As David Gates seems to have been forced to note in last week’s Newsweek, Jack Kerouac‘s On the Road was published fifty years ago, and that has engendered a fair amount of activity from the book’s original publisher, Viking. Despite the apparent involuntary nature of his effort, David has done an admirable job of sorting… — read more

Ingmar Bergman died last week, and I don’t think that he or his heirs need my assessment of his genius added to the pile that’s been rightly accumulating since then. But I do feel the need to note that he was, at the time of his passing, one of perhaps two or three living artists… — read more

The Interdependence Project has posted the first issue of their dharma arts magazine, Sentient City, and in it they’ve published an essay I submitted called “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Dreaming).” This is the first time I’ve ever been published, yet in the one-line bio at the end they call me a writer. In truth,… — read more

It took a few weeks longer than I had hoped, but I finished Against the Day this week. To attempt any summary or assessment of Pynchon’s novels, given their complexity, is daunting. That this one runs more than a thousand pages only makes any such attempt that much more ambitious. I saw a few brief… — read more

Two events, rare in my adult life, occurred yesterday: a new Tom Waits album (all 56 songs of it) was released and a new Thomas Pynchon novel (all 1,085 pages of it) was published. I had a very busy day at work, so I didn’t get a chance to listen to the album, but I… — read more

A couple of weeks ago, I read Liesl Schillinger’s review of Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics in the New York Times, which begins as follows: Whoever coined the phrase “everybody loves a winner” probably wasn’t one. When the news came out that a distractingly pretty actress, playwright and Barnard College graduate named Marisha… — read more

Tomorrow night is the last meeting of my class on emptiness. At last week’s meeting, the instructor suggested–I’m not quite sure how ironically–that we each write our own Heart Sutra. Several of my fellow students encouraged me to actually try it, but I didn’t think I’d have the time (spending the weekend basting in my… — read more

I spent the weekend studying compassion, and then came home to relax a little before facing the new week. Before bed, we watched tonight’s episode of The Sopranos, and the most enlightened thing I can think of to say is that if anyone thinks there’s a better pair of actors than James Gandolfini and Edie… — read more

This is one of the funniest jokes I’ve heard in a while: Two men meet on the street and one of them asks the other, Is it true that you formed a musical group? “Yes, a quartet.” How many? “Three.” Who? “Me and my brother.” You have a brother? “No.” — read more

Dick started this, and Anne continued it, so I thought I’d join in as well. The Bible or Shakespeare: Both Anne and Dick mention the King James Version, but I’ve just started investigating Tyndale’s slightly earlier translation (his New Testament in particular), and it’s fascinating. Many people who know a lot more about these things… — read more