Tag Archives: A. A. Milne

Wheezles and Sneezles

Like my literary namesake, I’ve had wheezles and sneezles for the past five days.

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Portrait of the Lesbian as a Young Artist

Proust and James Joyce were particularly important in helping Alison Bechdel negotiate her complex relations with her father.

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Books about People Reading Books

Books about books give readers a sense that they are part of a larger community.

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The Rising Floodwaters of Sadness

My father is dying. One of his last acts was to find an A. A. Milne passage about Sewanee’s incessant rain for the local newspaper.

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March Madness, A Return to Innocence

Sports Saturday March Madness begins this weekend. Actually, to be exact, it begins for the big schools. Division III colleges are in the final week of their tournament. I know because my college was one step away from making the final four. For the first time ever, St. Mary’s College of Maryland sent a team […]

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On Being Named after Christopher Robin

  As I have been writing about fathers and sons in the past few posts, I shift today from my position of father to that of son and to the literary origins of my name.   My father named me after Christopher Robin and recently told me that he envisioned having the kind of relationship with […]

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Prancing Poetry and a Child’s Imagination

Last week I gave a list of my favorite children’s books when I was young.  My father, who is a poet along with being a French professor, read us poetry as well as fiction (each night, one story or chapter and one poem for each of my three brothers and me), so I thought I’d […]

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Michael Jackson and Peter Pan

  “I am Peter Pan,” Michael Jackson reportedly once said, and of course he chose to name his ranch Neverland. In this second of my two posts marking Jackson’s death, I thought I would reflect upon why J. M. Barrie’s fictional creation meant so much to him. Peter Pan: The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up […]

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The Magic World of Children’s Lit

William Kristof, the much traveled Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times, wrote recently about the disturbing way that children’s IQ scores often drop over summer vacation. The cause is lack of intellectual stimulation. The problem is more severe with poor than it is with middle class kids. As an antidote, Kristof offered […]

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