I recently recovered a first-semester graduate paper of mine about Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. I believe I wrote it as a final paper for a graduate class on Irish literature taught by Dr. John Warner. He advocated for my admission to the program on the basis of my senior undergraduate honor’s thesis onContinue reading “The Shape of Beckett’s Waiting”
Category Archives: Literature
Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song
If Dylan died tomorrow, this book would be a fitting last word.
A New Poetic Form: The Hourglass Sestina
I’ve been working with artist, photographer, and documentary filmmaker Lee Fearnside on an illustrated collection of poems titled The Fantastic Bestiary. During the writing process for this collection, I came up with the idea of an abbreviated sestina form that would usually take the approximate shape of an hourglass if centered on the page. ThoseContinue reading “A New Poetic Form: The Hourglass Sestina”
Pete Townshend and World War II
I have three iTunes playlists dedicated to The Who — 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to the present — and I can’t listen through them without being impressed, over and over again, by Pete Townshend’s genius. Record sales aside, his creative accomplishments exceed that of the Beatles, Dylan, or the Rolling Stones throughout the 60s andContinue reading “Pete Townshend and World War II”
“I Can’t Believe We Made It”: Romanticism and Afropresentism in Works of African-American Women Hip Hop and R’n’B Artists
Another problematic of Romanticism for rock (and therefore North American pop music in general) is Romanticism’s pernicious racism, which I will show instigated the very origins of rock and roll. Romantic ideologies of racial categories and hierarchies fed into the mythologies of white artists drawing from supposedly vulgar, primitive Black music for sexuality, physicality, andContinue reading ““I Can’t Believe We Made It”: Romanticism and Afropresentism in Works of African-American Women Hip Hop and R’n’B Artists”
The Philosophy of Contemporary Song 