Radiant Bliss
1. Recently ten of us became acquainted with Japanese-American Mayumi Oda in the Writing Our Own History class. Here autobiography had just been published, Sarasvati’s Gift. As an artist Oda had a breakthrough when she…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Love in Action: The Brothers Karamazov Reading Community 2021
“The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us…
True Happiness Is a Verb
Monday 28 December 2020 Dear C, Having written you yesterday about Annie Liebovits and Susan Sontag, I want to mention today that I took the phrase “Wisdom Project” from Sontag in her collection, At the…
Share the Wealth Sunday 27 December 2020
As I was driving in the Central West End this afternoon, I realized that I had not asked a friend to do a Share the Wealth with us this weekend. Then, knowing that Christmas…
Always an Opportunity
Tariq Ali, Conversations with Edward Said 22 May 2006 There’s not much to this 128-page book, a long interview between Ali and Said, “the true chronicler of his people and their occupied homeland,” most all…
Share the Wealth with Natalie Long/Gratitude and Grace: Lessons from a Summer Garden
In late 2019, my partner and I conceived a garden. Rooted in dusty recollections of summer gardening with grandparents, our memories animated a vision that inevitably turned out differently than imagined; as reality eventually supplanted…
Plus Ça Change, Plus C’est la Même Chose
The following is from a 1983 interview with MIT professor Noam Chomsky… Interviewer: If you were to wake up tomorrow morning, and find yourself at the State Department, not MIT, and you were Secretary, what…
Cheer Up!
Dear Simone, It’s been a pleasure to spend the last seven months reading together Montaigne, Sarah Blakewell, Peter Berger, and, above all, Pierre Hadot! Your fascination with him has deepened my own: The Present Alone…
Freeing Up Our Poetic Imaginations
The Ghost of Birds has many intriguing pieces; I want to focus simply on one. And on the riches of the last three paragraphs on the final two pages of his essay, “American Indias.” …
In Medias Res/2
This Is What I Can Do When it comes to righteous indignation Reshma makes Arundhati Roy seem timid At a public reading of The Book of Mev I made sure she went last and read…