I’m not a big hockey fan, but I cheered along with (most of) the rest of America when the USA team defeated Canada and won the gold medal in the Olympics in Milan. The algorithms at Facebook and Instagram noted my interest and filled my feeds with reels, posts, photos and news reports. And then came the Huffington Post and its coverage. I suppose there will always be one Ebenezer Scrooge shouting “Bah! Humbug!”
When the American Revolution began, colonists had a choice – join, resist, or stay out of it. Quakers usually avoided participation, but one, Abraham Carlile of Philadelphia, chose active support of the British when they occupied the city. When the British army abandoned the city the following year, Carlile remained, believing he’d doing nothing wrong. And that decision turned out to be a mistake.
If you’re interested in Medieval history, you might be interested in what Andrew Roycroft is starting at New Grub Street. He’s beginning a series on the Medieval period, starting with a discussion of Piers Plowman by William Langland. I haven’t read the poem since taking English literature in college some 50 years ago, and I think I’ll revisit it.
When I read Evangelineby Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in high school, I had no idea that I was not only reading one of his epic poems; I was also reading a fictionalized account of some of my own ancestry and history.
Yes, I knew I had some French ancestry on my mother’s side, sitting side by side with some German as well. I didn’t know that the German had arrived relatively late, in the mid-nineteenth century, while the French had been there more than a century earlier. And I didn’t know that most of that French had come from Canada, in the maritime provinces collectively called Acadia. A tiny handful of my mother’s French ancestors had come directly from France.
I didn’t know that, at college football games, when I chanted “Hot boudin! Cold coosh coosh! Come on Tigers, poosh, poosh, poosh,” I was using words from my own ancestry. When I read A Cajun Night Before Christmas to my children, I never thought to ask why I could imitate the Cajun accent so well.
Yesterday, I received I Gave You My Silence, the new novel by Nobel Prizewinner Mario Vargas Llosa. Vargas Llosa died last year; this is his final work, published posthumously.
When I saw the notice that it was being published. My mind moved back in time, some 40 years, to 1986. I was in a master of liberal arts program at Washington University in St. Louis, and I signed up for a fall seminar – The Latin American Novel. We would be reading novels by Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Manuel Puig (Kiss of the Spider Woman), and Carlos Fuentes, among others. The reading syllabus was challenging.
I don’t recall why I signed up for that particular course; others were available. My total reading experience in the Latin American novel was limited to one book – One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Perhaps that was the reason; Latin America has a vast literature, and I’d read very little of it.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Poetry is often associated with the young. We think of the fire of the Romantics, or the young T.S. Eliot upending traditional poetry with modernism with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. But even younger poets age, banking the fire and passion as they become tempered by experience and understanding.
Two of my favorite contemporary poets are Luci Shaw (1928-2025) and Rhina Espaillat (b. 1932). It’s something of a coincidence, or perhaps it isn’t, that both reached their 90s. Shaw died last December, just shy of her 95th birthday. Espaillat tuns 94 this year. Theirs is not the poetry of youth but instead the poetry of long lives lived – and lived well. It’s also the poetry of understanding and affection for people, in all our wild and crazy humanity.
For Instance, the new poetry collection by Espaillat, demonstrates this understanding and affection.
