Reading Du Fu

Some friends and I are reading Du Fu in David Young’s translation. Here’s what Ye Xie (1627-1703) had to say about him– “Take any one of Du Fu’s poems, or even one line, and everywhere…

He Would Have Never Gotten Tenure

The thing is to get under the students’ skin and arouse enough enthusiasm that they get under their own skin.  This means allowing yourself to be yourself in class. My own best teachers were WC…

Comfort and Consolation

What I saw then was this fairly obvious faculty of art: that it goes on, it lasts a bit longer that our frail human lives—it offers comfort. The vision is more enduring than our persons—it…

Pass It On

A work of art is something you make, something you give to other people. It’s an object for use, and people can make many different uses of the same work. Susan Sontag

Respecting the Vietnamese

On John Balaban’s Remembering Heaven’s Face: A Moral Witness in Vietnam For Chris, Carol, and Cristina John Balaban declared himself a Conscientious Objector during the VietnamWar; he ended up going to Vietnam, but as a member…

A Dangerous Novel

In his novel Life and Fate Vasily Grossman exposed the horrors of the Soviet system Some of the Soviet intellectuals acknowledged He had told the truth But they were against publishing it Because it could hurt the…