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 …
“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 …
Zen Master – Gary Snyder and the Art of Life.
The Underside of Silicon Valley – Rebecca Solnit
Solnit is a San Francisco native and has written about the town from many perspectives including art, photography and geography. This article appears in "Tom Dispatch" and is part of a dark take on the current explosion of revelations on government spying and recently the FBI's admission that it is using drones domestically. From both …
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A Brit Blows America’s Horn – “America The Marvelous”
LETTER FROM LONDON July 2013 America the Marvelous At any liberal-establishment dinner table in London, say, or Paris, the U.S. will figure as a big, fat, dumb child. Enough, says the author, in an adaptation from his new book: America is Europe’s finest invention—and ultimate aspiration. By A. A. GillIllustration by Barry Blitt KING OF THE WORLD The …
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Thinking Out Loud
Only citizens through their responsive government can monitor and guide the behaviour of corporations and their interaction with people and the natural, fragile earth. We need more people who are intelligent, informed, and unbiased and who articulate the truths that media won't.-rlw
…nature’s laws … are the only measures that count…
Capitalism, for all its merits and failings as a 500-year practice, may be better than the alternatives, but may not be able to meet the stringent conditions imposed by nature's laws. These, ultimately, are the only measures that count.From "The Common Sense Canadian" Ray Grigg on anthropologist Ronald Wright. http://thecanadian.org/item/2056-anthropologys-capitalism http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_myth_of_human_progress_20130113/
Bill Moyers Interviews Oregon’s Barry Lopez
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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Theodore Roethke In Seattle
_____________________________________________ From The Univesity of Washington Archives ____________________________________________________ From - The Stranger - Seattle Weekly Publication TUESDAY, MAY 15, 2012 BOOKS Heather McHugh Is Giving the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Reading at UW on Thursday posted by CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE on TUE, MAY 15, 2012 at 4:18 PM DAVID BELISLE Heather McHugh, the certified genius—by The Stranger and then, a few months later, …
Kenneth Rexroth on Morris Graves – 1955
It is rare that a towering intellect will let an artist have the last words on the judgement of his own work and worth. But Rexroth has done just that here in this 1955 piece. This essay is a wide-ranging contemplation of Graves when he was in his prime. Rexroth was in his prime as …
Czeslaw Milosz – A Treatise On Poetry
From the Preface - A Treatise On Poetry, 2001, HarperCollins, NY, translated by Robert Haas: First, plain speech in the mother tongue. Hearing it you should be able to see, as if in a flash of summer lightning, Apple trees, a river, a bend of a road. And it should contain more than images. Singsong …
San Francisco Poet – FERLINGHETTI: A REBIRTH OF WONDER – Theatrical Trailer
George Steiner – Paris Review
It is a very peculiar climate, summed up by that man of undoubted genius, Monsieur Derrida, when he says that every text is a “pretext.” This is one of the most formidably erroneous, destructive, brilliantly trivial wordplays ever launched. Meaning what? That whatever the stature of the poem, it waits for the deconstructive commentator; it …
Haida Animal People – Pacific
"The Haida believed both animals and people had souls, which were essentially the same. The bodies of different animals were merely their "canoes" and all were capable of assuming other forms at will; "or better, they possessed a human form, and assumed their other forms when consorting with men." The killer whales were believed to …
The Quiet American – Graham Greene
photo credit: Clay Enos Graham Greene has a very European take on life that is artfully described in this book. The setting is Vietnam, Saigon, in the mid-fifties and while there is an ongoing stream of events that take place in his time there as a journalist, it is his relationship with his Vietnamese woman, …
Gary Synder – A Curse
Volcano Woman - Wayne Young - Northwest Coast (Nisga’a / Haida) acrylic on paper 30" x 23" 2005 ----------------------------------------- He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village The Dimensions of a Haida Myth Gary Synder The Curse From the Foreward: "A curse on monocultural industrial civilization and its almost deified economic and political systems that compete, exploit, an …
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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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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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 …
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 …
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) – America Breaking Away To Find Its Voice.
The San Francisco Renaissance – Kenneth Rexroth
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 …
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 …
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
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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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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Carmel Point – Robinson Jeffers Tor House
Lead Illustration: Tom Killion BY ROBINSON JEFFERS The extraordinary patience of things! This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses— How beautiful when we first beheld it, Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs; No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing, Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on …
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One-Straw Reveloution – M. Fukuoka – Zen
A Village Without War and Peace A snake seizes a frog in its mouth and slips away into the grass. A girl screams. A brave lad bares his feelings of loathing and flings a rock at the snake. The others laugh. I turn to the boy who threw the stone: “What do you think that’s …
Scientists Adopt Tiny Washington Island as a Warming Bellwether
Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times Cathy Pfister is part of a team of scientists conducting research on Tatoosh Island, Wash. By STACEY SOLIE Published: October 6, 2012 fi Scientists Adopt Tiny Island as a Warming Bellwether By STACEY SOLIE TATOOSH ISLAND, Wash. — From a stretch of rocky shoreline on this tiny island, one …
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THEREFORE, YE SOFT PIPES, PLAY ON – ECHOVAR
PHOTO BY AP PHOTO/PAUL SAKUMA
Poem – Living Beings – Near a Western Red Cedar
we are the same as those who came before. yet our distance from our kind is great. do we not see that we the living, all of the living, are a clan? each with natures unique but living and this simple fact: our being. existence is a bond so great in this vast universe of …
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James Hillman – Dream’s Language
Dreams follow their own logic. And the use of logic is a poor choice of words. Is there a beginning, middle and end? Or does our waking mind force the linear script onto the contents? Dreams often do not recognize time and therefore a linear story line is not the point. What is the point? …
Lincoln – Poetics, Character, Precipice of War and Human Design.
Lincoln - Poetics, Character, Precipice of War and Human Design. Upon reading Edmund Wilson's profile of Lincoln in "Patriotic Gore - Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War," I am taken by the literary and poetic drama of the account. Lincoln is shown to be chiefly literary in character — it is what …
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Zen & Thomas Merton
I have been reading Thomas Merton in the last few weeks in his book, "Zen and the Birds of Appetite". It was written in the late 60s and his point of reference in learning is D.T. Suzuki, who was then the most popular translator of Zen to the western world. When I started the book …
West Pacific Review 