Bewildering Stories welcomes...

Robert J. Meindl

Bob Meindl is an old colleague and friend of your editor’s. We served together for many years at the Writing Proficiency Exams at California State University, Sacramento.

I remember visiting one of Bob’s composition classes. Smooth. A discussion of a student’s essay from the depths of punctuation to the heights of content, concluding with a cosmic reference to the carbon cycle. That may well have been one of the seeds that eventually germinated into Bewildering Stories.

And those were the days when we had to photocopy everything for student handouts. Today, instructors probably just forward everything to the students’ iPads or something similar. How did anyone ever get anything done before computers?

Literary criticism answers one or more of four basic questions: What does the text say? How does it say it? What did it mean in its own time? What might it mean in ours? A historian answers similar questions: What happened, and why? What did it mean then, and what might it mean now?

“The Message of the Ruins: Reading Devastation” answers the historian’s questions. And it is a rara avis: an article that is at once scholarly, personal and easily accessible to the general public. It covers a lot of ground, from 14th-century England to mid-20th century Germany from the perspective of the people, scholarship and events that link them all.

Robert J. Meindl’s bio sketch can be found here.

Welcome to Bewildering Stories, Bob. And thanks for sharing the article with us.