Culture Industry

Yes, it's that time of year when I'm reading towards the upcoming teaching semester, & start posting fiddly harumphs about how v...

So for the last 2 weeks, save for a couple days in the City at the outset and a single foray into Queens for a friend's birthday party, ...

So Saturday we're leaving town for six weeks – to be divided roughly between the NYC area & Europe. Usually I load up with books bef...

Well, it doesn't yet quite feel like summer break. I spent last week and the week before thrashing out that essay whose progress I allud...

Last I posted, I felt I was hitting a pace. I managed to sustain than, even with an inevitable weekend break, & with all the crazy inten...

So I'm writing again. I don't really count the other week, when I pumped out a 1000-word book review; not a bad book review, either,...

One Hundred Etudes , Benjamin Friedlander (Edge Books, 2012) The overall form is simple. As the book's opening page notes, the etudes ...

It's become abundantly clear to me that one could make a life's work, not on Ruskin, but on secondary Ruskin materials alone. That...

  So among the books I dip into at night has been this, By the Sword Divided: Eyewitness Accounts of the English Civil War (1983, this...

Our Fair University's president just resigned , after a perfectly dreadful semester of one public relations blunder after another. She h...

The semester is over, the dust has finally settled. Earlier today I sent off a short book review of a very long book of poems—a review I enj...

Okay, the latest issue of Lou Rowan's excellent Golden Handcuffs Review hasn't got its picture online quite, but if you go to the w...

Appleseed , John Clute (2001; Tor Books, 2003) John Clute's known as perhaps the most learned and intelligent critic of SF/fantasy ali...

Public Figures , Jena Osman (Wesleyan UP, 2012) Is it an essay? (even a "lyric" essay?) or is it a longish poem? Who cares; it...

Michael Moorcock, The Chinese Agent (1970; Mayflower, 1979) I must've read this one about 30 years ago, probably in a library copy, be...

So I've been thinking about my own "knowledge base," a concept I've borrowed & modified from Jonathan Mayhew's ver...

It's one of those lines that echo in my mind, even if I have to resort to Google to make sure that I remember its source – James Wright...

So I'm feeling a bit more sanguine about the fantasy/sf conference, which is coming up next week. I finished (a draft of) my paper, and ...

[MS at the Florida Renaissance Festival, photo by Patrick Farrell of the Miami Herald ] Okay, perhaps you wonder whether the fellow i...

The letter carrier – well, the UPS person, I guess – brought a package from Cambridge University Press the other day, & after I scrat...