Friday 9 September 2022
… Later I’m back in New York sitting around with Irwin and Simon and Raphael and Lazarus, and now we’re famous writers more or less, but they wonder why I’m so sunk now, so unexcited…
Tag: Jack Kerouac
Problematizing My Faves: A Conservative Remembers Allen Ginsberg
Norman Podhoretz, Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer In a recent post, I acknowledged finally paying closer attention to the second precept of Thich…
From a Recent Notebook
Of course, Diane di Prima is in My Canon… Because she honored Suzuki Roshi’s unprecedented presenceBecause she made the case for old-school being literally in touchBecause she gave primacy to cosmologyBecause I gifted C. with…
Jack and Allen
This website is indebted in a variety of ways to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. For example, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage from their one-liners such as “Be in love with yr life” (JK)…
Styron/Kerouac
Recently, I read Jack Kerouac’s novel, Tristessa, which didn’t take long but it was an unpleasant experience. Not long after, I came across the following prediction in James West’s Conversations with William Styron from 1962: …
June Journal 2019
Hanna Krall: “All my books are about how very good human beings can be, and about how very bad they can be—something we are constantly discovering over and over again.” Chasing the King of Hearts,…
These Are a Few of Our Favorite Things—A Winter Class to Take Us into Spring
Somehow [Bonnie] forced you to see yourself at your most amazing. Most precious. And believe in what you saw. She saw. A ll obstacles fell into shadow, disappeared, backlit by the blaze of what could…
Quit Complaining!
Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T’ang Poet Han-shanTranslated and with an Introduction by Burton Watson I first learned of Han-shan 30 years ago when reading Jack Kerouac’s novel, The Dharma Bums, which starred Japhy…
A Letter from Yael
Recently Yael asked me to share some favorite haiku writers, which I happily sent along, along with Yoel Hoffman’s book, Japanese Death Poems. I received the following response. 10/24/21 What a delight. Three big envelops all…
What I Love about the US of America: Overture to an Unfinishable List
Martin Luther King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, Riverside Church, NYC, April 1967; Route 50 in Nevada; Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; Duke Ellington, “Take the ‘A’ Train”; Joey Neilsen, resister of Catholic high school homophobia; massive…