Culture Industry

So I've reached a top-ish rung in the academy – I'm full professor; there's nowhere to go, as someone said, but to the grave. (O...

There's one advantage to electing Democrats to the White House; at least every four years they give you something to talk about in a poe...

[James Spates] One of the few treasures in my Ruskin collection – and it's a working library, not a collector's treasure-trov...

Yes, as I always say, I hate year-end "best of" lists, whether of books or records or movies or whatever. Especially of books. On ...

I meant to paint some soldiers this evening, but time got away; I ended up varnishing some already painted soldiers and gluing them (with ru...

Ben asks me to expand a bit on my praise of Lisa Jarnot's Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography . Maybe the word "f...

I turned in my grades last night, just under the wire as usual. I'd tried something new in my undergraduate course: sick to death of tak...

Alone in the house today; everybody's else's off at of all things a Swedish Xmas fest, Santa Lucia and a bazaar and so forth. I had ...

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 ...