Culture Industry

Last weekend I picked up my younger daughter from her “performing arts” summer camp in the Catskills; yesterday my older daughter got bac...

[This note dates from a month ago; I haven't been keeping up with this cross-posing business very well.]   My brushes with celebr...

I’ve just finished the 42,000+ lines of William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise , volumes 3 through 6 in the big collected works. There was...

[prefatory to a longer note on boredom]   I was at a mini-conference on the long poem, in the city, at a famous university, a few mon...

“This book seems to give me eyes.” —Charlotte Brontë, on John Ruskin’s Modern Painters   It’s all about seeing , Ruskin argues in tho...

Feeling strangely divided this late morning. After a few days of intense stretching exercises—many of them suggested by FB friends, some ...

I’ve had pretty decent luck with the old machine—my body, that is—for never having taken particular care of it. I was not an “active” chi...

When I first moved to Florida late last century, I was fascinated by the animals, more specifically by the reptilian-type animals. When I...

I haven't been good at keeping up the blog for the past—well, a long time. Recently, I started writing short notes on Facebook's ...

Reading Bob Archambeau 's little memoir of Ron Ellingson and Chicago's Aspidistra Bookstore in Bob's latest collection, Inventio...

Yes, that's the Cambridge Library Edition of William Morris — a nicely-produced, print-on-demand reprint of the twenty-four volume Co...

--> Dear Senator Alexander, One of the proudest mementos of my adolescence is a photograph taken of me as a high school seni...

There's a video turning up frequently in my Facebook feed of the president praising Frederick Douglass in terms of astonishing banality:...

I haven't been to the annual Modern Language Association conference for maybe six or seven years, but I'll be in Philadelphia later ...

I used to post a year’s-end list of books I’d read and been impressed by; 2016, however, has been such a eventual year...

And then there was that time— he’s telling someone, years hence—he hopes to be —when we all             ran a ra...

My new collection of essays and reviews is out now: The Mathematical Sublime: Writing About Poetry . (Those of you who are scared of math—co...

Right now I'm working on a large essay-review, an attempt at coming to terms with a long and very complicated recent book of poetry. And...

Why am I reading Wyndham Lewis?, you ask. Well, he represents a major hole in my knowledge of modernism. (Or perhaps, more fairly, one of t...

Paul O’Keeffe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (2000; London: Pimlico, 2001) I started and abandoned The Enemy , Jeffrey ...

Hannah Sullivan's book The Work of Revision (did I mention how generally excellent it is?) captured a long-held desire of mine to think...

It's been ages; no excuses, though this has been a wearying semester, punctuated with some fine conference visits and some good music. I...

I'm about a third of the way through indexing the book—that is, entering all my highlighted elements into an alphabetized document—and I...

So I read and returned the proofs of Michael Moorcock: Fiction, Fantasy and the World's Pain . By my count, 15 corrections total, and on...

I've been feeling not great about my writing lately, so it was a mixed blessing to get page proofs for my forthcoming Michael Moorcock: ...