Notre-Dame de Paris as seen on May 24, 2012. Photograph by Peter K. Burian.
In a week in which we’ve “rendered unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are (April 15, tax day, having coincided with the beginning of Holy Week, whose end in turn coincided with Passover) — we also continued our discussion of the language and literature of leadership.
Read More“The Battle of Agincourt” from Enguerrand de Monstrelet’s “Chronique de France.” (circa 1495), manuscript on parchment.
“Game of Thrones” has returned, but I gave up on it after the first season. I found it sexist and misogynistic. If you’re going to show female nudity, then you have to show male nudity, as HBO did on “Rome.”
In any event, “GOT” had nothing on the Plantagenets, the Rolls-Royce of English royal families.
Read MoreLestat, the rapturous protagonist of Anne Rice’s “The Vampire Chronicles,” has the right attitude toward (unending) life.
Three friends, the same reaction: They’re all in a tizzy — bewitched, bothered and bewildered — by Trump world.
One is appalled at the Trump Administration’s restrictive treatment of pregnant undocumented immigrants. Another is angry about President Donald J. Trumpet’s policies and tone in general. And speaking of which, the third is severely stressed by his threats to the American resistance, which preceded the massacre of 50 Muslims — and the injury of just as many — at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand by yet another young man with a disproportionate rage at life’s rejections, one who counted El Presidente as a white power inspiration.
Read MoreThe case of two American brides of ISIS fighters who want to come home has some of us remembering Edward Everett Hale’s tale of renunciation, remorse and redemption.
In Edward Everett Hale’s 1863 short story “The Man Without A Country,” treasonous Lt. Philip Nolan renounces the United States, getting his wish — never to hear about his native land again. But sailing the seven seas in a military ship as a kind of Flying Dutchman or Ancient Mariner, Nolan finds the country he relinquished is everywhere, because it is lodged in his mind and, ultimately, his heart. He dies, having composed this epitaph for himself: "In memory of PHILIP NOLAN, Lieutenant in the Army of the United States. He loved his country as no other man has loved her; but no man deserved less at her hands."
I thought of this when I read the story of two American women who married — and were abused by — ISIS fighters and now want to come back to the United States
Read MoreJ.M.W. Turner’s “Shipwreck of the Minotaur” (1810), oil on canvas. Calouste Gulbenkian Museum.
When I was in college, I was invited by some female classmates to join them in posing nude for some Polaroids. Horrified but not wanting to appear uncool, I instead posed a question: “You want to be an architect, a lawyer, a doctor, a biochemist?,” I asked. “Yes, of course," they said. This was the 1970s when sexual liberation and experimentation was in the air along with lofty ambitions for women and the women’s movement. But I saw that those ambitions and that liberation were on collision course and told my classmates that those photos would one day come back to bite them in their bare butts.
Read MoreNathanial Hone the Elder’s “Portrait of Catherine Maria ‘Kitty’ Fisher” (1763-64).
I tend to use this headline to write about young men who have a disproportionate rage at the world and take it out on others as mass murderers, assassins, terrorists and serial killers. I’ve also written about a number of literary works that deal with such young men – Homer’s “The Iliad,” John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” among them.
But I think it is also an appropriate title for a post about the Lambda Literary Awards, which I attended Monday night at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts as a nominee. My book “The Penalty for Holding,” published by Less Than Three Press, the second novel in the series “The Games Men Play” was a finalist in the Best Bisexual Fiction category. (When I got the news, I had two thoughts: This must be an email for somebody else. And, were any of the characters in my book bisexual? It goes to show that the readers sometimes know more than the authors do.)
As I sat there, I had a feeling of disassociation. I didn’t know anyone …
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