Neither Conformism Nor Eccentricity
John Armstrong, Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007 Almost twelve years ago I read this book, and the themes of Bildung and mastery were most…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Not So Random Entries, Commonplace Moleskine/10
111. Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction. –Simone Weil 222. When [Arthur Waley] was at work, all else was eliminated. –Ivan Morris 333. Whenever I…
Share the Wealth 2018
Thanks to my/our friends–those who shared with us, those who hosted, and those who came, opened, and listened. Like my student Anlin, I’m one of the richest people around. Harvest in Occupied Palestine: Lea Koesterer…
Why Do They Come to Hinder Us?
Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des Clercs) [1927] Julien Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals can be read as a gloss on the Dreyfus Affair. In this polemic against intellectuals who have…
Birthday Greetings to Dianne Lee
You have been for many decades A light in the darkness Countless people (and creatures) You have loved and sacrificed for It’s true, Love is the best Resistance— How come NPR hasn’t interviewed you these…
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…
“I Belong to Chomsky”
The following is the chapter, “Peril,” from The Book of Mev. Spring 1994 was blooming in the Bay Area. We participated in a Good Friday demonstration at the Lawrence Livermore nuclear laboratory with Steve…
The Last Few Pages of “The Poetry Deal” by Jessica Flier
Jessica is taking my Diane di Prima class, and posted this at our class blog. She gave me permission to share with whomever I wished. Enjoy! The last few pages of The Poetry Deal are…
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…