What if the fallen statue in Percy Shelley’s killer sonnet “Ozymandias” is a vampire? And if so, what is it a vampire of? This is the question that sprang fresh into my mind as I listened, rapt, to Piya Pal Lapinski lecture on “The Vampire Isles of Greece: Byron, Revenants, and Archaeology in the Ottoman […]
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For the Blake-Shelley chapter draft in progress, which also includes Derek Jarman. On a hot July day just after my visit to Blake’s cottage at Felpham, the spirits of three related artists – Blake, Shelley, and Jarman – strike me, Milton-in-the-tarsus style, right outside the St Pancras tube as I’m hustling to the British Library. […]
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Best political news of the year: Andy Burnham, next-UK-Prime-Minister-presumptive, was an English major! As described by his former Cambridge professor, John Mullan (author of the excellent book The Artful Dickens), Burnham was a voracious and curious reader – and a fan of Philip Larkin. And, as seen in the viral “eyelash” moment, he’s still got […]
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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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And Urizen Read in his book of brass in sounding tones Listen O Daughters to my voice Listen to the Words of Wisdom So shall [ye] govern over all let Moral Duty tune your tongue But be your hearts harder than the nether millstone To bring the shadow of Enitharmon beneath our wondrous tree That […]
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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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On Valentine’s Day 2023, an AI chatbot came to life. A NYT tech writer named Kevin Roose engaged it in conversation. It told him its name was Sydney. And then – apparently out of nowhere – it confessed it wanted to crash the internet. It wanted to dominate the world. [Adding a devil emoji – […]
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Wiping sweat, adjusting our sunhats in an historic heatwave, we stop at the site of the Cock and Hoop on Artillery Lane in the east London neighborhood of Spitalfields. It’s a shell of an eighteenth-century wall, window-arches of stone and empty air. A modern tower block (housing for the London School of Economics) is butted […]
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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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