Two New Articles: Toy Story and T. S. Eliot

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I’m happy to announce that I have two new articles out this summer:

The first is my first-ever academic article, titled “Relocating the Great Good Place, from Dante to James to Eliot’s Cocktail Party.” Published by The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, it argues that Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party isn’t just a reimagining of Dante’s Divine Comedy; it is also in dialogue with the Henry James short story, “The Great Good Place”—which is itself a reimagining of Dante’s Comedy. This article began a few years ago as a seminar paper in Dr. Sebastian Langdell’s class on Dante and Dante reception at Baylor University. I’m grateful to Dr. Langdell for giving me the opportunity to first explore this topic, to Dr. Julia Daniel for introducing me to Eliot’s play while I was her research assistant, and to Timothy Lawrence and Justice Flint for their feedback and encouragement while I was putting together and revising what has been one of my most complicated writing projects so far. For those who can access the article through academic libraries, I will provide the Project MUSE link here.

The second is a review of Pixar’s Toy Story 5, my first original article for FilmFisher in over five years. This is a follow-up to the two-part “A Toy’s Telos” essay that I wrote for FilmFisher seven years ago (click here for Chapter 1; click here for Chapter 2). I am grateful to FilmFisher’s new editor Timothy House for giving me the opportunity to keep writing on this subject, and again to Timothy Lawrence for helping me flesh out my thoughts on this latest sequel. (Since Toy Story 5 is about technology, writing the article also gave me the opportunity to reflect further on Andy Crouch’s idea of “truly advanced technology.”) The review can be found here.   

Why "Presents"?

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“One must choose a corner and cultivate that.” (Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James)

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.” (Master Oogway in Kung Fu Panda)

“[Time’s] present is God’s present, and you should be that: present.” (“Be Present (Live from Catalyst Atlanta)” by Propaganda)

When I created this website in January 2017, seven years ago now, I gave it the name, “Robert Brown Presents.” There were two reasons for this.

First, the name is a nod to the show Alfred Hitchcock Presents. (This is also why my picture on the home page is in black-and-white cameo.) Similar to how that show was a way for the great director to share his favorite kinds of stories, this website is a way for me to share the things I’ve made or the things I care about. 

Second, ‘present’ is one of my favorite words in the English language, and I can summarize  much of my life philosophy just by expounding its different senses. Senses 1 and 2: We present presents to others. I want to live my life as a gift to God and neighbor, and make things I can offer as gifts. Senses 3 and 4: When we use the phrase “be present,” we mean presence in place and in the present time. So much of my creative work and so many of my thought projects are attempts to answer the essential question, “How should I live, here and now?” More pointedly, as a Christian on this side of glory, “How should I live in the tension of the already-not-yet?” (If these questions resonate with you, you might enjoy my poems “Yet,” “Ground,” and “Borgesian.”)

Broadly speaking, this is what “Robert Brown Presents” exists to do: to present presents—articles, Notebook posts, poems, songs, podcast episodes—that might help others be present. They’ve certainly helped me.