Transmitting Beauty
Donald Keene, Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan Columbia University Press, 2008 The first sentence of George Steiner’s first book (on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) reads: “Literary criticism should arise out…
Category: World Literature
Knowing and Not Knowing the Global American Berserk
Philip Roth, American Pastoral Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997 …the angry, rebarbative spitting-out daughter with no interest whatever in being the next successful Levov, flushing him out of hiding as if he were fugitive—initiating the Swede…
Her Vivacity Gladdened Life
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Knopf: Everyman’s Library, 1992 I’ve acknowledged previously the importance of Reinaldo Arenas and Eduardo Galeano during the late 1990s into 2000 as I was trying to figure out…
Wherever We Are Useful
Katharina Mommsen, Goethe’s Art of Living Trafford, 2003 Translators: John Crosetto, John Whaley, Renee M. Schell A teacher who can awaken a sense of a single good deed or a single good poem accomplishes more…
A Call to Life and Deeds: Goethe’s Maxims
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections Translated by Elisabeth Stopp; edited with an introduction and notes by Peter Hutchinson; Penguin Books, 1998 I’ve been reading Pierre Hadot’s 2008 book, N’oublie pas de vivre:…
Share the Wealth with Mary Bast: The Magic of Self-Gift, Or, Why You Should Ask Yourself the Big Questions in Life, With Some Russian Literature Sprinkled In Along the Way
Mary Bast came back from a whirlwind year-long working holiday in Ireland in 2014, wondering why she was so unhappy over what she thought was going to be the journey of a lifetime with her…
This Pilgrimage of the Heart
I first read the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time spring through autumn of 1997. A couple of years later, I read the collection of Proust’s essays in On Art &…
“Nobody’s Going To Do It for You”
Anne Waldman and Laura Wright, editors, Beats at Naropa: An Anthology Coffee House Press, 2009 I read Beats at Naropa exactly nine years ago, 2009. In my notes on the dialogues, essays, and interviews are…
Making the World Bearable: A Reading/Writing Class on Diane di Prima—Fall 2018
Feeling a need to be inspired in these dismal times? Been burnt out with academic writing that doesn’t originate in your soul? Seeking a community of comrades to inspire, console, and rouse you? Wanting to…
Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself
“I was like a pauper who moistens his dry crust with fewer tears if he assures himself that at any moment a total stranger is perhaps going to leave him his entire fortune. We are…