BIRTH

I was born in Chicago in 1941. A quarter-century later, a group of white Chicago musicians, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, recorded a song, "Born in Chicago," in which that sentence, "I was born in Chicago in 1941," repeated twice, provides the opening lines of their blues anthem. I was born in Chicago, in 1941, on January 19, a Sunday morning at about 3 a.m., into the hands of the attending physician at Lutheran Deaconess Hospital, Dr. Nathan Kane, my Uncle Docky. Actually, he was my... 
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(MY) BERLIN

“Now let me call back those who introduced me to the city,” is the way Walter Benjamin begins “A Berlin Chronicle” (1932). Let me do likewise. “For although the child, in his solitary games, grows up in closest proximity to the city,” Benjamin says, “he needs and seeks guides to its wider expanses…” As does the stranger to the city. The first of my guides, on a mid-March afternoon in 1990, a day or two before the first election in East Germany since the... 
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DIASPORISM: SPEAKING AS A BAD JEW

In Philip Roth’s very funny novel about Israel, Operation Shylock (1993), there’s a character who advocates the wacky philosophy of "Diasporism." The term "diaspora," whose etymological roots have to do with the notion of a "scattering," is often used to refer to the international Jewish population outside of Israel. The idea suggests that eventually the world’s "scattered" Jews will return "home" to Israel, their alleged Biblical land of... 
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THE BEGINNING OF THE SHORT VERSION: AN ABC’S BOOK

…Perhaps my ABC’s are instead of: instead of a novel, instead of an essay on the twentieth century, instead of a memoir. Each of the individuals [and places] remembered here sets into motion a network of mutual allusions and interdependencies linked to the facts of my century. In the final analysis, I do not regret that I have dropped names so cavalierly (or so it must seem), or that I have made a virtue of my casual way. –Czeslaw Milosz, Milosz’s... 
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JOHN BERGER

In one of the thirty or so "stories" in John Berger’s Photocopies (Pantheon, 1997), the then seventy-year-old Berger, who lives in a French alpine village, has just visited an old friend in Paris, the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, at the time in his eighties. The two men had a rambling and suggestive conversation about "the instant of taking a picture… ‘the decisive moment,’" as the photographer had once put it. Later that afternoon, in the Paris Metro, as... 
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BANGKOK

At about 8 o’clock in the evening in Twilight Alley, there’s a suspended moment of languid nothingness mixed with tremulous expectation–and that moment is at the centre of my idea of Bangkok. Twilight Alley, named after the Twilight nightclub at its mouth, is a short, mostly pedestrian lane off Surawong Road, which is one of the two main thoroughfares of the Patpong tourist and sex district (the other one is Silom Avenue). At night both of these streets are filled with continuously moving... 
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SONNET ABOUT ORPHEUS 3 (MIROIR)

SONNET ABOUT ORPHEUS 3 (MIROIR) In the Mirror of the Real each scene found in negation not the lake of the heart     not the body torn to pieces by the Furies    not the tongue of Orpheus In the Mirror of the Real    reversals doubles, endless folds, oppositions     the actual trees, stones, stars, lakes     reflect the dead, the "irreparable," the under- world. Eurydice not... 
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David Berg

Fritz Perls, one of the founders of Gestalt therapy, came to Vancouver around 1970, a couple of years before his death there. Gestalt, unlike protracted Freudian analysis, emphasised the existential "here and now," proposing a psycho-dramatic technique for "getting in touch" with one’s suppressed feelings, and enacting the divided elements of self in an effort to create a more integrated or whole person. Perls, a rambunctious man in his seventies–possibly a lascivious old fraud,... 
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Wilder Bentley and Walt Whitman

The first college course I took, at San Francisco State College in the early 1960s, was a survey of American literature taught by Wilder Bentley. Although in my naivete I had no idea of who Bentley was, he was well-known in the college, if not beyond it, as one of those professors who is an inspiring catalyst for receptive students. Going to college reflected a shift in my intellectual allegiances toward the views of the poet Robin Blaser, who was then working as an acquisitions librarian at SF State and who... 
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SONNET ABOUT ORPHEUS 2

Today no one cares about the tongue of Orpheus cut out by order of the tyrant yesterday. And everyday schoolchildren visit the museum to gaze indifferently upon the tongue of Orpheus in a glass case. Allthat’slivingmemorytome isbuttheendofhistory for the children bow their heads only to the little screens in their palms "…class antagonisms pale before the new division of people into friends and enemies of the word." Make your "Ode" to the tyrant ... 
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