Monthly Archives: September 2009

Imagine Everyone Reading and Discussing

By Robin Bates | Published: September 17, 2009

James McBride This evening our Leonardtown Library Book Discussion group discusses James McBride’s Song Yet Sung, a fine book that I will address in an upcoming post.  Today I want to talk about the occasion.  Readers from all over Maryland are reading this book as part of a “One Maryland One Book” program sponsored by […]

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Literature as a Leadership Handbook

By Robin Bates | Published: September 16, 2009

Joseph Conrad  I have just begun reading a book that is very much in tune with this website: Joseph L. Badaracco’s Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership through Literature, published by Harvard Business School Press (2006). I report here on the introduction. The author talks about assigning Joseph Conrad’s “Secret Sharer” to a […]

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Obama as Wycherley’s Country Wife

By Robin Bates | Published: September 15, 2009

As I teach William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, I am struck by the resemblances between Restoration society and our own.The play was written in 1676 during the age of Charles II, and in some ways our worlds couldn’t be more dissimilar.This was a monarchy and a very formal society in which sincerity was viewed with […]

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Discussing Literature without Teachers

By Robin Bates | Published: September 14, 2009

My son Toby    My son Toby, who is with us for two more days before he leaves for the University of California-Davis English Ph.D program, gave a lecture to the St. Mary’s College Tolkien society on Friday. I am the club’s advisor but it was first time I had attended a meeting for several […]

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Empty Sex in an Empty World

By Robin Bates | Published: September 11, 2009

John Wilmot, by Jacob Huysmans (1675) I’m have just finished teaching Lord Rochester and, as always, it has been an adventure.   I sometimes think I get more embarrassed than the students by his explicit sexual language.   My women students (they’re all women in this class) are more tolerant of his diatribes against their gender than I […]

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I Was a Secret Holden Caulfield

By Robin Bates | Published: September 10, 2009

I contrasted Lord of the Rings with J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye the other day.    It’s not a contrast that anyone other than I would make, and it’s all based on the fact that I loved the one and hated the other.  In my post today I explore my dislike of the Salinger […]

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Fantasy As a Roundabout Road to Truth

By Robin Bates | Published: September 9, 2009

Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn  I didn’t do entire justice in Monday’s post to the Tolkien essay of my son Toby. In correcting that here, I also open up a more complicated vision of fantasy in general, as well as Tolkien’s fantasy specifically. I was wondering if Tolkien had retreated into fantasy as a refuge from […]

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Fantasy: Help or Hindrance?

By Robin Bates | Published: September 8, 2009

My friend Alan Paskow, who is struggling with cancer, queried me about my post on Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman,” wondering whether the poem wasn’t just an insubstantial fantasy. I’ve been writing about The Lord of the Rings as a fantasy perhaps indulged in by a World War I veteran who wasn’t willing to face up […]

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Tolkien’s Ring and World War I

By Robin Bates | Published: September 7, 2009

 Otto Dix, Trench Warfare (1932) I have gained some new insights into The Lord of the Rings since my son Toby wrote an essay about it for the University of Pittsburgh’s graduate English program.  Toby informs me that there are a number of debates around the book, especially whether it should be considered great literature. The […]

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