Culture Industry

I was going to start blogging again, wasn't I? Well, that worked out well... At any rate, the semester is almost over. I have taught m...

The semester is winding down, & it's been a doozy. I've cooked up two conference proposals, done three tenure reviews, written a...

Yes, back to blogging, with no fanfare, no trumpets, no FB announcements (maybe). With a welcome cold front, and an even more welcome end to...

[Stephen Burt, channeling Brian Eno ca. 1975] There's a big piece in the New York Times today on Stephen Burt, calling him ...

[Bran Mak Morn, as painted by Jeffery Jones – the cover of Worms of the Earth by Robert E. Howard ] It's a long story, the winding...

I should have posted a link here already, since I mentioned it last week: the new Ruskin-related blog, The Ruskin Seminar , is up and runnin...

I spent one of the latter weeks of July in my parents' home in Tennessee, grimly sifting thru papers & boxes, drawers, shelves full ...

I'm totally behind the curve on most things, so it's not surprising that I only got around to watching the Zizek! documentary the ot...

Things of interest I've read this summer: I downloaded from the internet someone's coding (for the Kindle) of the Complete Works o...

Once again I've reached a crossroads point in my Ruskin reading, & it's time to take a deep breath. I have, for all intents ...

[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...