Tag Archives: Odyssey

Judge Doty in the Role of Deus ex Machina

By Robin Bates | Published: March 5, 2011

Sports Saturday Negotiations between the National Football League owners and the Players Association were at an impasse. The owners locking out the players seemed all but inevitable, along with suspension of the 2011 season. Then the goddess Athena stepped in. Taking the form of U.S. District Judge David Doty, she ordered the two sides to […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Beowulf, blood feuds, Football, Homer, labor negotiation, Sports | Comments closed

Rogers No Longer in Odysseus’ Shadow

By Robin Bates | Published: February 12, 2011

Sports Saturday Something memorable occurred last Sunday in Dallas in addition to the Green Bay Packers bringing “Vince Lombardi home” in their Super Bowl victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers. Quarterback Aaron Rogers stepped out of the shadow of a legend. The literary equivalent that comes to mind is Homer’s Telemachus, but Rogers is Telemachus with […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Aaron Rogers, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Brett Favre, Football Green Bay Packers, Homer, Sports, Ulysses | Comments closed

Analyzing Loughner’s Booklist

By Robin Bates | Published: January 10, 2011

Like much of America, I am still in a state of shock over Saturday’s shooting of a Congresswoman, a judge, and 16 others. Like many I wonder if this was an example of a disturbed mind encountering the inflamed political rhetoric that has come to characterize American political discourse. (Add Arizona’s permissive gun laws into […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Adolph Hitler, Aesop, Aldous Huxley, Alice through the Look Glass, Alices Adventures in Wonderland, Arizona killings, Ayn Rand, Brave New World, Charles Bukowski, Communist Manifesto, Ernest Hemingway, Fables, Fahrenheit 451, Gulliver's Travels, Harper Lee, Hermann Hesse, Homer, James Barrie, Jared Lee Loughner, Jonathan Swift, Karl Marx, Ken Kesey, L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll, Mein Kampf, Meno, nimal Farm, Norton Juster Phentom Tollbooth, Old Man and the Sea, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Peter Pan, Plot, Pulp, Ray Bradbury, Reading George Orwell, Republic, Siddhartha, To Kill a Mockingbird, violence, We the Living, Wizard of Oz | Comments closed

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 […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Beggar's Opera, Br'er Rabbit, Football, Homer, Joel Chandler Harris, John Gay, Michael Vick, Sports | Comments closed

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. […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Don Quixote, electronic books, Homer, Iliad, Miguel Cervantes, print culture, publishing, reading, technology | Comments closed

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 […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Anatomy of Criticism, Catcher in the Rye, death and dying, Heroism, Homer, J. D. Salinger, Northrup Frye, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | Comments closed

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, […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Alan Paskow, cancer, death and dying, Homer | Comments closed

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 […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Add new tag, death and dying, Homer, Maurine Holbert Hogaboom | Comments closed

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 […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Homer, Olympics, Sports, Thomas Kyd | Comments closed