Pass It on
In English, I send my articles out via e-mail. It’s one of the best ways, and certainly the easiest, to publish political writing in this country. Send it to your friends and let the friends,…
Category: Writing
Writing and Reading Inter-Are/2
Johnson made such chains of learned reference in his writing, and his written works are the outgrowth of the kind of reading Johnson did, in which fragments of writing can be distributed under preexisting topics…
Today’s One-Liner (#30)
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. –Joan Didion, The White Album
Today’s One-Liner (#25)
It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. –Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook,” in Slouching towards Bethlehem Sao Paulo,…
Today’s One-Liner (#24)
“You have to write your own history, nobody’s going to do it for you.” –Allen Ginsberg, quoted in Anne Waldman, Beats at Naropa
Writing and Reading Inter-Are/1
When a man writes from his own mind, he writes very rapidly. The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library…
Today’s One-Liner (#18)
I remember when I lived in Boston reading all of Dostoyevsky’s novels one right after the other. –Joe Brainard, I Remember
Advice to a Young Person on Keeping a Journal
Let her review her journal often, and set down what she finds herself to have omitted, that she may trust to memory as little as possible, for memory is soon confused by a quick succession…
Honesty & Humility
There is a story that Po always showed his poems to an uneducated old servant-woman, and anything she couldn’t understand, he rewrote. –David Hinton on Po Chü-i, in The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese…
Reading Jewish
In 1994, I purchased Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, and would peruse it from time to time, and pick a book off of Bloom’s four lists. He got me back to Shakespeare and sparked…