Optimistic about the future, feminist Solnit sees the right panicking over liberalism’s advances. Her Gramsci quote echoes Matthew Arnold and Virginia Woolf.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Optimism in the Face of Trumpism
Palm Sunday and Two Donkey Poems
Two donkey poems to celebrate Palm Sunday, by G.K. Chesterton and Mary Oliver.
The Courage of a Tennessee Librarian
As a Tennessee library direct stands tall against a reactionary library board, I use Beowulf to reflect on the courage involved.
An Optimist Revises Yeats’s “Second Coming”
Parodies of Yeats’s “Second Coming” and Williams’s “This Is Just to Say” provides us with a little midweek levity.
The Goddess Nemesis at Work in Iran
The goddess Nemesis, mentioned in Hesiod’s Theogony and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is at work in Iran.
Catch-22 and DJT’s Iran “Excursion”
Catch-22 understand perfectly Trump’s double dealing in the Iranian conflict.
Clifton: the dead shall rise again
Lucille Clifton celebrates Jesus’s Lazarus miracle by pointing to the resilience of the African diaspora.
Using Lit to Grapple with a Death
Friday I’ve written so many times about the accidental drowning death of my son Justin—most thoroughly in Better Living through Literature—that I won’t repeat what I’ve said. Instead, I use today’s “a life lived in literature” installment to reflect back on aspects I haven’t touched on before, some of which are unbearably painful but which may […]

