Category: World Literature

On Ivan Ilyich

ahamkara [aham, “I”; kara, “maker”] Self-will, the ego mask, the principle in people which makes them feel separate from others. — Diana Morrison, A Glossary of Sanskrit from The Spiritual Tradition of India The Death of Ivan…

All Power To the Imagination

Have you ever tried to email chicken soup?Diane di Prima The Poetry Deal—It’s only 109 pages. But Diane di Prima—poet, printer, feminist, Buddhist, anarchist, pacifist, cultural revolutionary— packs a lot of life into those pages….

Reading Du Fu

Some friends and I are reading Du Fu in David Young’s translation. Here’s what Ye Xie (1627-1703) had to say about him– “Take any one of Du Fu’s poems, or even one line, and everywhere…

He Would Have Never Gotten Tenure

The thing is to get under the students’ skin and arouse enough enthusiasm that they get under their own skin.  This means allowing yourself to be yourself in class. My own best teachers were WC…

Comfort and Consolation

What I saw then was this fairly obvious faculty of art: that it goes on, it lasts a bit longer that our frail human lives—it offers comfort. The vision is more enduring than our persons—it…

Pass It On

A work of art is something you make, something you give to other people. It’s an object for use, and people can make many different uses of the same work. Susan Sontag

Respecting the Vietnamese

On John Balaban’s Remembering Heaven’s Face: A Moral Witness in Vietnam For Chris, Carol, and Cristina John Balaban declared himself a Conscientious Objector during the VietnamWar; he ended up going to Vietnam, but as a member…