The Usefulness of Human Rights
Reading the odd, short book Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, I was reminded of the gripping 1979 study by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky on “the political economy of human rights.” The…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
One Thing Leads to Another
Z studied with meIn a Social Justice class fall 2007 I learned that semesterHow much Z loved poetry They kept a notebook of new wordsThey’d come across and then make the words a part of…
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…
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.)…