In her recent contribution to the Topaz Stories project that publishes narratives by survivors of the WWII concentration camp for Americans of Japanese descent, Meri Mitsuyoshi writes about an artwork by her maternal grandfather, Saburo Tamura (1899–1998), who studied painting with Chiura Obata (1885–1975) while unjustly incarcerated in a Utah desert in the years 1942–1945. […]
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Tom Killion’s Giant Sequoias postcard slid through our mail slot today. It announces two upcoming opportunities to appreciate in person one of the Bay Area’s truly great artists. Tom is a consummate craftsperson whose work celebrates the abundant, overflowing, vibrant life that is the more-than-human world that makes us possible. Do you see how the sequoias here are […]
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A photomontage showing Mark Gonnerman in front of the entrance to Lushan Temple on Yuelu Mountain behind Hunan University and on Orange Island in the Xiang River that runs through Changsha. Lushan Temple (麓山寺) was founded as the Hui Guangming Temple (慧光明寺) in 268 CE. I went there as a visiting professor to lecture and teach courses on the Beats […]
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Poem by Wang Yangli and Shinto Silent Concerts Before Cage CLICK IMAGE FOR LEGIBLE PDF For a discussion of John Cage and Gary Snyder’s affinities, see Peter Jaeger, John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics (Bloomsbury, 2013), 60–64; 150–51.
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Happy Ninetieth Birthday, Gary! Link here to the video: Gary Snyder 90 Birthday Reading from “Little Songs for Gaia”
Continue reading →Tim Hogan, Zen Mountain Man and Collections Manager of Botany at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Museum of Natural History, just shared his review of Eileen Crist’s Abundant Earth: Toward an Ecological Civilization (University of Chicago Press, 2019). After quoting Paul Shephard saying that “the ‘civilized mind’ attempts to simplify and level the world, whereas the […]
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This morning Meri reminded me that today is the 75th rebirthday of Smokey the Bear, so together we read out loud, antiphonally, the Smokey the Bear Sutra under the Sunflowers of Vairocana and over breakfast. Of this Smokey the Bear Sutra, Katherine McNeil has this in her bibliography (Entry A 20): Single leaf broadside.…Printed in black on light […]
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Available here is a PDF of Appendix 3: Mark Gonnerman, “Fieldwork: Gary Snyder, Libraries, and Book Learning,” in A Sense of the Whole: Reading Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End, ed. Mark Gonnerman (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2015), 291–315. Gonnerman_Gary Snyder and Book Learning_A Sense of the Whole 2015
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The other day, Meri Mitsuyoshi caught a Wall Street Journal article introducing Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan. This exhibition opened at Japan’s Yokohama Museum of Art (January 12–March 24), is currently at the Noguchi Museum in Queens (May 1–July 14, 2019), and will be at the Asian Art Museum in […]
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Here I’ll attach two recent interviews with Richard Powers, author of The Overstory (2018) in a PDF format that makes them easy to print out and read with pen in hand, which always enlivens the reading experience for me: 1] Everett. Hamner, “Here’s to Unsuicide: An Interview with Richard Powers,” Los Angeles Review of Books (7 April […]
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