Thursday – First Day of Spring I’ll let Emily Dickinson usher in the new season with “A Light exists in Spring.” I like how the poet describes this time of year as elusive, a sentiment found in a number of other magnificent spring poems, including A. E. Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees” and Robert Frost’s “Nothing […]
Monthly Archives: March 2019
A Light Exists in Spring
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Light Exists in Spring", "Nothing Gold Can Stay", "Spring", A. E. Housman, Emily Dickinson, Loveliest of Trees, Robert Frost Comments closed
Same-Sex Desire in the Sonnets
Wednesday If you want a one-stop article about the same-sex desire expressed in Shakespeare’s first 126 sonnets, Sandra Newman’s recent Aeon article is the place to go. Newman neatly summarizes the historical debates over the sonnets and pretty much puts the matter to rest: they really are expressions of homosexual love from Shakespeare to a […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Sonnet 20", As You Like It, LBGTQ community, Same-Sex Intimacy, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare Comments closed
Conrad and White Male Panic
Tuesday This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post about how Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness provides special insight into white terrorism. At one point I mentioned Conrad’s own racism and sexism, which leads to an interesting literary question: can we consider a work a literary masterpiece if it has one-dimensional depictions of women and Africans? […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Colonialism, Feminism, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, Marxism, white terrorism Comments closed
The World’s White Heart of Darkness
Monday The rise of white terrorism around the world is leading liberals like me to question some of our basic assumptions. Are our democratic institutions, which we took for granted, strong enough to withstand the murderous resentment of entitled people who feel threatened? Amongst the entitled I include both those wealthy individuals who countenance violence […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged authoritarianism, Donald Trump, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, white terrorism Comments closed
A Dark Grave Can’t Hold a Deathless Soul
Spiritual Sunday In response to a white terrorist’s slaughter of 49 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, I turn to two poems by the 13th century Sufi mystic Rumi. Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam, and Rumi helps us move beyond our conventional understanding of death to a deeper understanding of how spirit works in […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "come on sweetheart", "you mustn't be afraid of death, Al Noor mosque massacre, New Zealand massacre, Rumi, white terrorism Comments closed
Fantasy Frees Us from Narrow Thinking
Friday I share today a new insight that I gained from my recent Lifelong Learning class about “Wizards and Enchantresses.” To set it up, I first share my theory of fantasy. As I see it, fantasy is always oppositional in its invocation of magic and the supernatural. If it flourished in the wake of the […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Enlightenment, fantasy, Fundamentalism, Geoffrey Chaucer, scientism, Wife of Bath Comments closed
When College Admissions Goes Awry
Thursday I agree with Vox’s Libby Nelson on the subject of the recently exposed scandal about rich people hiring consultants to scam admissions departments so that their kids will get into top colleges. The real scandal, Nelson says, is what is legal. For instance, it was legal for Charles Kushner to pay Havard $1 million […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged affirmative action, college admissions scandal, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley Comments closed
From Frontier Racism to Wall Racism
Wednesday New Yorker writer Francisco Cantu has alerted me to an important book on the role that the frontier plays in the American imagination. Greg Gandin’s The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, traces Donald Trump’s wall back to America’s frontier days. I describe the […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Long Hair", America-Mexico border, American frontier, Blood Meridian, border wall, Cormac McCarthy, Donald Trump, End of Myth, Francisco Cantu, Greg Gandin, Hernan Diaz, In the Distance, Ofelia Rivas, Ofelia Zepeda, Tohono O'odham, Trump's wall Comments closed
Vets in WWI Documentary Do Not Age
Tuesday Last night Julia and I watched Peter Jackson’s extraordinary documentary about World War I in which he applied filmmaker’s magic to archival footage to create a sense of immediacy. By brightening dark shots and darkening overexposed ones, erasing scratches, evening out movement (World War I film was shot with hand-cranked cameras), turning long-shots into […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Anthem for Doomed Youth", "Greater Love", "The Man He Killed", Peter Jackson, Thomas Hardy, war, Wilfred Owen, World War I Comments closed
