N + 1 has published an essay in their November, 2012 issue titled, "The Intellectual Situation". It is a frolic through the current "serious" national commercial literary front, with assorted, some frontal others just a hip bump, attacks on The Atlantic, Harpers, The New Yorker and finally the Paris Review. The subtext is how each …
Albin Brunovsky – Adam & Eve
Many of Brunovsky's illustrations are explorations of Adam and Eve characters; they are depicted in the midst of the natural world of plants and trees and are captured in ways that promote a very strong affinity to their surroundings - the same makeup, the same DNA perhaps. The humans look like they belong in their …
Pacific Return
December Apples
Impressions of “Dispatches” by Michael Herr
Leading Image: The Desire and the Satisfaction, 1893 (pastel on card), by Jan Theodore Toorop (1858–1928) Impressions of "Dispatches" by Michael Herr I am a long way into Dispatches and I remember the experience like I do my own dreams. Herr's book is poetic in force: showing the inside of Herr's brain more than most authors …
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The Dead and the Living
The dead surround the living. The living are the core of the dead. In this core are the dimensions of time and space. What surrounds the core is timelessness. from Hold Everything Dear - John Berger
John Muir’s Description of The Pacific Northwest in 1901
"The vast Pacific Coast reserves in Washington and Oregon--the Cascade, Washington, Mount Rainier, Olympic, Bull Run, and Ashland, named in order of size--include more than 12,500,000 acres of magnificent forests of beautiful and gigantic trees. They extend over the wild, unexplored Olympic Mountains and both flanks of the Cascade Range, the wet and the dry. …
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Janus, in Ovid’s Poem “Fasti”
From Ovid's Poem "Fasti" (8 AD) "See how Janus appears first in my song To announce a happy year for you, Germanicus. Two-headed Janus, source of the silently gliding year, The only god who is able to see behind him, Be favourable to the leaders, whose labours win Peace for the fertile earth, peace for the …
Bolivia Enshrines Natural World’s Rights With Equal Status for Mother Earth
photo: Esto es Bolivia Bolivia enshrines natural world's rights with equal status for Mother Earth Law of Mother Earth expected to prompt radical new conservation and social measures in South American nation John Vidal in La Paz ,The Guardian, Sunday 10 April 2011 13.17 EDT Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all …
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Winter Colors – Greenbank
Native Grove of Rhododendrons
Along the hiking trail at Greenbank Farms woods in central Whidbey Island.
The First Time On The Pacific
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 …
Nikky Finney – Poet
2011 National Book Award in Poetry - Head Off & Split Background http://nikkyfinney.net/index.html
Henry Gilpin (1922-2011) – Northern California Landscapes
photo - Henry Gilpin - "Highway 1, 1965" Background http://www.johnsexton.com/Henry_Gilpin_remembered.html http://redwoodgallery.co.uk/photos.cfm http://www.freestylephoto.biz/board/gilpin/gilpin_bio.htm http://www.russlevin.com/gilpinthms.html
Jack Gilbert – A wonderful American Poet – Visions of California, Greece and Linda.
A Winter’s Day
John Cage – American Inventor
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 …
Straight of Juan de Fuca
Literary Estimations – Gore Vidal on Italo Calvino
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 …
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Back To The Emerald City
Pacific Northwest Connections Are Critical to Orcas
Baby Island – Inhabitants: Seals Only
Wind & Rain
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) – America Breaking Away To Find Its Voice.
top photo - public domain. bottom photo: Lisa Larsen/TimeLife Pictures/Getty Images
Looking West – The Olympics
Seattle 100
Louise Erdrich
Louise is a very powerful woman, speaker and individual. In twenty minutes she is able to frame a profile of the Native American expereince.
Marisa dos Reis Nunes
la mer
The Sea, The Sea
The Sea, The Sea Routine till its not. Sun and wind and blue moving at their own pace yet quickening to work together to follow their natures with pushes and pulls and the wind works the sea and the sea works the sky and the sky works the wind.And we,observers.Yet if we are in the way, in …
Blur Magazine – Excellent Photography
Lives All At Once – Whidbey Island
The San Francisco Renaissance – Rexroth
Czeslaw Milosz – Biography – The Wilno Poet Under California Skies
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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To Robinson Jeffers – Czeslaw Milosz
To Robinson Jeffers If you have not read the Slavic poets so much the better. There’s nothing there for a Scotch-Irish wanderer to seek. They lived in a childhood prolonged from age to age. For them, the sun was a farmer’s ruddy face, the moon peeped through a cloud and the Milky Way …
Mt Baker – Facing the Island from the Northwest
Hunter Thompson – Writing & Transparency
This is Hunter Thompson reporting on many things from Key West, Fl as he pens an article for the Rolling Stone in 1976. Reading Thompson reminds me of his colorful journalism that borders on genius. He took Tom Wolfe's devices and made them his own - he is certainly unique and how he manages to …
Seattle Spaces
The Third Mind – Asian Influence of the American Perception
Poem – Now It Is
Now It Is motions today are real, and yet they house potentialities that are full. They are not present and yet the scent of them is. it is the mystery of their unfolding that draws me in.
Gary Snyder – Thoreau Prize
Paul Valery – La Dormeuse
Paul Valery La Dormeuse or The Sleeper appeared in Paul Valéry's 1922 Charmes ou poèmes What heart's hot secrets is my young friend keeping in soul that through the mask of flowers must breathe? What vain food will natural warmth conceive to make the radiance of woman sleeping? The breath of dreams …
Zen & The Heart Sutra
The Heart Sutra Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, meditating deeply on Perfection of Wisdom, saw clearly that the five aspects of human existence are empty*, and so released himself from suffering. Answering the monk Sariputra, he said this: Body is nothing more than emptiness, emptiness is nothing more than body. The body is exactly empty, …
Think of Nothing – Alan Watts
An Opportunity To Serve
Hanging Out On The Saratoga Passage
Its sort of boring here, good boring. Earthquakes north at Queen Charlotte Islands and the hurricane back east. Its raining and fifty here. So much to do. Its Sunday and we have a full house, isn't it wonderful?
The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent
The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent Gianni Dagli Orti/Art Resource A painting of 17th-century Venice, with a view of the banks of the Grand Canal and the Doge’s Palace, by Leandro Bassano. <nyt_byline> By CHRYSTIA FREELAND Published: October 13, 2012 IN the early 14th century, Venice was one of the richest cities in Europe. At the …
THE VEXING SIMPLICITY OF NEIL YOUNG – Alec Wilkinson
OCTOBER 17, 2012 THE VEXING SIMPLICITY OF NEIL YOUNG POSTED BY ALEC WILKINSON I was a little surprised when Neil Young published his memoir, “Waging Heavy Peace,” because he is the only artist I have ever encountered who is proud of not reading. Reading would distract him from writing songs, he once told me, meaning interfere …
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Ai Weiwei – Never Sorry
Seattle and Its Mayor, Mike McGinn – Were We Ever a Civilized Part of the World?
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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West Pacific Review 