Transcendentalism. What does it mean? According to a book called ‘Masterpieces of Literature’, edited by Frank N. Magill, the Transcendentalists had “a healthy irreverence for secondhand customs and beliefs, especially those transplanted to America from England … a desire to mend the supposed split between God and man in order to glorify God-man, and they insisted that Christ be seen as a historical personage, a man …” This was around the 1840’s.

In the article written by brooklyn on this same website, Ralph Waldo Emerson …

Richard Brautigan is a native of the deep Pacific Northwest, the same richly wooded territory that later produced the talents of David Lynch, Matt Groening and Kurt Cobain. Brautigan, who fits like a glove into this pantheon of weird brilliance, was born on January 30, 1935 in Tacoma, Washington.

His mother moved the family to a shack in Eugene, Oregon, where Brautigan spent his childhood. The utter poverty of his “white trash” upbringing seems to have affected him deeply. Many …

What really knocks me out is a book that,
when you’re all done reading it,
you wish the author that wrote it was
a terrific friend of yours and you could call him
up on the phone whenever you felt like it.
That doesn’t happen much, though.”
– Holden Caulfield in ‘The Catcher in the Rye’

When I finished reading The Catcher in the Rye I was near tears. Okay, so I’m 15, hormonal and a little melodramatic — a lot moves me to tears — …

During the Heian period of Japanese culture (700-1100), it was a social requirement to be able to instantly recognize, appreciate and recite Japanese and Chinese poetry. It was around this period that short forms of poetry (tanka) grew in popularity over long forms of poetry (choka). The rigid lifestyles of the time carried over into art; every poem had to have a specific form. The approved form was the 5-7-5 triplet followed by a couplet of seven syllables (this was the Japanese equivalent to the …