Culture Industry

Seth Abramson, with his annual Poets & Writers rankings of the top creative writing programs in the country, has become something of a ...

A veritable maelstrom of work lately, in the wake of an epic birthday party this past weekend. (The recycling bins are full of beer and wine...

It was a kind of gnarly weekend. Yesterday (Sunday) I cooked up a pretty excellent dinner for some guests – palak paneer, chicken korma, bas...

My musical life tends to be a one-track thing. For the past week or more I've been doggedly (but with delight) listening thru the entire...

Thinking about Lycidas over the past few days, rereading the poem again & again. Thinking about Emerson in 1833, on his first transatla...

Ruskin did more than write big books critiquing Renaissance art & architecture; he was a pretty busy critic of his contemporaries, as we...

1) Sacha Baron Cohen, he of Brüno, Borat, & Ali G. fame, is set to star in a biopic of the Queen lead singer Freddy Mercury, according ...

Back in February 2008 I got a nice email from a journal editor (henceforward we'll call him "JE"), asking me to write a brief ...

It's been a very long time since I've posted any original poetry on Culture Industry, but perhaps reaching the half-way mark on a lo...

The Milton course this semester will be reading what I guess is a substantial chunk of his controversial prose – more than they’d like to, I...

I've been revisiting Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces lately, & thinking about one of my fantasy jobs – music journalism. Fantasy...

When Ezra Pound died in 1972, I was – well, I was alive, but I wasn't old enough to be reading him. I grew up on Pound in those tatty Ne...

For the most part I can't listen to pop music while writing or reading intently; the words being sung simply interfere with the words I...

Milton's 7th sonnet, "How soon hath Time," bemoaning the passing of his 23rd year & the fact that he has as yet little in ...

The girls started a new school this Fall. Among the delights of which are a newfound emphasis on daily homework. It's been a hard adjust...

Bob Archambeau embarrasses me again. Not so much with his fashion choices – that goes without saying – as with his blog, where he posts the...

So we've decided that real education for our girls can't be trusted to the schools, public or private: we're going to have to i...

So it's the end of the 1st week of classes. I ought to be all excited and, you know, tingly about the start of a new semester, opening ...

The first day of classes – well, the 1st class, day 1 of Milton – is over, & went fairly well. You know: I read the syllabus, made them ...