As any card-toting member of POEM (Professional Organization of English Majors) knows, Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satire, A Modest Proposal, offers a chillingly simple solution to Irish poverty: Those in need should sell their year-old children as food. Swift joked that he had been assured by a “knowing American” that infants would be “most delicious .... Continue Reading →
Back to the Garden
If you are reading this blog entry, you are using some technological apparatus—computer, tablet, cell phone—which runs multiple processes at one time. If I click on the little apple icon on my Mac and then on “Force Quit,” for instance, I get a list of all the processes I am running right now—Microsoft Word, Safari,... Continue Reading →
Buck Up!
"And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy."--Kahlil Gibran I believe in the experience of pain. I believe that ours is a country of wusses but not one for wusses, and that if we don’t learn to cope... Continue Reading →