Monday My wife Julia alerted me to an intriguing although somewhat frustrating article in Atlantic about the end of time. Drawing on Frank Kermode’s 1967 The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Megan Garber wrestles with an issue recently raised by The Washington Post: how do we live with constant reminders […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Dover Beach", "Second Coming", Alexander Pope, endings, Frank Kermode, King Lear, Matthew Arnold, modernism, post-apocalyptic fiction, Sense of an Ending, William Butler Yeats, William Shakespeare, world weary ennui | 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 Uncategorized | Also tagged Bachelor, Bachelorette, Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Henry James, House Hunters, Importance of Being Earnest, Jane Austen, Jeopardy, Lost, Oscar Wilde, Pride and Prejudice, reality television, television shows, Waiting for Godot | 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 | 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.
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.
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.”
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).
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 | Two dogs we were keeping recently ran off, triggering a flood of anxiety and poetry.
