Dr. Johnson and Jane Austen
One unblushing admirer of the Dictionary was Jane Austen’s father, who assembled a substantial collection of books by Johnson, by his friends and associates, and about both the man and his circle. Inspired by her…
Category: World Literature
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…
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…
Then and Now
“Brothers, do not be afraid of men’s sin, love man also in his sin, for this likeness of God’s love is the height of love on earth. Love all of God’s creation, both the whole…
Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky’s art is literally prophetic. He is not prophetic in the sense of predicting the future, but in a truly biblical sense, for he untiringly denounces the fall of the people of God back into…
Dylan’s Tweets
Yesterday I had lunch and spent some time with Andrew Ivers, a gentleman and a scholar, at Courtesy Diner on Hampton. Of course, we eventually came around to Bob Dylan, after Andrew gave me a…
A Year of Reading Marcel Proust (& Sri Ramakrishna)
Cami Kasmerchak just gave me the idea of a reading group (like the one we did in 2021 of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov) of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Who’s been wanting to…
Which Would You Choose?!
I receive frequent emails from Tablet, including the late afternoon What Happened Today: Scroll. Here is today’s Idea of the Day—