The next installment of my audiobook for David Eagleman's Sum: forty tales from the afterlives... At once funny, wistful and unsettling, Sum is a dazzling exploration of unexpected afterlives—each presented as a vignette that offers a stunning lens through which to see ourselves. In one afterlife, you may find that God is the size of a microbe and unaware of your existence. In another version, you work as a background character in other people’s dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple, or that the universe is running backward, or that you are forced to live out your afterlife with ..read more

My audiobook of these sonnets continues using the Stephen Mitchell translation.. Dedicated to the memory of a young woman whose premature death deeply affected him, "these strange Sonnets," Rilke wrote, "appeared, often many in one day, completely unexpectedly…I could do nothing but surrender, purely and obediently, to the dictation of this inner impulse." I have the great Bill Evans Trio and imagery from the exquisite Fantasia accompanying my reading. If you enjoy my readings and would like to support the channel, you can buy me a cup of coffee : https://buymeacoffee.com/lorigomez_apoetrychan ..read more

Candide is a French satire written by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment, first published in 1759. The picaresque novella begins with a young man, Candide, whose very name bespeaks guilelessness and innocence. Candide is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise with a noble family while being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism by his mentor, Professor Pangloss. What proceeds is a savage denunciation of metaphysical optimism—as espoused by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz—that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Published when the author was 65 and co ..read more

Happy Thanksgiving! Among her many honors, 73 year old Joy Harjo has received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America (1991), the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award (2015), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2017), and the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award (2022). She served three consecutive terms as The United States Poet Laureate between 2019-2022 and is the first Native-American to have that honor. If you enjoy my readings and would like to support the channel, you can buy me a cup of coffee : https://buymeacoffee.com ..read more

The next installment of my audiobook for James Joyce's idioglossial masterpiece. Started in 1928 and eventually published in its entirety in 1939, Finnegans Wake is a complex novel that blends the reality of life with a dream world. The motive idea of the novel, inspired by the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, is that history is cyclical. To demonstrate this, the book ends with the first half of the first sentence of the novel. Thus, the last line is actually part of the first line, and the first line a part of the last line. The plot itself is difficult to follow, as the no ..read more

The next segment of this wicked poem;) Book 2, section 9. Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers reads like Mother Goose in comparison to this subversive Grimm fairytale. Les Chants de Maldoror is a French poetic novel, or a long prose poem. It was written and published between 1868 and 1869 by the Comte de Lautréamont, the nom de plume of the Uruguayan-born French writer Isidore Lucien Ducasse.Although obscure at the time of its initial publication, Maldoror was rediscovered and championed by the Surrealist artists during the early twentieth century. The work's transgressive and absurdist theme ..read more

A poem I wish I had written... Be near me now, My tormenter, my love, be near me— At this hour when night comes down, When, having drunk from the gash of sunset, darkness comes With the balm of musk in its hands, its diamond lancets, When it comes with cries of lamentation, with laughter with songs; Its blue-gray anklets of pain clinking with every step. At this hour when hearts, deep in their hiding places, Have begun to hope once more, when they start their vigil For hands still enfolded in sleeves; When wine being poured makes the sound of inconsolable children who, though you try with all ..read more

The next installment for the audiobook. Apparently there are people seeking to "cancel" Cormac McCarthy. Get a fucking life. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7Wr1VPtVzqWRvWgGEgTt1OZSD62PwDtN If you enjoy my readings and would like to support the channel, you can buy me a cup of coffee : https://buymeacoffee.com/lorigomez_apoetrychannel ..read more

“The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” My recording of Milton's 17th century epic poem about the ultimate rebellion continues... If you enjoy my readings and would like to support the channel, you can buy me a cup of coffee : https://buymeacoffee.com/lorigomez_apoetrychannel The audiobook playlist thus far: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7Wr1VPtVzqV7OTPLK8fAcfWXiJGwweHD Writer and critic Samuel Johnson wrote that Paradise Lost shows off Milton's "peculiar power to astonish" and that Milton "seems to have been well acquainted with his ..read more

“If my words have done no more than to shake you in the faith of your fathers, that would have been reason enough to write them. For he who does not doubt does not look; and he who does not look will not see, but must remain in blindness and confusion.” He illustrates the point with this couplet: Forget all you’ve heard and clutch what you see— At sunrise what use is Saturn to thee?" I have skipped the translator L E Goodman’s 105 page introduction and will instead read Ibn Tufayl’s own preface. Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (literally translates from Arabic to 'Alive son of Awake') is an Arabic philosophic ..read more