Monthly Archives: March 2019

A Light Exists in Spring

By Robin Bates | Published: March 20, 2019

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 […]

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Same-Sex Desire in the Sonnets

By Robin Bates | Published: March 19, 2019

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 […]

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Conrad and White Male Panic

By Robin Bates | Published: March 18, 2019

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? […]

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The World’s White Heart of Darkness

By Robin Bates | Published: March 17, 2019

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 […]

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A Dark Grave Can’t Hold a Deathless Soul

By Robin Bates | Published: March 16, 2019

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 […]

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Fantasy Frees Us from Narrow Thinking

By Robin Bates | Published: March 14, 2019

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 […]

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When College Admissions Goes Awry

By Robin Bates | Published: March 13, 2019

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 […]

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From Frontier Racism to Wall Racism

By Robin Bates | Published: March 12, 2019

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 […]

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Vets in WWI Documentary Do Not Age

By Robin Bates | Published: March 11, 2019

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 […]

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