Some of Jack’s Dharma

Practice recognition of complete emptiness of all things at all times, under every condition, everywhere, and you will learn by yourself what Buddha preached. Free from Desire: What I really only want, what Ma’s given…

Vexation of Spirit

What is my book but just making history among the fools—the sooner I give up literary attainment the sooner Enlightenment will come to me—If on my deathbed I’m still involved in literary matters I’ll deserve…

Bodhisattva/Neurotic

Allen wanted to see everything, do everything, and meet everyone. 267 Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg Recently, I have read biographies of Goethe and Proust.  Today I finished…

Drop Pop Culture, Some Say

Miles Davis–why bother with any of it–Jazz, modern musicians, dope addicts, punks–Monk, crooks, killers, Bud Powell, Dizzy’s razor and Dizzy’s scorn & Al Sublette’s scorn–no. Give me the Bodhi men. Don’t even play the radio…

City Lights Journal, Revisited

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, ed. City Lights Journal #4 See AlsoFerlinghetti, Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination Thursday  28 May 2018Cami gave me three Fabriano notebooks, and I had an itch to start in one of…

Ginsberg’s Gratitude

And I never realized that [the cornices of the buildings] meant spiritual labor, to anyone—that somebody had labored to make a curve in a piece of tin—to make a cornucopia out of a piece of…

Friday 9 September 2022

… Later I’m back in New York sitting around with Irwin and Simon and Raphael and Lazarus, and now we’re famous writers more or less, but they wonder why I’m so sunk now, so unexcited…

The Main Compass

First Thought: Conversations with Allen GinsbergEdited by Michael Schumacher  When it comes to interviews with Ginsberg, I prefer the larger and deeper Spontaneous Mind, which warrants a complete rereading.   But then I come across…