Culture Industry

Here's Dan Chaon , who teaches fiction writing at Oberlin: Occasionally, I have students who want to be rock stars. They have started a ...

[William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World (1854)] “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I...

[ Walter Pater ] Reading Walter Pater's The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry this morning, I came across the lovely word opsimathy...

I'm back – at least I'm back in Boca, which doesn't seem appreciably warmer than DC, where we spent the last week of our vacatio...

What is this 300-gram lump of plastic good for? Certainly not serious reading, during which I find myself reaching repeatedly for the pen o...

(If you can think of a more anodyne title for this post, by all means forward it my way.) So we're a good deal into our summer vacation,...

Even in some outlandishly manipulated Florida outdoor environment – dig the lights strung around the palm trees – my mother is able to maint...

[Professor Scroggins, preparing to begin his lecture] The scab dropped off today. Which means I don't have skin cancer. Probably. No, se...

We buried my mother two weeks ago today. It’s not something I’m really prepared to write about, but it does I hope go some way towards expla...

So I happened on one of those "identify this quotation" sites, where the quotation in question was Albert Einstein's "Eve...

Well, for a while this morning Blogger was talking about how they were in the process of restoring the posts that had been for some reason t...

One of the more disconcerting aspects of reading thru the Library Edition of Ruskin – as yes, I am still doing – is the complicated balanci...

Steve Burt laments , on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog, that there's just too much happening in the wide world of poesy, that ...

There's only about a week & a half of classes left; my bag is full of papers to grade, however, & there are a thousand little ad...

I went to listen to this spring's visiting writer Thursday night. Even tho I was simmering with resentment – the department's readin...

We have no portraits of Hegel in his first Jena years, only a silhouette showing him (in Terry Pinkard's words) "sporting the very ...

Well, I'm sure you don't remember this post from about 5 months ago, in which I mused on harnessing my OCD for something useful – n...

So Ron S. really seems to have shuttered the shop , at least as a venue for actually writing about poetry. Not sure how I feel about it; li...

"Well, nobody actually reads anthologies – you teach out of them. You find the one that fits your own pedagogical predispositions most...

I haven't dropped off the face of the earth, tho I haven't been in this space for a while. Much has been going on, some of it not so...