Month: December 2012
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Boccaccio in Love
I love love, and I love (for the most part) teaching and reading about love, especially when such involves the work of a ‘master’ of love such as Sappho, Ovid, Hafiz, Stendhal, or Octavio Paz. Giovanni Boccaccio, the ‘third leg’ of the great Italian humanist triad after Dante and Petrarch, certainly belongs in such esteemed…
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Dead Sea Scrolls
I wish I could get excited about the Dead Sea Scrolls, but frankly, I’m having great trouble doing so. And this is from a guy who generally loves sacred texts, for all their weirdness and ‘human, all-too-human’ aspects. Just the other day I was raving to a friend about the Vedas with their longing for…
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The Evil that is Plastic, Part I
Prior to the recent US presidential election I participated in one of those on-line polls (something I usually avoid as being silly and time-consuming). After asking a series of questions regarding values/policies on a wide range of issues, this poll matches you to the political party (and leader) with which you have the most in…
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Post-feminist Neo-gothic Fairy Tales
After finishing Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, I turned my ‘leisure reading’ eyes to something completely different — albeit a text and author equally indebted to “Gothic” sensibilities of another sort — Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber & Other Stories (1979). This collection is a ‘post-feminist’ reconfiguring of classic fairy tales, as bloody and lubricious as the originals, but…