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Recent Posts
- My Book Draw-List for 2019
- An Upstart Poet I Like a Lot
- And a Child Shall Lead Them: Healing What Ails Us
- The Plight of Native Americans in a White America
- Why We Name Our Children as We do.
- Thoughts on a remarkable book I’ve just re-read
- Trophy Hunting Looms for Grizzly Bears
- Amy Lowell’s “A Fixed Idea”: An Exploration in Paradox
- Artificial Intelligence: Will It Take Your Job?
- Alzheimer Breakthrough? Bredeson’s The End of Alzheimer’s: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline
- Does American Sign Language (ASL) Have a Future?
- Does the Qur’an Preach Violence?
- Elegy for Iris: A Review
- My hummingbird friends
- NFL Hypocrisy
- Love for All Seasons
- Baseball’s Decline
- The Left’s War on Free Speech
- Reflections on the 2017 Philip Larkin Exhibition at Hull
- Perhaps Someday We Will Learn How to Live
- America’s Unofficial Poet Laureate: Mary Oliver
- On First Looking Into Milford’s Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay
- Sarah Teasdale: “There Will Come Soft Rains”
- Is Mindfulness Warmed-over Buddhism?
- She showed us the way: Reflections on Mary Tyler Moore
- Book fan, Barack Obama
- Happiness: What it is and How to Find It
- Tibet’s Tragedy: A Culture Teetering into Oblivion
- Weighing-in: Reflections on 2016
- Does the Electoral College Have a Future?
Author Archives: RJ
Does American Sign Language (ASL) Have a Future?
We all have hobbies or special interests. Mine has been studying languages. As a child, it literally became an obsession. I’d buy paperbacks with my meager allowance, seemingly offering a pathway to fluency in German, a language I desperately wanted … Continue reading
Posted in Health, Technology
Tagged American Sign Language, ASL, Bébian, cochlear implants, deaf, Gerald Shea, hard of hearing, hearing aids, oralism, sign language, The Sounds of Silence
2 Comments
Does the Qur’an Preach Violence?
Yesterday came news of the slaughter of up to 300 Sufi worshippers exiting a mosque in Egypt’s Sinai at the close of prayer, among them, twenty-seven children. It isn’t the first time such a murderous attack on unarmed civilians, even … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Reflections
Tagged Boko Haram, Garry Wills, ISIS, Islam, Koran, Quran, Sufi, Taliban, theocracy
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Elegy for Iris: A Review
“We can only learn to love by loving.” —Iris Murdoch I’ve just read John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris, his moving memoir of his wife, renowned British novelist Iris Murdoch—26 novels in addition to nonfiction—who succumbed to Alzheimer’s in 1999 at … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged authors, book reviews, Elegy for Iris, Iris and her Friends, Irish Murdoch, John Bagley, writers
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My hummingbird friends
My hummingbird friends descend upon my garden landscape each spring, or like clockwork with the advent of April, having journeyed more than a thousand miles from their winter feeding grounds to the south or in Mexico. They stay with me, … Continue reading
NFL Hypocrisy
The media has been all over this story of Sunday’s NFL response to Trump’s provocative tweet that NFL team owners should fire players who don’t stand proud when the national anthem is played: “Wouldn’t you love to see one of … Continue reading
Posted in People, Politics, Reflections
Tagged Koepernick, National Anthem, NFL, NFLprotests, Trump
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Love for All Seasons
“I hope that I will be the last victim in China’s long record of treating words as crime.” Liu Xiaobo (1955-2017) China isn’t usually a quotidian staple of the Westerner’s mindset. Let’s face it: our culture operates in Eurocentric … Continue reading
Posted in People, Poetry
Tagged "Morning", "Road to Darkness:, Liu Xiaobo, Liu Zia, People's Republic of China, Poetry
1 Comment
Baseball’s Decline
Last night, the Cleveland Indians won their twentieth straight game, tying the 2000 Oakland A’s, an American League record. Win one more, and they’ll have tied the 1935 Chicago Cubs. Still, they have a ways to go for the all … Continue reading
The Left’s War on Free Speech
But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up … Continue reading
Reflections on the 2017 Philip Larkin Exhibition at Hull
The Guardian (July 4, 2017) features a review of a favorite poet of mine, Philip Larkin, in connection with a current exhibit of Larkin artifacts at Hull’s Brynmore Jones Library, where he was a librarian for many years. It notes … Continue reading
Posted in Poetry
Tagged Hull, literary criticism, Philip Larkin, Poetry, poets, Terry Eagleton
1 Comment
Perhaps Someday We Will Learn How to Live
Every morning I awaken to a country bristling with hate, intolerance, and violence. Trump bullied his way to the presidency, exploiting public anxieties, e. g., steel belt resentment of jobs sent abroad, latent fears of a changing demographic replacing White … Continue reading
Posted in Lifestyle, Politics
Tagged hate, Islamaphobia, Muslims, Southern Poverty Law Center, Trump
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