Culture Industry

[Sir Philip Sidney, an 18th-century copy of a 1578 original] I realize that my blogging has been largely Ruskin-related for a while now...

In his luminous autobiography, Praeterita , Ruskin recalls how he read the Bible with his mother, from the time he was able to make out the ...

Happy May Day, y'all. April – sweet showers, the cruelest month, etc. National Poetry Month, whatever that means. For a bunch of peopl...

I was arrested by Kenny Goldsmith's post early this week on Harriet, the Poetry Foundation's blog. He was browsing a flea market ne...

Reading late Ruskin can be a disspiriting affair. There is a heady charm to the digressiveness of Fors Clavigera , a wonderful sense that on...

A couple of years ago in this space I reported on "brief lives" of Ruskin, offering capsule reviews of capsule biographies by Que...

Harm , Hillary Gravendyk (Omnidawn, 2011) One feels old. The letter carrier today brought Michael Heller's huge and beautifully desig...

Like most people who've read & worked on Ezra Pound, I've always found the economic side of his writings pretty tough going. Sur...

Reading Wells's Tono-Bungay on the iPad, after reading stacks of his science fiction things on my (pre-Touch) Kindle over this past sum...

As of 3.00 pm Friday, I've been on Spring Break. Which means of course beer bongs, foam raves, and general non-stop partying. Not really...

My resolution to jump right back blogging seems to have gone awry. Any way – No, I didn't go to AWP this year. I know I should've go...

I have been a poor blogger. That's not true: in point of fact, for a bit over a month now I haven't been a blogger at all. I hope to...

I am still reeling, & delighted, at the publication of Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles , and looking forward to formally launchin...

Dissolves: Terra Lucida IV - VIII , Joseph Donahue (Talisman House, 2012) "Dissolves" is of course a verb, what the Alka-Seltzer d...

So I read the lists of "year's best" whatevers this time of year, & inevitably feel out of it, behind the times, fuddy-dud...

The excellent Brent Cunningham, big cheese at Small Press Distribution out the Bay Area way (god, I remember ordering from that catalogue f...

One of the earliest posts on Culture Industry was a rumination on Robert Creeley after his death in late March 2005. I know he is still mou...

Shortly after I posted that last post, I launched into Fors Clavigera , Volume I, 1 January 1871. And it was grand to revisit the texts of t...

So I've reached a crossroads in my Ruskin reading. After he accepts the Slade Professorship of Art at Oxford in 1870, our man becomes un...

So I read two books the other day. One of them was Ian Hamilton's A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (Basic Books, 20...