psychology dector

The thing I most appreciate about celebrated writer, Maya Angelou , is her bravery.   She spoke and wrote what was on her mind, never mincing words.   In today’s world of empty praise and false positive affirmation, this poet is a fresh ocean breeze in the heat of summer.   I love her poetry and I teach it often along with her memoir, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings .   Her work connects back to the Harlem Renaissance writers and other African-American artists.   The title of her memoir comes from a poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906).   However, she is not an artist addressing a particular race; she is a poet for the ages and for all people, a true American treasure. The Washington Post published a piece yesterday by Valerie Strauss that made clear Angelou’s ability to speak the truth.   She was exuberant about the election of President Obama, and he in turn awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.   However, she often spo...

For a long time now, I’ve been looking for Mary Ford.   I think she’ll have the answers I seek.   She’ll recommend books that will once again save my life.   I Google her, but the name is too common.   I call the school where she was teaching 25 years ago but the woman on the line doesn’t know any Mary Ford.   Mary Ford has disappeared, possibly dead and buried, like so much of the past. In my dreams, I’m flying through the streets of my childhood, the streets of Panorama City, a misnomer of epic detail.   In the vernacular, “nobody can see nothing from there!”   But in this dream I’m flying on my ten-speed bicycle to the library, the only window open to me in Panorama City. I check out ten books for two weeks, the most they’ll let me have in a single visit.   I’ve read all the Hardy Boys ; all of Louis L’Amour’s westerns; every sports book by Matt Christopher; Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, and The Yearling .   I’ve read a children...

Critics like comparing television writer-producer David Simon to Charles Dickens; they marvel at the way Simon serializes his stories across multiple episode arcs. They love to call his characters “Dickensian.” But Simon is in a class by himself, a man who creates and writes shows that offer social commentary and cultural criticism as well as intriguing and compelling stories. Calling him the second coming of Charles Dickens is meant as a complement, but it is unnecessary. David Simon is a unique genius who makes television dramas that should be classified as literature, pure and simple. His latest effort, HBO’s Treme , continues this tradition. Treme is set in a neighborhood of New Orleans circa 2005, a culturally rich and diverse place nearly destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The first season of episodes took place only a few months after the disaster. The recently completed second season found the characters more than a year on and still struggling with the effects of the storm. Sim...

I have spent some time in the last weeks rereading Hamlet , and that brings me around to contemplating Ophelia again. To me, she is one of the most captivating characters in English literature. Why? Because she is caught in the mechanizations that are not of her own creation. Because she is a lost soul who can find no other way to fight back in her world but to sink into madness. Because, in the end, Hamlet loves her, and the result is tragedy of the deepest kind. I love literary critic Elaine Showalter’s essay , “Representing Ophelia: Woman, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” if only because she gets it right when she writes about Ophelia that she brings forward “the issues in an ongoing theoretical debate about the cultural links between femininity, female sexuality, insanity, and representation.” Ophelia suffers in the play, caught in the pedantic spying of her father, Polonius, the treacherous actions of Claudius, the savvy escapism of Gertrude, and Hamlet’s...

The Wasteland: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism By T.S. Eliot ; Edited by Michael North Norton Critical Editions , $13.75 paper ISBN: 978-0-393-97499-7 The pleasure of reading T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland is the horror of the epiphany. If this sounds paradoxical, it is. How can a poem written and published 89 years ago say something about the way we live now? And what is the pleasure of reading something that should scare us? If pleasure means instigating an emotional response, a catharsis , then Eliot’s poem offers pleasure even in the face of its horror. The poem is frightening, sprawling, prophetic, historical, confusing, elliptical, dangerous, even sexual, but also, as Conrad Aiken points out, incoherent. F.R. Leavis counters Aiken by saying Eliot’s “touch with which he manages his difficult transitions, his delicate collocations, is exquisitely sure. His tone…exhibits a perfect control.” For the record, I agree with I.A. Richards who finds the poem “a music of ideas.” Or ...

Last Sunday’s The New York Times Book Review deftly deconstructed the state of modern literary criticism . Just who is it that book reviewers write for these days? The collection of essays on the subject from a diverse group of intellectual writers takes inspiration from Alfred Kazin’s “The Function of Criticism Today,” published in the journal, Commentary , in 1960. In this space, I have reviewed a fair number of books. I love to read, and consider myself more reader than writer. It began as an escape, a way of avoiding the rage and oppression I felt at home as a child. In books, I was not me, probably the biggest attraction. I could live other lives and experience other ways of existing, and that got me to the library every two weeks for my parcel of books which I then poured through neglecting my homework and other obligations, much to the chagrin of my parents. They were powerless to stop me. When I started this blog years ago, I wanted to write about two things: my reading life ...

The Complete Sherlock Holmes: All 4 Novels and 56 Short Stories in Two Volumes By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Bantam Classics, $13.90 paper ISBN: 978-0-553-358257 I have been amusing myself this holiday season by walking the streets of Victorian London with Sherlock Holmes . Of course, it was nothing like when I was actually there, walking the streets of the east end of the city in the steps of Jack the Ripper . The Tower of London is nearby, and across the Thames is the famed Dungeon Museum . However, that was modern London, and nothing like the slums and opium dens haunted by the criminals who are the targets of Holmes and his intrepid partner, Doctor John Watson . Bantam Classics has a nice two-volume set of the complete Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novels and short stories featuring Homes and Watson, reasonably priced, in a cardboard slipcover. This is light reading, something to sit with by the fire in an evening and drift off. The books are also suitable for trains, planes, and automob...