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…
Category: Writing
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…
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…
Three Questions
Gregg Krech, Naikan: Gratitude, Grace, and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection (Stone Bridge Press, 2001) I learned of Naikan through consulting the bibliography of Patricia Ryan Madson’s book, Improv Wisdom. Therein, she cited books on…
Like Staying up All Night with Your Best Friend
Allen Ginsberg, Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness, edited by Gordon Ball There are many influences that went into my creating Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, and Allen Ginsberg was a major one. Here…
To Contend, To Enliven, To Distance, To Advocate, To Investigate, To Rally, To Prioritize, To Surprise
I’ve read Anne Waldman since 2001 (Fast Speaking Woman: Chants and Essays got me started). Her epics, poems, interviews, and edited anthologies (from the Kerouac School at Naropa) stimulate and open up possibilities. One of…
Congratulations to Jason Makansi!
Friends, I highly recommend Jason’s novel–here’s a blurb I wrote for it… “Religious texts aver that to save one life is akin to saving the entire world. The beauty of Jason Makansi’s novel is in…
Writing to Wake Up: A Course in Creativity and Community
Think about it: Even with all our sophisticated technologies and modes of communication, who feels as though there is enough time? And yet, we need time, as community activist Grace Lee Boggs has said, to…
“True Happiness and Joy”
Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. He was the author of 40 novels, 350 short stories, and five plays. When I was in Palestine in 2003, I would read…
Three Hours in the Morning
In Talking with Sartre, U.S. professor John Gerassi explores a fascinating range of subjects with the French intellectual, writer, and activist. At the book’s conclusion, Gerassi writes, “What we must do instead, he said, is…