The Good News of the Barakats, 4.6.2017
Last night, Sharifa Barakat and I had dinner at Central Cafe (along with Imman Musa and Dania Saffaf Atienza). Sarah Dwidar introduced me to Sharifa her freshman year at SLU on sunny day on West…
The Good News of a Reader’s Response, 4.4.2017
Some time back I received the following from Fred Zweig after he read The Book of Mev– “Mark, I finished reading your book yesterday. It has it all: a beautiful love story, heroic idealism, clarity. It is…
The Good News of MLK, 4.4.2017
Fifty years ago today at NYC’s Riverside Church, Martin Luther King delivered a powerful, prophetic indictment of U.S. war-making in Vietnam: “They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve…
The Good News of Rereading, 4.2.2017
Tasha Rutledge and I had class together when she was a freshman at SLU in 2007. We read The Book of Mev in that class, and many years later she told me she reads it…
Sunday 9 April — Share the Wealth with Marilyn Vazquez
I came to the U.S when I was five months old, and attended public schools, made friends, and played sports my whole life. I will be speaking about the two key issues facing the integrated…
Average
It’s a practice I’m pretty average at it But compared to what Or to whom? Take Chomsky, for instance: In the 1990s He said that he spent 20-25 hours a week Writing letters This was…
The Good News of a Play, 3.31.2017
Playwright, clown, musician, and mensch Colin McLaughlin has invited friends over this evening to do a collective reading of his new play, Jailbird, about Eugene Debs. Colin asked me to read Debs’ famous statement to…
The Good News of a Play, 3.31.2017
Playwright, clown, musician, and mensch Colin McLaughlin has invited friends over this evening to do a collective reading of his new play, Jailbird, about Eugene Debs. Colin asked me to read Debs’ famous statement to…
The Good News of Jean Abbott’s Accompaniment, 3.30.2017
Jean Abbott* is like Kwan Yin, a bodhisattva who hears the cries of the world and through such listening knows what to do, or knows sometimes that there’s nothing to do except the being present…
The Good News of Monthly Mutuality, 3.29.2017
Since this past September, Cami Kasmerchak and I have been visiting monthly, taking turns to come up with an agenda to explore topics and themes of mutual interest, such as photography, politics, poetry, traveling, teachers,…