I admire Elizabeth Barrett Browning immensely, but I’m tempted sometimes to classify her among the undead.

I said I liked this review by Brett McCracken of the new Terrence Malick film “Knight of Cups” and my friend, the artist David Wittig, asked why, so I thought I’d try to figure it out.

I read this book by Jon Ronson because Austin Kleon told me to, and I basically do whatever he says.

Here’s a little prayer by Eugenia Leigh that I found on the Poetry Society of America Website. 

I was thinking of a special topics class I could offer for graduating seniors in the in English Department here at Northwest University, and came up with the following, for which I mocked up this poster design. 

eople like this Paul Ford fellow, who wrote this otherwise excellent article about computer coding, are always holding up statistics like the following, presumably for our collective horror: “less than 30 percent of the people in computing are women.” We’re supposed to say: Can you imagine? That’s disgusting. etc. etc.

But man, 30%! That’s great!

In a typically delightful essay called “What I Found in my Pocket,” G.K. Chesterton refers to "municipal patriotism” as "perhaps the greatest hope of England” (91). By this curious phrase, he means not love of country per se, nor civic machinery as such, but something more like love of the neighborhood. An odd claim, don’t you think?

In class this week, we finished our reading of Faust, and buttressed our discussion thereof with a summary of sublime discourse from Longinus and Burke.

I saw this book on the shelf at the Edmonds Bookshop on my bi-monthly trip to the seaside town for tea.

And now it’s the lead story over at The Chronicle of Higher Education. The new #Wheatongate continues apace and will likely continue so to do until the decision comes down from the Board of Trustees, at which point–whatever the decision–it will all flare up again until we find someone else’s business to be aghast over, or we forget. For the most part, I actually like this convtoversy for the level of conversation it has engendered.

Favorite records of 2015

 I recently taught Shelley’s play The Cenci for this course at the University of Washington.

I’ve just finished reading The Fellowship, by Philip and Carol Zaleski, a group biography of the Inklings that evokes with extraordinary clarity images of clubmanship and bonhomie the group enjoyed between the wars.

I’m a sucker for Christmas: while serious about the holy season, and against commercialism both generally and in its specifically American shopping bonanza iterations, I go in for the schmaltz and fanfare attached to the whole production with gusto

I’m having a great time teaching here at Northwest. Though my office is windowless, I have some lovely lamps and a comfortable writing chair. 

Unfortunately, I also have a PC.

 I recently taught Shelley’s play The Cenci for this course at the University of Washington. It struck me as “unstageable” for the same reasons it did so for the play’s early readers: the sexual episodes are too extreme for the (especially late-Romantic) stage, and the characters deliver exhausting monologues that would bore any live audience. Besides, the language is to full, so intellectual, that hearing it spoken by an actor, one loses half of the meaning. I know, Shakespeare managed to write just as rewardingly for the page and for the stage, but then, he was Shakespeare, wasn’t he? 

My favorite records.