24 may dear brenda, i have three mfa letters to write; lately i have been obliging all my students to write on the same schedule, which means i have one week of very hard work, followed by, or interspersed with, three weeks of anxious leisure, in which i wonder what i ought to do with…
One way to look at it is this: the spiritual history of European communism is divided evenly into two parts by the name of Moses Hess. And the essay Uber das Geldwesen (On the Essential Nature of Money) is nothing less than the watershed which divides it. Ernst Bloch has famously distinguished two currents in…
I could remember a big black car bumping my dog Skippy's head on the highway when I was seven years old. Skippy didn't die, but he went insane. I remember hearing dogs howl in the Sacramento Delta migrant camp where I grew up, accurately signaling someone's death the day after. When I was ten, I…
i Thrusting from the head of Picasso's goat are bicycle handlebars. They don't represent anything, but they are goat's horns, as night is a black bat, metaphorically. Come into the garden. . . . . .the black bat night has flown. Metaphor, like the night, is an idea in flight; potentially, a story: There was…
I little knew the turbulent time which lay ahead of me when on the telephone my friend Margaret Lane invited me, subject to the consent of the Chinese authorities, to join a little party including herself and her husband for a month's visit to China in April 1957. It was during that deceptively hopeful season…
What's A Story Mary Ward Brown Rosellen Brown Robert Cohen Carol Cosman Louise Glück Brenda Hillman Rhoda Huffey Jeff Hush August Kleinzahler Phillip Lopate Thomas McGuane Sue Miller Oscar Pemantle Mary Peterson Edgar Poma C. E. Poverman David Reid Danny Romero Roger Salloch Jean-Paul Sartre Gary Soto Edited by Leonard Michaels ISSN 0048-4474
Over the years I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre, the knack of knowing how to live. Not that I disapprove of all hearty enjoyment of life. A flushed sense of happiness can overtake a person anywhere, and one is no more to blame for it than the Asiatic flu…
In 1862, Flaubert recalls for the Goncourts the beginnings of his liaison with Louise: “He told us the story of his coupling with Colet, initiated in a drive home in a carriage, painting himself as playing the role of someone disgusted with life, of the dark, handsome stranger, of the suicidal romantic, which so amused…
When V. S. Naipaul was a toddler growing up in Trinidad, his grandmother sold marijuana. Only old people bought it, for, during the early 1930s in Trinidad, only the elderly, whose energies were depleted and for whom life had become boring, desired to smoke hemp. Naipaul told this story to his students at Wesleyan University…
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