Monthly Archives: April 2011

The Immigrant’s Choice

By Robin Bates | Published: April 12, 2011

Adrienne Rich has a well-known poem that is powerful in large part because it captures, simply and directly, the immigrant’s plight. Rich depicts immigration as a stark choice—either one goes through the door or one doesn’t. The decision has immense ramifications, both positive and negative.

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Meaning Is the Meaning of the Liberal Arts

By Robin Bates | Published: April 11, 2011

When Frost’s tree falls in front of us, it can mean two things (at least). Literally, it’s a hassle. To the unexamined life, that’s all it will ever be. Get down and clear it away. On the other hand, there’s that question of meaning and where it comes from. Human beings do their best when their actions are invested with significance. That’s why we have ceremonies, like this one, to compel us to stop (because time itself doesn’t do so on its own), take some time, reflect on the significance of what is happening to us.

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Dry Tears & Raise Your Heads as Flowers

By Robin Bates | Published: April 10, 2011

In “The Beauty of Death,” Kahlil Gibran orders his friends not to mourn him when he dies but to celebrate instead. “Let me rest, for my soul has had its bounty of days and nights,” he says. When Alan learned that he only had a limited number of months to live–months that he managed to stretch to four years–he made sure that he reaped each day’s bounty. He spent a lot of his time intoxicated with the beauty of it all.

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March Madness Ends with a Whimper

By Robin Bates | Published: April 9, 2011

“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” Eliot’s well-known conclusion to “The Hollow Men” (read the poem here) came to mind after watching the Butler Bulldogs lose to the Connecticut Huskies 53-41.The game was so bad that it takes a masterpiece of modernist despair to do it justice.

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Tea Party Plays Chicken with America

By Robin Bates | Published: April 8, 2011

Are there other way in which Rebel without a Cause applies to the budget battle? Maybe Jim Boehner is the weak father, unable to stand up to his Tea Party fantatics and failing to teach them that governing requires compromise. Maybe President Obama is the man in the apron, failing to robustly address a future deficit that will be unsustainable, thereby letting radicals step into the vacuum.

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I Weep for Adonais–He Is Dead

By Robin Bates | Published: April 7, 2011

When W. B. Yeat died on January 28, 1939, a despondent W. H. Auden wrote, “The day of his death was a dark cold day,” an instance of how we look to the weather for confirmation of our distress. The idea of a dying friend slipping away without leaving a trace is an unsettling one. Much better if the weather functions as a second witness, which it seems to do if it metaphorically expresses how we feel. When my good friend Alan Paskow died on Tuesday, I latched on to the fact that the day began with a tornado alert and that we were lashed by slashing rain for much of the morning.

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A Plague on Both Your Houses!

By Robin Bates | Published: April 6, 2011

“A plague on both your houses!” So I found myself venting at both Christian and Muslim zealots as I heard the recent news in Afghanistan. In this case, the Montagues were Pastor Terry Jones and his fundamentalist followers who burned a Koran in South Carolina while the Capulets were the fundamentalist Muslims (a crowd exiting a mosque) who attacked and killed United Nations workers in Afghanistan.

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The Long Goodbye

By Robin Bates | Published: April 5, 2011

My friend Alan Paskow is in his final days. Although not in a coma, he appears in perpetual sleep, and each day his breathing is more labored. Thomas Hood’s poem “The Death Bed” captures some of the experience of waiting and watching.

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Schools Cowed by the Religious Right

By Robin Bates | Published: April 4, 2011

Holly Blumner had a vision. A member of the St. Mary’s theater department, Holly wanted to stage Susan Zeder’s Mother Hicks, a adolescent girl’s identity quest, and then take it into area schools. This post is the story about how rightwing groups have so terrified our schools that the vision died.

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