Modus Operandi
If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. –Antoine…
Category: World Literature
A Master’s Blog
This past June, José Saramago died. He was 87. Awarded the Noble Prize for Literature in 1998, he was the author of such novels as Blindness, The Gospel according to Jesus Christ, and The Year of the Death…
“There’s Just a Meanness in This World”
On Charles Reznikoff, Testimony, v.2 The United States (1885-1915): Recitative I can’t say I was tremendously impressed with this “broken-up prose” (wife Marie Syrkin’s label). Maybe it’s the dating—it’s way back in US history, and it’s hard…
The Gospel according to Marcel
Neeta and I were happily shopping for books in Left Bank Books this afternoon, and she ended up with Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and I left with Days of Reading by Proust. As for the inner book of…
Elstir’s Point of View
Lubna, If you lived here (or I there), we could have a bi-weekly Proust Reading Club! The following passage is from Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove: It was along this train of thought, meditated in silence…
The Scholars by William Butler Yeats
Bald heads forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love’s despair To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear. All shuffle…
A Lifetime of Letters
The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan (Da Capo Press, 2008) I have a file titled “Noam Chomsky” that contains several letters from the linguist during the 1990s. I first began writing him…
An Israeli Poet
The following poem by Israeli Aharon Shabtai is translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole. It appears in his aptly entitled collection from New Directions, J’Accuse. “War” I, too, have declared war: You’ll need to…
An Influential Neurotic Bodhisattva Bard
A few months after Mev died, I read all of Allen Ginsberg‘s poetry and several volumes of essays and journals. Somehow, his spirit cheered me. Recently, I’ve read several books about Ginsberg and what follows are…
Poet against War – Aharon Shabtai: A Voice Mocking in The Wilderness
It’s summertime and this means vacation for some of us, and people will be browsing in chain bookstores for the perfect summer escapist read: mysteries, sci-fi, biographies, anything to take our minds off of work,…