Not So Random Entries, Commonplace Moleskine /2
40. The principal truth is this: latent in every act of complete reading is the compulsion to write a book in reply. The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in…
Category: Reading
“What Am I Living My Life for?” Ivan Ilyich and Ikigai- A Summer 2018 Reading/Writing Class
“I see that all of my work amounts to nothing, that my ten volumes aren’t worth anything!” —Guy de Maupassant, after reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich David Barsamian: You had something in mind in…
“What Am I Living My Life for?” Ivan Ilyich and Ikigai- A Summer 2018 Reading/Writing Class
“I see that all of my work amounts to nothing, that my ten volumes aren’t worth anything!” —Guy de Maupassant, after reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich David Barsamian: You had something in mind in…
That Glow, That Yes!
Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft 30 September 2000 It’s clear to me today, anyway, that my Holy Contour of Life book will be a structure like Natalie’s: short, compressed, easy…
“Why Must the Poet’s Mouth Be Bloodied, His Teeth Caved in?”
More than a decade ago, octogenarian Jesuit felon Daniel Berrigan spoke at the local Jesuit university (in the auditorium of the business school, no less). During the Q & A, a friend of mine asked…
Short, Savory, and Sound: Aitken’s Miniatures
In fall 2000 I first encountered Robert Aitken Roshi with his book, The Dragon Who Never Sleeps, a collection of scores of four-line poems, or gathas. Nine years later, I read his Miniatures of a…
“True Happiness and Joy”
Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. He was the author of 40 novels, 350 short stories, and five plays. When I was in Palestine in 2003, I would read…
A State of Wonder and Serenity
What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? And if so, what…
“The Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha”*
Notes on Eliot Katz, The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg Example of George Steiner’s championing learning by heart: Ginsberg knew hundreds of poems from memory [20] In Dear Layla and Book of Mev: The…
A Feat of Reading and Writing
1. [T]he sheer enormity of what took place between 1933 and 1945 beggars our powers of description and understanding. The more one studies this period and its excesses, the more one must conclude that for…