Monthly Archives: April 2020

Sci-Fi Provides Pandemic Guidance

By Robin Bates | Published: April 20, 2020

Our society is currently split on the value of scientific expertise. That split goes back at least as far as Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

A Literary Survey of What Plagues Mean

By Robin Bates | Published: April 19, 2020

A survey of how literary authors have grappled for meaning in times of pestilence bolsters our own search. I look at Sophocles, Virgil, Defoe, Porter, Camus, King, Mandel, Atwood, and Erdrich.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Church Attendance in Plague Times

By Robin Bates | Published: April 18, 2020

Defoe in “Journal of the Plague Year” captures people’s need for church in plague times.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Trump Is Captain Queeg, Not Bligh

By Robin Bates | Published: April 16, 2020

Trump apparently sees himself as Captain Bligh. Try Captain Queeg instead. Or the captain in a recent Dave Eggers comic novel.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Postal Service Under Attack (Again)

By Robin Bates | Published: April 15, 2020

Trump apparently would like to see the U.S. Postal Service die. Pynchon has a novel that helps us understand rightwing opposition to what others regard as a treasure.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Toni Morrison on Insensitive Employers

By Robin Bates | Published: April 14, 2020

Wednesday The tragic coronavirus death of a Maryland grocery store clerk with cerebral palsy reminds me of a death in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which I’m currently teaching remotely to my Composition and Literature course. We see similar levels of corporate insensitivity in both cases. According to CBS News, A 27-year-old grocery store clerk […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments closed

What Awaits COVID Grafters

By Robin Bates | Published: April 13, 2020

Grafters with their eyes on the Coronavirus Relief Plan will have a special place (Circle 8, Ditch 5) in Dante’s “Inferno.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Neruda: Let’s All Stop for a Moment

By Robin Bates | Published: April 12, 2020

In “Keeping Quiet,” Neruda offers us a powerful challenge in the face of the world’s horrors: what if the entire world were to observe a moment of stillness?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Shafts of Golden Light

By Robin Bates | Published: April 11, 2020

Easter Sunday For Easter I offer up two April poems that work as a before and after. First, Rainer Maria Rilke speaks of the “slumbering silence” before everything bursts into flower. Then William Carlos William describes that bursting as almost too much to bear. First the breathless anticipation, then the flowering. In the Rilke poem, […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed