Reading of Dorothy’s Reading
The Dorothy Day Book, compiled by Margaret Quigley and Michael Garvey, is a kind of posthumous commonplace book, that is, a collection of quotations from Dorothy’s decades of reading (largely from her column in the…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Not So Random Entries, Commonplace Moleskine/3
100. [T]oday it is not nearly enough to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the preset moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent. –Simone Weil 200. Poets who died with…
Not a River-Like Novel; But a Novel Like Poetry, or Rather, a Narrative Poem, an Epos in Mosaic, a Kind of Arabesque Preoccupation
Over the weekend Lindsey asked me some questions about my writing process (such as, How long did it take you to write Book of Mev? Did you always know what the structure would be? How did…
Share the Wealth with Rebecca Gorley: The Overnight Janitor
Loss is universal. The impact of loss is unpredictable. Overnight Janitor tells these stories. Anyone can be an Overnight Janitor. The idea for Overnight Janitor originated from incessant feelings and observations of loss. Even though…
Not So Random Entries, Commonplace Moleskine /2
40. The principal truth is this: latent in every act of complete reading is the compulsion to write a book in reply. The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in…
Gratitude for Demun Share the Wealth Writing Class
As the summer Share the Wealth Writing Class on Demun winds down, gratitude is, once again, an appropriate theme for meditation (quotations with page number are from Robert A. Emmons, Gratitude Works!). “A French proverb…
Not So Random Entries, Commonplace Moleskine /1
63. And that will take up a thousand hours of energy. — Jack Kerouac, letter to Allen Ginsberg 126. Nevertheless you still charge words with meaning mainly in three ways, called phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia. You…
Not So Random Entries, Commonplace Moleskine /1
63. And that will take up a thousand hours of energy. — Jack Kerouac, letter to Allen Ginsberg 126. Nevertheless you still charge words with meaning mainly in three ways, called phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia. You…
“What Am I Living My Life for?” Ivan Ilyich and Ikigai- A Summer 2018 Reading/Writing Class
“I see that all of my work amounts to nothing, that my ten volumes aren’t worth anything!” —Guy de Maupassant, after reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich David Barsamian: You had something in mind in…
“What Am I Living My Life for?” Ivan Ilyich and Ikigai- A Summer 2018 Reading/Writing Class
“I see that all of my work amounts to nothing, that my ten volumes aren’t worth anything!” —Guy de Maupassant, after reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich David Barsamian: You had something in mind in…