Reads.

Wendell Berry's A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural
Henry Giroux's Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability
and David Foster Wallace's uncompleted The Pale King



What are you reading?

All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

May I be honest and admit that all I want to do is go up to the Canadian Rockies? Maybe after a few weeks, I'd be ready to want and chase something else again.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

WENDELL BERRY.

Keep a green tree in your heart.

Who wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothing.

It's the end of August and autumn is in the air, nosing its way into the edges of each day. And I am dreaming of mountains. I want to climb until my knees quake.

I'm not so hung up on mountain ranges that I'd kick a rocky coastline out of bed, though.

Photos by NaturalLight on Flickr.

Please be there when I get home.

5:24: Sara and Sean Watkins' "Be There"

All I want to wear this fall.

Believe that further shore is reachable from here.

History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

The Isthmus reviews American Players Theatre's production of The Cure at Troy: The play is gracefully suspended between ancient Greece and our modern era.

It's ragged-raw and elegant on a spare set and it saws on the bone the way only Greek tragedies can.

i imagine that yes is the only living thing.

Favorite breakfast: granola with strips of dried coconut and banana coins swimming in Sassy Cow milk, one mug of masala chai, one tall glass of pineapple juice, and a piece of fresh fruit. I always eat a big breakfast since I am impatient with lunch. In the middle of the day, there are too many other things on my mind and I rarely find (or make) time for more than a yogurt, hastily scarfed down and not enjoyed. Breakfasts, though, must be unrushed, and it's best enjoyed with This American Life and the Willy Street Co-Op Reader in a chair by the window.

I ran early errands this morning (being out of lovely just-detailed breakfast foods) and found empty streets and crowded church parking lots. The air is crisp and very September, and the sky is aggressively blue the way summer skies aren't.

Going to see Philoctetes at American Players Theatre in Spring Green today.

listen:there's a hell

of a good universe next door;let's go

e e cummings

Most flawless day of the summer.

It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it.

I've often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they're on, why they don't fall off it, how much time they've probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on. I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck on explaining why we don't fall off the planet. Gravity is just a word. It doesn't explain anything. If I could get past gravity, I'd tell them how we reproduce, how long we've been here, apparently, and a little bit about evolution. I didn't learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It's also a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it.

KURT VONNEGUT.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth;

whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can.

Finished Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale, and am now too wound up from the chase to sleep.

I'll confess Chapter 32, Cetology, charmed me the most.

Bliss — were an Oddity — without thee —

hulaseventy

I've got it! I've got it! We'll call it "The Last But One Supper"!

People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone.

Not drives or appetites but simple attention, awareness, if only I could stay awake off speed.

I'm not the smartest person, but even during that whole pathetic, directionless period, I think that deep down I knew that there was more to my life and to myself than just the ordinary psychological impulses for pleasure and vanity that I let drive me. That there were depths to me that were not bullshit or childish but profound, and were not abstract but actually much realer than my clothes or my self image, and that blazed in an almost sacred way — I'm being serious; I'm not just trying to make it sound more dramatic than it was — and that these realest, most profound parts of me involved not drives or appetites but simple attention, awareness, if only I could stay awake off speed.

David Foster Wallace in The Pale King