Tuesday What are we to make of longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone’s flamboyant behavior following his arrest by Special Counselor Robert Mueller for lying to Congress about his contacts with Wikileaks? I think back to a passage from Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man that I applied to Trump during the campaign but which applies equally […]
Thursday I came across this enjoyable tweet from one Ross Danniel Bullen, who imagines a Victorian version of the House Hunters television show: Host: I— Henry James: I should like a kitchen whose concept is – how shall I conceive of it – not closed, not in some way occluded, but bright, agape, unrestrained as […]
Posted in Austen (Jane), Beckett (Samuel), Dickens (Charles), James (Henry), Wilde (Oscar) | Also tagged Bachelor, Bachelorette, Hard Times, Henry James, House Hunters, Importance of Being Earnest, Jane Austen, Jeopardy, Lost, Oscar Wilde, Pride and Prejudice, reality television, Samuel Beckett, television shows, Waiting for Godot | Friday High school teacher Carl Rosin, whose Great Expectations class interviewed me by telephone yesterday, suggested that Donald Trump’s national shutdown is giving us our own versions of Dickens’s “toadies and humbugs.” For a while I’ve seen Vice President Michael Pence as candidate #1, but I must say that South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is […]
Thursday Tim Parks has written a provocative essay for The New York Review of Books, asking, Is literature wise? In the sense, does it help us to live? And if not, what exactly is it good for? If you follow this blog, you already know my answers: –Yes, literature is wiser than we are (and […]
Dickens would have a field day with the Trump administration’s decision to separate children from their families.
The U.S. celebrating the opening of the Jerusalem embassy while Israeli soldier kill scores of Gaza protesters bring to mind Dickens’s “Tale of Two Cities.”
Columnist George Will calls Mike Pence a cross between Elmer Gantry and Uriah Heep. I see the two and raise to a Dante sycophant and Shakespeare’s Cassius.
Posted in Dante, Dickens (Charles), Lewis (Sinclair), Shakespeare (William) | Also tagged Dante, David Copperfield, Elmer Gantry, Inferno, Julius Caesar, Mike Pence, Sinclair Lewis, William Shakespeare | Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Chinua Achebe, John Milton, and Thomas Hardy see through men like departing Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
Posted in Achebe (Chinua), Carroll (Lewis), Dickens (Charles), Hardy (Thomas), Milton (John), Rand (Ayn) | Also tagged "How Doth the Little Crocodile", Alice in Wonderland, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, Chinua Achebe, Hard Times, John Milton, Lewis Carroll, Oliver Twist, Paradise Lost, Paul Ryan politics, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Things Fall Apart, Thomas Hardy | In her account of the 2016 election aftermath, Hillary Clinton resolved not to become a Miss Havisham. This is testimony to her depth of soul.
