“She felt like her skull was a bone box full of water and that somebody had dumped about twenty-five Alka-Seltzer tablets into it”
Ecochondriacs, p. 6
No Categories
“This was an ethical dilemma with a fire in the attic. This was an ethical dilemma with the brakes gone clean out at the very top of the switchback grade”
Ecochondriacs, pp. 5-6
An Ill-Used Reliquary
“Now she felt like an archbishop would have felt had he been goaded into opening up his cathedral’s most precious reliquary to a team of scientists so that they could carbon date the finger bone of St. Andrew, only to have them come back to him with the hot news that the finger bone was only seven hundred years old, a time nowhere close to the time of St. Andrew, and that it was, moreover, the finger bone of a chimpanzee. It was the chimpanzee part that hurt”
Ecochondriacs, p. 4
Only Cash
“Fueled by massive amounts of money from multiple governments and international organizations, climate change research was a growth industry, a boom town, a cash cow that emitted no methane, only cash”
Ecochondriacs, p. 2
The Monster and the Dragon
“The malevolence of Grendel is hot, like malice always is. The rage of the dragon is cold, like the gold it is acquiring or defending. The dragon hates, but it is nothing personal. Grendel hates, and everything about it is personal. With the dragon, killing is a means to an end. With Grendel, killing is the end itself. The dragon is a night-flying outsider. Grendel is a cannibal. So this society is surrounded—hot enmity within and cold enmity without”
Quite Attractive Thanes
“The morning after Grendel is killed, Hrothgar receives the good news and comes out to look at the grisly arm. He comes, a great warrior king, having spent the night in a warm bed with Wealtheow, and when he comes, he advances with a troop of maidens following him (922-926), a bevy of curvaceous thanes”
Beowulf’s Inner Child
“But to represent this epic poem as a portrayal of the internal subjective struggles of a narcissistic modern is as anachronistic and foolish as to start looking for Beowulf’s inner child. The poet is addressing a problem which this people as a people knew they had. A poem like this should not be used as a blank screen on which we project problems that we know we have. Maybe Hrothgar was actually worried about global warming or high cholesterol”
However Hard to Imagine
“Their long-established way of doing things gives them all the civilization-building power of a biker gang. It is hard for us to imagine Viking angst, but I want to argue that the author of Beowulf is delivering a vision of exactly that”
Nobility at the End of Its Tether
“The paganism that is so evident throughout this poem is presented to us by a thoroughly Christian poet, and he does not show us this paganism in order to say, ‘See, pagans can be noble, too—even without Jesus!’ Rather, he is doing precisely the opposite—he is refusing to engage in a fight with a heathen straw man of his own devising. He acknowledges the high nobility that was there, but then he bluntly shows us that nobility at the point of profound despair . . . This is nobility at the end of its tether”
Drank the Smoke
“She dreaded doom of battle, the days to come
Would be devastating, deadly, dark, and shameful.
There would be sorrow and sadness. The sky drank the smoke”