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Various Secret Forms Within
Billy Budd, Sailor (adapted for the stage, LA Opera) In a remarkable moment early in Billy Budd, Sailor, Melville writes, “In this matter of writing, resolve as one may to keep to the main road, some...
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Naming Names in THE NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Frederick Douglass I’m intrigued by Frederick Douglass’s habit of identifying individuals by their proper names in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Though Douglass’s naming of names may...
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Jarena Lee’s Many Conversions
Jarena Lee One of the things that struck me about Jarena Lee’s (the 19th-century African American woman travelling minister) account of her religious conversion is that she seems to undergo a...
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Speculations on Racist Violence (w/ some observations) in Zora Neale...
Zora Neale Hurston In her introduction to Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road, Maya Angelou writes: “Hurston [...] most certainly lived through the race riots and other atrocities of her time....
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Richard Wright’s Anti-Christian Pragmatism
Richard Wright Richard Wright’s Black Boy is rich in social criticism. He unhesitantly indicts racial prejudice, poor public education, and economic inequality as social blights with dire,...
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Ralph Ellison’s Light/Dark Paradox
Ralph Ellison When the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man says, “My hole is warm and full of light,” he begins to establish a paradox in which light and darkness collapse into each...
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Bernie Sanders on Denmark’s Solidarity System
Denmark in Red Bernie Sanders, the Independent senator from Vermont, has a recent article on the Democratic Socialists of America’s website assessing Denmark’s “solidarity system.” I’ve always known...
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The United Kingdom of American States
King George III by Allan Ramsay I’ve recently taken to reading Juan Cole’s excellent Informed Comment blog, where he writes on all sorts of current events, including the contemporary Middle East, the...
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Critical Approaches to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
Gustav Dore’s Ancient Mariner with Albatross Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is, in many respects, a poem about articulation and interpretation. That is, despite its fantastic plot and...
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Nothing but a Corpse
At the beginning of Orhan Pamuk’s fascinating novel My Name Is Red, one of the story’s narrators, Master Elegant Effendi, says: “I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well” (3)....
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The Pilgrim at the Gate of Idleness
The Pilgrim at the Gate of Idleness I took a detour to the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) on my way to work the other day, which has become all the more appealing since the DMA made membership free. Yes:...
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Seasickness at the Ball
Seasickness at the Ball François-Auguste Biard’s c.1860s oil painting (on canvas) *Le mal de mer, au bal, abord d’une corvette Anglaise* (Seasickness at the Ball, on Board an English Corvette) is one...
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Celtic Tale
Celtic Tale Paul Sérusier’s *Celtic Tale* (oil on canvas, 1894) is among the more perplexing paintings that hang in the Dallas Museum of Art. It has a strange inside-out quality: figures are outlined...
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Drone Hive Strange No More…
With major changes in my life looming, I’ve decided to discontinue DRONE HIVE STRANGE. I will now be posting at Expat Academix (http://expatacademix.wordpress.com), where you can follow my adventures...
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The Year of Ecological Thinking
The first time I entered a desert was fourteen years ago, in the winter of 2002. I drove west from New Jersey to Indiana, and then southwest to Gallup, New Mexico, where I rested for the first time...
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The Last Chapter of Genesis
Christian theology is at odds with itself when it comes to the natural world. On the one hand, Christianity promotes a deep-seated aversion to nature, which is said to be corrupted by sin. Joseph...
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Locusts and Wild Honey
When I think of the word “ecology,” images of rainforests leap immediately to mind. The dense canopy, the intense diversity of flora and fauna, the screeching monkeys and brilliantly colored birds. If...
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Accused = Convicted; Or, How to Write about Terrorism in a Country with a 99%...
A few weeks ago, the website Literary Hub published a brief overview of Chinese crime writing* under the title “Shanghai Noir: How to Write Crime Fiction in a City with a 100% Conviction Rate.” Written...
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Exercising Wisdom / Exchanging Bodies
Considering the extent to which education impacts some of the central characters in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, it is surprising that the novel contains so little information about Rahel’s...
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The Monster in the Park
I spent the morning reading Luke Morgan’s The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design, which is a fascinating book. I’m particularly interested in what he...
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