Tag Archives: Homer

Michael Vick, Escape Artist Extraordinaire

By Robin Bates | Published: September 25, 2010

Why do I find myself rooting for someone guilty of an abominable crime? And yet this Sunday, when the Philadelphia Eagles play the Jacksonville Jaguars, I will find myself cheering for Michael Vick. The stories of the dog fighting ring run by Vick will turn any stomach. He went to jail for it and now […]

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Learning to Live with E-Readers

By Robin Bates | Published: August 5, 2010

Gustave Dore, Don Quixote  An e-reader has entered our family. Here’s how it happened. My son Toby is studying for his English Ph.D preliminaries and wanted to spend a month reading 19th century British works in the family Maine cottage. He was accompanied by his girlfriend Candice, who is writing qualifying essays for her dissertation. […]

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Epic vs. Ironic Heroes

By Robin Bates | Published: June 10, 2010

On Monday I described my friend Alan as an Odysseus figure for the way he has coming back, time after time, in his battle with his cancer.  He appreciated the article but was taken aback by the comparison and asked why I hadn’t compared him instead with someone like Holden Caulfield.  He said he didn’t […]

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A Battle with Cancer: The Epic Version

By Robin Bates | Published: June 7, 2010

From time to time I have written about my friend Alan, who has been assaulted by a series of cancerous tumors that the doctors keep on removing, either through surgery or through radiation/cyberknifing.  He has had tumors removed from his eyelid, his neck, both lungs (six in all from the lungs) and now, most recently, […]

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Maurine Holbert Hogaboom Exits Stage Left

By Robin Bates | Published: March 30, 2010

Yesterday a good friend died. Her name was Maurine Holbert Hogaboom and she was 98. If you want to read about her amazing life—how she journeyed to New York from rural Texas as a member of a burlesque troupe, how she found a living in the theatre, how she was called up before the House […]

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Poets Helped Shape Modern Olympics

By Robin Bates | Published: February 27, 2010

Sports Saturday I am adding a new feature to Better Living through Beowulf, which I am calling Sports Saturday.  If you wish to see all of the website’s posts on sports and literature, click on “sports” in the tag cloud. Once again the mesmerizing spectacle of the Olympics has descended upon us as we watch […]

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Is Father-Son Conflict Inevitable?

By Robin Bates | Published: July 22, 2009

I had an interesting conversation with my two sons yesterday as we drove them and my daughter-in-law to the Portland airport, marking the beginning of the end of our summer vacation.  The conversation began with me wondering why there weren’t works of literature that accurately capture the kind of father-son relationship that I feel that […]

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The Magic World of Children’s Lit

By Robin Bates | Published: July 7, 2009

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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