Culture Industry

Philadelphia was nice, if a bit cold. A shame, given that this was one MLA – with Marjorie Perloff as president, much of the big show was ge...

I'm off the Philadelphia later today, where I'll be spending most of my time in an overcrowded hotel room talking to people who'...

One of the welcome gifts to cross my threshold this holiday was this , the 4-volume Grove Press Centenary edition of Samuel Beckett. I'v...

One of the great watersheds of late 20th-century pop music, so far as I’m concerned, came in 1970 or so, when Richard Thompson sold his gold...

I’m by no means on my deathbed, but I’ve been operating at a lot less than 100%, that’s for sure. Reading, as I noted, has become somewhat s...

(drumroll...) the Illness Formerly Known As Walking [ or in this case pretty much lying down all the time & shuffling around a little bi...

[ Man Ray, Marcel Proust on his Deathbed ] how I'm feeling right now, in the grips of some flu-like something or other.

Okay, I really should be finishing grading a stack of finals on the synoptic gospels & John – but I can't resist drawing the interes...

So as I kinda expected, Bob Archambeau has weighed in on pleasure & difficulty, with a rather detailed (& illustrated) “story thus ...

I can help feeling there’s been a certain slippage in the recent discussion of pleasure among Josh Corey , Eric Selinger , & YVT, attrib...

Two of my favorite blogspherians, Josh Corey & Eric Selinger, have started a discussion on an old subject – pleasure & difficulty in...

It's been a pretty frantic week – the holiday, family in town, grading essays, watching as the wee little cough I'd had for a week m...

Ray Davis comments of Ulysses ’s 18 stylistic menu-choices, “I wonder if fear of stylistic tinnitus is why goofy "Eumaeus" and ...

It's hard to avoid Fernando Botero's paintings down here in South Florida. The Colombian artist's pudgy figures are enormously p...

There are only two blogs I read that address academic affairs in anything more than a tangential way – Michael Bérubé's and University ...

Michael Bérubé, in this suspiciously like that other regular-guy-with-a-French-surname Bob Archambeau, has taken to posting his conference p...

For some reason or another, it’s been a long week, & a long (but nice) weekend following. A couple nights ago, deathly tired of grading ...

So the whole exhausting business of the mid-term elections is over, & a substantial portion of the electorate sems to have decided that ...

In the lovely 22 October quotation from Our Leader, "Listen, it's never been 'stay the course,'" belied as any number ...

Don't miss this – the best meditation on reading (Sir) Walter Scott's poetry I've very encountered. The money line: "There...