Monthly Archives: February 2010

Sarah Palin and All the King’s Men

By Robin Bates | Published: February 16, 2010

The political world seems to be agog over Sarah Palin these days, with Joel Klein of Time and  David Broder of The Washington Post, two columnists I respect, telling us to take her very seriously.  This has got me thinking of fictional populists, especially Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946), one of […]

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The Light that Came from Lucille Clifton

By Robin Bates | Published: February 15, 2010

I have just heard about the death of poet Lucille Clifton and I still can’t wrap by head around the news. Even as I write this sentence, the opening paragraph of a story by James Baldwin (whom Lucille knew well) comes to me: I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my […]

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The Kafkaesque World of Cancer

By Robin Bates | Published: February 12, 2010

Tony Perkins in Welles’ The Trial               I ran into my friend Alan in the gym on Monday.  As I have reported in a number of past posts, Alan has been battling tumors in both lungs that continue to baffle doctors.  At least one doctor predicted that he would be dead a […]

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Earth, Love, Birches, and Ice Storms

By Robin Bates | Published: February 11, 2010

I promised this post on Robert Frost’s “Birches” in the event that we have an ice storm.  I don’t know yet whether we will have one, but we had frozen rain for much of the night, and as I write this (Wednesday morning) we are being attacked by a blizzard.  So if I don’t arrange […]

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Gripped by a Mind of Winter

By Robin Bates | Published: February 10, 2010

Snow is pounding us for the third time in two weeks and classes once again have been canceled.  Significantly enough, I have been forced once again to postpone Midsummer Night’s Dream.  “Where are the songs of spring?  Ay, where are they?” queries Keats (although he’s asking from the vantage point of autumn, not that of […]

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Snow Days Open Up Cracks in Time

By Robin Bates | Published: February 9, 2010

An unusually heavy snowstorm has locked us into our homes these past few days, cancelling my Monday classes and locking down the county. Years ago, in an essay I’d love to find again, an author wrote about the “found time” of a snow day.   She noted that, because we normally believe we must make every […]

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Win or Lose, Turn to Beowulf

By Robin Bates | Published: February 8, 2010

Drew Brees, Super Bowl MVP     A few years back, if I remember the article correctly, I came across two interesting statistics about life in America on Super Bowl Sunday.  During the game the country’s crime drops to the lowest level of the year. Following the game, however, acts of spousal violence hit their highest levels of […]

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Bread (Pretzels) and (Super Bowl) Circuses

By Robin Bates | Published: February 5, 2010

      Bread and circuses.  That was the accusation of the Roman satirist Juvenal, directed against those politicians who used free bread and gladiatorial contests to divert the populace’s mind from their political responsibilities. Today our diversions continue to occur in coliseums and arenas.  I plead guilty to having been so diverted.  These past […]

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Quarterback Poems for Inspiration

By Robin Bates | Published: February 4, 2010

When I was a child, my father used to read us poems from a wonderful poetry anthology called Some Haystacks Don’t Even Have Any Needle, edited by Stephen Dunning. Two of the poems were about quarterbacks, which seems appropriate for this Super Bowl week given that the top two quarterbacks in football will be playing. […]

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