As we do every week, Julia and I visited our friends Alan and Jackie this past Sunday evening, Julia to administer Reiki massage and I to talk. Alan was tired from his chemotherapy treatments and in pain from a cracked rib (he doesn’t know how that happened). Nevertheless we talked about literature, including Sir Gawain […]
Monthly Archives: October 2010
No PhD Needed to Understand Lit
In today’s post I direct your attention to an article in yesterday’s New York Times entitled “In Defense of Naïve Reading.” It affirms the kind of literary interpretation this website specializes in. Author Robert Pippin, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, is concerned that, because university literature departments have tried to emulate […]
Hard Times in 1854, Hard Times in 2010
I am teaching Charles Dickens’ Hard Times this week and it is disconcerting to see how applicable is still is to modern life. To be sure, one needs to be careful with comparisons. Industrial England in 1854 is not America in 2010. Dickens was writing about a world in which there were no air quality […]
Renegotiating Our Spiritual Mortgage
Spiritual Sunday Today’s poem, a fabulous sonnet by my favorite religious poet, is also very much in the spirit of the times given our mortgage foreclosure crisis. The latest news is that federal attempts to aid homeowners have been meeting with indifferent success and that people continue to lose their homes. George Herbert’s “Redemption” (1633) […]
Doc Halladay No Longer Blushing Unseen
Sports Saturday The baseball postseason is off to an amazing start, what with Roy “Doc” Halladay pitching only the second no-hitter in playoff history to begin it. And it was his first game ever pitching in the postseason! The other no-hitter is enshrined in legend: Yankee Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Baseball, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Roy Halladay, Sports, Thomas Gray Comments closed
“Up” Battles Aging Like . . . Beowulf?
Film Friday I was rewatching the Pixar film Up last week (it kicks off a series I am running on “animated films for adults”) and saw one scene that was simply too fantastical for belief. Geriatric hero Carl Fredricksen is battling with the even older Charles Muntz and both throw their backs out in the […]
Forget Bootstrapism – We Need Each Other
Always be suspicious of people who talk about pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. The image is an excellent one since you can only rise if you have help from others. Yet many people think they are somehow diminished if they can’t claim to have risen on their own. Thanks to Dickens, there […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Charles Dickens, Hard Times, politics, poverty, welfare Comments closed
Regency Teens, Same Issues as Today
Seldom have I enjoyed a course more than my current first year seminar on Jane Austen—specifically “Jane Austen and the Challenges of Being a Regency Teenager.” The title of the course isn’t historically accurate since young men and women in the early 19th century didn’t think of themselves as teenagers. Adolescence wasn’t as prolonged as […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged adolescence, Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, teaching Comments closed
