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…
Category: World Literature
Making It Be Spring with Everything
Burton Watson, Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings, Columbia University Press, 1996 Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know…
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…
“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…