Wednesday My last two days have been mired in a plumbing morass, during which time I have bonded with my plumber and his family. I found a poem by one Tony Gruenewald that gets at some of what I’ve been feeling. Here’s our situation. My mother has been taking her water from the lake by […]
Monthly Archives: October 2018
Plumbing Nightmares
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Plumber", "Poem for Plumbers", James Tate, plumbing, Tony Gruenewald Comments closed
Yes, GOP Is Atticus, but Not in a Good Way
John Cornyn compared the GOP to Atticus Finch? The comparison holds if he has in mind the Atticus of “Go Tell a Watchman.”
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Brett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford, Feminism, Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee, Supreme Court hearings Comments closed
Atwood’s Circe vs. Brett Kavanaugh
Monday The contrast between an accommodating Christine Blasey Ford and an exploding Brett Kavanaugh is indelibly printed on my mind and may be the major thing I take away from the hearings. That white privileged men can use anger to assert dominance while women and people of color must speak in measured tones has become […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Brett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford, Circe Mud Poems, Donald Trump, male entitlement, Margaret Atwood, Mitch McConnell, Sexism, white male privilege Comments closed
God Loves As If There Were Only One
Martha Serpas’s “As If There Were Only One” sounds as though the speaker is emerging from a deep depression and learning to love again.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "As If There Were Only One", Depression, Healing, Martha Serpas Comments closed
Zamiatin Anticipated Trump Cultism
Friday Having just reread Eugene Zamiatin’s dystopian novel We (1920) for the first time since encountering it in 1972 in a junior-level utopian literature class, I’m struck by how it captures the cult behavior of Donald Trump fans. The novel even features a protective wall. Although Zamiatin supported the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, by 1920 he […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged authoritarian states, Donald Trump, Eugene Zamiatin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Grand Inquisitor, panopticon, We Comments closed
The Snow Queen & Child Snatching
Andersen’s “Snow Queen” tells of a child abduction that is only too relevant as children are separated from their immigrant parents.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Donald Trump, Hans Christian Andersen, immigrant child separations, Kirstjen Nielsen, Snow Queen Comments closed
Why Poetry When Tsunamis Strike
Poetry seems inadequate to deal with large scale natural disasters but we turn to it anyway.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Hap", human suffering, Indonesia tsunami, Thomas Hardy Comments closed
Remembering a Favorite English Teacher
My favorite English teacher just died after years of Alzheimer’s. I share the epitaph from Gray’s “Country Churchyard,” which he introduced me to.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, English teachers, teaching, Thomas Gray Comments closed
Camilla, the Woman Who Fights Back
Camilla is a woman who fights back against Aeneas. It prove to be all in vain, which may be the case of those opposing rightwing justices on the Supreme Court.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Aeneid, Brett Kavanaugh, Camilla, SCOTUS, Supreme Court nomination, Virgil Comments closed
