Ode to a Frog
My ex-husband has been going through his papers, and yesterday he found something I thought had been long lost—a poem I had written as a 14-year-old sophomore in high school. How it came to be in his stuff I don’t … Continue reading →
Category Archives: Literature and writing
Reluctant to let go of “Reluctance”
I find I have still more to say about Frost’s poem “Reluctance.” The theme of the poem is the difficulty of letting go, so I guess it’s fitting and proper that I’m loathe to leave it alone after posting the … Continue reading →
Reluctance
I’ve been touched by how many people seem to have empathized with the difficulty of letting go and the sadness over the passing of time that I expressed in the post “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” … Continue reading →
Holocaust stories: temperament and trauma [Part II]
[NOTE: Part I can be found here.] I can’t find the quote right now, but Holocaust survivor and author Primo Levi—who wrote Survival In Auschwitz, which I consider the single most definitive and brilliant book on the camps from the … Continue reading →
Holocaust stories: temperament and trauma [Part I]
[Hat tip: Open Blogger at Ace’s.] [NOTE: Part II can be found here.] Here is a fascinating interview with an elderly concentration camp survivor. If you’ve read or heard many camp survivors’ tales, the horrors he faced will not surprise … Continue reading →
Europe and the Sea of Faith
When I was in college, I took a year-long survey course in art history. We began with a deep dive into Greek and Roman art, and then lingered long and hard on the cathedrals of Europe, particularly the Gothic variety. … Continue reading →
Which comes first, the duck or the chicken?
On the “literally” thread, commenter expat asked a burning question: Maybe you can help me figure out whether the duck who lives with my cousin’s chickens is literally transspecies. His egg was abandoned by his mother in the creek that … Continue reading →
Rare books, together again
The Library of Congress holds many treasures:
Continue reading →Christ in the stranger’s guise
Recently something reminded me of a book I had first read back in the 1980s, one I would recommend to everyone. It’s called Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, and it’s quite different from most Holocaust literature: An important work of … Continue reading →
Cloud cuckoo land
Recently a commenter used the phrase “cloud cuckoo land” to refer to something outlandish in the political realm. I’d heard the phrase before, and always had thought it was of relatively recent vintage—sort of like “la-la land” or “tinfoil hats.” … Continue reading →
Orwell on Tolstoy vs. Shakespeare: the theme and variations vs. the symphony
[NOTE: I’m not becoming Tolstoy-obsessed, although I’ve written two days in a row on him. However, I think that the topic of both posts is not really Tolstoy per se, but larger philosophical questions about the good life, politics, and … Continue reading →
Tolstoy on Communism—and a lot of other things
Leo Tolstoy lived from 1828 to 1910, and was probably just as famous for his political and religious/social beliefs as he was for his writing (maybe even more so). Tolstoy was a Titan of energy and creativity who later in … Continue reading →