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The Jes Plain Folks Poems

The poems of the Jes Plain Folks School can be broadly categorized as “Remark Poems” and “What If Poems.” There is nothing necessary about them, nor do they give the sense of having needed to be written. They may be whimsical.

Juanderful

Book Review

In either case — whether Goodman believed he had finally been accepted and could really pull out all the stops, or whether he sensed the dangers of success and wanted to warn people off — Don Juan is Paul Goodman at the height of his powers.

A Lady’s Journal: Reclining Morals

Our minds are made up of sentences to be liked by everybody: by the time we grow up we have to take them apart, by paragraph, chapter, and story, to find our own style, ’til finally the mind is random as alphabet soup, ready to make new combinations of feeling and thought.

Facing Cancer

Do Doctors Do More Harm Than Good?

It angers me that he can share that ambivalence about the value of treatment with a surgeon and get enraged when I, not only a patient but also a woman, question his recommendation.

And Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, Wherever You Are

Book Review

The Ghost Writer ends in a punchline, so it must have been a comedy. . . . Yet it was the reader’s impression through most of the novel that he was deeply absorbed in serious problems of art, and character, and relationships among people. Philip Roth’s writing at its best is characterized by just this deft touch, a blend of high seriousness with sometimes light, sometimes broad comedy.

Why The News Spreads Fear Rather Than Light

If there is no way to separate story and story teller, there is no way to avoid facing the fact that the press never simply covers news. It defines and authenticates certain ways of seeing. It does this by the way it focuses, the way it names, by its choice of authenticating authorities and of story parameters.

Menace Around The Edges

Book Review

Thus the Bowles who held our attention with striking and almost mythical action in the early stories holds it toward the end in more subtle ways.

The Body Temple

The human body is not an opaque, solid mass to be lugged around until it’s traded in for wings. It is an energy field that is constantly changing, a living sculpture, a mirror of ourselves, an instrument that may be more or less in tune.

Bodywork: A Primer

It’s easy to get confused by the many different approaches to working with and through the body. What follows are brief descriptions of some of the more widely practiced techniques.

People’s Park: Ten Years Later

Before it was over, there were nearly 1000 police and 2300 National Guard troops called in to augment local police. There were nearly a thousand arrests, more than 100 people shot, one killed, one blinded, and a million dollars in property damage in one of the longest-running civil disturbances in the nation’s history.