Peter Coviello is a professor of English at Bowdoin College, where he talks mostly about Whitman, joy, Mormon polygamy, and American literature. His newest book is Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.

• July/August 2012: The Talk That Does Not Do Nothing
  Fighting over music (often drunkenly, with the same person, for twenty years) is a valid critical enterprise; it is also a type of love song