Commonplace Books
From the Be in Love with Yr Life class, Annie Kratzmeyer was telling me about the commonplace notebooks she fills. Here’s a page of one of mine. What Emerson kept, and what he recommended enthusiastically…
Month: August 2017
A Witness to Power’s Mendacity
A while back I reread David Barsamian’s first collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky, entitled Chronicles of Dissent. Actually, I first heard the material starting in the mid-1980s, listening to Barsamian’s cassette tapes of interviews…
The Good News of Inspiration from Rereading Lindsey Trout Hughes’s Letters and Poems
In the last year and a half, I have benefited enormously from exchanges with Lindsey, who lives in Brooklyn.
Those Blasts of a Trumpet
I’ve recently finished reading Robert Richardson’s engrossing biography, Emerson: The Mind on Fire. The author regularly highlights the exuberant reading Emerson did throughout his life. Robertson not only identifies authors and titles of what Emerson…
A Briiliant Bit of Victor Hugo
My friend Andrew Wimmer has taken on a translation of Hugo’s Les Misérables. He shared the following in this morning’s email… “If it had not rained on the night of June 17, 1815, the future…
Coming Soon: Share the Wealth with Laura Lapinski: The Films of Wes Anderson
Laura Lapinski, a graduate student in psychology at SIUE, is doing her Share the Wealth on film director Wes Anderson on Sunday 8 October. For those interested in joining us, here’s some background from Laura……
Gratitudes/639
Pairon Mein Bandhan Hai, with gratitude to Dr. Anjali (Marwaha) Oza, who introduced me to Bollywood film through Mohabbatein fourteen years ago…
Yiddish Writers/3
Isaac Bashevis Singer was the only Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (Elie Wiesel, whose first book, And the World Remained Silent, was in Yiddish, was awarded the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize.)…
She’s Had a Pretty Good Nocturnal Run
At Dunkin’ Donuts She said matter-of-factly “I haven’t had a nightmare In 17 years” She’s 22
Yiddish Writers/2
I tried in my book Kiddush Hashem to picture Auschwitz in seventy pages. But I wrote the book over a period of six years, in pain and agony. And writing it I became a changed…