In the final Epilogue, Prior, Louis, Belize, and Hannah sat on the rim of the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. That was one of the most memorable shots in the HBO series for me. These four characters sit under the giant statues of an angel, surrounded by the wings of the angel. This angel is […]
Read More →Category: Art
Camus wrap-up
As promised, I am creating a post here for us to discuss the swimming scene. However, as I was preparing to post this I discovered that during the 2012 class, I must have fallen sick for the session in which we would have finished our discussion of this novel, and so I had created a […]
Read More →Facing Death
A common theme that interconnects multiple readings, and perhaps becomes more apparent in Defoe’s work and matures in Pushkin’s “A Feast During the Plague” is the personification of death. We are introduced to different descriptions of mortality and the plague and more importantly, further understand characters, figures and viewpoints through how ‘it’ is described. To […]
Read More →The city in tears
Defoe illustrates in great detail how the face of London drastically changed as a result of the plague. Once a cosmopolitan, buzzing city, he now describes it as “desolate”, stating that “London might well be all in tears”. This dark description of a once lively city reminded me of the impact that the pandemic had […]
Read More →Can you see my ghosts?
Richard Eyre was the director of Ibsen’s Ghosts at the BAM Harvey Theater in 2015. In this interview he is asked “Why do people have to write plays which are so sad?” He answers that “that is what art is about… perceiving pieces of the world that can’t be put together in any other way.” He is touching […]
Read More →ORPHÉE ET EURYDICE: Act III Duet
I’ve posted this in the past, but the version I used has been taken down. Here’s another version, though the subtitles are in Spanish instead of English. Perhaps you can piece it together if you’re not one of our resident hispanohablantes. Early in Part IV of Camus’s The Plague, Cottard and Tarrou head to the Municipal […]
Read More →A Feast: Remixed, Recreated, and Reimagined
“The “little tragedies” contain a number of scenes that are so intensely dramatic that they demand to be seen and heard, rather than merely read” (Anderson, 6). From our reading aloud of Pushkin’s A Feast During the Plague it became clear that the play is chock-full of emotion, ranging from love to guilt to horror. […]
Read More →Take a break and enjoy these different book covers :)
Personally, I am a big fan of book covers. When I was young and went to the bookstore, I would only pick up those books whose covers interested me (so this is why I end up reading more magazines than books… ). After I finish Animal’s People with a strong feeling of depression, I really […]
Read More →Who’s feasting today?
On the 23rd of July 2014, Barack Obama spoke at a $32,400 per plate fundraiser. Meanwhile, Vladimir Yakunin, a Russian businessman whose assets are being frozen and his visas blocked, updated his Facebook page with pictures of his family sailing in the Caribbean. These factoids are especially crucial to us, analysts of Pushkin’s ‘A Feast […]
Read More →Scapegoat mechanisms
We talk fairly casually about the notion of the scapegoat — a being forced to bear the burdens of a larger group’s sins or flaws, ritually sacrificed or exiled in order to restore social balance — and certainly this is a useful term for us as we think about social responses to epidemics. One of […]
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