Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship
I was 8, maybe 9 years old, when my parents gave me a hardcover copy of Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship by Victor Appleton II. Probably a birthday or…
books
Snow White and the Huntsman reviewed
Take one part Brothers Grimm and one part Malory’s Morte d’Artur, add a dash of Tolkein, a pinch of Joan of Arc, a sprinkling of Robin Hood and a sprig…
New projects, new horizons
Hello, all you phenomenal followers of Polygonic, who’ve put up with both my obtuse rants and my long, long silences with absolute aplomb. Your stamina and support bends my actual…
New projects, new horizons
Hello, all you phenomenal followers of Polygonic, who’ve put up with both my obtuse rants and my long, long silences with absolute aplomb. Your stamina and support bends my actual…
Waterloo, 200 years later
This June we will be a short two years from the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo*. It is expected to be a large event, especially since the 100th…
Rasputin: Two Perspectives
Perhaps no character stands out in pre-Revolution Russia as much as that of Grigory Rasputin. He was influential, enigmatic, charismatic, secretive, held no office, yet had enormous influence on the…
Shakespeare’s Lost Plays
Shakespeare’s canon, as it is known today, is incomplete. The Bard is known to have written several plays that were not, for various reasons, included in the First Folio printed…
The Pulp Renaissance
In the late 1950s, I came across a copy (1912; an original edition, I believe) of Edgar Rice Burrough’s first published novel, Tarzan, The Ape Man, on my parent’s bookshelf…
Plato, Music and Misquotes
I spent a pleasant morning, Saturday, browsing through the works of Plato, hunting for the source of a quotation I saw on Facebook, today.* I did several textual searches for…
The Missing Lines
The National Museum of Iraq – known originally as the Baghdad Archaeological Museum – once housed some of the oldest works of literature in the world. Treasures from the origins…
April, the cruellest month
April, wrote T.S. Eliot in his remarkable poem, The Waste Land, is the “cruellest month.”* And not merely because of the inclement and unsettling weather that seems to mix winter…
Culloden and the Family Tree, 267 Years Later
It doesn’t begin with Culloden. History is seldom so neat and precise that a single event can be identified as the start or end of a thing. Rather, Culloden was…
Enter Christopher Marlowe – Again
Back in the late 1990s, I wrote an essay about the “controversy” over who actually wrote the works of Shakespeare. I wrote, then, Not everyone agrees that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.…
Homeschooling Topic of the Week: Afghanistan
I noticed the book The Sky of Afghanistan, by Ana A. de Eulate and Sonja Wimmer, with the library’s collection of new kids’ books. The title of the book brought…
Homeschooling Topic of the Week: Afghanistan
I noticed the book The Sky of Afghanistan, by Ana A. de Eulate and Sonja Wimmer, with the library’s collection of new kids’ books. The title of the book brought…
Weiwei-isms: the Coles Notes of an infamous Chinese dissident
A magnitude 8.0 earthquake shook through Wenchuan County in Sichuan province of the People’s Republic of China on May 12, 2008. Official figures listed 69,197 dead, including 5,335 children, mostly…
The Consolation of Literature
For Boethius, it was the Consolation of Philosophy*. For me, it’s literature. Not to write about it so much as to read it. Consolation from the act of reading. And…
the complicated problem of sweatshops
Have you ever heard of the island of Saipan? It is an American territory in the pacific, where I had never heard of it until an email arrived from Walt…
the complicated problem of sweatshops
Have you ever heard of the island of Saipan? It is an American territory in the pacific, which as a Canadian I had never heard of it until an email…