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…
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…
“To take flight” every day! At least for a moment, which may be brief, so long as it is intense. A “spiritual exercise” every day—alone or in the company of a person who also wants…
Interviewer: Later this month you’ll be reading at the poetry festival, Split This Rock. Do you have an expectation for what you want the audience to take away from your reading? Alice Walker: A clearer…
Norman Finkelstein has been calling on people to make a donation to al-Awda Hospital in Gaza in the hopes of raising $100,000. Please consider making a donation of $10 if you can. One of the…
I recently read a collection of essays in Brenda M. Boyle’s The Vietnam War: Topics in Contemporary North American Literature. Academics explored authors like Bao Ninh (The Sorrow of War), Michael Herr (Dispatches), Duong…
Overcoming Speechlessness is a short book on poet and novelist Alice Walker’s travels to Rwanda, Congo, and Palestine where she bears witness and attends to heartbreaking tales of atrocity, devastation, and cruelty. Yet, she is…
I was sitting outside at RISE with a young Irish-Jewish American friend who asked me, when I showed her a particular chapter in Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, “Who is Abbie Hoffman?” It was a pleasure…
Philosopher Paul Ricoeur identified Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as three masters of suspicion in the modern West. Over the last three decades, Norman Finkelstein has shown himself to be a contemporary maven of suspicion when…
In our Thursday evening class, Walking Together without Fear: Reading and Writing with Alice Walker, we pondered the following reflections from Alice Walker, Denise Levertov, and Fred Branfman. 1. Alice Walker, Thousands of Feet Below…
for Lindsey Trout Danielle Mackey Katie Madges Katie Consamus Magan Wiles New Yorkers all As some of you know, I have recently taken to the writing of Diane di Prima. You know this because…