Published: Mar 18th, 2020
Breaking social rules about what women could say in public, American confessional poets and standup comediennes sassed up the 1960s with their candid revelations. Spouses, children, and even parents were… Read More
Published: Jan 5th, 2020
Since my Liquid Whitman post in July, more 12-ounce tributes to the poet’s Bicentennial have emerged in the Leaves of Grass Series from Bell’s Brewery. I’ve reviewed three of them… Read More
Published: Sep 30th, 2019
Tennessee Two, that’s like a punk band. –Elvis Costello Ken Burns’s Country Music documentary wrapped its PBS broadcast last week, and now you can binge it. I didn’t expect the… Read More
Published: Sep 25th, 2019
A stone is a thought that the earth develops over inhuman time. — Louise Erdrich The first stories I remember were children’s stories my mother read to me, and Bible stories… Read More
Published: Jul 4th, 2019
Happy 4th of July in this bicentennial year of Walt Whitman’s birth! In addition to archival exhibits and poetry contests, the major U.S. celebrations include a 7-part liquid tribute from… Read More
Published: Jun 8th, 2019
Seeing Rocketman this week recalled what most struck middle-school me about Elton John, master of styles. There were other piano men moving onto my Memphis radio dial in the early… Read More
Published: May 8th, 2019
The Humanities have become a sustainability study in these STEM-driven times for higher education. How does our hive survive the academic climate changes of a shrinking professoriate, curricular compression, and… Read More
Published: Feb 6th, 2019
Maker of poems, paintings and assemblages, designer of household objects, Mina Loy is a fitting figure to bring into my seminar Modernist Studies & Pedagogy. Her creations are magnets of modernity.… Read More
Published: Jan 22nd, 2019
Tidiness is not a delicacy… Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons What serendipity teaching Tender Buttons again during a week I’m also watching the Netflix sensation Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Doyennes… Read More
Published: Dec 3rd, 2018
I’m two-thirds through the Coen Brothers’ latest take on the Wild West, their Netflix production The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (see the trailer here.) And thus far, the image that sticks with me… Read More