Monthly Archives: February 2019

Brown’s Populism Comes from Tolstoy

By Robin Bates | Published: February 8, 2019

Friday While I don’t yet know whom I will be supporting for the 2020 Democratic nominee for president—I very much like the women who have declared so far—I have a soft spot for Ohio’s Sherrod Brown. Brown, whose working class sympathies helped him comfortably win reelection in a red state, just made his case stronger […]

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Puritans vs. Cavalier Theatre

By Robin Bates | Published: February 6, 2019

Thursday I’m currently immersed in John Stubbs’s Reprobates, an account of the cavalier poets during England’s 17th century civil war. I met John when I was in Ljubljana—he’s married to a Slovenian high court judge and teaches at the international high school—and the work is even more enthralling than his biography of Jonathan Swift, which […]

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When Is a Wall Not a Wall?

By Robin Bates | Published: February 5, 2019

Wednesday A few weeks ago I wrote about how Donald Trump’s wall slides between the literal and the symbolic depending on which day it is. On some days the president goes into great detail about its physical features and claims that it will stop armored cars filled with drugs and duct-taped women that otherwise will […]

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Shakespeare Hated Bullies

By Robin Bates | Published: February 5, 2019

Tuesday Last week a reader accused me of anti-Semitism for defending Merchant of Venice. While I’m always willing to learn new things about myself—personally, I think I have more trace elements in my system of sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, and ableism than of anti-Semitism—the response sent me back to early recollections of the play. For […]

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Winter’s Assyrian Invasion

By Robin Bates | Published: February 4, 2019

Monday When the polar vortex descended on the United States last week, the opening lines from Lord Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib” came to mind. While I’d memorized the stanza in high school to learn anapestic meter (short-short-long), it captures the emotional force of extreme weather events. (Another Byron poem that does so is “Darkness”) […]

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A Dream of Black and White Together

By Robin Bates | Published: February 2, 2019

Spiritual Sunday My mother and I went to hear St. Olaf’s sublime choir at Sewanee’s All Saints Chapel Thursday night. (This in spite of the fact that we both attended St. Olaf’s archrival, Carleton College.) Amongst the program’s “peace on earth” offerings was an arrangement of Langston Hughes’s “I Dream a World.” I share it […]

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Another Way Frankenstein Is Relevant

By Robin Bates | Published: February 1, 2019

Friday I somehow missed this New Yorker article on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when it appeared last year in observance of the novel’s 200th anniversary. Although anti-Trump pundits have frequently cited Frankenstein in recent years to capture how the GOP created a monster it couldn’t control (see here and here), Joan Lepore argues that the novel […]

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