stood up against the trees to sharpen their front claws. Showers of birds came out of the trees. Butterflies fluttered. Bees got to work on the flowers as if they hadn’t a second to lose….And now you could hardly hear the song of the Lion; there was so much cawing, cooing, crowing, braying, neighing, baying, barking, lowing, bleating, and trumpeting.

To Gatta, Aslan singing Narnia into existence is the most memorable feature of Magician’s Nephew, something “beautifully consonant with the way other imaginative writers–ranging from the authors of the Book of Job, Dante, and Shakespeare to J.R. R. Tolkien, T.S. Eliot, John Muir and Wendell Berry –have expounded upon the music of creation.” 

In both Genesis and Magician’s Nephew, Gatta observes, creation stems “not from any intrinsic necessity, but in a spirit of pure, radically expansive love, exuberance, and joy.” Where the two stories diverge is that Aslan’s song “culminates in the birth not of our own human species, but of animals gifted with intelligible speech who will become the land’s central consciousness.”

This is important, Gatta says, because it moves us past the dominion/stewardship conversation. Although “humans from elsewhere” will play a role in Narnia’s future, the focus is initially on non-human creation. Gatta points out,

After Aslan as Singer sounds the keynote, other beings—including trees, stars, waters, horses, rabbits, moles, beavers, leopards, and sundry wild beasts–are drawn to join their voices in glorious harmony with that keynote, and with “the voice of the earth herself.” It’s a symphony that echoes the Book of Job and other biblical texts, wherein the morning stars join with countless other forms of being, both visible and invisible, to sing God’s hymn of ongoing creation.

By calling out, ‘“Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. . . . Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters,” all created beings are “called to consent to their full emergence.” Nor is that all. The Creator expects them to take an active part in their own being and becoming, as well as “in promoting the health of their larger community of creation.” Gatta explains the significance of this:

The creatures Aslan addresses here have already come to birth but still need to awaken to a fuller, second stage of their creation. That participatory stage calls for them to respond to the gift of life with a sign of their acceptance. It is phrased in strikingly direct, penetrating language.

“Creatures, I give you yourselves. . . . and I give you myself.” 

Accentuating his point, Gatta says that Aslan is expecting his creatures “to develop an involvement and responsibility in their own creation, conceived as an ongoing process.” By the declaration, “I give you myself,” the creator lion “confirms his own sustained engagement in the process.” He further confirms it by touching noses with each of the animals.

God, in short, has “a personal, intimate investment in the process of Creation.”

Unfortunately sin has also entered Narnia in the form of Uncle Andrew, who dreams of monetizing the new world, and Queen Jadis, who wants to assert dominion over it (and ultimately will do so as the White Witch). They are incapable of hearing the voice of the Lion. As Aslan says of Andrew, “If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings,” before adding, “Oh Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!”

For those humans who harken to the Lion’s song, however, a vision of heaven on earth opens. “Gawd!” says the cabdriver. “Ain’t it lovely?”

“Whoever has ears,” Jesus said, “let them hear.”

To sum up Gatta’s argument, Magician’s Nephew shows a divine Creator who is integrally involved in “the continuous creation of things” and a Creation that is called upon to play an active role in the process. Rather than thinking of God as one who has set up Creation and then ducked out, only to return disgusted when humans messed things up, Gatta says we should see God as an on-going, ever-changing, and never-ending journey. The question is whether we will get on board.

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Cavorting through Literature’s Wonderland

By Robin Bates | Published: May 29, 2026
Johann Hamza, A Gentleman Reading

Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 36th Installment

I was blessed beyond all measure to have had a career teaching at a public liberal arts college whose mission I believed in and where I had the flexibility to teach a wide variety of literature and writing courses. Whenever, as a faculty member, I was asked to fill out a “job satisfaction” survey, I could never reply with anything but the highest marks. I put a tremendous amount of time and effort into creating and teaching courses, so much so that other areas of my college service suffered. (For instance, I was a so-so department chair, except when it came to hiring good faculty, and an indifferent contributor to faculty meetings.) Serving students struck me as a sacred duty, and I was always grateful to competent administrators for allowing me to focus on my teaching.

As I am nearing the end of this memoir, I look back at the courses I taught in search of what they tell me about myself.

Every semester we taught three four-credit classes. Usually we taught either Composition or Intro to Lit, along with a 200-level survey class and a 300 or 400-level period/author/elective class. In my later years we added two-semester senior projects and first-year seminars.

Being a small college, we could teach our grad school specialty only once every two years—a Restoration and 18thCentury British Literature course in my case. Since a normal semester had us teaching a general education course and a survey class, this meant we had three extra courses to play with in a two-year-cycle. The senior projects, for their part, had their own variety, and over the years I supervised projects on Beowulf, the Arthurian tradition, Charles Dickens, the Faustus/Faust tradition, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Stoppard, Tom Robbins, Milan Kundera, and Gail Godwin (to name a few), along with a number of film projects. The senior projects were very hands-on as I required my students to meet with me weekly.

By the end of my 36 years, I had taught all three of the Literature in History surveys multiple times. These comprised British Literature to 1700 (the class I taught most often), British and American Literature in the 18th and 19th centuries, and English-language literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. The surveys were among my favorite courses. I turned the first two into “greatest hits” courses and, for the third survey, found a work that could represent each significant historical period (Wilfred Owen for World War I, Great Gatsby and The Waste Land for the Twenties, Grapes of Wrath for the Thirties, Catch 22 for World War II, The Things They Carried for Vietnam, Handmaid’s Tale for feminism, Things Fall Apart and God of Small Things for post-colonialism).

For Intro to Lit, which I also loved, I initially chose a fantasy literature focus (for which I included The Odyssey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Midsummer Night’s Dream) but eventually moved to a Nature focus after the college received a grant from the Pew Foundation.

My favorite course was my Restoration and 18th Century Literature course. I had chosen the period in graduate school on the grounds that any era that produced Tom Jones: History of a Foundling was worth studying, and I taught Henry Fielding’s novel every two years, challenging though that massive work proved to be. The author is a comic genius and fit nicely into the “Couples Comedy” theme that I ultimately settled on, as did Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. In the course we explored the dark anarchistic comedy of the Restoration and the milder comedy of the later “Age of Sensibility.” In one assignment I had the class apply different theories of laughter to the Restoration works. In another, they were to compare and contrast one of the 18th century works (which also included Pope’s Rape of the Lock and Fanny Burney’s Evelina) to a modern rom-com.

Later, once the school initiated first-year seminars, I spent several years teaching “Jane Austen and the Dating Game.” Oh, and I once taught an upper-level author class on the works that Austen’s characters are reading. (Austen is critical of most of them.)

What does it say about me that I have always preferred comedy to tragedy, including Shakespeare’s comedies to his tragedies? I think of Northrup Frye, who saw in plays like  As You Like It, Midsummer, and The Winter’s Tale “the old ritual pattern of the victory of summer over winter” and “the death and revival of human beings.” Talking of the “New Comedy” of the Roman playwrights, he theorizes,

In all good New Comedy there is a social as well as an individual theme which must be sought in the general atmosphere of reconciliation that makes the final marriage possible. As the hero gets closer to the heroine and opposition is overcome, all the right-thinking people come over to his side. Thus a new social unit is formed on the stage, and the moment that this social unit crystallizes is the moment of the comic resolution. In the last scene, when the dramatist usually tries to get all his characters on the stage at once, the audience witnesses the birth of a renewed sense of social integration. In comedy as in life the regular expression of this is a festival, whether a marriage, a dance, or a feast. 

My commitment to community and my general optimism probably leads me to love comedies. Perhaps my love also stems in part from my own privilege—I can afford to believe that all will come out right—although I have found myself questioning this preference. Towards the end, I fell a little out of love with Tom Jones, coming to see Fielding’s satire, especially at the expense of women and the lower classes, as arising out of a sense of gentry entitlement. In my last year, knowing that I would never again teach the course, I used the three weeks that I usually reserved for Tom Jones to instead teach, for the first time, Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina and Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem. Still, one could do worse than embrace Fielding’s wit and his open-hearted love of life.

I’ve written about how my love of fantasy as a child never left me, providing me a way to simultaneously escape from while indirectly engaging with a threatening world. In my final years, I started teaching courses in both American and British fantasy. In the American Fantasy class, I identified two strains of fantasy running through American literature, dark and light, with the interrelation of the two defining us as a country. (On the one hand, there is Poe, Hawthorne, Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Anne Rice, on the other L. Frank Baum and Disney.) I concluded the course with Louise Erdrich’s magical realist novel Tracks, which coming from a Chippewa author from a different tradition resisted this neat bifurcation.

With British fantasy, meanwhile, I would begin with The Tempest, move on to Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes, and then plunge into the rich fantasy creations of the Victorians before concluding with C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, Angela Carter, and Terry Pratchett.

In the spring of 2018 I wanted to teach an entirely new course before I retired and so created a course devoted to Magical Realism. My “world literature” course began with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and then moved on to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, and Haruki Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  I chose this last because I became enthralled with what I characterized as the Japanese author’s “existential fantasies.” I also chose Murakami as the topic of my final first-year seminar.

For years I taught the department’s Literary Theory class, eventually focusing just on the reader. (Before I had divided the class into theories of text, context, author, and reader.) This became an immensely important course for me and served as the foundation for my book. As we worked our way from Plato and Aristotle to W.E.B. Du Bois, Bertolt Brecht, Wayne Booth, and Martha Nussbaum, I had my students try out the different theories. We explored why audiences went ballistic over the subtitle of Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman and examined how Oscar Wilde’s opposing trial lawyer attacked Picture of Dorian Gray. For the class’s final essay, as I describe in my book, the students chose literary works that had “caused a commotion” and figured out why. I road-tested early versions of my book on the class. 

There were a few other courses sprinkled among these: a “Literature of Madness” course team-taught with a psychologist; multiple film classes (including composition courses with a film theme); a “Technology and the American Dream” class, team-taught with a sociologist; “Literature of Revolution” and “Sexual Politics of the Novel” classes (taught in my earlier, more political days); Black Literature; Minority Literature; Victorian Novels; and Feature Writing.

I’ve sometimes wondered whether my wide-ranging interests signaled a dilettante at work. Certainly, the path I took didn’t lend itself to my producing scholarship in my field of specialty, which is what people do at research universities. I was fortunate to be at a college that valued teaching over scholarship although St. Mary’s required some publications, and by the end I had 20 articles and a self-published book. But they were all stand-alone projects. My most significant publication, Better Living through Literature: How Books Change Lives and (Sometimes) History, I completed after I retired.

I sometimes wonder how my academic life would have been different had I focused on my “reader response” interests from the very first. I now realize that studying the impact of works on readers has been the throughline of my college teaching, even though I didn’t always realize it. So do I look back with Robert Frost’s regretful sigh about the wandering path that I chose?

A little. I am certainly proud of my son Tobias Wilson-Bates, who is far more focused than I ever was and who is producing ground-breaking work on Victorian time machine literature.  My father was similarly focused in his work on the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. I, by contrast, look like someone who could never make up his mind.

And yet, I carry so many rich memories of reading and teaching these works that my regrets exist only in a minor key. Furthermore, as my blog has become my classroom since retiring, I can see how my wide range provides me with a tool for almost every occasion.

Given that I haven’t stopped filling my toolbox—once I finish listening to Dombey and Son, I will have completed my collection of Dickens’s novels (excluding the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood)—it appears that I will stick to my eclectic approach to reading. Maybe, after all, this was the pathway I was destined to follow. I was just fortunate enough to find a college that allowed me to do it.

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)

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The Odyssey, U.S. Fascism, and the Iran War

By Robin Bates | Published: May 27, 2026
Odysseus navigating between Scylla and Charybdis

Thursday

Thanks to Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film, The Odyssey is having a moment. Elon Musk once again displayed his racism by decrying the casting of Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o (she also holds U.S. citizenship) as Helen of Troy, and Jay Kuo, one of my favorite political bloggers, has invoked Sylla and Charybdis in discussing Trump’s Strait of Hormuz dilemma. And then (although this isn’t connected with the film), a friend alerted me to a news item that basketball legend Shaquille O’Neil earned an advanced degree in Sports Management with his thesis “Interdisciplinary Approach to Mentorship through the lens of the epic poem The Odyssey.” But this last one will have to await a future post.

Blogger Noah Berlatsky, another fine political blogger, lays out the fascistic foundations of Musk’s bigotry and then explores its dangers. To “racist pseudo-intellectuals like Musk”—and, one could add, to the Nazis–the Greeks were “not just white, but transcendental icons of white culture.” For them, therefore, Nolan’s casting decision is “an insult to whiteness, and a sign of Hollywood’s assault on Western purity and honor.”

In his article, Berlatsky parallels this aesthetic with Hitler’s attack on Jewish art and notes that Musk has the same genocidal aims as the Fuhrer. For Hitler, he notes, 

genocide was not just about eliminating and murdering human beings. It also involved a thoroughgoing effort to remove, destroy, and discredit art which he believed was “degenerate”—especially art by Jewish, Communist, and avant garde artists (groups which Hitler indiscriminately and compulsively conflated.) Under the Nazis, the work of Jewish composers like Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Schoenberg were banned. Jewish musicians were barred from performing. Jewish artwork (or art that Hitler claimed was Jewish-influenced) was ridiculed in an infamous “degenerate art” exhibition. Jewish directors and actors were expelled from German cinema.

Musk, who has expressed an admiration for Hitler, obsesses over the fact that non-whites outnumber whites. Unfortunately, also like Hitler, he at one point had the power to carry out a genocidal project. His wholesale attack on USAID and other global aid programs last year led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans, mostly children, of malnutrition and preventable disease. Berlatsky points out that the end of aid has also contributed to a dangerous increase in African violence. “If aid is not restored,” he writes,”researchers believe preventable deaths because of Musk’s genocide will reach 14 million by 2030.”

In The Secret War against Hate, Steven J. Ross—interviewed by Rachel Maddow Monday night—notes that there has been an active fascist strain in nn life for much of the 20th and 21st centuries. One must see Musk’s attack on Nolan and Lupita Nyong’o in light of that strain. Unlike political correctness and DEI programs on the left—which are often attempts to address racial inequalities—violent erasure is the end goal of America’s fascists. Attacking multiracial art is integral to their project. Bertlasky observes,

For Hitler, a painting that didn’t appeal to him was not just a painting that didn’t appeal to him. It was a deliberate, violent attack on his nation and all that he held dear. Decadent art, Jewish art, was framed as an essentially genocidal assault on Germany, its culture, and its people. The destruction of such art was part of the effort to erase Jews from Germany, but it was also a justification of that effort. The ridicule of Jewish cultural production, and the framing of Jewish visibility in culture as an existential threat, served to dehumanize actual Jewish people and to legitimize their mass murder.

Over the past 18 months, we in America have becoming increasingly aware as to how far authoritarians are willing to go once they seize the reins of power. Whether it’s unleashing ICE agents on American cities, banning books, purging school history curricula, or attacking a Black actress, it is all in service of white Christian fascism.

Jay Kuo takes his use of Odyssey in a different direction. I start first with the passage he alludes to in his discussion of the Strait of Hormuz. Unlike Trump with his war of choice, Odysseus is forced to navigate a dangerous strait if he is to get home. Both men, however, learn that a price must be paid once they are enmeshed. The island goddess Circe sets forth the problem, starting with the six-headed serpentine Scylla: 

That is the den of Scylla, where she yaps
abominably, a newborn whelp’s cry,
though she is huge and monstrous. God or man,
no one could look on her in joy. Her legs—
and there are twelve—are like great tentacles,
unjointed, and upon her serpent necks
are borne six heads like nightmares of ferocity,
with triple serried rows of fangs and deep
gullets of black death. Half her length, she sways
her heads in air, outside her horrid cleft,
hunting the sea around that promontory
for dolphins, dogfish, or what bigger game
thundering Amphitrite feeds in thousands.
And no ship’s company can claim
to have passed her without loss and grief; she takes,
from every ship, one man for every gullet. (trans. Robert Fitzgerald) 

To avoid her, however, a ship would have to deal with a whirling maelstrom:

On the opposite point seems more a tongue of land
you’d touch with a good bowshot, at the narrows.
A great wild fig, a shaggy mass of leaves,
grows on it, and Charybdis lurks below
to swallow down the dark sea tide. Three times
from dawn to dusk she spews it up
and sucks it down again three times, a whirling
maelstrom; if you come upon her then
the god who makes earth tremble could not save you.

Circe advises Odysseus to choose Scylla:

[H]ug the cliff of Scylla, take your ship
through on a racing stroke. Better to mourn
six men than lose them all, and the ship, too. ..

This is what Odysseus does, even though, in a futile gesture, he tries hacking at Scylla as she grabs his men. The scene is heartrending:

Then Scylla made her strike,
whisking six of my best men from the ship.
I happened to glance aft at ship and oarsmen
and caught sight of their arms and legs, dangling
high overhead. Voices came down to me
in anguish, calling my name for the last time.
A man surf-casting on a point of rock
for bass or mackerel, whipping his long rod
to drop the sinker and the bait far out,
will hook a fish and rip it from the surface
to dangle wriggling through the air; so these
were borne aloft in spasms toward the cliff.
She ate them as they shrieked there, in her den,
in the dire grapple, reaching still for me—
and deathly pity ran me through
at that sight—far the worst I ever suffered
questing the passes of the strange sea.

Now for Kuo’s application. First, there’s the Scylla option, which would involve America cutting its losses and rowing like hell to get out of the entanglement. 

For Trump, the Scylla of Hormuz is the giant loser of a “peace deal.” Steering toward it means accepting a brutal political accounting: Trump started a war that sent oil prices surging 40 percent above pre-war levels, drove inflation to its highest point in three years, and cost innocent lives, including 13 Americans and over 120 Iranian school children. Under the current proposal, Iran would be in a stronger position than it was in February. Even more humiliating for Trump, Iran’s uranium stockpile—which he repeatedly cited to justify the global economic pain inflicted by the war—would remain intact. And to top things off, Iran would retain de facto control of the Strait.

As bad as this is, the Charybdis option is even worse since it would involve

a full resumption of the war. It would require more U.S. military strikes and more economic pressure, all in the hopes of finishing what Operation Epic Fury started. But a wider conflagration risks pulling in an already volatile entire region, setting neighboring nations’ oil refineries ablaze, sending oil above $200 a barrel, and inflicting economic damage on an unprecedented scale. Once caught in its vortex, no one would return from that whirlpool, and Trump seems finally to recognize this.

Those Republicans worried about a shellacking in the November elections are opting for Scylla:

For all their bluster, Trump’s officers on deck remain in a trap they cannot escape. The party fears becoming the sacrificial vessel, politically devoured by Scylla from a terrible and humiliating deal. But they understand that there is no better deal to be had. 

There are Congressional war hawks, however—including Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Lindsey Graham—who are arguing against the Scylla option. To do so, however, they are refusing to openly acknowledge that the whirlpool of all-out war is the only alternative.

Say that Trump, like Odysseus gets through the strait—which is to say, that he walks away and pretends that the Iran debacle never happened. If one goes by the story, although he himself will survive, his party won’t. Kuo draws the continuing parallels:

Six of his party had been devoured by Scylla, and the rest had grown restless. They were warned by the gods not to slaughter the sacred cattle of the sun god, but they proceeded anyway, with hunger, exhaustion and the collapse of discipline doing what Scylla and Charybdis could not.

As punishment, Zeus destroyed the ship. Every last member of his party perished, and Odysseus had to survive on his own, the wreckage of his vessel now his life raft.

Tidy though the comparison is, Kuo needs a second Greek myth to round out his story. This one, like so many Greek stories, involves hubris, and I can’t think of a more perfect story to sum up Trump, not only with regard to Iran but to the United States as well:

Yet to compare Trump to Odysseus is to flatter him beyond recognition. The figure from Greek mythology Trump more closely resembles is Phaethon, the vain mortal son of the sun god Helios, who demanded to drive his father’s celestial chariot across the sky to silence those who doubted his divine bloodline. His father warned him, begged him, enumerating every danger, every reason Phaethon was unqualified for the task.

Phaethon grabbed the reins anyway, certain that his stature accorded him what greater beings had mastered through long experience. He lost control almost immediately. The chariot lurched and careened. The earth scorched, and rivers boiled. Whole civilizations burned below while he clung to the reins. He was unable to halt the conflagration he’d lit, and unable to admit he never should have begun it.

Zeus finally struck him down with a thunderbolt, not to punish him, but to stop the terrible damage he was inflicting on everyone else.

Kuo concludes with a punchy moral:

Were this Ancient Greece, we’d say the gods are being sorely tested by Trump’s hubris and recklessness. And their patience is wearing thin.

With Trump’s all-out assault on efforts to address climate change, the story works literally as well as metaphorically. God help us all.

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The Loneliness of the Tyrant

By Robin Bates | Published: May 26, 2026
William Hogarth, David Garrick as Richard III

Wednesday

I bring your attention to an essay that expresses something I have long thought. In writing about Donald Trump’s response to Stephen Colbert’s final appearance on CBS’s Late Show, Editorial Board’s John Stoehr reflects that Trump, for all his power, is “the loneliest, most miserable man in America.” As such, he hated Colbert’s joy.

In making his case, Stoehr cites a Robert Hayden poem and also references Shakespeare’s Richard III.

Trump pressured CBS to fire Colbert and then, following the final show, posted a putdown that doubled as a self-description. Colbert, Trump wrote,

is finally finished at CBS. Amazing that he lasted so long! No talent, no ratings, no life. He was like a dead person. You could take any person off of the street and they would be better than this total jerk. Thank goodness he’s finally gone!

Colbert, of course, has always refused to be dragged down to Trump’s level, and I learned from Stoehr that he once quoted the first stanza of the following Hayden poem: 

We must not be frightened nor cajoled 
into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. 
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction 
police and threaten us.

Reclaim now, now renew the vision of 
a human world where godliness 
is possible and man 
is neither gook nigger honkey wop nor kike

but man 

permitted to be man.

The major monsters of abstraction currently threatening us are race-based, but Hayden generalizes beyond African Americans to include Vietnamese, whites, Italians and Jews. His poetry was criticized by Black activists in the late 1960s, who engaged in their own abstracting (some even called him an Uncle Tom), but today we are facing white fascism’s far more lethal abstractions. To counter them, Hayden tells us, we must hold on to a vision of humanity “where godliness is possible.”

Stephen Greenblatt’s 2018 book about Shakespeare’s tyrants helps Stoehr understand Trump’s loneliness. The eminent Shakespearean, writing with Trump in mind, has this to say about Richard III:

What excites [the tyrant] is the joy of domination. He is a bully. Easily enraged, he strikes out at anyone who stands in his way. He enjoys seeing others cringe, tremble, or wince with pain. He is gifted at detecting weakness and deft at mockery and insult. These skills attract followers who are drawn to the same cruel delight, even if they cannot have it to his unmatched degree. Though they know that he is dangerous, the followers help him advance to his goal, which is the possession of supreme power.

His possession of power includes the domination of women, but he despises them far more than desires them. Sexual conquest excites him, but only for the endlessly reiterated proof that he can have anything he likes. He knows that those he grabs hate him. For that matter, once he has succeeded in seizing the control that so attracts him, in politics as in sex, he knows that virtually everyone hates him. At first that knowledge energizes him, making him feverishly alert to rivals and conspiracies. But it soon begins to eat away at him and exhaust him.

Sooner or later, he is brought down. He dies unloved and unlamented. He leaves behind only wreckage. It would have been better had Richard never been born.

Alone and panicking as his enemies close in, Richard calls out, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.” By this point in the play, however, he has alienated practically everyone and there is no one to come to his aid. 

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