Monday Last week I finished teaching a short “Wizards and Enchantresses” course for Sewanee’s Lifelong Learning program and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Having already talked about my class on Merlin (see here, here, and here), today I share what I had to say about Morgan Le Faye and her successors. With Morgan, we looked at how […]
Monthly Archives: March 2019
Morgan Le Faye through the Ages
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Morte d'Arthur", C. S. Lewis, Edmund Spenser, enchantresses, Faerie Queene, Feminism, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gwenhwyfar, Idylls of the King, Life of Merlin, Little Mermaid, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mercedes Lackey, Mists of Avalon, Morgan Le Faye, Silver Chair, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, T. H. White Comments closed
Lent: The Air Heavy and Thick
Spiritual Sunday I share today a good Lenten poem by Denise Levertov where the poet finds herself in a funk, albeit not a dramatic funk. She’s experiencing neither a “dark night of the soul” nor a scorching wasteland desert, those extreme moments of crisis that have pushed people to revelation. (Today’s Gospel reading is Jesus’s […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Hound of Heaven", "Oblique Prayer", Denise Levertov, Francis Thompson, Lent, Mary Oliver, T. S. Eliot, Waste Land Comments closed
Are We Watching Shakespeare or Beckett?
Friday When assuring my English majors that they will find jobs in the world beyond college, I sometimes point out that they are experts in narrative. Increasingly we are learning how much we process reality through stories, and political operatives talk ceaselessly about “controlling the narrative.” How you organize facts (or for that matter, lies) […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Arthur Conan Doyle, Donald Trump, Endgame, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Mueller investigation, narrative, Richard III, Samuel Beckett, Unnamable, Waiting for Godot, Westword Ho!, William Shakespeare Comments closed
Nourish the Refugee Angels
Thursday To defend the Trump Administration’s unconscionable actions on the U.S.-Mexico border, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen dodged and weaved as the House of Representatives grilled her yesterday. Disregarding conditions that a number of Congress members had witnessed with their own eyes, she insisted that children are not being taken away from their parents and […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Central American immigrants, Donald Trump, immigration crisis, Kirstjen Nielsen, Philip L. White, Robert Harris Comments closed
Children’s Choirs, Vienna’s and Blake’s
Wednesday Last Friday I was able to see in person the Vienna Children’s choir, which previously I knew only from their recordings. As I listened to the high, pure voices in Sewanee’s cathedral-like All Saints Chapel, I thought of William Blake’s “Holy Thursday” from Songs of Innocence. The poem has some of Blake’s characteristic irony, […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Holy Thursday", Songs of Innocence and Experience, Vienna Boys Choir, William Blake Comments closed
Trump Is Dracula, Cohen Is Renfield
Tuesday Though I’ve compared Donald Trump several times to Dr. Frankenstein’s monster (for instance, here), New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has compared the Trump saga to another monster story that I hadn’t considered. Michael Cohen, she writes, is Renfield to Trump’s Dracula. Renfield is a Dracula acolyte who has been imprisoned as a madman, […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Bram Stoker, Donald Trump, Dracula, Michael Cohen, Renfield, Trump resistance Comments closed
Exposing Stalin-Style Fake News
Monday NeverTrumper Jennifer Rubin made a Stalin allusion on MSNBC’s A. M. Joy yesterday that caught my eye because I am currently reading a novel about Stalin’s Soviet Union during the German invasion. Vasily Grossman’s extraordinary Life and Fate (1960), resembles Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the way it captures the country at a moment […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged fake news, Fox News, Jim Jordan, Joseph Stalin, Life and Fate, Ukraine's forced famine of 1932, Vasily Grossman, World War II Comments closed
Living Glory Full of Truth and Grace
Spiritual Sunday Today’s church readings are about, as Paul puts it in his First Letter to the Corinthians, seeing God face to face rather than “through a glass darkly.” We hear first about how Moses, after receiving the Ten Commandments, returned to the Israelites with his face so lit up that he had to wear […]
Posted in Uncategorized Comments closed
