First Muammar Gaddafi, Guernica-like, bombed his people. Now the United States and several western countries are bombing Gaddafi. As this Carl Sandburg poem makes clear, the nightmare has no end: Gaddafi jeering and Allied responding go on and on (if not in Libya, then elsewhere) as America enters its third war in ten years. Gargoyle […]
Monthly Archives: March 2011
March Madness, A Return to Innocence
Sports Saturday March Madness begins this weekend. Actually, to be exact, it begins for the big schools. Division III colleges are in the final week of their tournament. I know because my college was one step away from making the final four. For the first time ever, St. Mary’s College of Maryland sent a team […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "King John's Christmas", "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College", A. A. Milne, Basketball, Childhood, Sports, Thomas Gray Comments closed
Your Friendly Neighborhood Serial Killer
Film Friday Today, in a slight departure, I am writing on a television series rather than a film, one that has gripped me for months. My love affair came to a crashing end last week, however, and I have resolved never to watch another episode. Since I tell my students that negative viewing experiences are […]
Beaten by the Recipe, I Hear Stars
Yesterday I wrote about my colleague Karen Anderson entering into a poetic dialogue with cookbooks, particularly The Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook (or “the Big Red Cookbook,” as it is frequently called). She particularly hones in on the star recipes and examines the way that we may look to them as an escape from a life […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Radio Cooking School", Cooking, Domestic labor, Housewife, Karen Anderson Comments closed
Grace Kelly in the Kitchen
My colleague Karen Anderson, who teaches poetry in many of our creative writing classes, recently gave a fascinating talk to the faculty on her poetic dialogue with cookbooks, especially the Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook (commonly knows as the “Big Red Cookbook”). I asked for her lecture notes so that I could reconstruct her argument for […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Recipe: Hollywood Dunk", Domestic work, Karen Anderson Comments closed
Reverencing an Exaggeration Artist
David Lodge’s Small World is the funniest novel I know about international academic conferences. Among the more bizarre scenes is an American Jane Austen scholar, once a New Critic and now a reborn deconstructionist, who against his will is pulled into the bondage and domination games of an Italian feminist poststructuralist. As described by our […]
