| TNS Events | TNS End of Life Conversation
Dec 5: Eric Karpeles
The Last Threshold - Artists and Mortality
TNS End of Life Conversation
Jan 16: Frank Ostaseki
Being A Compassionate Companion
TNS End of Life Conversation
Feb 6: Steve Heilig
The Modern Evolution of Death
Feb 13: W.S. Merwin
Readings and Conversation with Eric Karpeles
-------------
Visit our website for more information.
|
Art Exhibitions
| Feb 5 - Apr 15
Site-Specific:
A Retrospective by
Corrie McCluskey
More information
|
TNS Online
| NEW Podcasts
Susan Braun and Mike Witte, MD
Fighting 'till the End?
(Recorded Nov 7)
Michael Lerner
Lessons from the Commonweal Cancer Help Program
(Recorded Oct 3)
Professor James Morris
Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man
Nick Yiangou
Ibn 'Arabi Conversations
(Recorded Oct 2010)
Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr.
The Hip Hop Caucus
(Recorded Oct 19)
Sim Van der Ryn
Ecological Design
(Recorded Oct 1)
See our website
Find us on iTunes
|
The New School
Commonweal
|
No degrees, grades, or homework - we're a new kind of school, a community of inquiry exploring topics in health, the arts and sciences, the environment, and the inner life.
The New School at Commonweal presents conversations, book readings, performances, and other events with thought and action leaders who are changing our world. The events, almost 100 over the past four years, are recorded and then offered as podcasts on iTunes and our website. Most of our events are offered free of charge as gifts to the Commonweal community - and you are part of it - giving forward into a circle of generosity.
Kyra Epstein
The New School Coordinator
TheNewSchool@Commonweal.org
www.The-New-School.org
|
|
|
 Dear New School Friends,
Over the course of several days this past June, on a visit to William and Paula Merwin at their home in central France, William and I engaged in talk on a wide variety of subjects -- poetics and literature, politics, ecology, aging, food, and wine. Merwin has a singular voice, soft in tone but formidable in persuasion, one that casually interweaves emotion with reason, a voice at once dispassionate and passionate. I became increasingly aware that, besides being a complex and accomplished artist, William Merwin is also a fierce advocate. And I was struck how well the "agenda" of his advocacy concerns reverberate with those of Commonweal, whose programs "contribute to human and ecosystem health - to a safer world for people and for all life." Learning of his upcoming lecture tour in the Bay Area, I contacted him to ask if he would consider participating in a New School program. I'm delighted to say he readily agreed.
For several decades, William and Paula's primary home has been on Maui, where he writes and works nineteen acres of land that now host more than 800 species of palm, planted methodically by him over a period of 30 years. Living in harmony with the world around him and reclaiming degraded land, Merwin has made a unique model of sustainability in Hawaii. Only recently has he put into reality a dream of preservation for this property, now known as the Merwin Conservancy.
Through his lifelong observation of the simple marvels and beauties of the natural world, Merwin has developed a spare and direct poetic voice; inimitable, fusing what he sees with what he feels, what he knows with what he has yet to learn. I invite you to hear for yourselves the many articulate voices of William Merwin on Sunday, February 13, 2011, at The New School at Commonweal, when the reigning poet laureate of the United States will come for a visit to Bolinas.
There is no cost to attend this very special event, but please be aware that reservations by email are REQUIRED and that it will likely fill up quickly. RSVP to TheNewSchool@Commonweal.org.
On another note, I hope to see you this Sunday, when I bring the next conversation to the End of Life series -- The Last Threshold: Artists and Mortality.
Thanks for being part of The New School.
Eric Karpeles
Commonweal Board Member
|
|
|
TNS End of Life Conversations Series
Co-presented by The New School and The Coastal Health Alliance
Sunday, December 5, 2pm-4pm
Eric Karpeles
The Last Threshold: Artists and Mortality
In the fourth of an ongoing series of New School presentations on the end of life, Bolinas painter and writer Eric Karpeles will talk about the role that artists have played in helping to imaginatively frame and comprehend the idea of how we cease to be.
How is it that artists, engaged in the most willful need to express their very beings, seem to overcome the fear of the loss of self? Focusing on three distinct art forms-painting, poetry and music-and three supreme practitioners-Mark Rothko, Emily Dickinson and Gustav Mahler-Karpeles will attempt to create an awareness of how, in their struggle to give voice, artists make use of their accumulated subjective experience to look and listen and learn with acute attention and focus, navigating between the physical world and the life of the mind. The boundary between what we know and what we cannot know is a minefield of stimulation for artists, who help teach us by example how to meaningfully embrace the end that awaits us all.
Commonweal Board Member Eric Karpeles is a painter, author of Paintings in Proust, and translator of Proust's Overcoat.
Please RSVP to The New School: TheNewSchool@commonweal.org
|
|
TNS and Point Reyes Books present
 Sunday, February 13, 2pm-4pm
U.S. Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin
Readings and conversation with Eric Karpeles
In a career spanning five decades, W.S. Merwin, poet, translator, and environmental activist, has become one of the most widely read-and imitated-poets in America.
W.S. Merwin's recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held beliefs. He is not only profoundly anti-imperialist, pacifist, and environmentalist, but also possessed by an intimate feeling for landscape and language and the ways in which land and language interflow. His latest poems are densely imagistic and full of an intimate awareness of the natural world.
He was named United States Poet Laureate for 2010-2011 and is a Pulitzer Prize-winning and National Book Award-winning poet and essayist.
Learn more about W.S. Merwin's life and poetry, and hear recordings of him reading his poetry.
There is no cost to attend this very special event; please be aware that reservations by email are REQUIRED and that it will likely fill up quickly. RSVP to TheNewSchool@Commonweal.org.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
