Jon Stewart on Fox News. Incredible.

http://airamerica.com/entertainment/10-30-2009/watch-jon-stewart-eviscerates-fox-news/

 

Health Care Reform

You can read it, here!

I didn’t know what was in it! Then I read it. Here’s the link. Scroll down a bit to reach the .pdf. It’s only 42 pages to understand it! I printed it out and read it over lunch. It was actually kind of exciting.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/11/05/health.care/

 

Swallowed by the semester

There are three books I want to read — badly enough that it’s making me worry about the fact that I don’t have any time to read them! But this is not a bad thing, in some ways. It just clarifies my reading list for the Winter Holidays.

Here they are. Perhaps talking about them will ease my distress over not reading them:

Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer

Manhood for Amateurs, by Michael Chabon

The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk

The first two titles have particular resonance for me, personally. And the last: Well, I heard an interview with Pamuk saying that he was actually building the museum from his novel, this year, in Istanbul. If that’s not amazing, I don’t know what is.

I am reading a little bit right now: The Night Counter, by Alia Yunis.

This is a great novel!

More soon…

 

 

 

And now, I find myself worried for our President

The uptick in vitriol from his opponents has me deeply worried… How can we get distracted from the health care debate at a time like this? Please — do what you can to bring calm to this debate…

 

1:00 AM on the first Thursday night of the semester finds me…

Grading papers!
Ha!

 

The Summer Through a Super Angulon Lens

Day

 

End of semester

Hello.

Semester 4 has ended. 2 years at Lewis and Clark. Amazing.

There’s a moment in my life that has stayed with me. It was in 1999, in August. I was living in Palo Alto with my friend Daniel. I had thought I would come down there and work for him at his web startup, but I arrived just as the bubble burst. The money dried up and so I just paid rent with cash I borrowed from my parents and worked on my second (failed) novel.

Anyhow. Sometimes I took BART into the city and hung out in downtown San Francisco. It was (and is) a pretty city — and so I’d write in some cafe or hotel on my laptop and then wander back out to the suburbs. On one such night, I walked all the way back to the house from the train station (rather than call and have Dan come pick me up).

It was a warm summer night, and just walking and being alone and unencumbered — it gave me a resolute sense of joy, a shiver, that I’ve felt rarely in my life.

In the geography of mental status, I’m certainly closer to the side where depression lies — those formidable dark lands that can be such a struggle for many. But I have had a few moments of happiness, of happiness so pure you can feel it in your body. That night, walking from the train, I experienced one. For no reason, other than I was walking. And I was young. And it was a pretty evening in the Bay Area.

Now, sitting in my classroom, my 94-seat auditorium where I held a lecture class on the Rock N’ Roll Novel this term, I experienced the same feeling. It was the end of classes. My last exam. And the seats were silent. Quiet. I was alone with the classroom, and my memories of the class, and the formidable performance that is teaching. And I was filled with that same happy visceral shiver.

 

The work of students.

Sorry about the lapse in posting; although if you read the dates on the posts from the past two years, you’ll see that I am prone to these silences. I think it’s just part of not being entirely comfortable in the self-disclosure of the web. Anyhow.

But, I wanted to post a paragraph by one of my students, Adam Rager. This week he turned a 51-page story in to workshop. It was really wonderful in so many ways. This is the last paragraph of his story:

“…So this is the end.
Our dreams are paper cities. Our metaphors are paper cities. Our fictions are paper cities. Our truths are paper cities. God is a paper city. I am a paper city. Sadness, loss, and death are paper cities. Happiness, love, and life are paper cities. We are paper cities.”

 

A Quote From Socrates

“Rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul — on which they mightily fasten.”

I thought that was a beautiful quote.

 

Please Watch: Proposition 8 Video

“Fidelity”: Don’t Divorce… from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.