For JAI
I was out driving around in my ancient PriusListening to some Dylan songs on my CD player Blind Willie McTell“Well, I heard that hoot owl singing” Brownsville Girl“I can still see the day that you…
Category: World Literature
For Everything and Everyone
My friends, ask gladness from God. Be glad as children, as birds in the sky. And let man’s sin not disturb you in your efforts, do not fear that it will dampen your endeavor and…
Hermitages
Turns out that all my final favorite writers (Dickinson, Blake, Thoreau) ended up their lives in little hermitages… Emily in her cottage, Blake in his, with wife; and Thoreau his hut… –Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters, v….
Being Interested
When a cowhand got on the bus at Hugo, and smiled at all of us in there, a whole busload of people, I knew that he was more interested in mankind than 10,000,000 New School…
All Too Human
Feeling alternately overwhelmed by his inability to comprehend and discuss the Holocaust yet charged with the awesome duty of recording it, [Yankev] Glatshteyn felt tempted at times to run—not towards his heritage, but away from…
All-time Greats
By the novel of ideas I mean realist fiction, focused on the complexities of human psychology and the social conditions peculiar to a specific time and place, that tests theories by examining the sources of…
Across the Centuries
Li Po was an important part of the modernist revolution Pound engineered. –David Hinton, The Selected Poems of Li Po, 125
Compelling
His voice was deep and resonant and somehow brave, like the voice of old-time American heroes and orators. Something earnest and strong and humanly hopeful I liked about him, while the other poets were either…
Four or Five Times in Life
“He smiled understandingly — much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It…
House of Hospitality
Every time he said this word monsieur, with his gently solemn, and heartily hospitable voice, the man’s countenance lighted up. Monsieur to a convict, is a glass of water to a man dying of thirst…