Batman and Hamlet: The Risks of Being an Intellectual Anti-Hero

As one travels through the classical literary canon, the traditional view of the time honored hero remains relatively the same. Variations of Achilles present themselves all over classical literature, with a few exceptions, such as Odysseus. We hesitate to call him aner because his heroism isn’t strictly thumos-driven. In fact, his heroism is derived from…

The Female Aner in Antiquity and Contemporary Representations

Aner is a term that can be equated with manliness, great physical strength and great heart. In the era of The Iliad and The Odyssey, an aner is what a real man is; today, I would equate the aner to our modern notions of what makes a superhero. However, the Greeks were very modern in…

Odysseus: The Modern Hero

Reading The Iliad in 2015 is a conundrum. We have to reconcile our modern cultural values, our ideas of heroism and our image of these mythic figures that is informed by movies starring Brad Pitt and throwaway references to things such as the famous Achilles Heel in television with what is given to us on…

Country Ghetto Prodigy

We have a peanut festival where I’m from. Yup. Peanuts. We harvest them. We celebrate them. And then we have an entire festival devoted to them. Where my parents are from, there’s a peanut factory, their little rickety Black Baptist church on the corner of the road, and the 7/11 where my Grandpa used to hang out with his chipped old…

Protected: An Academic Tribute to Ferguson

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Creative Endeavors: Knitting Projects part 2

In which I discover bulky yarn and big needles create scarves almost instanteously. Amazing. Seriously, I made this in 2 hours. …Potential Business Endeavor?

My Creative Endeavors: Knitting Project 1

I made a cowl for my mother; simple design, pretty yarn.

Strange Fruit by Joel Christian Gill

After a year long hiatus on this blog, I am back to make an announcement: I am a comic nerd. I’m not sure how it happened. Sometimes, I attribute my love of graphic novels to my best friend in high school, sometimes my first big crush in middle school, sometimes my dad. Then, sometimes, I…