City Lights Book Store
‘Kindness of the soul.’
February 25, 2021Lawrence Ferlinghetti passed this week. He was 101. [1919-2021]
Ferlinghetti was a publisher, poet, and bookseller in San Francisco, publishing the controversial “Howl” by Allen Ginsburg that embraced and argued for our First Amendment rights.
F R E E D O M O F S P E A C H
‘Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity! Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!’
-Howl, 1956
From Jelani Cobb: “Not many people can say they both built an institution and become one.”
“There is a voice that doesn’t use words, listen.” -Rumi
It was in Ferlinghetti’s passing this week I gravitated to a film exemplifying the ‘kindness of the soul.’ Incredible filmmaking. ‘Nomadland’ [Hulu]. Here’s the trailer:
“What’s remembered, lives. I maybe spent too much of my life just remembering.”
This film broke me about seven different ways; it is extraordinary. It is beautifully written, directed, edited, and produced by Chloé Zhao.
[Frances McDormand and director Chloe Zhao.]
The film stars Francis McDormand and actor David Strathairn has a role, too. Remarkably and seamlessly, Zhao uses real folks to tell the story, their story, of the ‘workampers.’ They will find your heart, and stay.
The impetus for the film came from a Harper’s Magazine article by Jessica Bruder, “The End of Retirement: When you can’t afford to stop working,” published in 2014.
Later, Bruder would drive more than 15,000 miles in the camper van on a mission to follow the wanderers who would become the stars of her 2017 book “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century.”
See it. Share it. And maybe, even live it.
“Energy is like a muscle; it grows when we use it. We grow in our capacity to do the right thing each time we do the right thing.” -Rolph Gates
There is an expectation that the pandemic to create more nomads with an interest in the van-dwelling surge after the 2008 crisis, hardly letting up. Cost of housing being one major factor, but suggests another: disillusionment and dissatisfaction — with the American Dream and the evaporation of pensions. “The golden years were not going to be golden.”
“Nomadland” is nominated for four Golden Globes on Feb. 28: best picture, director, screenplay and actress, and is a strong contender for the Oscars in April.
Team Human
January 29, 2019
City Lights Book Store/San Francisco
“Right now, I’m reading a galley of Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass, by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri.”
What are 3 books you would you never part with?
- Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger
- Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media
- The Tanakh
What writers/artists/people do you find the most influential to the writing of this book and/or your writing in general?
David Lynch, Timothy Leary, Aleister Crowley, Karen Armstrong, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, Mircea Eliade, Howard Rheingold, Frances Moore Lappé, Karl Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois, Terence McKenna, Fred Turner, Zeynep Tufekci.
“Find the others. Restore the social connections that make us fully functioning humans, and oppose all conventions, institutions, technologies, and mindsets that keep us apart.
Our values–ideals such as love, connection, justice, distributed prosperity–are not abstract. We have simply lost our capacity to relate to them” (p. 211).
Harnessing wide-ranging research on human evolution, biology, and psychology, Rushkoff shows that when we work together we realize greater happiness, productivity, and peace. If we can find the others who understand this fundamental truth and reassert our humanity―together―we can make the world a better place to be human.
[Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author, media theorist, professor, and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age.]
Rushkoff’s talk at City Lights Book Store in San Francisco…1.29.19…will be recorded for a future podcast.
