Monthly Archives: February 2011

Post Football Season Blues

By Robin Bates | Published: February 19, 2011

Sports Saturday For American football fans, February is the cruelest month. Suddenly there are no Sundays to look forward to anymore. Suddenly there are no players or coaches or owners to excoriate. Suddenly there is, well, emptiness. It may be pushing it, but for me, the feeling is captured by a 1960’s Flannery O’Connor story. […]

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Chicks Who Kick Butt, 20th Anniversary

By Robin Bates | Published: February 18, 2011

Film Friday Slate reminds me that 2011 is the 20th anniversary of Thelma and Louise, a film that once worked (and perhaps still does) as a gender Rorschach test. When it came out, many women loved it and many men didn’t. I remember walking out of the theater feeling very uncomfortable while my wife was […]

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Egypt’s Glorious Phantom Bursts Through

By Robin Bates | Published: February 17, 2011

I’ve been looking for literature that can speak to the earth-shaking events going on in Egypt. Poetry seems almost unable to do justice to the joy that people are feeling as they revel in a vision of liberty. Maybe this sonnet by Percy Shelley gets at their breakthrough. On August 16, 1819, a large but […]

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The Moment Kindheartedness Walks In

By Robin Bates | Published: February 16, 2011

Sometimes when I get depressed about the state of the world, I do two things. First, I remind myself that too often I allow myself to be stampeded into fear by media headlines, which use adrenaline to hook us. Second, I recollect the many generous and kind people in my life and in the world. […]

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Lit’s Precondition: People All the Same

By Robin Bates | Published: February 15, 2011

I’ve just come across an illuminating contrast between literature and war.  Theater director Mary Zimmerman is currently staging a version of the Arabian Nights at Washington’s Arena Stage, and in the program notes she responds to the question, “Are you saying that you believe certain feelings are universal, or perhaps that we share an essential […]

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A Delicious Poem for Your True Love

By Robin Bates | Published: February 14, 2011

My wife was sitting at a stoplight a few years ago when she heard a National Public Radio story about a fifth taste, the other four being sweet, sour, bitter and salty.  Often we know it by the name given it by the Japanese, who first identified it early in the 20th century, although we […]

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Rise Up, My Fair One, and Come Away

By Robin Bates | Published: February 13, 2011

Spiritual Sunday St. Valentine, who has evolved into the patron saint of lovers, was beheaded by the Romans for (among other things) marrying Christian couples.  As Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, I turn to that most erotic of books in the Bible, Song of Songs (also know as Song of Solomon).Some, unnerved by its unbridled sensuality, have […]

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Rogers No Longer in Odysseus’ Shadow

By Robin Bates | Published: February 12, 2011

Sports Saturday Something memorable occurred last Sunday in Dallas in addition to the Green Bay Packers bringing “Vince Lombardi home” in their Super Bowl victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers. Quarterback Aaron Rogers stepped out of the shadow of a legend. The literary equivalent that comes to mind is Homer’s Telemachus, but Rogers is Telemachus with […]

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A Strange Love: Orgasmic Self Destruction

By Robin Bates | Published: February 11, 2011

Film Friday Last Friday I wrote that, in one respect, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) is outdated: we no longer talk about our missile gap with the Soviet Union. In too many other respects, however, this filmic masterpiece feels all too contemporary, especially in the […]

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