looking past

"All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life. Whose history can ever reveal very much? In my view Americans put too much emphasis on their pasts as a way of defining themselves, which can be death-dealing."
-----------------------------
" ... what I am a proponent of is forgetting. Forgetting dreams, grievances, old flaws in character—mine and others'. To me there is no hope unless we can forget what's said and gone before, and forgive it."
--Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

half slumber

"Half-slumber took him. [They] turned out the lights and all was quiet and then a succession of images came forward, resurrected by some crow-eyed part of his mind that would neither wake nor sleep. Fragmentary emotions possessed and released him, drawn like garments from a wardrobe and discarded, one after another. Below that chaos of image and memory, something so powerfully suppressed he would barely remember it: the idea that everything once true in the world was now past, and a thousand new possibilities had been loosed."
--David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

immersed in creation

"Fiction specifically is an organic whole and allows you to immerse yourself and your mind in another mind's vision. The reading experience is quite intense, really, and to my mind, not well understood or even much talked about. Directed dreaming while awake is one shorthand, but that leaves out the language component, that is, most of the picture. Many think language is what makes us human; reading therefore makes us more human, more intensely ourselves. Reading is a creative experience for the reader, and fiction involves the most intense creative process on the part of the reader. That creative process is what energizes my love of reading and fiction in particular."
--Rick Kleffel, NPR Correspondent

stupid is as stupid does

"You're not stupid. You're just in Congress."
--Gust L. Avrakotos character in Charlie Wilson's War

"Politeness. Now, there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them. I hardly suppose Wagner lost sleep worrying about whether he'd hurt someone's feelings. But then he was a genius."
--Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

sunbeams

"You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive."
--James Baldwin
----------------------------------------
"If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly."
--Andrew Harvey

soul mirror

"People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it."
--Elizabeth Gilbert, quoting Richard from Texas, in Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia

you know who

"I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe, and someone said I was a snake, I'd think, no, actually I'm a giraffe."
--Richard Gere

what's wrong with america

What is wrong in a country when during a historic primary election, every major American TV network is reporting on the latest Britney Spears breakdown, and the only place where you can find out what's going on in New Hampshire is BBC World News on PBS? What is the matter with us?

"Independence is an achievement. Interdependence is a choice only independent people can make."
--Stephen R. Covey

it's better than inertia

"Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from."
--Al Franken

starchy

"It is hard to be reckless and still have one's shirts starched."
--Caitlin Macy, The Fundamentals of Play

invisible

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
--Virginia Woolf

mini feasts

"What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you ... You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you. The workings of nature are mysterious, but they do account for a certain amount of despair among single persons, the irrelevance you sometimes feel."
--------------------------
"Passion occupies a space that is not vacated until another passion occupies it."
--------------------------
"One of the lyrical consolations of insomnia is that the sufferer becomes acquainted with the special luminous emptiness of 4 a.m., these spectral stirrings when, just before dawn, the spirits seem to be abroad and are moving slowly toward you for reassurance ... Not all insomnias are alike, as any victim of this condition knows very well."
--Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love

imitation

"The story was like an imitation of something literary, made by someone who hadn't developed a distinctive voice of his own."
--Meg Wolitzer, The Wife

darkness and light

"... the central reason why books have meant so much to me. It is not because of my pleasure in the art of writing, though that has been very great. It is because they have taken me so far beyond the narrow limits of my own experience and have so greatly enlarged my sense of the complexity of life: of its consuming darkness, and also--thank God--of the light which continues to struggle through."
--Diana Athill, Stet: An Editor's Life

know the right word

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."
--Stephen King

bad numbers

"It’s the rare individual who, at the age of eighteen, knows very much about the world or even herself."
--Margaret Heffernan

cover it in sequins

"I must say, I've fallen in love with the musical genre. It's the art form of the common man. If you want to communicate something to the proletariat, cover it in sequins and make it sing. It's noisy, vulgar, and utterly meaningless. I love it."
--Slings and Arrows

pseudointellectualism

"Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own."
--Sidney J. Harris

steamy victorians

Interviewer: "Put a handsome bloke in a period costume and his popularity rating goes off the scale. What's that about?"

Suppression. Not being able to touch someone, or say what you feel, because it's inappropriate. That tightens the sexual tension. You want to metaphorically rip off the corset! We don't think twice about such stuff nowadays. Anything goes in our society.
--Richard Armitage, North and South hottie

chef's special

"Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don't have ... there are two kinds of people in this world: those who do what they say they're going to do -- and everyone else."
-----------------------------------------
"Assume the worst. About everybody. But don't let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious, and corrupt asshole shouldn't prevent you from enjoying his company, working with him or finding him entertaining. This business grows assholes: it's our principal export. I'm an asshole. You should probably be an asshole, too."
--Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

another thousand days

"Right now all I know is that in love there must be some form of desperation and some form of joy. Both these sensations -- along with whatever else the lovers invent or permit -- are constants. Lovers are never long without one or the other or both of them. Is the joy fuller through the desperation, as it is to eat when you've been very hungry, to sleep when you've been awake too long? And if it is, shouldn't we welcome the despair as much as the joy? The giving, the getting, the taking, the nurturing, I have begun to understand that we take turns signing on for one or another of these as though they were daily jobs. We continue to assume jobs until all of them are filled, until all roles established. The dynamic part of love lies within each of these jobs but rarely beyond it. Consider, too, that love transforms the lovers."
-----------------------------------------------------
"Did you know it's defiance that keeps a man optimistic? Without his secrets, his rebellions, his little vendettas against another man or against the same wild hare who eludes him three days in a row, against hunger, against time itself -- if he loses these, he loses his voice."
--Marlena de Blasi, A Thousand Days in Tuscany

literary decor

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."
--Anna Quindlen

the accidential venetian

"In those solitary evenings by my fire I found finely spun threads, a pattern, my own story. I opened up the kind of memory that feels like a wistful hankering for something lost or something that never was. I think most of us have it, this potentially destructive habit of mental record-keeping that builds, distorts, then breaks up and spreads into even the farthest flung territories of reason and consciousness. What we do is accumulate the pain, collect it like cranberry glass. We display it, stack it up into a pile. Then we stack it up into a mountain so we can climb up onto it, waiting for, demanding sympathy, salvation. 'Hey, do you see this? Do you see how big my pain is?' We look across at other people's piles and measure them, shouting, 'My pain is bigger than your pain.' It's all somehow like the medieval penchant for tower building. Each family demonstrated its power with the height of its own personal tower. One more layer of stone, one more layer of pain, each one a measure of power."
------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whether we call it controlling or enabling or the more poetic 'taming,' power issues don't rear up as frenzied in a marriage between older people, the riper souls understanding these maneuvers to be ruinous. Older people get married for different reasons than younger people do. Perhaps it's that in a younger partnership, the man lives on his side of the marriage and the woman on hers. Gracious opponents in competitions over career, social and economic status, frequency and intensity of applause, they meet at table or in bed, each exhausted from the solitary race. In a later marriage, even if they work on different things, they're still working as a team, remembering that being together was why they got married in the first place. I look at Fernando, and I can't imagine not remembering that."
--Marlena De Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice

master is slave

"Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known. He did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed before he had even spoken the first syllable of the word master."
--Edward P. Jones, The Known World

running

All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
--James Thurber

brain nutrients

"It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different books which have made him wise. Let us see the results of good food in a strong body, and the results of great reading in a full and powerful mind."
-- Sydney Smith

mrs rochester burns the house down

"I waited a long time after I heard her snore, then I got up, took the keys and unlocked the door. I was outside holding my candle. Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do. There must have been a draught for the flame flickered and I thought it was out. But I shielded it with my hand and it burned up again to light me along the passage."
--Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

the documentary age

"When we say a thing or an event is real, never mind how suspect it sounds, we honor it. But when a thing is made up -- regardless of how true and just it seems -- we turn up our noses. That's the age we live in. The documentary age. As if we can never, never get enough facts. We put on the television set and what we hear is the life cycles of birds. The replaying of wars. Interviews with mass murderers. And the newspapers know nothing else.
--Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

missing the point

"Now there's a woman who made a terrific meatloaf, who knew how to repot a drooping rubber plant, who bid a smart no-trump hand, who wore a hat well, who looked after her personal hygiene, who wrote her thank-you notes promptly, who kept up, who went down, went down and down and down, who missed the point, the point of it all, but was, nevertheless, almost unfailingly courteous to others."
--Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

unexpected delight

A week in Minneapolis, a more delightful city than I expected it to be:

My favorite destination(s):
Walker Art Center and Sculpture Garden
This was especially interesting.

Some great meals:
Bellanotte (I will remember this meal for a long time, especially the chocolate lava cake)
Chambers Kitchen
New Delhi (the only meal to slightly disappoint, probably because it was lunch buffet)
Hell's Kitchen (ham and pear grilled sandwich -- yum!)

ticking off

"I loathe the expression 'What makes him tick.' It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm."
--James Thurber

gems from housekeeping

"When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate."
-----------------------------------
"It is ... difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows."
----------------------------------
"Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has to look and not to buy."
----------------------------------
"I learned an important thing in the orchard that night, which was that if you do not resist the cold, but simply relax and accept it, you no longer feel the cold as discomfort."
-- Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

why didn't I think of that?

"I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top."
--An English Professor

losing sight

"Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles."
--George Jean Nathan

the sane response

"Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane."
-- Philip K. Dick

what will we say? what will we do?

"What shall we say when history asks how such crimes came to be committed in the name of America? Will we say that we stood silently by, shrugging our shoulders, filling our bellies, closing our eyes? Or will we be able to say: We saw. We dissented. We resisted. We condemned."
-- Chris Floyd

reading about reading

So, you think you know how to read?

night is another thing

"It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing."
--Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

and so I become a homeowner

The architect's vision of my new townhouse, done in May. Hooray! Renter no more!

freaks

" ... we have that word normal and we can say we are normal because a psychological, sexual, or spiritual abnormality can -- with a little luck -- be safely hidden from the rest of the world. But if you are less than three feet tall, you have to deal with that fact every second of every day of your life. And everyone witnesses your effort. You go into a bar and you can't get up onto a stool. You whistle down a taxi and you can't open the door. If you're a lady with a beard, every face you meet is a mirror to give you back the disgust and horror and unreasonableness of your predicament. No matter which corner you turn on which street in which city in the world, you can expect to meet the mirror. And I suppose I have never been able to forgive myself the grotesqueries and aberrations I am able to hide with such impunity in my own life. It was a painful and wondrous moment of self-knowledge, one I might never have had if I had not taken the bike on the road, looking for something I knew I'd recognize only when I saw it, looking for the limit -- ultimately, looking for the edge."
-- Harry Crews, Introduction to A Harry Crews Reader

stepping out

"The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame."
------------------------------------
"Disorientation is the loss of the East. Ask any navigator: the East is what you sail by. Lose the east and you lose your bearings, your certainties, your knowledge of what is and what may be, perhaps even your life ... But let's just suppose. What if the whole deal -- orientation, knowing where you are, and so on -- what if it's all a scam? What if all of it -- home, kinship, the whole enchilada -- is just the biggest, most truly global, and centuries-oldest piece of brainwashing? Suppose that it's only when you dare to let go that your real life begins? When you're whirling free of the mother ship, when you cut your ropes, slip your chain, step off the map, go absent without leave, scram, vamoose, whatever: suppose that it's then, and only then, that you're actually free to act! To lead the life nobody tells you how to live, or when, or why. In which nobody orders you to go forth and die for them, or for god, or comes to get you because you broke one of the rules, or because you're one of those people who are, for reasons which unfortunately you can't be given, simply not allowed. Suppose you've got to go through the feeling of being lost, into the chaos and beyond; you've got to accept the loneliness, the wild panic of losing your moorings, the vertiginous terror of the horizon spinning round and round like the edge of a coin tossed in the air.
You won't do it. Most of you won't do it. The world's head laundry is pretty good at washing brains: Don't jump off that cliff don't walk through that door don't step into that waterfall don't take that chance don't step across that line don't ruffle my sensitivities I'm warning you now don't make me mad you're doing it you're making mad. You won't have a chance you haven't got a prayer you're finished you're history you're less than nothing, you're dead to me, dead to your whole family your nation your race, everything you ought to love more than life and listen to like your master's voice and follow blindly and bow down before and worship and obey; you're dead, you hear me, forget about it, you stupid bastard, I don't even know your name."
------------------------------------
Can you hear in my voice that I'm angry? Good. I've been reading a book about anger. It says that anger is evidence of our idealism. Something has gone wrong, but we 'know,' in our rage, that things could be different. It shouldn't be this way.
--Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

favorites of 2006

Books:
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
Barney's Version, Mordecai Richler
Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, Brady Udall
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
Ash Wednesday, Ethan Hawke

Movies:
Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus
A Very Long Engagement
Little Miss Sunshine
Capote

And two exceptional TV series, because watching them on DVD was more enjoyable than most of the movies I saw this year:
The West Wing (whole series)
Slings & Arrows (Seasons 1 and 2)

o happy dagger

Ellen: I hate this play. When you watch it, you feel miserable because you don't have that kind of passion in your life. Nobody does ... it's a fantasy. It's irresponsible.
Geoffrey: I think it's painfully accurate. Two idiots meet. They fall in love. They're happy, briefly, then all hell breaks loose. Happens all the time.
--Slings and Arrows, two actors speaking of Romeo and Juliet

and the bad writing award goes to ...

"Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe."
--Christopher Moore, The Stupidest Angel

More choice metaphors/similes:
"as inviting as a drunken prom queen"
"like she was using it to render tallow from building inspectors' butts"

I'm sure there must be more disastrous attempts at figurative language. I couldn't bear more than 3 pages.

you're my favorite, charlie brown

The story of Vince Guaraldi and A Charlie Brown Christmas.

deliberate solitude

"More often than not people who see me on trains and in ships, or in restaurants, feel a kind of resentment of me since I taught myself to enjoy being alone. Women are puzzled, which they hate to be, and jealous of the way I am served, with such agreeable courtesy, and of what I am eating and drinking, which is almost never the sort of thing they order for themselves. And men are puzzled too, in a more personal way. I anger them as males.
I am sorry. I do not like to do that, or puzzle the women either. But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence. Men see me eating in public, and I look as if I 'knew my way around'; and yet I make it plain that I know my way around without them, and that upsets them."
--MFK Fisher, The Gastronomical Me

to be happy

"To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruit of your passion, and learned your place in the world."
--Santayana

the sea

"I had ever had the conviction, resistant to all rational considerations, that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is my life, with its so many misreadings, its slips and fluffs, will be done with and that the real drama for which I have ever and with such earnestness been preparing will at last begin. It is a common delusion, I know, everyone entertains it."
---------------------------------
"I experienced a sense almost of panic as the real, the crassly complacent real, took hold of the things I thought I remembered and shook them into its own shape. Something precious was dissolving and pouring away between my fingers. Yet how easily, in the end, I let it go. The past, the real past, matters less than we pretend."
--John Banville, The Sea

goodbye don -- we wish we hardly knew ye

"It is unknowable how long that conflict [the war in Iraq] will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."
--Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 2003
-----------------------------------------
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
(formed into verse in Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld, by Hart Seely)

the speed of gossip

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
--Mark Twain

sometimes the irony kills me

"You cannot win the war on terror if you don't have a plan to win the war."
--George W. Bush, campaigning in Missouri

it's the great pumpkin

A must watch -- at least once a year.

unfathomable discoveries

"Auntie made me believe we live in a discoverable world, but that most of what we discover is an unfathomable mystery that we can name -- even defend against -- but never understand."
--Harry Crews, A Childhood

well-chosen beats many

"The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words."
--George Eliot

want

"We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we're so desperate to pretend that things are OK, really, that confessing to ourselves they're not looks like a bad move."
Nick Hornby, The Long Way Down

soul food

Sleep Positions

This is how we sleep:
On our backs, with pillows covering our chests, heavy as dirt
On our sides, like wistful spoons
Clenched, knees in-tucked, arms folded
Wide, like sprawling-rooted lotuses.

In Iowa on pictures of Hawaii, huge white flowers on blue
In New York on black satin
In China on straw.

This is how our dreams arrive:
As hot yellow taxicabs
As sudden blazing steam, we who have been pots on a stove,
looking only at our own lids
As uninvited insects, all at once on our tongues.

O hairdresser, auditor, hard-knuckled puller of crab traps, you who
think poetry was school, you who believe you never had
a flying thought,
lie down.
--Lola Haskins, Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems
(read by the poet for the WSU Visiting Writer Series this evening)
--------------------------------
Love

She tries it on, like a dress.
She decides it doesn't fit
and starts to take it off.
Her skin comes, too.
--Lola Haskins, Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems
(poet's comment: "You can't write a poem called 'Love' until you're over a certain large age."
--------------------------------
"The truth is horizontal and vertical."

on the NIE ...

"Both the Democrats and the President are wrong ...
We as Americans need to get beyond not just Iraq but also beyond the September 11 retaliation era so that we can look at our adversaries and our potential enemies with a clearer eye, with some openness, and some compassion.
A lot more is needed today than getting out of Iraq.
If the Democrats had their way, and the 'war' against terrorism were just accelerated in Afghanistan and Pakistan, my guess is that 'it' would become the new 'cause celebre.' The 'war' against terrorism is the problem at this point, as is our simplistic view of ourselves and what we are fighting."
--William M. Arkin (complete article)

home

View from my hotel room balcony in Lincoln City, Oregon.

Whale sighting in Depoe Bay (back, then tail). The whale-watching cruise was amazing! It was a big migration day.

the chance of ultimate possibility

"The chance of ultimate possibility kept repeating itself in his head, a mad little chant that would not stop, nor did he want it to ... Everything is chance, and chance is everything ... Most people refused to believe that, because chanced frightened them. But that was only ignorance. Chance contained every possibility. Of course, some of it might be bad--that was what the ignorant dwelled on, and it was what frightened them--but a heartbeat away from what might be bad, unthinkably bad, was what might be unthinkably great, a bliss that even the gods would envy."
--Harry Crews, Celebration

no doubt

"If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt."
--Geraldine Brooks, March

the great middlemarch

"Don't take my word about Middlemarch. Take Virginia Woolf's. When I urge my friends to read Middlemarch, as I do all the time, I often explain that the reason I re-read it several summers ago was because I'd found, in Virginia Woolf's essay on George Eliot, her description of Middlemarch as 'the magnificent book which, with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'" (more)
--Francine Prose, You Must Read This (NPR)

the fallacy in the question

Joss Whedon, genius creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and Serenity, answers the question he gets over and over again: "Why do you create these strong women characters?"

"Recognizing somebody else's power does not diminish your own."
--Joss Whedon

veronica

Weevil: Uh, yeah, can we stay focused here? 'Cause if we're seen together by the wrong people, that would be bad.
Veronica: So, this is sneaking? I've got a pantomine-horse disguise you could use. Do either of you have any experience being a horse's ass?
------------------------------
Lamb: Still picking winners, huh, Veronica?
Veronica: I told you, when I start picking losers, it's all you.
------------------------------
Keith: I'm thinking about getting you some sort of... giant hamster ball, so you can roll everywhere in this protective sphere.
Veronica: It'd just draw attention to me. Nobody likes a blonde in a hamster ball.
--Veronica Mars

it's just showbiz

Today, Morgan Spurlock introduced a new regular segment on the CBS evening news.

an old truth -- a new way

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

reductionist science

"... once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine."
--Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma

a delightful week in boise

The main event:
The Idaho Shakespeare Festival

And some new and old favorites:
The Bombay Grill
Goldy's
The FlipSide Cafe

pez pundits

"We need anything politically important rationed out like Pez: small, sweet, and coming out of a funny, plastic head."
--Dennis Miller

i love a good storm

Tonight: Windy with isolated thunderstorms this evening, then skies turning partly cloudy after midnight. A few storms may be severe. Low 56F. SW winds at 20 to 30 mph, diminishing to 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%.

ultimate romance

Debi: "OK, you can go now."
Marty: "You want me to leave right now? You don't maybe want to watch CNN, Crossfire, something romantic?"
Debi: "No, airplane was quite enough."
Marty: "OK, I'll go. That's fine. I'll go. But this night, tomorrow night, the reunion, is going to be an important step in our burgeoning relationship."
Debi: "You're a f***ing psycho."
Marty: "Don't rush to judgment on something like that until all the facts are in."
--Minnie Driver and John Cusack, Grosse Pointe Blank

how to preside over a house on fire

Today's headlines:
Lebanon death toll 'reaches 900'
Wave of Rocket Attacks Kill 8 in Israel
U.S. General Says Iraq Could Slide Into a Civil War
Suicide Bomber Kills 21 Civilians in Afghanistan
Marines Charged With Assault in Iraq Case

so ....
Bush previews border efforts before vacation

stop, children, what's that sound

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware

I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

There's battle lines being drawn
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind

I think it's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side

It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away

We better stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down ...

--Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's Worth"
Stephen Stills, 1966

give 'em hell

"Some 37 years ago, as a bunch of us spent a night in a cozy jail cell for protesting the Vietnam War, we noticed the graffiti on a wall of our cell which said: "What do we ask for? Freedom. What do we get? Bologna sandwiches." The phrase has stuck with me: You have to ask for a lot to get a smidgeon of freedom.

And I dare you to ask for a lot, I dare you to hold fast to your ideals and to expound them as publicly and as fearlessly as Martin Luther King and Bill Coffin and Betty Friedan and those dozens of grandmothers arrested a few weeks ago for protesting the war in Iraq.

Most such paradigms of valor and commitment have been galvanized by the belief that you have to give hell to entrenched power when it violates our notions of human justice. So my final message to you is this: Whether it be on the issue of racial integration or gay rights or sexual equality or the pathetic state of health care in this country or one of the dumbest military excursions ever waged by an American government--the Iraq War--your motto should be: Give 'em hell, give 'em hell, give 'em hell!

There are never enough troublemakers fighting for justice, so go out there and give 'em hell to create a better world for you and your children to grow into. You know one of Barnard's mottoes--say it with me: "Change the world, one woman at a time."
--Francine du Plessix Gray, Commencement Address to the Class of 2006 at Barnard College, May 16, 2006

roth

"Sandy wasn't angry any longer. He wasn't contemptuous. He wasn't superior-acting in any way. It was as though he too had taken a blow to the head, but one that, instead of bringing on amnesia, had rejuvenated the quiet, conscientious boy whose satisfactions emanated not from his being a precocious big shot full of contrary opinions but from that strong, even current of an interior life that carried him steadily along from morning to night and that, in my eyes, had always made him genuinely superior to the other kids his age."
-----------------------
"It's so heartbreaking, violence, when it's in a house -- like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree.
--Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

jungian reflection

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
--Carl Jung

the flip side

"I am only slightly less astonished by the egotism of the assassins, the inflated self-esteem it requires to kill a president, than I am astonished by the men who run for president. These are people who have the gall to believe they can fix us -- us and our deficit, our fossil fuels, our racism, poverty, our potholes and public schools. The egomania required to be president or a presidential assassin makes the two types brothers of sorts. Presidents and presidential assassins are like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City that way. Even though one city is all about sin and the other is all about salvation, they are identical, one-dimensional company towns built up out of the desert by the sheer will of true believers. The assassins and the presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are?"
--Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

a room (and books) of her own

"... if we cordon off the issue of education for girls in the developing world as a 'women's issue,' we will make far less progress than if we enlist both genders in the drive for full equality. I hope that this is not only a women's issue, but also a men's issue.
...
The United Nations has consistently advocated that educating girls has a larger impact on the developing world than any other initiative. If girls do not have the opportunity to attend school, we cannot hope to make lasting progress in the fight to eliminate global poverty ... there are few better ways to change the course of the world than getting girls into school and keeping them there."
--John Wood, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World
Support Room to Read.

yankee doodle dandy

Guess we're all a little country. How yankee are you?
My score:
"38% Dixie. You are definitely a Yankee."

happy birthday to canada

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!
From far and wide,
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

And I can't think about Canada without fondly remembering poutine in Montreal. Tourtière, too, though I don't remember that quite as fondly.

small minds

"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."
--Eleanor Roosevelt

the difficult kind

the difficult kind
--sheryl crow

I think I was wrong
I think you were right
All my angry words
Will keep me up at night
Through the old screen door
I still hear you say
Honey won't you stop
Treating me that way

If you could only see
What love has made of me
Then I'd no longer be in your mind
The difficult kind
Cause babe I've changed

Tell it to me slow
Tell me with your eyes
If anyone should know
How to let it slide
I swear I can see you
Coming up the drive
There ain't nothing like regret
To remind you you're alive

If you could only see
What love has made of me
Then I'd no longer be in your mind
The difficult kind
Cause babe I've changed

I crossed the canyon a thousand times
But never noticed what was mine
What you'll remember of me tonight
Well, it almost makes me cry
Yeah, it almost makes me cry

Oh ballbreaking moon and ridiculing stars
The older I get, the closer you are
Don't you have somewhere that you need to be
Instead of hanging here making a fool of me

If you could only see
What love has made of me
Then I'd no longer be in your mind
The difficult kind
But you won't see the change in me
If you could only see
What love has made of me
But I'll forever be in your mind
The difficult kind
But you won't see, no you won't see
The good in me
But babe I've changed
Cause babe I've changed

kiss

"When a thought is too weak to be expressed simply, it should be rejected."
--luc, marquis de vauvenargues

fini

"The past is finished. There is nothing to be gained by going over it. Whatever it gave us in the experiences it brought us was something we had to know."
--Rebecca Beard

patriotic duty?

"When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty."
--George Bernard Shaw

i miss the old conservatives

"We establish no religion in this country, we command no worship, we mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate. All are free to believe or not believe, all are free to practice a faith or not, and those who believe are free, and should be free, to speak of and act on their belief. At the same time that our Constitution prohibits state establishment of religion, it protects the free exercise of all religions. And walking this fine line requires government to be strictly neutral."
--Ronald Reagan

the sleep cure

"The cure for the blues is to go to sleep and wake up in the morning. A good night's sleep can change everything. Don't base your life on what you think at 3 a.m. Go to bed early and be asleep in your bunk as the train chugs over the Donner Pass of the soul, and awaken fresh and happy in San Francisco."
--Garrison Keillor, Love Me

dean moriarty

"'Sal, think of it, we'll dig Denver together and see what everybody's doing although that matters little to us, the point being that we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE.' Then he whispered, clutching my sleeve, sweating, 'Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there -- and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end.'"
------------------------------
"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
--Jack Kerouac, On the Road

broken delusion

"They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn't know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way. Our broken Ford, old thirties upgoing America Ford, rattled through them and vanished in the dust."
--Jack Kerouac, On the Road

crying to be done

"Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done -- whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was."
--Jack Kerouac, On the Road

searchin'

"In a Pentecostal town like this, Saturday night's the time you decide who you are and what you're gonna do. When you're poor, and you got very little resources, you can't live up to God's expectations of ya -- it hurts too much. And you're waitin' for that promise of heaven, and you're waitin' and waitin', and it never comes. Pretty soon you think, 'I'm just gonna take what I can get.'"
--Jim White, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus

say yes

Well, you are about to start the greatest improvisation of all. With no script. No idea what’s going to happen, often with people and places you have never seen before. And you are not in control. So say “yes.” And if you’re lucky, you’ll find people who will say “yes” back.

Now will saying “yes” get you in trouble at times? Will saying “yes” lead you to doing some foolish things? Yes it will. But don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying “yes” begins things. Saying “yes” is how things grow. Saying “yes” leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say “yes.”
--Stephen Colbert, Commencement Address at Knox College, 2006

lost bliss

"Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing us all across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death."
--Jack Kerouac, On the Road

if only

"I'd never have believed I'd see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.
--Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

an interesting planet

"That mention of Feuerbach and joy reminded me of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church. There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don't know why I thought of that now, except, perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it."
--Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

bibliophilism

"Now and then Fox feels agitated for reasons unknown. It causes him to throw stones or break tree limbs to no purpose. He runs along the beach to kick up sprays of shell like a mischevious child and he yells until his throat is sore. He still can't believe that he's managed to arrive here without a single book. He revisits every opportunity on the road, considers the poetry volumes crammed into old Bess's caravan. He thinks wistfully of every novel he's ever turned his nose up at or given up on, every hyphenated Englishman and triple-barrelled American who's ever put him to sleep. Come home Gertrude Stein and Jean-Paul Sartre--all is forgiven. Fox would content himself with a phone book, a shopping list."
--Tim Winton, Dirt Music

the reality bias

"Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

So, Mr. President, please, pay no attention to the people that say the glass is half full. 32% means the glass -- it's important to set up your jokes properly, sir. Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, because 32% means it's 2/3 empty. There's still some liquid in that glass is my point, but I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash."
--Stephen Colbert, White House Correspondents Dinner, 2006

crosses

Don't you know that I'll be around to guide you
Through your weakest moments to leave them behind you
Returning nightmares only shadows
We'll cast some light and you'll be alright for now
Crosses all over, heavy on your shoulders
The sirens inside you waiting to step forward
Disturbing silence darkens your sight
We'll cast some light and you'll be alright for now
Crosses all over the boulevard
The streets outside your window overflooded
People staring they know you've been broken
Repeatedly reminded by the looks on their faces
Ignore them tonight and you'll be alright
We'll cast some light and you'll be alright
--Jose Gonzalez, "Crosses" (lyrics)

on 9/11

"... what they do is all sit together and feel really bad, and pray. No one in [this] crew would ever be so nauseous as to try to get everybody to pray aloud or form a prayer circle, but you can still tell what they're all doing.
Make no mistake, this is mostly a good thing. It forces you to think and do things you most likely wouldn't alone, like for instance while watching the address and eyes to pray, silently and fervently, that you're wrong about the president, that your view of him is maybe distorted and he's actually far smarter and more substantial than you believe, not just some soulless golem or nexus of corporate interests dressed up in a suit but a statesman of courage and probity and ... and it's good, this is good to pray this way. It's just a bit lonely to have to. Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around ... part of the horror of the Horror was knowing, deep in my heart, that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my America ... than it was these [people's]."
--David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster