Roger Clemens tried to bully his Congressional interrogators the way that Oedipus bullies witnesses. To say that he should have handled himself differently is to say that he should have been a different man.
Sign up for my weekly newsletter
Tag Archives: Sophocles
At 60, a Comfortable Old Scarecrow
Having just turned 60, I’ve been thinking of Teiresias. Wise though the blind seer may be, his advice doesn’t help others that much. Aging, in other words, appears to require humility.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Aging, Bacchae, Carl Jung, Euripides, Homer, Odyssey, Oedipus, T. S. Eliot, Wasteland Comments closed
Do Mistaken Idealists Apologize?
Watch out for political purists and dogmatic idealists. They can do a lot of damage. A writer who delivers this warning is Milan Kundera, a Czech novelist who owes his insights to his experience with communism and the 1968 Soviet invasion. Expect to encounter regular posts from me about Kundera because I am mentoring a […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Communism, Milan Kundera, Oedipus, politics, Unbearable Lightness of Being Comments closed
Using Twilight to Teach Antigone
Having compared Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight yesterday with Frances Burney’s Evelina, I feel I owe my readers an apology and an explanation. The apology is that I violated one of my principles for the website and judged the book by the movie. All I’ve read of Twilight is the excerpt on amazon.com. If I sell the […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged adolescence, Alexander Pope, Antigone, Dunciad, Father-daughter conflict, Stephenie Meyer, teaching Comments closed
Why Didn’t Poetry Save Neil from Suicide?
Yesterday I wrote about how Dead Poets Society, despite its support for poetry, still doesn’t give poetry enough credit and that Keating is the coin side of J. Evans Pritchard. Whereas Pritchard wants to graph literary excellence on a Cartesian plane, Keating (at least in the scenes we see, which are all we have to […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged adolescence, Antigone, Dead Poets Society, English teachers, Midsummer Night's Dream, Peter Weir, suicide, teaching, William Shakespeare Comments closed