Recent Reading
Sunday 11 April 2021 Dear Sarah, Thanks for your question about what I’ve been reading. Sometimes I make a plan, then other times I act entirely on instinct. So what follows are examples of each….
Category: World Literature
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…
Keeping Their Language Alive
Joseph Leftwich, Great Yiddish Writers of the Twentieth Century The writer wakens you, the reader, he rouses you out of your indifference, he shows you the things you had not seen before, he makes your…
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…
Zosima-isms/2
Which of the two is more capable of upholding and serving a great idea—the isolated rich man or one who is liberated from the tyranny of things and habits? Let us preserve the image of…
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…
Zosima-isms/1
This is the lot that befalls you, mothers, on earth. And do not be comforted, you should not be comforted, do not be comforted, but weep. And there is more joy in heaven over one…
People
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts…
Poets to (Re)Read
Sunday 4 February 2018 Justin I came up with this list of poets to become acquainted or reacquainted with, a few classic, several moderns, and many contemporaries. A good way to do this is fine …
Never Undemanding of Ourselves
John Garrard and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman Wednesday 1 August 2012 Vasily Grossman represents an inspiring figure of engagement, and old fashioned Russian insistence on telling…