William D Miller, A Harsh and Dreadful Love: Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement After reading and discussing The Brothers Karamazov with 12 friends in 2021, I finally read William Miller’s 1973 history of…
Above all, avoid lies, all lies, especially the lie to yourself. Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute. And avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems…
In the bar I told Dean, “Hell, man, I know very well you didn’t come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except…
… Later I’m back in New York sitting around with Irwin and Simon and Raphael and Lazarus, and now we’re famous writers more or less, but they wonder why I’m so sunk now, so unexcited…
Norman Podhoretz, Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer In a recent post, I acknowledged finally paying closer attention to the second precept of Thich…
In 1994 I purchased Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon after I had taken a leave of absence from my doctoral program in Religion and Society at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Bloom offered…
School starts in a week!
For in the years to come you will find yourselves up against gods of all sorts, big and little gods, corporate and incorporeal gods, all of them demanding to be worshiped and obeyed – the…
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention.Be astonished.Tell about it.–Mary Oliver, from “Sometimes” Laura …When I Am Among the Trees When I am among the trees,especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks…
Of course, Diane di Prima is in My Canon… Because she honored Suzuki Roshi’s unprecedented presenceBecause she made the case for old-school being literally in touchBecause she gave primacy to cosmologyBecause I gifted C. with…