After attending some remarkable reconciliation events dealing with America’s history of slavery, I now have a better understanding of Octavia Butler’s time travel novel about slavery–and about why the protagonist doesn’t escape back to the present unharmed.
Monthly Archives: September 2016
We Must Revisit Slavery To Find Healing
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Kindred, Octavia Butler, racial reconciliation, racism, slavery Comments closed
Trump & Bounderby: Cut Taxes or Die
In Monday night’s debate, Donald Trump warned that companies would take their business elsewhere if taxes and regulations on them weren’t lowered. As Dickens noted in “Hard Times,” businesses have been threatening this, like, forever.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged business regulations, Charles Dickens, Donald Trump, Hard Times, Hillary Clinton, presidential debates, Tax Policy, tax reduction, Taxation Comments closed
Hillary Clinton Is Hermione Granger
Hillary Clinton is like Hermione Granger in many ways, but there is one very important difference.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump, female ambition, Harry Potter, Hillary Clinton, J. K. Rowling, presidential debates Comments closed
A Novel about Unexpected White Violence
Octavia Butler’s “Kindred,” a time travel novel about an African American woman dragged into slave America, speaks to a number of our racial problems today.
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On Broken Ceasefires, in Homer & in Syria
The horrific bombing of a 31-truck aid convoy brought an end to the painstakingly negotiated ceasefire between Russian and the United States in Syria. The incident resembled how Hera and Athena break up the truce that the Greeks and Trojans are trying to negotiate in “The Iliad.”
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged broken truces, ceasefires, Homer, Iliad, Russia, Syria, Syrian aid convoy bombing, Syrian civil war Comments closed
I Am Lazarus Come Back from the Dead
I’ve just realized that the Lazarus mentioned in Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a different once than I’ve been assuming. This makes me appreciate the poem even more.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Grand Inquisitor, hell, Lazarus, Love Song of J. Alfred Pruforck, poverty, T. S. Eliot Comments closed
Black Lives Mattered to Langston Hughes
Following two more shootings of unarmed black men, the New York Times devoted a full page to Langston Hughes’s powerful poem “I, Too.” Meanwhile, his poem “Harlem” provides an explanation for the riots in Charlotte.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Harlem", "I, Charlotte rioting, Keith Lamont Scott, Langston Hughes, police shootings, Terence Crutcher, Too" Comments closed
You Never Did the Kenosha Kid
An aide to Ohio governor John Kasich recently labeled Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus a “Kenosha political operative.” This gives me an excuse to revisit Thomas Pynchon’s extended riff upon “the Kenosha Kid” in “Gravity’s Rainbow.”
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump, Gravity's Rainbow, Reince Priebus, Thomas Pynchon Comments closed
I Am Trump, the Great and Powerful!
Donald Trump is the Wizard of Oz, and this past week America got to see him exposed, complete with collapsing curtain.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged birtherism, Donald Trump, L. Frank Baum, Wizard of Oz Comments closed
