Dear Reader,
Welcome September.
This week I made two pilgrimages. One to City Lights in San Francisco and one to the Point Reyes Bookstore.
City Lights was founded in San Francisco in 1953 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. If you want to dip your toes in I recommend his A Coney Island of the Mind. I first read it on a train a couple years ago when he died. I wanted a way to mark the moment and that one had long been on my “to-read” list. It’s a surreal expose on life, full of wonder and childish imaginings that will suck you up into it. I once heard the poet Ann Lauterbach say that the mark of a good poem is it makes you want to return to the beginning as soon as you get to the end—it did that for me.
The Beat Room is upstairs. If you want to pick-up a copy of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems to keep in your pocket, or Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) this is the place to do it.
And those of you who know me, know how much I love Bob Dylan, so as much as this was a poetry pilgramage it was also a moment to imagine Dylan looking down the alley way between Vesuvio and City Lights, taking photos for Blonde on Blonde.
Here’s Robbie Robertson, Michael McClure, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg in the alley behind City Lights Books.
When I left I tried to go to Vesuvio for a beer, but my wallet was pinched in Trastevere, Rome a few months ago and the bouncer wouldn’t let me in without an ID. Not cool, man.
To mark the end of August yesterday, I took a trip out to Point Reyes Books.
I’ve always wanted to visit the bookstore there. Is there anything more wonderful than a crowded community bookstore on Saturday morning? They had a highly curated, less anarchic selection than City Lights. A little book-lover paradiso, in a beautiful place. If I was going to write a modern short story riff on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, I could imagine setting it here—
Between the two, here’s what I picked up:
What would be on your list?
And for your Sunday, instead of Auden, who is the obvious choice, I give you Robert Hass:
Because who doesn’t need more calm.
Until soon,
Sam
September course: Ralph Waldo Emerson: Philosophy and Solitude
Enroll here.
Transcendence, Emerson wrote, is to move beyond the physical world of our senses into spiritual experience through free will and intuition. He believed that God could be known if we could only find a way to look into our soul and find a connection to nature. A father of American transcendentalism, Emerson turned readers away from looking at the world through concepts like time and space and instead turned toward the imagination. An influence on Friedrich Nietzsche, Emerson argued that we find ourselves in solitude, alone. Free from the influences of society and relations that shape our personalities. Can self-reliance grant us freedom? Is it possible to discover one’s true self? Can we learn to follow our own inner-voice, instead of the voice of another? What does it mean to “trust thyself”? What is the difference between self-reliance and individualism? What is the relationship between experience and authority? Between experience and self-authority?
In this course we will read the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, including his major essays on “Experience,” “Circles,” “Self-Reliance,” “Nature,” “The Divinity School Address,” “Education,” “The Over-Soul,” and “The Poet.” Readings will be paired with entries from Emerson’s journals, correspondence with Henry David Thoreau. Secondary readings might include Nietzsche, Thoreau, William James, Harold Bloom, and Stanley Cavell, among others. Throughout we will imagine what an ideal form of education might look like in our world today. We will ask how technology has altered our notions of individualism and community. Is it possible to find oneself in nature today? How did Romanticism influence Emerson’s vision of the self? And is it possible to think poetically in our world of digital reality?
October course: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism
Enroll here.
When Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 she set out to provide a political framework for understanding the phenomenal appearance of National Socialism in the world, and its terrifying consequences. Offering a historical account of imperialism, anti-Semitism, and the atomized individual, Arendt’s work remains one of the most profound attempts at understanding the underlying social, political, and economic conditions that enabled totalitarianism to emerge.
In this course, students will read the entirety of the text and consider Arendt’s accounts of modern antisemitism, the spread of imperialism, and the human rights crisis engendered by the normalization of the nation-state following the First World War. In what ways did the institution of racism, as a form of ideology that collapsed the private and public realms, create an “iron-band” of totalitarianism? How was the rise of totalitarianism linked to the nation-state and the dissolution of heterogeneous modes of living together? And what are the contemporary implications of Arendt’s critique in this new era of refugees and statelessness, wherein the living conditions of “mere life” remain horrifically common?
With a bitter sweet appreciation for my recently departed home, I thoroughly enjoyed wandering with you through several of these favorite places of mine as well. Although you didn't mention the fantastic bakery new the Pt Reyes Book Store, I hope you enjoyed some delicious tastes. The gift of a well-traveled life is to be able to carry our travels with us, even as we lament the distance and joys left behind.
I have found Yiyun Li’s fiction pieces in The New Yorker affecting, and need to get to her novels. My recent bookstore purchase is Termush by Sven Holm about how a community copes after an apocalyptic event. It was featured in a display on literature in translation. I don’t know anything about it, but look forward to the discovery.