The Last Sentence of Middlemarch
For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number…
Category: World Literature
Be Here Now
In one of Tolstoy’s parables, a peasant is plowing a field. The narrator asks the old man what he would do if he knew that Death was coming to take him away within the hour….
Remembering Kanafani
Fatima Rhodes sent me this message: “Have you seen this, Remembering Ghassan Kanafani, or How a Nation was Born of Storytelling by Elias Khoury ? It was published around the time we read Men in the Sun together….
Patience
There are years that ask the question and years that answer. — Zora Neale Hurston
On Book Six of The Brothers Karamazov
For Cab Yau Perhaps these will speak to you as we reconsider Dostoevsky’s masterpiece… “where we read truly, where the experience is to be that of meaning, we do so as if the text (the…
On Diane di Prima (Again)
for Lindsey Trout Danielle Mackey Katie Madges Katie Consamus Magan Wiles New Yorkers all As some of you know, I have recently taken to the writing of Diane di Prima. You know this because…
The Typewriter Is Holy
Later this summer at Cafe Ventana, I’ll be facilitating a reading group of the new book, The Essential Ginsberg. I was just rereading Bill Morgan’s history, The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat…
halfway around the world the bombs are falling
On the dedication page of her 2007 updated collection of Revolutionary Letters, Diane di Prima states: The REVOLUTIONARY LETTERS are dedicated to Bob Dylan; and to my grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, friend of the great anarchist…
The Summons
We refuse to be strangled by the wall in silence. In a famous Palestinian short story by Ghassan Kanafani, “Men in the Sun,” Palestinian workers suffocate inside a tanker truck. Upon discovering them, the driver…
Anne Waldman on Allen Ginsberg’s Howl
It was a cri de coeur, an alarm, a vision. Its structure matched its energy, which seemed the voices of many, not one. It was a rhizomic collage, just like life, a pastiche of the…