There’s much to appreciate in Kerouac’s haiku descriptions of human emotions and humanity: Her yellow dolls bowing     on the shelf— My dead step grandmother The artifacts of the person now dead stand in that person’s place, and continue to articulate who she was. Are they bowing to her? I rather think they’re […]

Allen Ginsberg liked to say, “Notice what you notice,” by way of meditative writing advice.  We notice things, but then we’re in a hurry and already on to the next one.  Or we self-edit, and tell ourselves what we saw has no importance or meaning, and paper it over with something else.  But things do […]

Recently I attended Tom Peters’ long-running poetry reading series (35 years of consecutive Monday nights!) here in Boulder.  Tom runs the Beat Book Shop on the Pearl Street Mall, and every year gives time for people to take the stage and read from Jack Kerouac’s work.  This year we commemorated a hundred years since Kerouac’s […]

I’ve been posting political screeds for the last month, as the prospects for the collapse of American democracy came into view, but somehow it continues to breathe and remains above ground.  If you attended to those discussions, I focused them on how language gets employed to re-create reality in the image power-mongers want you to […]

As the Democrats retain control of the Senate, and, likely with the Republicans achieving only a slim, fractious majority in the House, the Republicans get to now engage in blame and finger-pointing.  The Republicans even blew the state level races in major electoral battlegrounds like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, where they fervently hoped to control […]

William S Burroughs One wonders what the Founding Fathers would think of contemporary rightwing media.  Aristocratic and highly educated sophisticates, they thought beyond the kneejerk response of power to pillory or behead anyone advancing an unwelcome opinion.  In their envisioned utopia, you could speak without fear, and the freedom to speak would enable greater understanding [...]

           “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” –John 1:1, King James Version                      The earlier Greek translation had it as logos, which became “the Word” in English, capitalized because, I suppose, God is capitalized, and the world was God’s expression, […]

  One thing consistently haunts me as we edge globally into a permanent state of Orwellian doublespeak. It’s not merely the weakening of journalism within the American democracy at the hands of social media–to some degree, a purely free market pivot. Who wants to pay for it, after all, despite its cornerstone value to accurate [...]

I recently watched Barbarella for the first time, a 1968 movie famously starring Jane Fonda. I’d always understood it to be a kind of cheesy sci-fi flick. Nevertheless, it mysteriously gets attached to her name 8 times out of 10, & it left some indelible imprint on pop culture that persists into now through spin [...]

By my observation, some writers take easily to the spotlight of self-promotion. A primary mentor of mine, Allen Ginsberg, did so with enthusiasm. He saw himself, I think, as not just a guy selling books, but as some sort of harbinger of changing consciousness, sexual and political liberation, spiritual proclamation, and really quite a list