I am currently reading Ruth Franklin’s 2016 biography of American author Shirley Jackson, subtitled A Rather Haunted Life, and I’ve come across a couple of passages in Chapter One (“Foundations: California 1916-1933”) I would like to comment on. Franklin informs us that Samuel C. Bugbee, “San Francisco’s first architect and Jackson’s great-great-grandfather” built in the […]
Tomorrow I’ll be introducing my class in ‘English Romantic Literature’ to the pleasure of discovering William Blake (1757-1827). I haven’t taught this course in fifteen years and, so, I needed to re-discover Blake myself, re-learn the basics I must transmit. Within limits, careful as usual not to let myself be carried away and use for […]