Monthly Archives: September 2010

Beowulf (the film): Fathering Monsters

By Robin Bates | Published: September 3, 2010

Jolie as Grendel’s Mother  Film Friday I’m teaching Beowulf at the moment and of course my class wants to know what I think of the movie, by which they mean Robert Zemeckis’s animated 2007 version rather than the 2005 Swedish film Beowulf and Grendel. Neither is very good but it’s interesting to see what each […]

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The Inner Hell of a PTSD Sufferer

By Robin Bates | Published: September 2, 2010

Larry Burrows photo, 1966 Continuing on with connections between Barack Obama’s reading list and the winding down of American involvement in Iraq, I notice that there are a number of Philip Roth novels. As the list is from when the president was in his twenties (for the most part), it is missing a more recent […]

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Exiting an Iraqi Heart of Darkness

By Robin Bates | Published: September 1, 2010

Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now  As I listened to the president talk last night about the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, I found myself thinking of a book on his reading list, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. (See last Thursday’s post for the entire list.) In his talk, Obama mentioned how he had disagreed […]

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