Essays, Articles, Observations & Images – Through the Lens of the Salish Sea
Rachel Cusk, The Art of Fiction No. 246 Interviewed by Sheila Heti ISSUE 232, SPRING 2020 PHOTO COURTESY OF RACHEL CUSK. Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967 to British parents, who moved the family to Los Angeles, then to England, where Cusk lives to this day. She began publishing in her midtwenties—clever and assured …
“an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968” - Joan Didion
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/
A dazzling new critical biography of T.S. Eliot’s modernist epic. A book review of The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, by Matthew Hollis (Faber & Faber) https://www.city-journal.org/the-waste-land-ts-eliot#.Y8a4oOzS6jB.link
Francois Mitterrand - Man of Action, Man of Words - Review of Philip Short’s, A Taste For Intrigue. R. L. Wallace November 8, 2015 Sitting up late one evening at Latche, I hear, all around me, talk of life and death, the origins of the world and the existence of God, the beyond and nothingness. …
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 …
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 …
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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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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I find that Robert Bringhurst brings to the world a unique perspective of humans and their role in nature. He argues the idea that humans are merely part of nature and the idea that we are here to rule nature and to separate it from our lives will not only remove us from reality but …
Continue reading "Robert Bringhurst – Language, Myth and Poetry"
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 …
Continue reading "McGinn’s Departure Is a Loss To the City of Seattle"
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 …
Excellent writing about a master of fiction and American life. Saul Bellow: Letters In the newly published collected correspondence of Saul Bellow... BY LEO ROBSON PUBLISHED 11 NOVEMBER 2010 Letters Saul Bellow, edited by Benjamin Taylor Penguin, 571pp, £30 "Of course I am not a Freudian," Saul Bellow wrote to Philip Roth in 1974. "For one fierce …
Barry Lopez has lived in the foothills of the Oregon Cascade mountains for 40 years. As a younger man he was a landscape photographer. He is unsurpassed as a western naturalist, scientist and philosopher. He is of course a journalist. His grasp of humanity is deep and highly spiritual. He sees the human situation as …
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An interesting character sketch and story. One that brings both people to life in a clear, crisp way. Valerie Eliot B. 1926 | By SAM ANDERSON Valerie and T. S. Eliot in 1957. (Angus McBean, from Houghton Library, Harvard University) SURELY SOMETHING HAS GONE WRONG WITH TIME. How else to explain that T. S. Eliot’s second wife, …
The First Time On The Pacific just eighteen. my nerves were adjusted. not only the speed but the direction. the pattern of rush lifted from stars and space, the place between planets and each other. is it black? what does it hold? the place we can't see, cannot understand. but we feel it. it shoots …
Photograph by Vincent Mentzel 1988/Hollandse Hoogte/Redux. " Cage requires a fundamentally different mode of listening: you need to relinquish expectations that successive sounds will fall into familiar harmonic relationships, or indeed relationships of any kind, and instead treat each moment in isolation. You “regard” the sounds as you would objects in a gallery. More …
Gore Vidal has always been highly intelligent, disciplined and cranky, and as this video shows, has left himself open to being dismantled due to his use of crude attacks on literary colleagues - not only attacks, but outright belittlement. No one can relish the idea of going up against his sharp tongue. However, by doing …
Continue reading "Literary Estimations – Gore Vidal on Italo Calvino"
Czeslaw Milosz - The Wilno Poet Under California Skies November 2012 It is not an anomaly to be transformed by the breadth and scope of the Northern California landscape. To stand on a mountain and look over the rocky shore and the expanse of the blue Pacific is a powerful sensation. While one's awe eventually …
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Seattle and Its Mayor - Were We Ever a Civilized Part of the World? Seattle, like the rest of the nation, has decided that cordiality - respect of opinion and differences - is yesterday's practice. Several months ago a local journalist said this: "I honestly believe that Mayor Mike McGinn is the worst office …
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Half Moon Bay, CA
West Pacific Review 