Since this is a daily newsletter, not the daily news, I won’t add (much) to the ongoing Robin Williams deluge other than to unrepentantly note how much Dead Poet’s Society meant to me (mostly because of Williams’ performance as John Keating) at a time when I was vulnerable and had almost no one around me who understood—much less supported—my love of art, writing and literature…and plenty of people who, inadvertently or not, demeaned or degraded it. In the form of Keating, Robin Williams gave me something I desperately needed: the belief that, as he said, “No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.”

WORK

WORK

…you become acquainted with the mass-produced man, the absent man: he goes from Paris to Tokyo, from Tokyo to New York. He goes everywhere on an electric earth, like a corpse laid out in death. He takes trains, the kind that go from one point to another. From nothing to nothing. In his haste he takes the void with him. However often he speaks, he only hears himself. However far he goes, he finds only himself. Wherever he goes, he leaves behind a stain of gray; he sleeps in the midst of what he sees.
[…] And then there is that other type of man. A useless fellow. Wonderfully useless. He certainly didn’t invent the wheelbarrow, ATM cards, or nylon stockings. He never invents a thing. He neither adds to nor takes away from the world: he leaves it. Or he finds that the world has left him, it’s the same thing. You might see him here or there, driving his flock of thoughts before him. He dreams in every language. You can see him from a long way off: he’s like the men in the desert, those blue men. He’s like the people with their flesh tinted from the cloth that protects them from the sun. His heart is seized with blue. You see him here and there, in the uprisings he inspires, in the flames that devour him. In the books he writes.

It’s Salmagundi Sunday, where I share the “best of the rest”—great links that didn’t make the cut for last week’s newsletters…and a few pithy quotes. Back to regular programming tomorrow!

LINKS

In Walden, Thoreau remarks that “there is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness.” And so we do, whether from simple preoccupation, sloth, cynicism or just being overwhelmed. I hope, occasionally, this very newsletter helps shine a light on some of the novelty that might otherwise go unnoticed.

WORK

Re-reading Pride and Prejudice. I’d forgotten how funny it is. And the novel provides an apropos quote given my recent experience watching a train-wreck of an interaction between a public reader and eventual new foe in a local coffee shop.

WORK

The formatting of Larry Eigner’s poems—his use of the page as canvas and typewriter as brush—is important enough that I don’t want to try to fake it with plain text. If you have problems viewing today’s work, here’s a direct image link. I love Eigner’s comment about the meaning of this poem:

Some lyrics today that stand well enough on their own but are best heard. A little longer than the usual WORK, but I just didn’t want to cut it down.

WORK

A brief poem today by William Michaelian that both settled into and enveloped me when I considered the wide variety of meanings of the word “drawn.”

WORK

“These Old Gods”

In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice comments on a description of herself, “that I had my good wit out of the ‘Hundred Merry Tales.’” That text—also known as “Shakespeare’s Jest Book” because of the many stories in it that can also be found in Shakespeare’s plays—is available in various forms including a reproduction of the 1526 version and .

It’s Salmagundi Sunday, where I share the “best of the rest”—great links that didn’t make the cut for last week’s newsletters…and a few pithy quotes. Back to regular programming tomorrow!

Links

In 2006, students in a high school class wrote to various authors inviting them to visit their school. The only one who wrote them back was Kurt Vonnegut.

WORK

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience , to find out what’s inside you, .

Three haiku today by Buson, one of the great Japanese poets. The cuckoo is both a symbol of the bursting forth of summer and melancholy—the cuckoo’s song said to be the sound of spirits singing to their living friends and family. A fitting word for today when it feels like Summer has ended and Fall has fallen upon us. The Japanese word used in these poems is hototogisu, referring to the Little Cuckoo, known for its songs (and, conveniently for haiku writers, its five syllables).

WORK

Peter Johnson said that Max Jacobs’ prose poems have a kind of “dream logic” to them. This seems to be at the heart of the surrealist strand of prose poems à la Russell Edson and Charles Simic…a rationale borne of revery.

WORK

“The Beggar Woman of Naples”

Ansel Adams said “every experience is a form of exploration.” Technically true, but some explorers cover many more actual miles than others.

WORK

In the novel Submergence, Hades is also a physical place, the deepest of the deep sea vents where both the newest and oldest life is found…among that yet to be discovered.

WORK

I can’t stop thinking about the line: “we still live in an italicized world.”

WORK

“Sparrows”

It’s Salmagundi Sunday, where I share the “best of the rest”—great links that didn’t make the cut for last week’s newsletters…and a few pithy quotes. Back to regular programming tomorrow!

Links

Time to clear a logjam of outstanding visual artists. We live in a time of riches.

Another piece by Jack Gilbert. What we don’t or can’t have—and what we don’t or can’t understand when we do—can nonetheless overflow us.

WORK

“Trouble”

A conversation last night prompted me to think about the idea of “favorite” and “best” artists. I try to avoid both terms without significant explanation: the former leads to impossible choices, the latter implies a breadth of experience and judgment I don’t possess. But I can speak of poets whose work most often or consistently speaks to me, as with today’s work. And as with most poetry, but Gilbert’s particularly, slow savoring of every word is important.

WORK

“Islands and Figs”

I woke with the thought of a short, formal, rhyming poem in mind but then discovered the following work which, but for brevity, is the opposite. I hold handfuls of such “breakage.”

WORK

“True or False”