I'm not a fan of a lot of contemporary writing.  It seems very shallow to me, and self-celebratory, though with little recognition of the sheer difficulty of being a real self.  I say this because this morning I came across a very interesting essay on the current state of personal essays:

For a certain...

To focus your attention not on events, but on patterns; not on ruptures, but structures; not on the weather, but the climate.  And also to remind you that there is, as Auden once put it, always an "altogether elsewhere."  Several, in fact.

Between Coronavirus and this coffee company scandal, there's plenty of evidence that the...

Here's a different kind of post.  Most of the time I use this to talk about politics and religion and scholarship.  But much of my life is lived, in my head, in thinking about and remembering poetry.  I wanted to share a poem that's been haunting me of late.

We think of ghosts as spectral, immaterial, somehow apart from the world of matter.  Yet we also think of ghosts in discrete places; ghosts are not agents of international finance, flitting about the world.  They are anchored in spots, or at most to people whom they haunt, anyway to...