Teaser

As you may have noticed, blogging has not gone particularly well around here for the last few weeks. Once the term ends (or maybe even before, but not until after I get the first draft of a research paper I'm working on), these are some topics I think I'll be covering:

• The promised second post on Christopher Lasch's The New Radicalism in America, where I will try to add something to his theory about "the intellectual as social type"
• Two posts about Richard Ohmann's sweeping study of turn-of-the-century mass culture, Selling Culture: the first dealing with Ohmann's definition of mass culture (I think there's a good discussion to be had about how we might adapt it to the present, or whether we should); the second dealing with the concept of a "national market" or a "national audience," and what is really entailed in invoking the "nation" in this manner.
• Some thoughts about this year's music
• Some contrarianism about the aesthetic and moral presumptions of modernism, or, rather, of the felt need to elevate it continuously