Speed

[At this point a nurse showed up, interrupting our talk. Although he was only sixty-five {Jean-Paul} Sartre was already suffering from all the amphetamines he had taken his whole adult life and needed to receive…

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…

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…