After Reading Brecht’s Galileo
We want heroes, role models, saints, exemplars Keep looking! Ramakrishna had his soft spot for the young lads, didn’t he? Howard Zinn had affairs Gandhi slept in his old age along side young Hindu relatives…
Category: World Literature
“Renounce and Enjoy”
Mohandas Gandhi used the Bhagavad Gita as his go-to source for dealing with life’s daily problems and issues. A short book of 700 verses, the Gita grounded and inspired Gandhi throughout his life. Like other …
Jew-in-the-Library, Jew-in-the-Streets
Jill Krementz, The Jewish Writer, Henry Holt and Company, 1998 Portraits, bios, occasionally quotations form this coffee table book collection of Jewish writers, poets, novelists, scholars. Wiesel is here, as is his nemesis Hannah Arendt,…
Exemplar of Epistolary Ecstasy
Bill Morgan, ed., The Letters of Allen Ginsberg “Recommending Hare Krishna to one and all” 375 It might have taken me 12 hours to read this book line by line, but it’s more important to…
A Radical Presence Constantly Goading Us (Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems)
Owner of the San Francisco institution, City Lights Bookstore; publisher of the Pocket Poets series, including HOWL, which brought an obscenity suit to City Lights and global fame to Allen Ginsberg; poet of A Coney…
A Radical Presence Constantly Goading Us (Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems)
Owner of the San Francisco institution, City Lights Bookstore; publisher of the Pocket Poets series, including HOWL, which brought an obscenity suit to City Lights and global fame to Allen Ginsberg; poet of A Coney…
Something I Had in Common with Philip Roth
As I sat there and watched him struggle to go on living, I tried to focus on what the tumor had done with him already. This wasn’t difficult, given that he looked on that stretcher…
Something I Had in Common with Philip Roth
As I sat there and watched him struggle to go on living, I tried to focus on what the tumor had done with him already. This wasn’t difficult, given that he looked on that stretcher…
Making the Whirling World Stand Still
Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works Translated by Paul Schmidt And so I come back to the boy-genius, enfant terrible whose Illuminations I bought while at Bellarmine (under the influence of a Kerouac whose words I enjoyed…
A Sangha with Tu Fu, Milarepa, Lady Murasaki, Li Ching-chao, Basho, and Jack Kerouac
Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling, editors, Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School Rereading this collection after many years, I’m struck by the following perspectives from various writers I noted then and that still…