Saving The Pacific
Before the Departure
“an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968” - Joan Didion
Whatever Works
This is a broad overview of Louis Menand with a focus on Menand's newest book, The Free World. However, Spillman reports a great deal on Menand's biography and our collective cultural milieu along the way. Louis Menand Scott Spillman https://thepointmag.com/criticism/whatever-works-louis-menand/
How To Speak Whale
How to Speak Whale by Tom Mustill (Grand Central) Nonfiction In this book, Mustill delves into the latest research on animal communication. “Is it too much of a leap to think we might someday decode the sperm whale click for ‘mother’?” Mustill writes. “For ‘pain’? For ‘hello’? The answer is, of course, that we cannot know until …
Covert Plants
Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World This is a transformative exposition of the nature of plants and their relation to humans and the earth. Rarely do we see a concentration on the cognitive and biological nature of plants. https://punctumbooks.com/titles/covert-plants/
Jorie Graham Takes The Long View – Katy Waldman
Literary Magazines – A Rough Road
Farming Along the Salish Sea
Trumponomics – Simple Supply & Demand
Trumponomics - It is clear to me that there is a very simple strategy for what Trump is doing to get the US economy booming. I think it is really fair to say that this is Trump’s only strategy. All of the misbehavior and destructive actions going on in all all of his cabinet positions …
The Nixon Question By Garry Wills
The Hive - Vanity Fair Sometimes a soaring rate of cockamamieness can leave us clueless about what to make of it and therefore unable to do anything about it.Those are the times when we seek out something—anything—with enough similarity to the new person or thing, to guess what we are dealing with. We see that …
“The Exile Returns” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in America
Profiles February 14, 1994 Issue The Exile Returns Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn posed such a threat to the Soviet Politburo that it exiled him after the publication of “The Gulag Archipelago,” but for twenty years the West was also a reluctant audience for his uncompromising views. Now, having completed his historical opus, the author is going home, …
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Harnessing Technology, Arts, and Culture to Solve Global Challenges – MIT Media Lab
Neri Oxman, head of the Mediated Matter research group; Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, curator of the MIT Solve Arts and Culture Mentorship Prize; and MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle speak at the 2017 Concordia Annual Summit in New York City on September 18, 2017. https://www.media.mit.edu/videos/mm-grand-central-neri-2017-09-18/
“Save The Whales, Screw The Shrimp” – Joy Williams
This is a riveting essay about the wild land, wild animals and wild sky. Ms William’s point is that the wild does not belong in our world anymore, cause, well, we just don’t want it too -it doesn’t fit into our consumer-led way of seeing the world. Wonderfully inventive perspectives draw down our mighty problem …
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Desert Solitaire – Edward Abbey
I do not recall if Abbey studied zen. It appears to me that inherent in his craft is the idea that what he does not say is as important as what he does. Each sentence zigs and zags around, over and under so many norms of American society, and he does so with nary a …
David Foster Wallace – Deciderization 2007 – A Special Report
This piece was written by Wallace for the 2007 issue of "The Best American Essays" by Houghton Mifflin publishers. For anyone who reads that publication and or is interested in essays this piece reads as fresh today as it did then. I think it’s unlikely that anyone is reading this as an introduction. Most of …
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William T. Vollmann – “Nothing is true; all is permissible.”
photos: PHILIPPE MERLE/AFP/GETTYIMAGES The Atlantic Magazine Interview Writers Can Do Anything William T. Vollmann, author of Last Stories and Other Stories, explains why he works by an assassin's credo: "Nothing is true; all is permissible." 1.0k 225 JOE FASSLER JUL 16, 2014 By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite …
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Susan Sontag – A biography – Review
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/books/review/McCulloch.t.html?_r=0 Susan Sontag - A Biography Daniel Schreiber Translated from the German by David Dollenmayer Daniel Schreiber has created a wonderfully written, well organized short biography on Susan Sontag. The book is fluid in pace and provides an ample well of historical context to enable the reader to see the many connections and subtleties of …
The Race Against CO2
Apple’s $850M solar plant rockets it to first place among U.S. corporations Computerworld | Feb 12, 2015 4:06 AM PT Apple over the next year or so is expected to surpass Walmart as the largest corporate user of solar power. The company this week announced it will invest $850 million to build a solar power …
Some Wisdom Stands The Test Of Time
For however strong you may be in respect of your army, it is essential that in entering a new Province you should have the good will of its inhabitants. The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli, 1532
Michael Kinsley Weighs in on “The New Republic” Controversy
photo - getty images The New Republic Magazine, a 100-year-old liberal publication was purchased recently (two years ago) by the young co-founder of Facebook ( worth $700 Million) who now wants to turn the company into a digital media company after initially announcing that he wanted to maintain the …
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Chritopher Hitchens Being Waterboarded
Accept Disgrace Willingly – Lao Tsu
"One lesson we may have learned in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks is that no terrorist group can damage or destroy the United States and its Constitution. Only we can do that to ourselves."Tim Weiner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former national-security correspondent for The New York Times and author of Legacy of Ashes: …
Going Right When We Meant To Go Left
As David Brooks points out, this should be a defining time for the left, if not an era for the left. Yet what we get is a staggering win for the right. This whirlwind of motion and change is left in a dark caldron to be sealed for as long as people let others run …
Rooting
Garry Wills – American Thinker & Iconoclast
Photograph by Gasper Tringale. (photo - Chris Walker, Chicago Tribune) Mr. Wills is the foremost literary journalist and thinker of our time. This article is a tribute to this iconoclast, one who has followed his own path to understanding America with intelligence, tenacity and grace. The American Mind The historian Garry Wills has written …
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Carol Blue on Christopher Hitchens
This is a short interview of Christopher Hitchen's wife, Carol Blue, shortly after he passed away in 2011. She is a very gracious and talented woman who shows what a muse she must have been. http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2012/s3619164.htm
The Salish Sea
Amazon – Dick Cavett – Hostage Taking
This is a recent post by the New Yorker Magazine. It is in further to the controversy surrounding Amazon's crude behavior to force publishers to do things the Amazon way and oh, to pay up. JULY 10, 2014 AN “UNBELIEVABLE” ENCOUNTER WITH AMAZON POSTED BY MALCOLM GLADWELL
Future of Journalism – Michael Kinsley – Riptide
Gary Snyder Interview – 5-14-2014
Point Omega – DeLillo’s Literary Masterpiece
photo - towards point omega - rlw This book is a meditation held together by the flow of time; time says that one thing must come after another, we do not will this, it is. We can will to erect things, language, to look as though we have arrested the flow but it is a …
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Ukraine – Summing Up – And the Role of the American Press
An excellent story from N + 1, showing some of the roots and political forces of the Ukraine conflict. Given the history of the Ukraine as it is told here, it is clear why simple violence can cut through the web of historical entanglement that refuses to get clear for a life in the present. …
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The Front Page 2.0 – By Michael Kinsley
Just when you thought it was over. From : VANITY FAIR MAGAZINE - MAY 2014 In most hand-wringing debates about the future of newspapers, high-quality journalism is seen as doomed by the Internet. The author—V.F.’s newest columnist—begs to disagree. By Michael Kinsley BY CARL MYDANS/TIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES.THE WAY IT WAS Multiple editions, breaking …
Ivan Illich & Jerry Brown – Natural Affinities?
THE ART OF SUFFERING by Jerry Brown When in 1976, I first met Ivan Illich at the Green Gulch Farm, he told me that his current focus was the study of economics. Then, I didn't understand that by the word economics, Illich meant a way of life where things are experienced only under assumptions of …
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Philip Seymour Hoffman
A very serious loss to our culture. Two articles on Hoffman - Open Letters Monthly and The New Yorker. In one of those wonderful old theater stories Laurence Olivier is said to have asked another Hoffman, Dustin, as the younger man voluntarily underwent physical abuse in order to convincingly play a tortured prisoner, “my …
Morris Graves – Northwest Art
A Masterful Story Of American Power – Errol Morris
McGinn’s Departure Is a Loss To the City of Seattle
http://take21.seattlechannel.org/2013/12/20/the-final-interview-mayor-mike-mcginn/ Please view the above link to the video. The interview was conducted by the Seattle Channel which is a service of the City of Seattle. McGinn accomplished much in his time in office. The city is better off because of him. He represents the best of progressive leadership in America. McGinn says this so …
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Camille Paglia – Making A Case For Real Gender Differences
American culture and specifically Hollywood TV, is in the process of neutering the males of our society. Masculinity is boxed up and cauterised to fit into the restraints of a fantasy feminine world that is controlled through PC management. Camille Paglia is a woman who sees this clearly. Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of …
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“The Quiet American” – David Remnick
The Quiet American - Gaby Wood - The Observer, Saturday 9 September 2006 It's a magazine that runs 10,000-word articles on African states and the pension system, has almost no pictures and is published in black and white. So how does the New Yorker sell more than a million copies a week? Gaby Wood meets David Remnick, its …
Marilynne Robinson – Community vs Tribalism
I have reposted two items: 1) a fragment from an interview of Robinson where she describes the process of how American colleges evolved in the Midwest. 2) the complete essay Imagination & Community from her book of Essays When I Was a Child I Read Books. The imaginative makeup of a writer is established by …
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This Is How The World Works
Anthropocene – “this civilization is already dead”.
Photo Credit:Jeff DelViscio A startling soldier's story of war and our future. Compact in its unfolding, but strong in its philosophical architecture. Listen up. Driving into Iraq just after the 2003 invasion felt like driving into the future. We convoyed all day, all night, past Army checkpoints and burned-out tanks, till in the blue dawn …
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Howard Zinn – Be Hopeful
"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys …
A Path To An Ocean Passage
Yellowstone to Yukon – Species Bridge
America Reborn – Martin Walker
An excellent essay on America considering the last 100 years. It is an overview that focuses on highlights and results. It establishes quickly the author's deep experience in the complexity of the society and its inherent conflicts and natures. While the conclusions feel right, the devil is always in the details. Our details are often …
Special Human Powers – The Lotus Sutra – Fragments
This is a talk about special powers that people have without knowing it nor using them. This discussion is a transcript of a talk given by Shunryu Suzuki and the transcript lacks fluidity but reflects the actual presentation style of Suzuki. The sutra story shows that through paying attention to what is in front of …
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Salish Archipelago
Zen Master – Gary Snyder and the Art of Life.
West Pacific Review 