Archive for June 2nd, 2011

Library and Journal: Converting to PDF

Posted by Michael Happy on June 2nd, 2011

Our summer project is to convert the material in both the Robert D. Denham Library and the Journal to PDF. The reason is simple: the text is easier to read, the pages are numbered, and — this is the best part — it is searchable. It means our scholarly material will have the scholarly cast it deserves. Our daily blog, meanwhile, will remain in its present format. It will take a little while to make this conversion, but it will happen soon.

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Thomas Hardy and God

Posted by Michael Happy on June 2nd, 2011

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sigcSoe45oE

A beautiful clip from the 1996 film adaptation of Jude the Obscure

More synchronicity: today is Thomas Hardy‘s birthday (1840-1928), and he adds nicely to our ongoing consideration of religion, compassion for the poor, and the pseudo-literal conception of God. Here’s Frye in “The Times of the Signs”:

A later poet, Thomas Hardy, is never tired of showing what an imbecile God turns out to be if we create him in the image of the starry order. Hardy has a poem called God’s Education, in which God is represented as learning from the misery of man, in the manner of middle-class people reluctantly coming to realize that some people are not only poor but poorer than they should be. He has another called By the Earth’s Corpse, where God remarks, at the end of time, that he wishes he had never started on this creation business, for which he clearly has so little talent. (CW 27, 349)

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