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.