Richard III and Epstein’s Crimes

By Robin Bates | Published: March 11, 2026
James Northcote, The Murder of the Princes in the Tower

Thursday

A few weeks ago, when King Charles of Britain washed his hands of his brother and watched Andrew get carted off to prison for passing British trade secrets to Jeffrey Epstein, blogger Greg Olear was put in mind of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Olear was thinking of the opening scene where Richard watches as King Edward imprisons their brother Clarence for suspected treason.

To be sure, the parallel isn’t exact as Charles wasn’t imprisoning Andrew but only saying that the law should take its course. (He did, however, strip his brother of his titles.) But by mentioning the play, Olear is able to use its famous opening lines to express his joy that someone, finally, was being held accountable for their association with Epstein. He felt that the dark winter had passed, at least in this instance, and that summer had finally come:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Olear writes,

Because here today in the United States, it really is the winter—literally and figuratively; our discontent is loud enough to be heard across the ocean; and the fall of our current “son of York,” Jeffrey Epstein’s buddy and Virginia Guiffre’s abuser, was glorious indeed, bringing a ray of sunshine to an otherwise bleak and dismal February day. There are plenty of clouds still louring upon our (White) House, to be sure. Nevertheless, I will take the “W.”

Olear admits that, just as Charles is no Edward, so the pedophile Andrew is no Clarence, a kindly man who is victimized by his evil brother’s machinations. (Richard has planted the bogus treason charge in Edward’s mind and later will make sure that Clarence is murdered.) But Olear loves the idea of the king’s brother being taken off by guards:

Richard: Brother, good day. What means this armèd guard
That waits upon your Grace?
Clarence: His Majesty,
Tend’ring my person’s safety, hath appointed
This conduct to convey me to the Tower.

Olear fantasizes about Andrew being conveyed to the Tower of London:

It is satisfying, is it not, to picture the scene: constables at the door of his well-appointed manse, Andrew sneering at the Thames Valley Police before slowly realizing he has no choice but to accompany them. He’s huffing and puffing, yowling and berating: indignant, insolent, making the officers wait as he barks instructions at some or other much-abused servant. And then the head officer says…

I beseech your Graces both to pardon me.
His Majesty hath straitly given in charge
That no man shall have private conference,
Of what degree soever, with your brother.

Olear notes that Andrew being arrested on his birthday—February 19—is a Shakespearean touch.

At this point, however, there’s no more to be gained from a Clarence-Andrew comparison so Olear shifts to a Richard-Epstein parallel. After all, both abused children—or in Richard’s case, murdered. (The Richard in the play anyway. Who actually murdered the two princes in the tower has never been conclusively established, as mystery novelist Josephine Tey points out in Daughter of Time.) Citing the best known line in the play—“A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”–Olear writes,

One imagines Jeffrey Epstein expressing similar sentiments, as his life was strangled out of him. And I cling to the hope that, sooner rather than later, the gaggle of nihilistic amoral oligarchs now running the world will be similarly thrown from their proverbial saddles. Oh how I yearn for Elon Musk, for Peter Thiel, for Jared Kushner, for Donald Trump, to have their “My kingdom for a horse!” moments!

Having brought Trump into the conversation, Olear notes parallels there as well:

We have seen Trump at first hand harming children—whether kicking his disabled nephew off the family’s health insurance (a move Richard III would have admired for its creative savagery), or sanctioning a secret state police that kidnaps children and transports them far away from home, or cutting aid to impoverished nations and condemning their children to death by starvation, or giving succor to the butchers in Moscow and Tel Aviv who brutalize the children of Ukraine and Gaza—or, as alleged many times in the Epstein Files, personally raping and killing children just as young and just as innocent as the Princes in the Tower.

He also points out that one of Richard’s enablers, Lord Buckingham, draws the line at murdering the princes (he pays with his life) and wonders whether Congressional Republicans will draw the line at the increasing evidence that Trump assaulted underage girls? 

As the political leader who stood by Richard thick and thin, Lord Buckingham represents the GOP House and Senate. Will the Republicans (who these days are all, ironically given the party’s name, monarchists) draw the line at the horrific abuse of children, as Buckingham did? If not that, what would it take for them to repudiate their grotesque and evil king? Will they ever come back to the light?

At this point I should mention a critique that my son Darien, whom I visited in Washington, D.C. last week, made about comparing Trump to various Shakespeare villains. When we do so, he said, do we not elevate rather than undermine Trump, making him appear more complex and interesting than he actually is? For instance, Lear, Richard, and Macbeth all undergo crises of conscience, which adds a tragic dimension to their characters, but we’ve seen no sign of remorse from Trump. 

Olear fantasizes about Trump being visited by the ghost of Epstein, as Richard is visited by the ghosts of the murdered princes, and questioning himself:

O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
The lights burn blue; it is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no. Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain. Yet I lie; I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree;
Murder, stern murder, in the direst degree;
All several sins, all used in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all “Guilty, guilty!”
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me,
And if I die no soul will pity me.
And wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?

But Olear is forced to admit that, unlike a Shakespearean protagonist, “Trump has no soul, no conscience, and no ability for introspection.” When we do make comparisons, in other words, we must also add in the contrasts—which in my defense I do every time I compare Trump to Lear, Macbeth, and Milton’s Satan. After all, Shakespeare and Milton understood narcissism in a deep way so we might as well apply their insights to our narcissist in chief.

There is certainly no problem in directing against Trump the words that Richard’s mother, appalled at his string of murders, directs against him: 

Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end;
Shame serves thy life and doth thy death attend.

I conclude with the words that the ghosts of the murdered princes deliver to him in his sleep:

Thy nephews’ souls bid thee despair and die!

While I don’t give Trump any credit for introspection, I do see him thrashing around in a deep unhappiness. He is aging quickly and panicking about it. Unfortunately, he’s making the world suffer for it.

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Epstein, Trump as Humbert Humbert

By Robin Bates | Published: March 10, 2026
Irons, Swain in Lolita

Wednesday

Numerous outlets are reporting on plausible allegations that Donald Trump forced a thirteen-year-old to commit fellatio (and then hit her when she bit his penis), and that Trump’s Justice Department has been attempting to cover-up the FBI investigations into the matter. Given that the president appears in the Epstein files thousands of times and that he visited the dressing rooms of teenage beauty contestants—not to mention his rape of E. Jean Carroll—there’s every reason that Trump not only knew what Epstein was up to but participated in some of his abominations. 

I find pedophilia so painful that I have long shied away from literature that deals with it. When I was enrolled in the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course in the summer of 1973, an editor gave us Robert Roper’s novel Royo County and asked us how we would respond if it came over our desk. I only remember a scene in which a man forces a girl to give him a blow job, which so appalled me that I called the book “filth,” thereby offending the editor. I failed to see that the novel is otherwise masterfully written.

When I look back at a revulsion verging on hysteria, I wonder if it has anything to do with a Frenchman running his hand up and down my leg when I was 13 and watching Gary Cooper’s The Unconquered with my brothers in a Paris theater. I didn’t know what was happening, just that I felt extremely uncomfortable. We got up and changed seats and fortunately nothing further transpired. 

A casual treatment of pedophilia by Tom Robbins’s Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates caused me to turn against an author whose counterculture irreverence I had previously enjoyed (especially Jitterbug Perfume and Skinny Legs and All). In this novel, however, I concluded that Robbins had broken one taboo too many and found myself questioning my former attraction. It was like watching the rebellious sixties degenerate into the decadent seventies.

No work has caused me as much distress as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Because it enjoys such a high reputation, it was one of those novels I felt I should read, but time and again I fled after only a few chapters. Only when I team-taught a “Madness and Literature” course with a psychologist did I finally finish it.

Returning to it following the Epstein files leads me to wonder whether the pedophile used the novel as a training manual. Not only did Epstein name his plane The Lolita Express but it appears that he used the narrator’s tactics to keep his victims off balance, which is easier to do when one is dealing with children.  In Humbert Humbert’s case, he retrieves Lolita/Dolores from her boarding school without informing her that her mother has died and then keeps her unsettled by moving around the country. He also finds ways to make her dependent, alternating gifts with threats. The rape occurs after the 12-year-old, feeling alone in the world, surrenders to her captor:

In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with white high shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent raincoat, sunglasses, some more garments—swooners;, shorts, all kinds of summer frocks. At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.

Notice how he turns the tables on her in the following scene. The child, not the adult, is in the wrong:

Finally, let us see what happens if you, a minor, accused of having impaired the morals of an adult in a respectable inn, what happens if you complain to the police of my having kidnapped and raped you? Let us suppose they believe you. A minor female, who allows a person over twenty-one to know her carnally, involves her victim into statutory rape, or second-degree sodomy, depending on the technique, and the maximum penalty is ten years. So I go to jail. Okay I go to jail. But what happens to you, my orphan? Well, you are luckier. You become the ward of the Department of Public Welfare—which I am afraid sounds a little bleak. A nice grim matron of the Miss Phalen type, but more rigid and not a drinking woman, will take away your lipstick and fancy clothes. No more gadding about! I don’t know if you have ever heard of the laws relating to dependent, neglected, incorrigible and delinquent children. While I stand gripping the bars, you, happy neglected child, will be given a choice of various dwelling places, all more or less the same, the correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile detention home, or one of those admirable girls’ protectories where you knit things, and sing hymns, and have rancid pancakes on Sundays. You will go there, Lolita—my Lolita, this Lolita, will leave her Catullus and go there, as the wayward girl you are. In plainer words, if we two are found out, you will be analyzed and institutionalized, my pet, c’est tout. You will dwell, my Lolita will dwell (come here, my brown flower) with thirty-nine other dopes in a dirty dormitory (no, allow me, please) under the supervision of hideous matrons. This is the situation, this is the choice. Don’t you think that under the circumstances Dolores Haze had better stick to her old men?

Humbert Humbert observes, “By rubbing all this in, I succeeded in terrorizing Lo.”

I’ve written about how, in Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi’s students identified with Dolores and saw Humbert Humbert as the mullahs who were ruling their lives. To put Trump and Epstein in that category sounds about right.

I’ve recently read one other book about a pedophile, a satisfactory mystery in that justice is dispensed at the end. In Linwood Barclay’s Find You First (major spoiler alert), the villain is a mixture of Epstein and Elon Musk. The Musk side is obsessed with what he sees as his genius DNA and the Epstein side with young girls and influence peddling, so it’s very satisfying to see a teenager and a young woman escape from the villain’s New York mansion and ruin his life.

I was amazed at how satisfying it was to see violence meted out to predatory men. It clued me into how angry I have been.  

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“Useful Knowledge” vs. Literature

By Robin Bates | Published: March 9, 2026

Tuesday

Last month a Literary Hub article, “On the So-Called Reading Crisis as Class Warfare,” caught my attention because it highlighted the distinction between pleasure reading and utilitarian reading. While I’m not always sure what author Eunsong Kim is getting at—at one points she confusingly contrasts “the technification and devaluation of public arts education” with “the rise of the growth of exclusive and luxury branded literary salons”—I think she’s saying that there’s a concerted effort by the moneyed classes to dumb down the proles and elevate the elite. Waldorf education for me, underfunded public education for thee.

I’m reminded of Jonathan Swift, in one of his less admirable moments, arguing that servants shouldn’t be taught how to read because it would make them dissatisfied with their position in life. In Gulliver’s Travels he describes the Lilliputian palace catching on fire because a servant falls asleep while reading a novel by candlelight. (The satire gets better when Gulliver saves the palace but offends the queen by urinating on the fire. This is an allegorical account of Swift’s brilliant but scatological satire Tale of a Tub so scandalizing Queen Anne that she quashed the author’s political ambitions. In other words, satirists sometimes have to be unpleasant and take risks to save society.)

According to Kim, Andrew Carnegie, though famous for the libraries he funded, thought like Swift about workers. She says she herself has traced the rise of U.S. philanthropy—particularly with regard to museums and libraries—to 19th-century labor-busting. She cites historian Paul Krause on how steel magnate Carnegie, famous for founding libraries, would break a town’s union and then “gift” the town with a library. Carnegie, however, believed that such a library

should only contain useful knowledge.  In a speech given to workers in Braddock 1889, after breaking the town’s steel union, Carnegie states, “If you want to make labor what it should be, educate yourself in useful knowledge. This is the moral I would emphasize.”

Kim says that Carnegie disparaged an education that taught Greek and Latin, arguing that workers assigned to read Homer, Aeschylus or Shakespeare were being educated “for life upon some other planet than this. . . . What they have obtained has served to imbue them with false ideas and to give them a distaste for practical life.”

Carnegie, however, embraced “impractical knowledge” for himself as he attempted to write literature and befriended Mark Twain and other luminaries. Carnegie distinguished the knowledge the workers should have from his own.

I don’t know the extent to which Kim’s elitists are getting their way, but I do know about efforts to push back against their efforts. Idealistic language arts teachers around the country attempt to excite their students with quality literature, and this blog is my own contribution. Furthermore, I spent my career at a public liberal arts college (St. Mary’s College of Maryland), whose goal was to break down the very barriers that Kim sees the rich as erecting. We figured that, just because you were poor or were a first-generation college student–i.e., you had parents who hadn’t gone to college–didn’t mean you should be deprived of a premier education. Half the states have such schools, which belong to the Consortium of Public Liberal Art Colleges (COPLAC).

On the other hand, I know that the Republicans running my current state of residency (Tennessee) have been pushing very hard to shift educational resources to charter schools, even though public teacher salaries are so low that the Appalachian high school in the county next to mine (Grundy) can’t get anyone to teach Algebra II. (Interested students have to study the subject on-line.) Meanwhile, nationwide, what could be called the proletarianization of the professoriat is occurring at state universities, with English introductory classes being increasingly taught by adjunct faculty. Eusong Kim, in other words, is on to something.

Defending quality public education requires all our efforts, and we must do all we can to keep alive the vision of a literate electorate. While a good education can’t break down class divisions entirely, it can do a lot. At St. Mary’s I saw many of my first generation college students go on to use their “impractical” English classes in very practical ways, possessing as they did the ability to adapt to a changing world. In this regard, a narrow vocational education can come up short. Only when you dehumanize the working class do you fail to see how Homer, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare will indeed prepare them for life on this planet. 

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Wilfred Owen on Murderous War Leaders

By Robin Bates | Published: March 8, 2026
Rembrandt, Abraham and Isaac

Monday

As we watch the macho posturing of Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth following their insane attack on Iran, more than ever we need poets like Wilfred Owen. From the vantage point of the World War I trenches, Owen saw the ruinous effects of nationalistic jingoism. In “Dulce et Decorum Et” he talks of those who are “ardent for some desperate glory,” which pretty much sums up Hegseth. Here’s a recent instance of his rhetoric:

Death and destruction from the sky all day long. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.

In the preface to his posthumously published poems Owen wrote,

This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds or lands, nor anything about glory, honor, dominion or power,
                                                        except War.
Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry.
The subject of it is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.

In one poem Owen takes the story of Abraham and Isaac and, after changing the ending, applies it to Europe’s leaders. It fits our own leaders only too well.

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
By Wilfred Owen

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Owen is spitting with anger in that concluding couplet.

When given a choice between sacrificing ego (“the Ram of Pride”) and sacrificing sons, the current leaders of Israel, America, and Iran will choose sons every time. 

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MAGA Christians Fall for Satan’s Temptations

By Robin Bates | Published: March 7, 2026
Jesus tempted by Satan in the wilderness

Spiritual Sunday

Today’s post is repurposed from one written on August 19, 2017

Military.com reported Friday that certain commanders are painting the current attacks on Iran as “rooted in Christian biblical prophecy”—which means it’s time to revisit what the Bible says about Satanic temptations. I turn also to Milton’s dramatic reenactment of Satan tempting Jesus in Paradise Regained.

First, here’s the report:

A complaint shared by an anonymous non-commissioned officer to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) claimed that non-commissioned officers were told that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that President Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” as originally reported by journalist Jonathan Larsen. Between Saturday and Tuesday afternoon, MRFF logged more than 200 similar complaints across 50 installations encompassing every branch of the military, its founder, Mikey Weinstein, told Military.com.

Matthew’s temptation story kicked off the season of Lent two Sundays ago:

Again, the devil took [Jesus] to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, 

‘Worship the Lord your God, 
and serve only him.’” 

Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him. (Matthew 4:8-11)

In Milton’s version, Satan shows Jesus the capital of the Roman Empire, tempting him in ways that would appeal to Trump and to Christian nationalists like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth:

The city which thou seest no other deem
Than great and glorious Rome, Queen of the Earth
So far renowned, and with the spoils enriched
Of nations. There the Capitol thou seest,
Above the rest lifting his stately head
On the Tarpeian rock, her citadel
Impregnable; and there Mount Palatine,
The imperial palace, compass huge, and high
The structure, skill of noblest architects,
With gilded battlements, conspicuous far,
Turrets, and terraces, and glittering spires.

He doesn’t mention White House ballrooms and triumphal arches but, if he were talking to Trump, he would have.

Then Satan contends that, by expelling a “monster from his throne”—think Ali Khamenei in the present case—Jesus can obtain absolute power:

This Emperor hath no son, and now is old,
Old and lascivious, and from Rome retired
To Capria, an island small but strong
On the Campanian shore, with purpose there
His horrid lusts in private to enjoy;
Committing to a wicked favorite
All public cares, and yet of him suspicious;
Hated of all, and hating. With what ease,
Endued with regal virtues as thou art,
Appearing, and beginning noble deeds,
Might’st thou expel this monster from his throne,
Now made a sty, and, in his place ascending,
A victor-people free from servile yoke!
And with my help thou may’st; to me the power
Is given, and by that right I give it thee.
Aim, therefore, at no less than all the world;
Aim at the highest; without the highest attained,
Will be for thee no sitting, or not long,
On David’s throne, be prophesied what will.”

Actually, this is not a bad description of Trump golfing at Mar-a-Lago, not to mention what we’re learning from Trump’s “horrid lusts in private,” which he’s ordering the Justice Department to redact from the Epstein files.

Jesus is not interested in such power, however, but with the Devil who drives such people (“what if I withal/ Expel a Devil who first made him such?”). When “my season comes to sit,” he informs Satan, it shall be “as a stone that shall to pieces dash/ All monarchies besides throughout the world”:

Know, therefore, when my season comes to sit
On David’s throne, it shall be like a tree
Spreading and overshadowing all the earth,
Or as a stone that shall to pieces dash
All monarchies besides throughout the world;
And of my Kingdom there shall be no end.

So no, God hasn’t appointed Trump to unleash holy hell upon Tehran. And if Hegseth and his Armageddon commanders think otherwise, it’s because they have fallen for Satan’s temptation.

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“Better Living” Emerged from a Midnight Epiphany

By Robin Bates | Published: March 6, 2026
Matthias Stom, Young Man Reading by Candlelight

Friday Installment of A Life Lived in Literature

Somewhere in my mid-forties—I think the year was 1998—I had the epiphany that led to Better Living through Beowulf. While I can’t claim that I heard the voice of God, there were similarities with what happened to young Samuel in one of my favorite Biblical stories:

Samuel was lying down in the house of the Lord, where the ark of God was. Then the Lord called Samuel. Samuel answered, “Here I am.”  (Samuel 3:3-4)

Two God calls later, Samuel answers, “Speak, for your servant is listening,” at which point he learns that he is to convey an important message.

By invoking the passage, I don’t mean to inflate the importance of this moment (although it was important to me). I use it only to capture how clear and momentous it felt. I awoke in the middle of the night, grabbed my notebook, and wrote steadily for two or three hours, something I never do. My life’s mission, I concluded that night, was to teach the general public (as opposed to other literary scholars) how literature can improve our lives. Starting with Beowulf, I would take major works from the British literary canon—my primary literary interest—and demonstrate how. My teaching, meanwhile, would be oriented similarly.

I’ve written about the only previous time that such a nighttime revelation came to me. While an undergraduate at Carleton and writing a Medieval history essay about Beowulf, at 3 in the morning I suddenly saw how the monsters in the tale represented the very real dangers threatening Anglo-Saxon society. As they listened to the tale, warriors were given powerful images of the troll violence that could well up in their companions (and in them as well) and of the dragon senility that could seize their kings. Literary fantasy, in other words, could provide people with invaluable tools for understanding and negotiating their challenges.

Although my nighttime vision in 1998 seemed clear, it took years for me to figure out what forms it was to take. Since self-help books were big in the 1990s (I suspect they still are), I initially envisioned writing about literary narrative as self-help. The book that emerged over the next ten years featured one big issue that each of my chosen works could address, along with accompanying exercises. This particular problem had a major problem, which I’ll touch on in a moment, but I start with sharing the table of contents and some sample exercises:

Better Living through Beowulf: How the Early British Classics Can Guide You beyond Terrorism Fears, Relationship Anxieties, Consumer Emptiness, Racial Tension, Political Cynicism, and Other Contemporary Challenges

Introduction: Harnessing the Power of Literature
Chapter 1 – ANGER & FEAR: Using Beowulf to Subdue Your Inner Demons and Find a Lasting Peace
Chapter 2 – DEATH: Using Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Transform Your Fear of Dying into a Deep Joy
Chapter 3 – MARRIAGE: Using Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to Save Your Relationship
Chapter 4 – SOUL: Using Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to Escape Your Private Hell
Chapter 5 – GENDER: Using William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night to Discover Alternate Selves
Chapter 6 – RACE & CLASS: Using Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko to Negotiate Difficult Friendships
Chapter 7 – INJUSTICE: Using Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and “Modest Proposal” to Keep Fighting the Good Fight
Chapter 8 – BEAUTY: Using Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock to Reach beyond Star Worship and Touch the Star Within
Chapter 9 – COURTSHIP: Using Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Find Your Soul Mate

As for exercises, for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight I suggested that each of the hunted animals represents a different way to approach death (and to approach life) and invited readers to think through their own responses. The Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale, I contended, can provide insight into why couples quarrel and how to work through differences. Rape of the Lock provided a workshop on dealing with sexual harassment while I approached Pride and Prejudice as a marriage manual (“Four Bad Reasons to Get Married”) .

To write the book, I had to reprogram my mind and write as I once had for newspapers. I still remember how the first essay I wrote in graduate school, a three-page essay in which I had 17 (!) paragraphs, elicited the professor’s wry comment, “Did you used to be a journalist?” With such prodding, I learned to master compound complex sentences, nuanced and qualified assertion, scholarly jargon, and all the rest, and here I was having to revert to an earlier prose style. It was not easy to do.

I found an agent for the book and for a while had high hopes. After a year with no success, however, the agent dropped me, sending me to small presses. I finally found one and was all set to begin working with them when the world-wide 2008 crash occurred. My book was one of the (very minor) casualties.

In retrospect, I’m not sorry. There was always something not entirely right about using the language of self-help to talk about literature. At times I felt inauthentic in how I was discussing Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Austen. Further, I’m not sure that people actually use self-help books in the way I was imagining. How many go through proffered exercises to change their lives? 

To be sure, America’s self-help tradition suggest that we should be able to do so. Think of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack and of the “general resolves” of Jay Gatsby. The tradition may grow out of the Calvinist tradition, and dissenter Daniel Defoe created a character in Robinson Crusoe who is obsessed with self-improvement, with heaven and hell hanging in the balance. But Crusoe fails to achieve many of his general resolves and, like the rest of us, lives a life that takes many unexpected twists and turns. Literature doesn’t change that state of affairs. 

Furthermore, literature is not a carpenter’s tool that can be directed to a single project but something more diffuse and wide-ranging. Whereas different people wielding a hammer will use it more or less the same, that’s not true of a novel, poem, or play. Sometimes readers will not even realize that the work has influenced their behavior until years later.

In any event, as I was feeling the disappointment of a 10-year project going up in flames, my son Darien, who was in marketing, informed me that I should establish a “platform.” Publishers would take me more seriously, he pointed out, if I could assure them that a ready audience existed for the book. He suggested that I start a blog and helped me set up a website.

I barely knew what a blog was but, once I began blogging, a new world opened to me. I was exhilarated by the instant contact with readers: no longer must I wait years for an article or a book to reach an audience. Furthermore, in its fragmentary form a blog was truer to the reading experience than my book had been: I wasn’t limited to a single theory about what a particular work means to readers but could just report on a range of responses, starting with my own. I could also share what the works meant to my students (always with their permission, of course), which meant that it became a pedagogical tool: they could see their work from an outside perspective, always useful. Meanwhile, I profited by regularly reflecting on my courses.

Of course, my unpublished book gave me a lot of ready material for the blog, and much of it has found its way into my daily posts. I also should note that, as blogs go, Better Living through Beowulf is neither the most scholarly nor the most casual. There are medieval experts who know far more about Beowulf than I will ever know and use their blogs to share their expertise. (While my own specialty is the British Restoration and 18th Century, I became a generalist by virtue of teaching at a small liberal arts college.) My blog is of limited value to them.

But my intense engagement with a wide variety of works has given me a different kind of expertise, which is useful for (1) general readers interested in literature (including those who may have had bad experiences in college literature classes) and (2) high school language arts teachers who are looking for ways to engage their students with the works. From the first, these were my intended readers, and they in fact make up the bulk of my audience.

I’ll recount in a later post how I came to write my recent book. I’ll just note that it emerged out of the blog in that, instead of focusing on a single way that literature changes lives, I have looked at what thinkers over the millennia have said about literary impact. They too diverge greatly, starting with Plato, who thought that Homer could lead young men astray, and Aristotle, who believed the great Greek tragedians provided valuable leadership advice. If one really wants to do justice to literature’s transformative potential, it’s best to share as many reading experiences as possible.

Past Installments of A Life Lived in Literature
A Life Lived in Literature: How It All Began (Sept. 5, 2025)
Early Reading Memories (Sept. 12, 2025)
Childhood Confusion: Reading to the Rescue (Sept. 19, 2025)
Confronting Segregation (Sept. 26, 2025)
School Reading vs. Real Reading (Oct. 10, 2025)
Childhood in Paris (Oct. 17, 2025)
My Time at Sewanee Military Academy (Oct. 24, 2025)
Existentialism for High School Seniors (Oct. 31, 2025)
Why I Majored in History, Not English (Nov. 7, 2025)
My College Search for Authenticity (Nov. 14, 2025)
On D. H. Lawrence and a Sexual Awakening (Nov. 21, 2025)
My Life as a Bildungsroman (Nov. 28, 2025)
Grad School: Literary Baptism by Fire (Dec. 5, 2025)
Early Scenes from a Marriage (Dec. 12, 2025)
Bringing Up Baby in Grad School (Dec. 19, 2025)
Grappling with Racism (Jan. 2, 2026)
Journal of a Young Teacher (Jan. 16, 2026)
Teaching and Reading in Yugoslavia (Jan. 23, 2026)
Life at 40: Barely Controlled Chaos (Jan 30, 2026)
From Secular Humanist to Christian Believer (Feb. 6 2025)
Looking Back at a Lifetime Together (Feb. 13, 2026)
To Ljubljana with Love (Feb. 20, 2026)
Forging a Separate Identity from My Father (Feb. 27, 2026)
“Better Living” Emerged from a Midnight Epiphany (March 6, 2026)

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Trump’s Duck Soup of a War

By Robin Bates | Published: March 4, 2026
The Marx Brothers in Duck Soup

Thursday

While Donald Trump has yet to satisfactorily explain why he’s launched a war with Iran, we’ve gotten one possible rationale from Secretary of State Marco Rubio: Trump knew that Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu was going to begin a war and figured that, as Israel’s ally, U.S. forces would be targeted. The bombing was to forestall those anticipated attacks. Are you clear now?

In addition to a war of choice being in blatant violation of international law, it’s also proof that we have Rufus T. Firefly in the White House.

Firefly (Groucho Marx) is the president of Fredonia in the late 1933 comedy Duck Soup. Tensions have arisen with neighboring Sylvania, leading to high stake negotiations. The following internal monologue by a paranoid leader is painfully on the mark for our present circumstances:

Firefly: I’d be unworthy of the high trust that’s been placed in me if I didn’t do everything in my power to keep our beloved Freedonia in peace with the world. I’d be only too happy to meet with Ambassador Trentino and offer him on behalf of my country the right hand of good fellowship. And I feel sure he will accept this gesture in the spirit of which it is offered. But suppose he doesn’t. A fine thing that’ll be. I hold out my hand and he refuses to accept. That’ll add a lot to my prestige, won’t it? Me, the head of a country, snubbed by a foreign ambassador. Who does he think he is, that he can come here, and make a sap of me in front of all my people? Think of it—I hold out my hand and that hyena refuses to accept. Why, the cheap four-flushing swine, he’ll never get away with it I tell you, he’ll never get away with it.
[Trentino enters]
Firefly: So, you refuse to shake hands with me, eh?
[slaps Trentino with his glove]
Trentino: Mrs. Teasdale, this is the last straw. There’s no turning back now! This means war!
Firefly: Then it’s war! Then it’s war! Gather the forces. Harness the horses. Then it’s war!

For comparison, check out Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s explanation:

“There absolutely was an imminent threat,” Rubio said. “And the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us, and we were not going to sit, sit there and absorb a blow before we respond.”

“If we stood and waited for that attack to come first, before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties,” Rubio went on. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

There are other lines in the film that are similarly relevant. Trump, when he disparaged fallen warriors as “suckers” and “losers” to White House chief of staff John Kelly, may have been channeling the following Firefly remark:

You’re a brave man. Go and break through the lines. And remember, while you’re out there risking your life and limb through shot and shell, we’ll be in here thinking what a sucker you are.

And then there’s this moment, which brings to mind Kuwaiti friendly fire downing two American jets. Like Trump, Firefly wants to give himself a medal for his performance:

Firefly: Where’s my Stradivarius?
Officer: Here, sir.
Firefly: I’ll show ’em they can’t fiddle around with old Firefly!
[he pulls a tommy gun out of his violin case and opens fire]
Firefly: Look at ’em run! Now they know they’ve been in a war!
Roland: Your Excellency!
Firefly: Hahahahahaha, they’re fleeing like rats!
Roland: But sir, I’ve got to tell you…
Firefly: Remind me to give myself the Firefly Medal for this!
[he fires again]
Roland: Your Excellency, you’re shooting your own men!
[Firefly fires again]
Firefly: What?
Roland: You’re shooting your own men!
Firefly: Here’s $5, keep it under your hat.
[holds out his hat to take the $5 back]
Firefly: Never mind, I’ll keep it under my hat.

The Iran invasion is like a mash-up of Duck Soup and 1984, which is to say, between comic ineptitude and authoritarian horror. Just as Trump invades Venezuela one day and Iran the next (with Cuba perhaps waiting in the wings), Oceania alternates between warring with Eurasia and with Eastasia. The reasons are as murky as those Trump has offered the American people:

At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

When Winston attempts to awaken Julia to this insanity, her response is not unlike those Americans who feel beaten down by Trump’s incessant assaults on the truth:

In the end he succeeded in forcing her memory back until she did dimly recall that at one time Eastasia and not Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as unimportant. “Who cares?” she said impatiently. “It’s always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.”

At one point in 2012, Trump predicted that Barack Obama would start a war to distract from his domestic challenges. Although Obama did not in fact do any such thing, we’ve learned by now with DJT that everything is projection and often prediction. It’s also how Big Brother uses supposed war victories to distract from food shortages:

Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grams to twenty.

In our case, Trump may be using foreign adventures to distract from rising inflation and his involvement in a pedophile ring.

All of this is so grim that we could use a little comedy. I therefore end with a song sung by President Firefly:

If any form of pleasure is exhibited, 
Report to me and it will be prohibited! 
I’ll put my foot down, so shall it be… 
This is the land of the free! 

The last man nearly ruined this place, 
He didn’t know what to do with it. 
If you think this country’s bad off now, 
Just wait till I get through with it! 

The Marx Brothers came out of a tradition of dark Jewish humor that helped this relentlessly persecuted people to psychologically handle pogroms and other forms of oppression. Duck Soup, however, missed its moment as Depression-era America in 1934 was looking for more optimism, such as Shirley Temple, Ginger Rogers, and Fred Astaire. Although arguably the Marx Brothers’ greatest film, it did poorly at the box office and probably would have fared better in 1931 and 1932, when the public was finding its rage and disillusion captured in violent monster and gangster movies. The cynicism of Duck Soup would have fit right in.

We today, on the other hand, can make 1984 references for only so long before becoming thoroughly demoralized. Black comedy was made for such moments.

And from another Marx Brothers’ movie: In Horse Feathers Groucho, as college president Professor Wagstaff, sounds like Trump in his singleminded determination to undo Obama and Biden’s accomplishments (including the agreement with the Iran nuclear agreement). Here’s the song he sings:

I don’t know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway
Whatever it is, I’m against it.

No matter what it is or who commenced it.
I’m against it!

Your proposition may be good
But let’s have one thing understood:
Whatever it is, I’m against it.

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Nabokov and a Timeshare Nightmare

By Robin Bates | Published: March 3, 2026
The photo that accompanied the Atlantic publication of Nabokov’s “Cloud, Castle, Lake”

Wednesday

Professors with PhDs are very smart in certain narrow areas and very dumb in many others. For some of us, the stupidity extends to timeshares. Indeed, because we prize ourselves for our thinking abilities, we can be particularly vulnerable to fast talkers. 

Thirty years ago Julia and I purchased a timeshare from Fairfield (later taken over by Wyndham), thinking of the affordable vacations that would be available to us. Little did we know that we had committed ourselves to a lease that we would be stuck with for the rest of our lives, along with rising maintenance fees. Even worse, death itself wouldn’t release us from our unsellable deed. Our sons would inherit it and the fees.

To save them from the dead hand of the past, Julia and I paid an exorbitant amount of money to Wyndham to escape the lease. For those of you who have never bought a timeshare, my advice to you is (1) thank your lucky stars you escaped and (2) resist all offers, no matter how enticing.

If my knowledge of literature didn’t save me from embarking on the purchase, it has at least provided me with literary friends in similar predicaments. I think of those duped by Herman Melville’s confidence man, by Mark Twain’s King and Duke, and by Gogol’s Chichikov (in Dead Souls). And then there are those trapped in a morass of officialdom, such as K in Kafka’s The Trial.

The work that resonates the most with me, however, is Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” published in The Atlantic in 1941. In it a man on a pleasure trip chances upon the place of his dreams. Rather than allowing him to fulfill his desire to spend the rest of his life there, however, the vacation management company intervenes and plunges him into a bureaucratic nightmare.

At first glance, our stories appear to start differently. Vasili Ivanovich doesn’t want the pleasure trip he wins through a charity raffle but decides to go after learning about the difficulties of declining. When he tries to sell his ticket at “the office of the Bureau of Pleasantrips,” he is told that to do so

he would have to have special permission from the Ministry of Transportation; when he tried them, it turned out that first he would have to draw up a complicated petition at a notary’s on stamped paper; and besides, a so-called ‘certificate of non-absence from the city for the summertime’ had to be obtained from the police.

We, by contrast, were more than ready to travel. We thought that a free weekend in Williamsburg, Virginia and a free visit to the historic site there were worth sitting through a timeshare pitch.

Then again, we didn’t realize that, had we failed to show up for the pitch, we would have had to reimburse Fairfield for everything. Although the company had a gentler way of getting us to comply than Pleasantrips, the results were the same. The tactic worked especially well on Julia and me because, like Vasili, we like to be agreeable.

Both Vasili and we thought we were free agents as we set off on our trip, not realizing that the organizers in each case had their ways of getting us to follow the mob. Vasili is subjected to peer pressure and bullying by his fellow train passengers whereas we, always with inducements, attended special group sessions in which everyone was encouraged to enthuse about past vacations. Slowly but inexorably we found ourselves being drawn in and buying more points.

To Vasili’s surprise, all the torment proves to be worth it for he finds the place he has always dreamed of. First we learn of his fantasies:

[H]e began to imagine that this trip, thrust upon him by a feminine Fate in a low-cut gown, this trip which he had accepted so reluctantly, would bring him some wonderful, tremulous happiness. This happiness would have something in common with his childhood, and with the excitement aroused in him by Russian lyrical poetry, and with some evening sky line once seen in a dream, and with that lady, another man’s wife, whom he had hopelessly loved for seven years—but it would be even fuller and more significant than all that. And besides, he felt that the really good life must be oriented toward something or someone.

Then, miraculously, his dream is fulfilled:

[A]fter another hour of marching, that very happiness of which he had once half-dreamt was suddenly discovered.

It was a pure, blue lake, with an unusual expression of its water. In the middle, a large cloud was reflected in its entirety. On the other side, on a hill thickly covered with verdure (and the darker the verdure, the more poetic it is), towered, arising from dactyl to dactyl, an ancient black castle. Of course, there are plenty of such views in Central Europe, but just this one, in the inexpressible and unique harmoniousness of its three principal parts, in its smile, in some mysterious innocence it had,—my love! my obedient one!—was something so unique, and so familiar, and so long-promised, and it so understood the beholder, that Vasili Ivanovich even pressed his hand to his heart, as if to see whether his heart was there in order to give it away.

Vasili determines to live there for the rest of his life.

Wyndham has large photos of clouds, lakes, and local landmarks in its sales offices. And if you want castles added in, perhaps you’ve seen those ads for Viking River Cruises on National Public Television. One of Wyndham’s favorite questions is “where do you dream of visiting?” which encourages the kind of fantasizing that Vasili engages in.

Unfortunately, in Vasili’s case reality sets in. His group leader will not let him remain:

You are taking a pleasure trip with us. Tomorrow, according to the appointed itinerary,—look at your ticket,—we are all returning to Berlin. There can be no question of anyone—in this case you—refusing to continue this communal journey. 

In our case, we too wanted to leave the group, and what we were then subjected to reminded me of Vasili’s fate. “What if we stopped paying our maintenance fees,” I said at one point, at which point it was pointed out that we could lose our house. Nor would death save us as our will would go into probate. While I admit that Vasili has it worse, I identify:

“If necessary we shall carry you,” said the leader grimly, “but that is not likely to be pleasant for you. I am responsible for each of you, and shall bring back each of you, alive or dead.”

Swept along a forest road as in a hideous fairy tale, squeezed, twisted, Vasili Ivanovich could not even turn around, and only felt how the radiance behind his back receded, fractured by trees, and then it was no longer there, and all around the dark firs fretted but could not interfere. As soon as everyone had got into the car and the train had pulled off, they began to beat him—they beat him a long time, and with a good deal of inventiveness. It occurred to them, among other things, to use a corkscrew on his palms; then on his feet. The post-office clerk, who had been to Russia, fashioned a knout out of a stick and a belt, and began to use it with devilish dexterity. Atta boy! The other men relied more on their iron heels, whereas the women were satisfied to pinch and to slap. All had a wonderful time.

At the end of the story Vasili, “much changed,” resigns from his job, telling his boss that “he had not the strength to belong to mankind any longer.” 

Wyndham’s tactics are softer–more Brave New World than 1984 or The Trial—but they often achieve the same ends. Thankfully I am not as broken as Vasili is but, God almighty, it has been painful!

Perhaps you’ve heard the expression, “If it seems too good to be true, it is.” Believe it.

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Hockey, Trump, and Ellison’s Invisible Man

By Robin Bates | Published: March 2, 2026
Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel in the hockey locker room

Tuesday

A friend asked me recently how I get my ideas for this column, and I thought I’d try to answer by making the question the subject of today’s blog post. In the process, I share my mixed feelings about the U.S. men’s hockey team, recent winner of an Olympic gold medal.

We process the world through our past experiences, so for one who has spent his life with his nose in books, it’s natural to see the world as literary narrative and poetic image. Given that many of the texts I cite are world treasures, there is potential for profound insight.

Once I link a news item or life incident to a particular text, the words begin to work their magic. While I often don’t know where the connection will take me, time and again I am impressed with the knowledge that ensues.

Making the initial connection is often the difficult part. Fortunately, sometimes someone else makes the connection for me. An essay mentions Milton or Voltaire or Yeats or T.S. Eliot or Tolkien, at which point I’m off and running.  But sometimes an image or phrase hovers just outside my consciousness so that hours or even a full day go by before I can pin it down. This happened with the aftermath of the hockey victory.

This was a great year for the Americans as both the men and the women triumphed over the nation that owns the sport. Both victories occurred in overtime. Applying a culinary metaphor, I savored them both.

I thought of the “savor” metaphor, however, only after I tasted the bitterness of what happened next. The sense of biting into something foul was so visceral that I knew I had encountered the image somewhere. It took me several frustrating hours before I recognized the source.

In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the unnamed narrator (let’s call him IM) has just moved to New York after getting kicked out of college. When a middle-class Black man in the south, he differentiated himself from lower class Black men (what he calls “Field Niggerism”), but in Harlem he suddenly finds himself freed from these social expectations. He can buy, without apologizing, a buttered yam, which like chitterlings, mustard greens, pigs’ ears, pork chops, and black-eyed peas are the the fare of the unrespectable. He savors the taste as I savored the U.S. victories. First, there’s the anticipation as he encounters a street vendor selling them:

The yams, some bubbling with syrup, lay on a wire rack above glowing coals that leaped to low blue flame when struck by the draft of air. The flash of warmth set my face aglow as he removed one of the yams and shut the door.

And then the taste:

I took a bite, finding it as sweet and hot as any I’d ever had, and was overcome with such a surge of homesickness that I turned away to keep my control. I walked along, munching the yam, just as suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of freedom — simply because I was eating while walking along the street. It was exhilarating. I no longer had to worry about who saw me or about what was proper. To hell with all that, and as sweet as the yam actually was, it became like nectar with the thought. 

Yet this momentary freedom gets him reflecting on how his likes and dislikes have been foisted on him. Much of his life, he realizes, has been wasted by accepting “accepted attitudes.” Suddenly the yam doesn’t taste so good:

Yet the freedom to eat yams on the street was far less than I had expected upon coming to the city. An unpleasant taste bloomed in my mouth now as I bit the end of the yam and threw it into the street; it had been frost-bitten.

After the nectar of the hockey victory, an unpleasant taste bloomed in my mouth. First there was FBI director Kash Patel chugging beers in the after-party celebration. Then it was Trump believing he had to denigrate the American women’s team in order to celebrate the win. “I must tell you,” he told the men when phoning in and inviting them to his State of the Union address, “we’re going to have to bring the women’s team, you do know that.” After that he added, “I do believe I probably would be impeached.”

In other words, those who are woke will victimize me if I say that you deserve more public accolades than than your female counterparts. To which most of the hockey players cheered.

The last bitter taste was seeing the team then used as a prop in Trump’s hate-filled speech, which among other things blamed bribery, corruption, and lawlessness on the Somali community and on African immigrants in general. The team’s borrowed valor, in other words, was used to bolster white nationalist jingoism.

Applying Invisible Man to Trump is appropriate since the man, as much as anyone, looks through people rather than seeing them. He has a “peculiar disposition of the eyes” (to quote IM) that renders them invisible. In his inhumanity, Trump demonizes everyone who disagrees with him, especially (but not only) women and people of color. Ellison’s remarkable novel explores the impact that such blindness has on Americans, white and Black both.

So that’s one way that I generate posts for this blog. 

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