For the Love of a Few Golden Sentences
What is genius but the faculty of seizing and turning to account everything that strikes us? … The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources…….
Category: Reading
For the Love of a Few Golden Sentences
What is genius but the faculty of seizing and turning to account everything that strikes us? … The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources…….
What I Can Use: Notes on Waldman and Birman’s Civil Disobediences
“Emerson was not a systematic reader, but he had a genius for skimming and a comprehensive system for taking notes…. He read rapidly, looking for what he could use.” p. 67 “He read widely in…
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…
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…
Share the Wealth with Jason Makansi: Painting by Numbers at Left Bank Books
For this week’s Share the Wealth, I invite you to learn from my friend Jason Makansi this Thursday! Left Bank Books welcomes author and independent consultant Jason Makansi, who will sign and discuss his new…
How Refreshing!
Unlike critics and “language” poets, I have no agenda at all: I read books. –Eliot Weinberger, Written Reaction: Poetics, Politics, Polemics
Liz, Here’s Another Work to Add to the Wisdom Literature List
But the whole teaching, the “way” contained in these anecdotes, poems, and meditations, is characteristic of a certain mentality found everywhere in the world, a certain taste for simplicity, for humility, self-effacement, silence, and in…
The Good News of Giving and Receiving Books, 6.26.2017
Ten years ago, because of a Social Justice theology class, I got to know Melissa Banerjee, a Bengali-American. It made sense to me to give her a hardback edition of the The Gospel of Sri…