Hank Stuever on Joan Didion: “Nobody parallel parks a Winnebago-size sentence like her.”
BTW: Hank is putting notes from is Popular Culture Journalism Class at the University of Montana on his blog. This is worth adding to your RSS feeds if you have any interest in writing. Great stuff.
Lara and I took advantage of an amazing spring day to walk the National Mall. We started at the MLK monument with no specific agenda, but we managed to see the Jefferson Memorial, a Huichol bead VW at the Museum of the American Indian and the Picasso sketches exhibit at the National Gallery of Art.
Not a bad stroll, all in all. And another reason it’s great to live in D.C.
Wendell Berry was hitting stride while delivering the 41st annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities at Kennedy Center last night. The great agrarian poet was calling out the excesses of corporate America, technology, capitalism and our rampant disregard for nature. Our wanderlust has destroyed our rootedness, our sense of place.
It suddenly dawned on me that his overly simplified assessment of 21st century life really wasn’t all that original. Blue Öyster Cult beat him to it.
History shows again and again
How nature points out the folly of men
Berry was just one umlaut short of tearing those high-tension wires down …