Monthly Archives: October 2010

Tolstoy and Celebrity Culture

By Robin Bates | Published: October 22, 2010

Film Friday Before there was celebrity culture there was celebrity culture. That’s what we learn from The Last Station, the fascinating recent film about the last days of Leo Tolstoy. The year is 1910.  Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) is seen as a national treasure and there is a struggle underway over who owns his work.  His […]

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History’s Arc Bends towards Kafka

By Robin Bates | Published: October 21, 2010

Literature provides a special way of knowing, a way different than, say, philosophy. But it’s hard to prove this because we need to use the language of rational philosophy to make literature’s case. Once we have done so, philosophy can seem more effective than literature. After all, it tells us things straight up, without resorting […]

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Do Mistaken Idealists Apologize?

By Robin Bates | Published: October 20, 2010

Watch out for political purists and dogmatic idealists. They can do a lot of damage. A writer who delivers this warning is Milan Kundera, a Czech novelist who owes his insights to his experience with communism and the 1968 Soviet invasion. Expect to encounter regular posts from me about Kundera because I am mentoring a […]

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Would Tolstoy Today Mention Facebook?

By Robin Bates | Published: October 19, 2010

A recent article in The Huffington Post complaining about a significant omission in contemporary novels reminded me of a similar complaint that Jane Austen makes about novels of her own time period. Read the complaint below and then, if you know Jane Austen’s works, see if you can guess which passage I’m thinking of. Asking […]

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Thy Eternal Summer Shall Not Fade–True?

By Robin Bates | Published: October 18, 2010

Sunday evenings are for visiting our friends Alan and Jackie.  I feel blessed that Alan is sharing his dying with us and that I get to have with him the final conversations I did not have with Justin, my son who drowned. We don’t talk that much about death. Mostly we talk, as we always […]

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Looking to Poetry for Afterlife Evidence

By Robin Bates | Published: October 17, 2010

Spiritual Sunday It has finally sunk in with me that my friend Alan will not recover from his cancer, and I find myself wrestling once again with the questions that arose after my son drowned.  The biggest question, of course, is whether death is the end. Every Sunday in my Episcopal Church I claim that […]

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Real Men Play Football AND Read Poetry

By Robin Bates | Published: October 16, 2010

Sports Saturday Professional football is a super violent sport and its 16-game season is a war of attrition. One never knows, from one week to the next, what team will have its Super Bowl hopes derailed by critical injuries. For a while this year, everyone was certain that the NFC would send either the New […]

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Austen Films Underestimate Her Heroines

By Robin Bates | Published: October 15, 2010

Film Friday I’ve been amazed at the success of the Jane Austen industry in recent years. Fan though I am, I never could have predicted the hunger for movie and television versions of her novels, movie biographies of the author, sequels to Pride and Prejudice, horror versions of her novels, novels where characters from different […]

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A Dickensian Response to the Mine Rescue

By Robin Bates | Published: October 14, 2010

As I write this, the last of the 33 Chilean miners has just been pulled to safety after spending two months underground in a situation that once seemed hopeless.   It appears that the entire world is celebrating, probably because we are all in need of hope.  Given how we are continually battered by economic […]

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