Culture Industry

A miscellany tonight, as all too often. A week or two ago, enthralled with the density and productive rhythm of Johnson's Rambler essay...

Hey, would whoever shared the Ruskin & Pubic Hair link on Facebook let me know who they are? Just out of curiosity...

I cannot live without books. –Thomas Jefferson We talk of food for the mind, as of food for the body: now a good book contains such food ine...

First things first: when it comes to writing tips, from the very basic hints as to how to get started up to how to organize one's work o...

I too dislike them – endnotes, that is, with continual flipping back & forth between where you're reading & the back of the book...

I've survived the weekend. It began, horrifically, with the girls' school carnival, 2 hours of trudging around in the sun (not awful...

The gradations of a hero's life are from battle to battle, and of an author's from book to book. Success and miscarriage have the sa...

The letter carrier & the UPS person have been dropping off a steady stream of books over the past few days. I finally decided to get ser...

[Robert von Hallberg, eminent retiree ] The lastest Chicago Review is out, & as usual it's both a beautiful artifact and a fascinat...

That time of year is upon us: the semester begins next week, & I'm as usual trembling in my boots (well, sandals) at the prospect. I...

We arrived back from NYC last night, after a purgatorial trip – endless security lines at LaGuardia with our two small children, numerous ca...

Tomorrow P. & I leave for the northeast, & we'll be there almost thru the end of the year, so I don't imagine I'll be do...

I love a post like that last one , or at least the reactions to it – here, read this, read the other... It's like having a real, you kno...

I am not, alas, a romantic, in any sense of the word. I have some friends who are true-blue, dyed-in-the-wool romantics (like Eric) in the ...

No, it's not Santa Claus, but Geoffrey Hill, as pictured in this Oxford Today feature on his entry as Oxford Professor of Poetry. Not ...

[Peter O'Leary, February 2008] We were talking at the pub last night about the sensation of reaching a certain age – a certain point at ...

A couple years back, my most delicious internet reading was the blog Faits Divers de la Poésie Américaine et Brittanique , a series of for t...

So the "BBC 100 books" meme is going around Facebook again. You've seen it -- it's a list of 100 books, chosen by some arc...

From K. W. Gransden's Virgil: The Aeneid (Landmarks of Western Literature) (Cambridge UP, 1990). We all know about Eclogue 4, right? You...

Addendum to the below (& perhaps a mortal blow for my potential use of Sarah Ruden's version of the Aeneid in next semester's c...