Frank Morgan Good Companions
Claire Wahmanholm
Instead, the poem is full of competent trees,
sturdy and slow-growing. The trees live on a wide
clean lawn full of adults. All night, the adults grow
older without somersaulting or spinning. They grow
old while thinking about themselves. They sleep well
and stay out late, their nerves coiled neatly inside
their grown bodies. They don’t think about children
because children were never there to begin with.
The children were not killed or stolen. This is absence,
not loss. There is a world of difference: the distance
between habitable worlds. It is the space that is
unbearable. The poem is relieved not to have to live
in it. Instead, its heart ticks perfectly unfretfully
among the trees. The children who are not in the poem
do not cast shadows or spells to make themselves
appear. When they don’t walk through the poem, time
does not bend around them. They are not black holes.
There are already so many nots in this poem, it is already
so negatively charged. The field around the poem
is summoning children and shadows and singularities
from a busy land full of breathing and mass. My non-
children are pulling children away from their own
warm worlds. They will arrive before I can stop them.
When matter meets anti-matter, it annihilates into
something new. Light. Sound. Waves and waves
of something like water. The poem’s arms are so light
they are falling upward from the body. Why are you crying?
Whenever I travel to Rome or Athens, I always visit ancient ruins and archeological sites. But it can be a bit of a stretch to try and picture what the buildings original looked like and how they were used. New Historia reveals what everyday life might have looked and felt like with their series of 3D “cinematic animations.” Their five-minute fly-through of ancient Rome below is mesmerizing . If you like this one, check out their other videos of ancient Greece and Egypt.
Although I’ve had many opportunities to learn about meditation over the years, it didn’t really stick for me until I began to read Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings and subsequently studied mediation with a teacher from his sangha. One of his best, and most engaging books is Peace Is Every Step. Here’s what none other than the Dalai Lama has to say about in the introduction:
Peace Is Every Step is a guidebook for a journey in exactly this direction. Thich Nhat Hanh begins by teaching mindfulness of breathing and awareness of the small acts of our daily lives, then shows us how to use the benefits of mindful-ness and concentration to transform and heal difficult psychological states. Finally he shows us the connection between personal, inner peace and peace on Earth. This is a very worthwhile book. It can change individual lives and the life of our society.
If you’re interested in checking out this beautiful book, you can read it for free here online.
The books below are also excellent introductions to mindfulness and meditation from a range of perspectives. I am especially inclined towards the valuable and groundbreaking work of Jon Kabat-Zinn who is probably more instrumental in bring an approachable, secular version of meditation to the West than any other teacher.
Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life is his inspiring, often poetic, introduction to meditation, what he calls “the process by which we go about deepening our attention and awareness, refining them, and putting them to greater practical use in our lives.”
After he suffered an on-air panic attack in 2004, ABC News anchor Dan Harris began to meditate. Since then, the self-described “evangelist” for the practice has written a bestselling book, launched a weekly podcast and created the popular 10 Percent Happier app. During the pandemic, Harris has also been hosting a daily short meditation session with some of North America’s best meditation teachers live from his NYC apartment. In January 2016, Harris and meditation teacher Jeff Warren took an 11-day cross-country trip to spread the meditation gospel. Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-to Book recounts that journey, in an entertaining story of their interactions with new and experienced meditators and simple guide for anyone new to meditation, or just interested in learning more.
If you have dipped your toes into the meditation waters before, but don’t have a regular practice, any book by the beloved teacher Pema Chödrön is highly recommended. Her book How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind describes the basics of mindfulness meditation, as well guidance about working with difficult emotions and incorporating sounds, sights and bodily sensations into one’s practice.
Here in the United States some of our most popular National Parks are starting to re-open. Yellowstone National Park re-opened last week, so did Grand Teton and Grand Canyon National Parks, along with a dozen or so others. The National Park Service created this clever series of posters to address safety concerns. I’m in no hurry to visit any popular tourist destination, but these posters are encouraging.
You can see the rest, download them all, print them out, frame them, do what you like, right here.
I don’t know anything about the short film below titled Vienna is like… except that it was directed by the award winning Argentine filmmaker Fernando Livschitz. But if love Wien half as much as I do, you will adore this very clever, unusual film.
The Detroit-based publisher Rotland Press advertises itself as “a fine publisher of excursions into humor + despair.” It is also the perfect vehicle for a literary and arts journal to help us cope with the overwhelming nature of the Covid-19 epidemic. This week they issued the second installment of The Plague Review, which is a compelling compilation of art, poetry, comics, essays, interviews and more.
Rotland’s publisher and Plague Review editor Ryan Standfest writes in his opening editor’s note, “In keeping with the mission of Rotland Press, The Plague Review presents a collection of responses to this moment that engenders the need to give form to collective trauma. Addressing that which challenges our lives at this time, the voices in this publication swing wildly from hope to grief, from intimate joy to overwhelming outrage. From visual makers and thinkers around the world who have worked toward evoking and representing that which is subjectively felt and not directly observed, strategies of thought contemplation mingle with mordantly humored bursts of enthusiastic despair. Collectively, the work contained herein represents a vital attempt at getting a psychic foothold within a pit where the fissures are often difficult to see.”
The Plague Review is free as a digital read until COVID-19 ends. At that point, the issues will be printed in a limited run. Check it out in full here. Also, consider purchasing some of Rotland’s previous publications to support this excellent small press.
If you are like me there are times that you are searching for a specific book but don’t remember or don’t know the title. The video below and this article from the website Make Use Of has some great ideas that could help. Suggestions include using Google Book Search, BookFinder, WorldCat, The Library of Congress, and Ask a Librarian.
Decades ago, I made my first biblio-pilgrimage to the iconic Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. These days it’s not quite the same place now that it has an adjoining café that serves American bagels and brownies. And then there are the philistine Instagramers who mob the store and don’t even pick up a book. Still, the bookshop is imbued with the spirits of some of the 20th century’s greatest writers and artists.
Recently, Princeton University launched a project to digitize records from the bookshop and the little known lending library that Shakespeare and Company offered select patrons. This overdue project provides tantalizing glimpses of Paris during the interwar years, revealing the reading habits of literary giants including Walter Benjamin,James Joyce,Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Simone de Beauvoir, and Gertrude Stein.
When Sylvia Beach opened Shakespeare and Company in 1919, English-language books were expensive and hard to find in Paris. Writers and artists who had flocked to the capital of literary modernism rushed to sign up for Beach’s library service. Joshua Kotin, an associate professor of English at Princeton and the project’s director, said that Beach was a “meticulous, obsessive record keeper”, and that “we are only now developing digital tools that will allow us to understand and realise the archive’s potential”.
“We want to understand genius,” Kotin said. “Does what Hemingway read help us understand what he wrote and why it is so great? It is also fascinating to connect our everyday practices – what we borrow from our local library, what’s in our Amazon cart – to the practices of people in the past. And there’s something illicit about learning about what and how people read – we’re learning about a very private, solitary activity.
Travel Between The Pages 