June Journal 2019
Hanna Krall: “All my books are about how very good human beings can be, and about how very abd they can be—something we are constantly discovering over and over again.” Chasing the King of Hearts,…
Category: Reading
Two Books I Finished Reading Today
A Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night: A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life [A commentary on Shantideva’s great manual], by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. We Were in Auschwitz / 6643…
Some Works Are Greater Than Others
Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews Edited and with an Introduction by Gauri ViswanathanPantheon Books, 2001 Two writers who are well known for their championing of the literary canon are Harold Bloom and George…
Keeping Our Mouths Shut, Our Minds at Peace
Some decades back New Directions published a series of slim Wisdom books that can still serve as an engaging introduction to several religious traditions. Earlier this year, I enjoyed Stephen Clissold’s The Wisdom of St…
A Letter from 2005
April 6, 2005 Dear Andrew, I recently finished a small book by Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, and it made me think of many conversations we’ve had over the past couple of years. So…
The Pleasure of Dwelling on Things We Have Read
Zilbadone, noun, Italian. A zibaldone is an Italian vernacular commonplace book. The word means “a heap of things” or “miscellany” in Italian. The earliest such books were kept by Venetian merchants in the fourteenth century,…
A Paradise for Perusers
I have given away four copies of James Mustich’s chef d’oeuvre, 1,000 Books to Read before You Die: A Life-Changing List, before I bought and kept one for myself. I became acquainted with Mr. Mustich…
Reading/743
Both M. and Akhmatova had the astonishing ability of somehow bridging time and space when they read the work of dead poets. By its very nature, such reading is usually anachronistic, but with them it…
Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Insurgent Art of Poetry: A Fall Reading and Writing Class
Where are Whitman’s wild children,where the great voices speaking outwith a sense of sweetness and sublimity,where the great, new vision,the great world-view,the high prophetic songof the immense earthand all that sings in it —Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Populist…
Reading in Prison
1. At one-hour intervals the night guards paced past every room. Each time I heard the approaching footsteps, I jumped into bed and feigned sleep. And as soon as the guard passed, I got back…