30 September 2005
29 September 2005
27 September 2005
Digital notepad
I'm writing something that has a character exiting this door, and the light was right to jot a picture down for future reference.
25 September 2005
24 September 2005
23 September 2005
22 September 2005
19 September 2005
Lengthening The Long Emergency
Writer James Howard Kunstler is no longer an optimist, and there is a reason I never finished reading his book: "Take a good look at America around you now, because when we emerge from the winter of 2005 - 2006, we're going to be another country... All kinds of assumptions about the okay-ness of our recent collective behavior are headed out the window. This naturally beats a straight path to politics, since that is the theater in which our collective choices are dramatized... It really won't take another jolting event like a major hurricane or a terror incident or an H4N5 flu outbreak to take things over the edge -- though it is very likely that something else will happen. George W. Bush, and the party he represents, are headed into full Hooverization mode. After Katrina, nobody will take claims of governmental competence seriously. The new assumption will be that when shit happens you are on your own. In this remarkable three weeks since New Orleans was shredded, no Democrat has stepped into the vacuum of leadership, either, with a different vision of what we might do now, and who we might become. This is the kind of medium that political maniacs spawn in. Something is out there right now, feeding on the astonishment and grievance of a whipsawed middle class, and it will have a lot more nourishment in the months ahead." [More besorrowment at the link.]
18 September 2005
13 September 2005
12 September 2005
11 September 2005
09 September 2005
07 September 2005
04 September 2005
Richard Ford on New Orleans
"In America, even with our incommensurable memories of 9/11, we still do not have an exact human vocabulary for the loss of a city - our great, iconic city, so graceful, livable, insular, self-delighted, eccentric, the one Tennessee Williams believed care forgot and that sometimes - it might seem - forgot to care. Other peoples have experienced their cities' losses. Some bombed away (by us). Others gone in the flood. Here now is one more tragedy we thought, by some divinity's grace that didn't arrive, we'd missed. But not. Our inept attempts at words only run to lists, costs, to assessing blame. It's like Hiroshima a public official said. But, no. It's not like anything. It's what it is. That's the hard part. He, with all of us, lacked the words. For those away from New Orleans - most all of us - in this week of tears and wrenching, words fail. Somehow our heart's reach comes short and we've been left with an aching, pointless inwardness. 'All memory resolves itself in gaze,' poet Richard Hugo wrote once about another town that died. Empathy is what we long for - not sadness for a house we own, or owned once, now swept away. Not even for the felt miracle of two wide-eyed children whirled upward into a helicopter as if into clouds. We want more than that, even at this painful long distance: we want to project our feeling parts straight into the life of a woman standing waist-deep in a glistening toxic current with a whole city's possessions all floating about, her own belongings in a white plastic bag, and who has no particular reason for hope, and so is just staring up. We would all give her hope. Comfort. A part of ourselves. Perform an act of renewal. It's hard to make sense of this, we say. But it makes sense. Making sense just doesn't help." [A full-length piece is at the link.]
03 September 2005
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