The new semester begins today. Margaret Edson’s play W;t is a useful reminder of where I should put my priorities as I begin teaching. When my career started out, I had a number of things in common with Vivian Bearing, the English professor and Donne scholar in W;t. I too reveled in the complexity of texts, […]
Monthly Archives: January 2010
Life before Health Benefits: A Jungle
The Chicago Stockyards In honor of Martin Luther King’s birthday, I am going to write about a cause that would have been very close to King’s heart and that America’s first black president has embraced: universal health care. Like many I believe that, if we don’t pass universal health care this year, we probably will […]
Responding to Unspeakable Horror
No work of literature can begin to address the trauma that Haitians are currently experiencing in the wake of their devastating earthquake. But then, literature can never do justice to human tragedy. In the face of such inexpressible suffering, the poet gropes around in the dark, occasionally making utterances that some, in their agony, find […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Auto Wreck", Candide, Haiti earthquake, Karl Shapiro, Suffering, Voltaire Comments closed
On Mark McGwire and Fallen Idols
Robert Redford in The Natural I take a momentary break from Margaret Edson’s W;t to address Mark McGwire’s confession yesterday to having used steroids. The man whose homerun race with Sammy Sosa “saved baseball” and who then refused to “speak about the past” in a Congressional hearing is finally opening up. Or at least opening […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Baseball, Bernard Malamud, Disillusion, Human fallibility, innocence, Natural, Sports Comments closed
Runaway Bunny Sing Thee to Thy Rest
In her dying moments, the Donne scholar in Margaret Edson’s W;t rejects Donne in favor of Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runaway Bunny. What does this say about the usefulness of both Donne and Brown when we are pushed to the edge? Runaway Bunny is about “a little bunny who wanted to run away.” But each […]
