Film Friday Henceforth I will devote my Friday posts to something I like almost as much as literature–which is to say, movies. Film is, after all, a narrative art form, and I teach film history and theory as well as literature at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Although I may, at times, look at intersections between […]
from Songs of Innocence and Experience My Introduction to Literature class (focus on Nature) has just moved from Robinson Crusoe to William Blake, and we are seeing in the 18th century a conflict similar to one we are witnessing today over the environment. Defoe’s protagonist is an advocate of the “drill, baby, drill” approach to nature although, […]
An unusually heavy snowstorm has locked us into our homes these past few days, cancelling my Monday classes and locking down the county. Years ago, in an essay I’d love to find again, an author wrote about the “found time” of a snow day. She noted that, because we normally believe we must make every […]
I share today a poem by my father Scott Bates, who is an ardent birdwatcher as well as poet. The poem reminds us of an ongoing war that too often we want to push out of our minds. Through contrasting the natural world with the disasters created by humans, my father expresses his longing for […]
Euripides’ The Bacchae was written 2500 years ago. Given the shape our environment is in, the play is more urgent than ever. The story involves the nature god Dionysus, who visits Thebes followed by a troupe of dancing women, the Maenads or Bacchae. Dionysus is the product of a union between Zeus and Semele, a […]
Claude Lorrain,”View of La Crescenza” (1648-50) Poetry enhances our lives in a host of little ways. It did so in a walk I took around campus with my wife last week. It was a beautiful fall day and we work at a beautiful campus. There is an incline at the edge of college that we […]
