My annual Best Albums of 2025—or at least, my favorite records this year, though not all were released in it. Does that make sense?
In which I recount, briefly, the glories of traveling to my first Rabbit Room gathering.
Eventually, we’d get around to the question “have you read anything good recently?” And that's when our cartridge needles would settle into our respective grooves and things would really start swinging.
What is it about combining lyrics and instrumentation that reduces so the use-by date?
I love the course because it allows me to talk about my favorite things: poetry and Christianity. But also I love how much is possible under those headings.
Philip James Bailey’s first poem was met with some rather excitable Victorian admirers.
What is evident about YHWH from at least as far back as the Abraham-Isaac story, is that He is perfectly comfortable disturbing the narrative from without.
The getaway vehicle was going to be a Bentley, but we moved out wedding date over a few days and so he asked would a white Rolls Royce be alright with me? Yes, I assured him, a Rolls Royce would be fine.
As with other forms of beauty, I've been interested in the aesthetic of smells for most of my life.
Amid so much that was bad, so many lives lost and also so much life—graduations missed and readings and concerts cancelled, careers stalled, businesses shuttered—there was, nevertheless this year much to rejoice.
It occurs to me that some people want more than the pithy, dust-jacket style biographies on offer on minimalist websites. We want to know about poets, our professors! Or at least I do.
I wanted to offer here a little more evidence for why I think we should consider Advent a time of joyous anticipation rather than one of solemnity, mostly for the unconvinced.
I don’t know what happened to damage Amazing Mike’s sense of consistency—let’s sell incredible cakes from the ugliest storefront imaginable! Let’s have pretty cakes taste like cardboard and plain one’s taste like ecstasy!—but I’m glad it did.
That’s not only adjacent to his English degree, or a case of his “using his degree” in a novel manner unplanned for by its architects; it’s straight down the middle of the plate. Mulaney does exactly the things we professors of English train people to do. But what’s odd to me is that he uses those skills to say the people who gave them to him conveyed no value.
I love every bit of Washington, but my does Oregon have us beat when it comes to beaches. I was not at all expecting such light, such shapes, such arrangements of space.
We were terrified out of silence by the crack of 100 wings lifting suddenly the hitherto slumbering mass.
Since I can be fairly easily impressed upon to dispense advice regarding cultural matters, I hearty yield to the demands of the populus and offer, from the top of my head and in no particular order, some more poets whose work concerns eternal matters and that I have read with delight.
I’ve been translating Ovid’s setting of Jason and Medea on and off for about two years now, when I have time, which is seldom.
Not to trumpet my preferences as to who released the “best records of 2018” but to remember what my life was like year by year, and to do that by tracing its soundtrack.
Lucifer here has just found out the the world is going to end; not someday, but in the next month or so, and is trying his hand at warning people, knowing, through long experience, that they will do nothing to change their lives.
I do think that it is clearer in its final form, and I also think clarity is a noble goal, but, when the edits came back I was a bit sad. To give you a sense of what I mean, here is the opening as I originally had it.
When a particular mode of production, or of concern, reaches certain thresholds, or when public taste shifts palpably enough, artifacts attesting to it arise to delineate its contours. Often this happens around the turn of the century, or when a major figure dies