A Letter from Israel Shahak
—Israel Shahak performed a vital service for many years with his translations “From the Hebrew Press,” which gave an accurate picture of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. A survivor of Bergen-Belsen, he was…
Category: Activists
What Kind of University Does SLU Want To Be?
Reading about SLU’s receiving of Rex Sinquefield’s fifty million dollars reminded me of a letter Mev Puleo wrote to then SLU President Biondi 25 years ago … A School/2 After the exhilarating World Youth…
Jew-in-the-Library, Jew-in-the-Streets
Jill Krementz, The Jewish Writer, Henry Holt and Company, 1998 Portraits, bios, occasionally quotations form this coffee table book collection of Jewish writers, poets, novelists, scholars. Wiesel is here, as is his nemesis Hannah Arendt,…
Exemplar of Epistolary Ecstasy
Bill Morgan, ed., The Letters of Allen Ginsberg “Recommending Hare Krishna to one and all” 375 It might have taken me 12 hours to read this book line by line, but it’s more important to…
Not So Random Entries, Commonplace Moleskine/4
99. There is a notion of “passing it on,” that simple. One to one. Elder to younger perhaps. That “poetry is news,” that the inspiration for any work you do and the work you do…
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…
Looking Deeply at Laos/1
Please take a look at this video by Legacies of War. It will require 2 minutes and 40 seconds of your time. Next, consider, Thich Nhat Hanh’s 4th precept of the Tiep Hien Order: Do…
“My Library Is What Is in My Head”
Leland Poague, ed.Conversations with Susan Sontag University Press of Mississippi, 1995 Sometimes I feel that, in the end, all I am really defending—but then I say all is everything—is the idea of seriousness, of true…
Where the Tortured and the Torturer Shook Hands
How many of our most famous novelists, for instance, have bothered to take the two-and-a-half hour flight from Miami and see for themselves what’s going on here? —Lawrence Ferlinghetti I first read Seven Days…
A Sangha with Tu Fu, Milarepa, Lady Murasaki, Li Ching-chao, Basho, and Jack Kerouac
Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling, editors, Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School Rereading this collection after many years, I’m struck by the following perspectives from various writers I noted then and that still…