Monthly Archives: March 2011

Libya: Gargoyle Laughing, Fist Pounding

By Robin Bates | Published: March 22, 2011

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 […]

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When Events Defy Human Understanding

By Robin Bates | Published: March 21, 2011

As I wrote last year when the earthquake hit Haiti, all human language, even literature, comes up short when faced with disaster and death. Literature is language by humans about humans, and destruction on this scale seems to laugh narrative and image to scorn. Nevertheless, being human, we try to bring even apocalyptic disasters into a […]

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Remembering My Son through Alyosha K

By Robin Bates | Published: March 20, 2011

Spiritual Sunday Several times over the past few months I have rhapsodized over Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, feeling a little bit like Keats upon first reading Chapman’s Homer. “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into its ken,” the poet writes, perfectly capturing the experience. One reason I like the novel is […]

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March Madness, A Return to Innocence

By Robin Bates | Published: March 19, 2011

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 […]

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Your Friendly Neighborhood Serial Killer

By Robin Bates | Published: March 18, 2011

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 […]

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Beaten by the Recipe, I Hear Stars

By Robin Bates | Published: March 17, 2011

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 […]

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Grace Kelly in the Kitchen

By Robin Bates | Published: March 16, 2011

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 […]

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Reverencing an Exaggeration Artist

By Robin Bates | Published: March 15, 2011

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 […]

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Leaders Who Don’t Want to Govern

By Robin Bates | Published: March 14, 2011

“Nature, be thou my goddess,” exclaims Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester in King Lear as he prepares to embark on a course of action that, before he is stopped, results in the disinheritance of his legitimate brother, the blinding and banishment of his father, the poisoning of one sister by another, and the execution […]

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