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Carissa Green Reads

I read widely from many genres. Perhaps this blog will feature fewer ratings and reviews, but I certainly intend to write about my reading life - it's the subject I most find myself wanting to talk about.

Currently reading

D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of WWII
Stephen E. Ambrose
Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad
M.T. Anderson
The Path Between the Seas
David McCullough
Chekhov Four Plays
Anton Chekhov, David Magarshack
The Gay Science: with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
Walter Kaufmann, Friedrich Nietzsche
A Kierkegaard Anthology
Robert W. Bretall
SPOILER ALERT!

Death be not proud . . . intellectuals already are

Wit - Margaret Edson

I am so glad that the character of Vivian Bearing, PhD exists.

 

Her male analog has been around in literature, film, and television for a looooong time. But the female version of the hard-as-nails, intellectualism-is-everything, got-no-personal-life professor rarely is seen.

 

Probably because when men are this character, they're admirable assholes. When women are this character, they're bitches. No quarter given. 

 

Of course, Vivian Bearing, PhD, leading scholar of John Donne and his Holy Sonnets, is given as much and more than she can "bear" in this play,  and we must ask ourselves what the relationship of the intellect is to the heart and the physical body. 

 

Death be not proud, for Vivian Bearing has earned her theatrical immortality. 

 

-cg