Tag Archives: Samuel Beckett

My Dinner with Mladen

By Robin Bates | Published: March 7, 2018

An account of a dinner with an old Slovenian friend and intellectual.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged intellectual conversations, Ion, King Lear, Mladen Dolar, Oedipus at Colonus, Pierre de Marivaux, Plato, Republic, Sophocles, Wayne Booth, William Shakespeare, Worstward Ho | Comments closed

Lit As a Framework for Exploring Death

By Robin Bates | Published: January 9, 2017

Paul Kalinithi turned to existential writers as he attempted to understand the fact that he was dying. He arrived at a more spiritual understanding than he anticipated.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Baron Brook Fulke Greville, death and dying, Krapp's Last Tape, Paul Kalinithi, T. S. Eliot, Waiting for Godot, Waste Land | Comments closed

Medicine & Lit, Working Together

By Robin Bates | Published: June 2, 2016

Paul Kalinithi’s “When Breath Becomes Air” represents an ideal blending of science and the humanities, including literature. It’s a book we all should be reading.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged death and dying, Doctors, Krapp's Last Tape | Comments closed

Waiting for Biden, Paul Ryan, & Reagan

By Robin Bates | Published: October 19, 2015

Some Democrats are waiting for Joe Biden and many Republicans are awaiting the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan. Samuel Beckett foresaw in all in “Waiting for Godot.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Democrats, Freedom Caucus, GOP, Joe Biden, Paul Ryan, politics, Republicans, Waiting for Godot | Comments closed

Awaiting Godot in the Age of Cable News

By Robin Bates | Published: May 5, 2014

Stephen Colbert realizes that only Beckett’s theater of the absurd will do justice to breathless media coverage of the latest crisis (whatever it is).

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged CNN, Malaysian Flight 370, Stephen Colbert, theater of the absurd, Waiting for Godot | Comments closed

Two Parables Involving Falling Leaves

By Robin Bates | Published: November 8, 2013

Scott Bates and Lucille Clifton find poetic lessons in falling leaves.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Existentialist Leaf", "lesson of the falling leaves", Albert Camus, Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, existentialism, Freedom, Jean Anouilh, Jean Paul Sartre, Lucille Clifton, Scott Bates | Comments closed

Beagles, a Wellspring of Poetry

By Robin Bates | Published: September 18, 2013

Two dogs we were keeping recently ran off, triggering a flood of anxiety and poetry.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Dogs, Four Saints in Three Acts, Jungle Book, Just So Stories, Midsummer Night's Dream, pets, Rudyard Kipling, Unnamable, William Shakespeare | Comments closed