Another Rainy Day

Another rainy day in the forecast. Squirming like a catawba worm. Looking up words in the dictionary. Impatience. Agitation. Disquietude. Boredom. Tedium. Monotony. Doldrums. Lassitude. Lethargy. Ennui. Fatigue. Yawning. Weltschmerz. Frustration. Petulance. Peevishness. Turbulence. Unrest. Irritability. Annoyance. Discontent. Vexation. Resentment. Insomnia. Jitters. Cabin Fever.

Why did Jonathan Franzen Criticize Edith Wharton?

I'm somewhat baffled that Mr. Franzen chose to "go after" Edith Wharton in a recent New Yorker article. Any thoughts on that? Anyone?

Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen

"What Franzen is getting at is the concept of being "islanded," the notion that — no matter what — we are on our own, all the time. This is among his fascinations; there's a reason his first essay collection was called "How to Be Alone." In that sense, all of it — from the kid in that car to the teenager wandering New York to the birder on Robinson Crusoe's island — is of a piece with David Foster Wallace and even Neil Armstrong: isolated dots of consciousness in a capricious universe, trying to find a point of real connection before time runs out. "The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking," Franzen acknowledges, but in the end, it is the counter-argument that lingers, even (or especially) when it leaves us exposed." - David L. Ulin (from a recent LA Times book review)

Vancouver B.C.

Behold the great northwest! The photograph says it all.

Helicopter Parents and Today's Youth

"My own view remains predictably twisty, fraught, and disloyal. Parents, in my opinion, have to be finessed, thought around, even as we love them: They are so colossally wrong about so many important things. And even when they are not, paradoxically, even when they are 100 percent right, the imperative remains the same: To live an "adult" life, a meaningful life, it is necessary, I would argue, to engage in a kind of symbolic self-orphaning. The process will be different for every person. I have my own inspirational cast of characters in this regard, a set of willful, heroic self-orphaners, past and present, whom I continue to revere: Mozart, the musical child prodigy who successfully rebelled against his insanely grasping and narcissistic father (Leopold Moz art), who for years shopped him around the courts of Europe as a sort of family cash cow; Sigmund Freud, who, by way of unflinching self-analysis, discovered that it was possible to love and hate something or someone at one and the same time (mothers and fathers included) and that such painfully "mixed emotion" was also inescapably human; Virginia Woolf, who in spite of childhood loss, mental illness, and an acute sense of the sex-prejudice she saw everywhere around her, not only forged a life as a great modernist writer, but made her life an incorrigibly honest and vulnerable one.

In a journal entry from 1928 collected in A Writer's Diary, Woolf wrote the following (long after his death) about her brilliant, troubled, well-meaning, tyrannical, depressive, enormously distinguished father—Sir Leslie Stephen, model for Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse and one of the great English "men of letters" of the 19th century:

Father's birthday. He would have been 96, 96, yes, today; and could have been 96, like other people one had known: but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books—inconceivable...

The sentimental pathology of the American middle-class family—not to mention the mind-warping digitalization of everyday life—usually militates against such ruthless candor. But what the Life of the Orphan teaches—has taught me at least—is that it is indeed the self-conscious abrogation of one's inheritance, the "making strange" of received ideas, the cultivation of a willingness to defy, debunk, or just plain old disappoint one's parents, that is the absolute precondition, now more than ever, for intellectual and emotional freedom."
- Terry Castle, from Don't Pick Up: Why Kids Need to Separate from their Parents (in the most recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education)

Seattle

Seattle is one of those cities that really tugs at one's imagination - there in the Pacific Northwest at the edge of the continent, beckoning for strangers and new arrivals like my Irish grandfather, who settled there as a dispatcher for the fire department. Memories of lush greenery, dense foliage, intense trees, leaves, ferns, hilly streets, urban fish markets, marvelous skyscrapers, harbor views,  ferry boats, and yes, rain. Don't get me started on Vancouver, B.C. I love that place too...

Oh Botheration...

"Oh botheration...don't you be moral." - Sydney Carton to Mr. Stryver