A Healing Pleasure
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Come Gather ’round, Scholars, Whatever You Tweet…
M. had yet to learn the distinction between knowledge and ignorance. Up to this time his conception had been that one got knowledge from books and schools. Later on he gave up that false conception….
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…
Sara
So as America melts down in a colossal boom of bad news (just read Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi) and as my age becomes more inescapable every week, and I wonder what to make of…
With Gratitude for Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth, 100 Poems from the JapaneseNew Directions, 1964 Dear EJ Kenneth Rexroth—poet, polymath, anarchist, and pacifist—is a fine guide to Chinese and Japanese poetry. He provided six books of translation for the enrichment of…
Instead of Reciting a Gatha, Here I Am Listening to Dylan
Leave at your own chosen speed….
Autumn Merton Hour with Rocco Erker: Love, War, and a Vocation
Join us for our fourth Zoom gathering this year to explore the work of Thomas Merton—Sunday 20 November7 p.m. Central TimeEmail me for URL: markjchmiel@gmail.com Rocco Erker has been a lifelong reader and student of Thomas…
An Out-Going Heart
Earlier today, I unintentionally came across the following writing in response to a prompt I received from Sara Rendell on September 9, 2013. We could learn a lot about having an out-going heart by following…