An online discussion with New Zealand writer, Alexander Bisley, December, 2012, Mr. Bisley later used some of this in articles he wrote for the Dominion Post and other New Zealand papers. His website is http://lumiere.net.nz 1) “What means the fact—which is so common, so universal—that some soul that has lost all hope for itself can […]
In his great book of changes and home-made koans, Silence, John Cage defines the purpose of music. “Music is edifying,” the devoted student of D.T. Suzuki wrote, “for from time to time it sets the soul in operation. The soul is the gatherer-together of the disparate elements (Meister Eckhart), and its work fills one with […]
Japanese literature is often about nothing happening, because Japanese life is, too. There are few emphases in spoken Japanese—the aim is to remain as level, even as neutral as possible—and in a classic work like The Tale of Genji, as one recent translator has it, “The more intense the emotion, the more regular the meter.” […]
If you’re interested in hearing Pico Iyer talk, mostly in connection with his new book, The Man Within My Head, here are a few dates and places to try: January 10-13 Key West Literary Seminar: “Writers on Writers” Key West, Florida January 24-28 Jaipur Writers’ Festival Jaipur, India January 30-31 Kolkata Writers’ Festival Kolkata, India […]
(The following is an introduction to a new edition of Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse, published to mark the 50th anniversary of the author’s death and the 90th anniversary of the book’s first appearance, by Peter Owen, in August 2012). “I can think, I can wait, I can fast.” As an innocent fifteen year-old, incarcerated in […]
Where is our new-millennium Norman Mailer? It’s startling, fifty years on, to look back at the work of Mailer and others in the 1960s—from The Presidential Papers to The Armies of the Night—and see such unabashed ambition, such reckless audacity and such a stubborn American readiness to try to save the republic from itself and […]
If you’re interested in hearing Pico Iyer talk in early 2012, mostly in connection with a new book, The Man Within My Head, here are a few dates and places to try:
(An introduction to the 17-set complete collection of Leonard Cohen albums released by Sony Records for online sales, 2011) Some artists come from the Mississippi Delta, some from the South Side of Chicago. But a few, a very few, come from nowhere you can name and you’ll never get to the bottom of them. People […]
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