Dirda in Threes
RULE TWO: General duties of a student — pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students. —Sister Corita Kent Michael Dirda, Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments Indiana University Press, 2000…
Category: Reading
The Reading Life/1
The Chasm between Them and Us Kadya Molodovsky, A Jewish Refugee in New York: Rivke Zilberg’s JournalTranslated by Anita Norich The accomplished Yiddish writer Molodovsky wrote this novel in serialized form in 1940-41, knowing obviously…
Gleanings and Connections
Anne Waldman and Laura Wright, editors, Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics—An Anthology Dear Layla: “modernist textual montage/collage of a wide-ranging array mixing the personal and the historical” Dear Layla: “Ezra Pound’s Cantos gave me a way…
Putting Marginalia to Use
for Danielle Mackey Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces 31 Saturday October 2009 I reread this book for one reason: To see if it could help me generate some ideas as to form and content…
Writing Our Own Histories: A Spring/Summer Class
“First We Read, Then We Write” –title of Robert D. Richardson’s study on Emerson’s creative life “Something that you feel will find its own form” –Jack Kerouac, U.S. novelist and poet “You have to write…
Japaneseness
In the 90s, phrases like “global village” and “global economy” were increasingly common. The technologies that have emerged since then allow us incredible possibilities of connecting and learning. Think … besides anime, what do we…
Anne Waldman on The Art of Writing, Reading, and Sharing—Winter Class/Arco-Online 2020
Imagine you are not alone. Consort with other writers. You are in a League of Writing. You are part of a conspiracy to lift the discourse and practice of writing higher. Think of your writing…
Dedication
Nathalie Vanderlinden takes a passion for Proust to a new, public level! Though Proust had a Jewish mother, he seems to me neither Christian nor Jewish. His wisdom is his own, and though it has…
Reading Roth on Writing and Reading
George Searles, editor, Conversations with Philip Roth Literary Conversation Series University Press of Mississippi 1992 I settled in this morning with a collection of interviews with Philip Roth, from the bright beginning of his career…
What Is Vaster
In the early 1980s Harold Bloom noted about his experience of decades at Yale University that “[t]here is a profound falling away from what I would call ‘text-centeredness” among the current generation of American undergraduates,…