Thursday I wrote yesterday’s Walt Whitman post before hearing Donald Trump’s Oval Office address, which is why I find myself returning to the poet again so soon. Like the Statue of Liberty mentioned by Sen. Chuck Schumer in his response to Trump, Whitman’s Song of Myself serves as an antidote to the president’s racism and xenophobia. Trump, as […]
Monthly Archives: January 2019
Whitman Would Embrace Trump’s Victims
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Song of Myself", Government shutdown, Immigration, Trump's wall, Walt Whitman Comments closed
Whitman Humanizes the Judicial Process
Wednesday In a fascinating project described by New Yorker author Jia Tolentino a while back, a young filmmaker used Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself to understand Alabama culture. Touring the state, Jennifer Crandall had different people recite lines from the poem, including a drug court judge in an open session. I highly recommend watching the […]
Through Lit, We Learn Compassion
Tuesday My brother Sam, an enthusiastic Unitarian Universalist, gave me Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life for Christmas, and I was pleased that the author sees literature playing a major role. In today’s post I share how she draws on the ancient Greeks. Armstrong writes, “All faiths insist that compassion is the test […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Prelude", Aeschylus, compassion, Eumenides, Euripides, Heracles, Homer, Iliad, Oedipus at Colonus, Oresteia, Sophocles, Tintern Abbey, William Wordsworth Comments closed
Trump’s Wall, Symbolic or Literal?
Monday Literature majors will find their training useful in understanding why Donald Trump has chosen to shut down the government. It has to do with the difference between the symbolic and the literal. A literal wall makes very little sense, with the $5.5 billion dollars that Trump is demanding from American taxpayers (not from Mexico) […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Beloved, Donald Trump, magical realism, Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie, symbolic vs literal thinking, Toni Morrison, Trump's wall Comments closed
Epiphany: A Baby’s Cry, a Big Bang
Spiritual Sunday I love this Bruce Monroe Robison poem that updates the story of the Wise Men, imagining them acquainted with astrophysics and the Big Bang theory. As he sees it, Jesus’s infant cry also created a new universe, “the first whisper in the still tissue of space.” Matthew 2: Magi We have seen his […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Matthew 2: Magi, astrophysics, Big Bang, Bruce Monroe Robison, Epiphany Comments closed
No Frigate Like a Book
Friday To end the week, I share one of Ilya Milstein’s enchanting illustrations, along with the Emily Dickinson poem that it reminds me of. We start off in a library and, next thing we know, we have been transported “lands away.” I haven’t always admired “There is no frigate like a book,” perhaps because I […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "There is no frigate like a book", Emily Dickinson, libraries, Travel Comments closed
Lit as a Survival Toolkit
Thursday Friend and occasional guest blogger Carl Rosin alerted me to a heartfelt Commonweal article by an English professor describing how literature helped her confront and work through childhood abuse. Cassandra Nelson’s difficult history leads to some remarkable insights into trigger warnings, which she opposes. Nelson’s view on trigger warnings is pretty much my own […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Bluest Eye, Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Bruno Bettelheim, childhood trauma, Dante, Inferno, Junot Diaz, King Lear, sexual abuse, sexual assault, Toni Morrison, William Shakespeare Comments closed
Which Shakespeare Character Is Trump?
Wednesday It’s satisfying to see national pundits take a page out of Better Living through Beowulf and turn to the classics to understand Donald Trump. Okay, so NeverTrumper conservative Bret Stephens has probably never read this blog, but we both recognize how literature deepens our understanding of the world, including American politics. I particularly appreciate […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Aristophanes, Donald Trump, Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part II, Lysistrata, Macbeth, Nikolai Gogol, Othello, Richard III, William Shakespeare Comments closed
