On the top floor of the Accademia in Florence, in an overlooked panel of a medieval altarpiece, is an image that’s easy to ignore: a shepherd’s dog, barking at the angel who’s suddenly appeared to rouse the obviously startled shepherds from their sleep. There were shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks […]
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7/7/25 draft: part of an attempt to trace the figure of the skylark through Blake and Shelley into the twentieth century for A Thing of Beauty. The Lark Ascending: A Musician Goes to War The map is heavy, stiff, on grayish linen-backed paper, springing out of its folds like a creature eager to breathe. It’s […]
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(This is the text of a talk delivered last night at Luther College, with responses from student attendees pasted at the end!) Intro music: Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody.” Books for the chalk tray: Taplin, Snyder, Lanier, Orwell, Haidt, Pomerantsev, Arendt, me, YOUNG ROMANTICS, and more. Welcome, and thank you all for being here. Thanks […]
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This year I’ve tried two ways – printmaking and welding – to get under the dirty, stubborn skin of William Blake. Both rely on fire to inscribe your intention and an elemental ground – paper or metal – to preserve and transmit it. Both ask you to dedicate yourself to learning an art that won’t […]
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One week ago, likely-not-for-much-longer British PM (and probably-soon-to-be-gratefully-reverted-hedgie/tech-bro) Rishi Sunak left the 80th anniversary D-Day celebrations at Normandy early to return to London and prerecord a TV campaign interview. Footage of that moment shows the host murmuring thank you for being here. Just back from Normandy, Sunak says. “It ran over.” Offense piled on offense, […]
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It’s official: actor Julian Sands has passed at age 65, after disappearing while hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains. He was a great actor – and also a genuine aficionado of literature. His work offered me an artist’s great gift: a small-town kid’s early intuition that the world can be grand and beautiful beyond its […]
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Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, Ripton, Vermont On a hillside in Vermont, at the end of a gravel road, a wooden cabin near the treeline. Four apple trees. A meadow alive with butterflies, tall buttercups, and the low intent fronds of wild parsnip, which will flower by August in skin-blistering yellow stalks three feet high […]
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“May you live in interesting times,” says an apocryphal Chinese curse. And for a Romanticist writing about Byron, boxing, and the celebrity culture of Regency England, the news that AI can now fake even more human creations is “interesting” indeed. Now AI has made a “song” by Drake and The Weeknd that neither artist authorized […]
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This is the book – and this is the writer – to whom I owe everything. When did The Giant, O’Brien cross my path? Sometime around my transition from 20th c. MA to 21st c. Ph.D student, when I was devising scholarly research topics and writing and publishing short stories on the side and groping […]
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This January, students and I were supposed to be in London and Haworth and Whitby, tracking Frankenstein’s Creature and Dracula and Heathcliff and Mr. Hyde. Instead we were in a classroom on campus, a beloved old building with a sloping floor, a harmless ghost named Gertrude (according to student legend), and a whanging, banging monster […]
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