Spiritual Sunday I have come to admire, a great deal, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Under unbelievable social and family pressure, the modest and overlooked Fanny Price sticks to her moral principles as she resists a marriage proposal from an eligible bachelor, the wealthy and dashing Henry Crawford. I have learned only recently […]
Monthly Archives: October 2010
San Fran Giants Strike out Mighty Casey
Sports Saturday We are well into the World Series but I want to hearken back to game six of the National League championship series where the San Francisco Giants won the pennant. It was a game eerily reminiscent of that described in poetry’s greatest poem about baseball, Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat.” Baseball […]
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Walt Whitman, William Blake, and Baseball
Film Friday The World Series between the Texas Rangers and the San Francisco Giants gives me an excuse for posting on what is, in my opinion, the greatest movie on baseball. Among the many virtues of Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham are its literary allusions and its literariness. Each year Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) chooses to […]
Revenge, Understandable but Unhealthy
I’ve been talking a lot about rightwing anger this past year.Today I write about my own.It is an anger I try to keep hidden but that nevertheless washes over me from time to time, usually when I hear about some act of gross injustice where the perpetrator seems to escape scot-free. At such moments I […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Prayer for the Man Who Mugged My Father", Anger, Beowulf, Charles Webb, Poiitics Comments closed
Beware! Attacking Elitism Can Rebound
All the talk in this election season about the tyranny of elites has got me thinking about Walter Miller’s 1960 post-apocalyptic sci-fi classic Canticle for Leibowitz. And no, it’s not because I think this is an apocalyptic election, despite all the heated rhetoric we’re hearing. As commentators have pointed out, people who complain about elites often […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Canticle for Leibowitz, Virginia Thomas, Walter Miller Comments closed
Season of Mellow Fruitfulness
In Southern Maryland our eternal summer appears finally to be fading and the fall, my favorite season, is a’cumin in. To celebrate it, I am posting one of my favorite seasonal poems, John Keats’ “To Autumn” (1817). The poem takes on added significance as the news continues to get worse for my friend Alan. Despite […]
A Harvest Love Poem to God
Spiritual Sunday Here is a harvest poem that moves quickly from an actual harvest (in the first line) to a heavenly one. The clouds are like sacks of grain, their meal drifting across the skies, and we can gaze upward and glean them with our eyes. As Gerald Manley Hopkins sees it, God reveals himself […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Hurrahing in Harvest", Gerard Manley Hopkins, Nature, Religion, Spirituality Comments closed
Football’s Culture of Violence – A Response
Sports Saturday Discussion of violent football hits has dominated the sports airwaves ever since the nation witnessed a series of frightening high-impact collisions last weekend. In apparent panic, the National Football League has been handing out large fines and threats of suspension to players, including a $75,000 fine to James Harrison of the Pittsburgh Steelers […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Circe Mud Poems, Football, Margaret Atwood, Sports, violence Comments closed
