Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night is an unusual combination of fact and reflection, probing the nature and meaning of libraries.
Andrew Sullivan says that we should not look for a savior in gay rights issues because, in America, “we save ourselves.” The sentiment also appears in a Lucille Clifton poem that appeared following the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Sink your teeth into Lee Young-Li’s poem about peaches and let it carry you into a sensation that is so deep that it banishes death.
It is possible to read a gay subtext into Oscar Wilde’s “Importance of Being Earnest.” For one thing, “Earnest” was slang for homosexual in late 19th century England, and a collection of homosexual verse entitled “Love in Earnest” was written by an Oxford classmate of Wilde.
George Herbert’s frustrations at not communicating with God are understandable because the words we use to pray will always feel inadequate. Rather than this being bad, however, we should learn to be humble. It is good that we feel wounded by our words because it is in our brokenness where we most feel God’s presence.
Something happened in the course of the recent U. S. Open tournament. Lucille Clifton’s poem is about the “damn wonder” of renewal, and golf is catching a whiff of something fresh in the boy-faced Rory McIlroy.
“The Kids Are All Right” strikes a blow for traditional family values within a same sex marriage.
It sounds to me that Hefner wasn’t cuckolded only because he wasn’t yet a husband. And while I don’t really care about either of them, I take a Chaucerian satisfaction is seeing a pretentious man outplayed at his own game.
Having just turned 60, I’ve been thinking of Teiresias. Wise though the blind seer may be, his advice doesn’t help others that much. Aging, in other words, appears to require humility.
Posted in Eliot (T.S.), Euripides, Johnson (Samuel), Sophocles, Yeats (William Butler) | Tagged Aging, Bacchae, Carl Jung, Euripides, Homer, Odyssey, Oedipus, Sophocles, T. S. Eliot, Wasteland | 
