Bodhisattva/Neurotic

Allen wanted to see everything, do everything, and meet everyone. 267 Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg Recently, I have read biographies of Goethe and Proust.  Today I finished…

City Lights Journal, Revisited

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, ed. City Lights Journal #4 See AlsoFerlinghetti, Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination Thursday  28 May 2018Cami gave me three Fabriano notebooks, and I had an itch to start in one of…

Ginsberg’s Gratitude

And I never realized that [the cornices of the buildings] meant spiritual labor, to anyone—that somebody had labored to make a curve in a piece of tin—to make a cornucopia out of a piece of…

Notice What You Notice

Primo Levi:  I never stopped recording the world and people around me, so much that I still have an unbelievably detailed image of them. I had an intense wish to understand, I was constantly pervaded…

“Observe What’s Vivid”

1.“There is a story in the Jewish tradition about a student going to see a great rabbi, not principally to study Torah or Talmud, but to watch how the rabbi ties his shoes.”–Eboo Patel 2. “I…

Jack and Allen

This website is indebted in a variety of ways to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. For example, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage from their one-liners such as “Be in love with yr life” (JK)…

Walt, Various

1. I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.–Walt Whitman 2. In 1968 Susan Sontag visited Hanoi for two weeks. In her account of her experiences, she seemed a bit surprised the…