Christopher Warley's blog

So the funny thing about Shakespeare, you will have noticed, is that there are a lot of editions of his plays. A lot. A LOT.

David Pogue, who miraculously manages to remain both an enthusiast for all things technological while, at the same time, starting a small insurrection against cell phone companies, has now convinced me not to worry about which edition of Shakespeare my students use.

Who says close reading is only for English professors?  How improbable is it that I would write an update to my slog about “Total Eclipse of the Heart”?  Apparently, not very improbable at all.  Criticism, it seems, can be interesting and useful and not boring.  My friend VW stopped reading Greek long enough  to send me “Total Eclipse Of the Heart” made into a flow chart.

Raymond Chandler is making me depressed this afternoon.  Not because Chandler has a knack for hitting a nerve (“On the way out I had another look at the face in the mirror.  I looked as if I had made up my mind to drive off a cliff”).  I’m depressed because I am currently rereading The Little Sister in The Library of America edition.

One of those little lies you tell undergraduates is that Romanticism-its obsession with unique inner feeling, its obsession with nature-emerged as a result of the Industrial Revolution.

With the help of Bonnie Tyler's 1983 #1 hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” I'm still trying to figure out what differentiates Adorno from what he calls cultural critics in "Cultural Criticism and Society."  

In Italian, when you say someone’s email address (chris dot warley at utoronto dot ca), instead of “at” you say “chiocciola,” which means snail, because @ sort of looks like a snail.