Touchstones: A Book of Daily Meditations for Men

Doesn’t it bug the shit out of you when you are completely stressing out  about a relevant, important matter in your life, palms sweaty, tense neck, trembling fingers and some says to you, “Just relax.” Hate to tell you, but it’s true. Grab this book and take your time to read it, absorb it, even if it’s paragraph by paragraph on the old crapper. Peace of mind may be simpler than you think and achievable. Fuck that was deep.

 

Overview

Don’t let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.
R.L. Evans

“One cannot always be a hero, but one can always be a man,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe tells us, but sometimes simply being a man can be a mighty struggle. Take heart from this companionable book of daily meditations, a year’s worth of friendly words to cheer you on your way.

Speaking straight to men who are striving for serenity or trying to maintain emotionally and spiritually balanced lives, these daily touchstones begin with quotations from sources as varied as William Shakespeare, Wendell Berry, Michael Spinks, and Woody Allen and conclude with affirmations that underscore the lessons of intimacy, integrity and spirituality. They explore the masculine role of lover or spouse, father or friend and, like a helping hand extended, case the daily strain of making a man’s way.

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The Way We Were: In His 10th Novel, Edmund White Again Draws on Personal Experience

"Jack Holmes & White Friends" by Edmund White. (Bloomsbury)

Here in Northern California winter is taking it’s sweet time to get here so our hibernation instincts haven’t quite kicked in yet. Soon though the rain will come and we will have watched out entire Netflix cue and masturbated our self out (that’s what men do). It it time to find some books to flex your brain while you are taking cover from the outdoor winter elements. M. Enders

Over the years, the novelist, memoirist, cultural critic and literary biographer Edmund White has been vocal about his decision to write from a gay perspective, for a gay audience. In the wake of the AIDS crisis, he became more firmly devoted to this audience, helping to found the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and publishing his breakthrough autobiographical novel, A Boy’s Own Story, about growing up gay in the Midwest. Ironically, it was only as he began to focus more exclusively on gay themes that his work became known to straight audiences. In his recent memoir, City Boy, Mr. White wrote about the creative liberation that occurred when he realized, in the late 1970s, that he could create groundbreaking work simply by mining his own autobiography: “A straight writer, condemned to show nothing but marriage, divorce, and childbirth, might need a new formal approach or an exotic use of language. But a gay writer, free to record for the first time so many vivid and previously uncharted experiences, needed no tricks.”