Author Archive

October 20, 2020 by Lisa Martinovic

Shakespeare says No to Trump!

Bard endorses Biden in full-throated repugnance for would-be tyrant! During the Shakespeare/Trump debate, when the President was asked what steps his campaign has been taking to try to infect Biden, Trump declined to answer on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate him.    But he couldn’t resist pointing out that Biden was already a ‘loser,’ didn’t need to be dead like all those stupid D-Day soldiers buried in France.    Fox News reported that, in off-camera remarks at the top of the long-sought town hall, Trump demanded that Shakespeare remove his mask.  The man courteously declined, saying he still needed to live to write King Lear, The Tempest, and what-have-you.    Trump scolded him for disloyalty, called him a wimp and in retaliation ordered Mitch McConnell to rewrite all 37 plays — and burn the discredited versions — so that the Bad Guys always win.   Note.  He has not fully settled on someone to rewrite the Lone Ranger, in which the main character is a killer and a Bad Guy.   Just then Hamlet’s father’s ghost — making a guest appearance, courtesy of Paramount Pictures — suddenly materialized and declared “Trump poisoned me too!”   “Did not,
September 22, 2020 by Lisa Martinovic

Jerry’s Homage to Florence Howe

Florence (center) died September 12 in Manhattan, at 91 In spring 1971, when I was in Berkeley, I was interviewing for college teaching jobs.  Back at the Modern Language Association meeting between Christmas and New Year’s, I’d managed to scare up a dozen interviews, one of which was with Goucher College in Baltimore.  Most of these didn’t lead anywhere but I had a follow-up call from a member of the Goucher English department: She would be passing through Berkeley and the department chairman had suggested that we meet.  Her name was Florence Howe.   As it turned out, we hit it off and our meeting, in an empty office, went on for hours.  I was surprised to find that the person who I would ordinarily need to impress for a job turned out to be a clear-cut left-winger.  She evidently had an analogous surprise about the interviewee.  On the Vietnam War, civil rights, and women’s liberation we turned out to be on the same page.   She warned me that Goucher might not be much of a place for activists.  She was the only one in the department, though the current chairman was a good guy.  She said that if