Mentshes/5

Sign Up by Lindsey Trout Hughes Hi, Mark! I hope this note finds you well. I saw your post last week about the spring writing course. I asked Katie Consamus over coffee if she’d like…

The Irresistible Power of Natural Powers

Having recently perused Jim Forest’s biography and memoir of Dan Berrigan (Playing in the Lions’ Den), I returned to Berrigan’s collection of poems, And the Risen Bread. If I can find five poems in such…

In Praise of Sentimental Slop

Back in the late 90s, when the spring semester ended, and the grades had been turned in, I’d treat myself with another reading of Dostoevsky’s magisterial The Brothers Karamazov.  I’ve lost track of how many…

On Susan Sontag, Trip to Hanoi

Journal, July 2005 Susan Sontag spent two weeks in North Vietnam in 1968, and wrote 90 pages about her experiences. (Perhaps I will cull from those notebooks I kept in Gaza and the West Bank…

On Book Six of The Brothers Karamazov

For Cab Yau Perhaps these will speak to you as we reconsider Dostoevsky’s masterpiece… “where we read truly, where the experience is to be that of meaning, we do so as if the text (the…

Some of What’s Not on Your CV

Your allusive ode to your soul-pal (“I am because you are”) That incendiary haiku you gave to Mona on the porch What prompted your most intense torrent of tears That photo of the blissed-out Hindu…

Lineage

From Markel to Zinovy From Zinovy to Alyosha From Alyosha to Kolya From Kolya to Cab From Cab to me From me to Eileen From Eileen to Adah From Adah to a world filled with…