In An Underdeveloped Country Don't Drink The

One Classic American Landscape Haunts All Of American Literature. It Is A Picture Of Eden, Perceived At The Instant Of History When Corruption Has Just Begun To Set It. The Serpent Has Shown His Scaly Head In The Undergrowth. The Apple Gleams On The Tree. The Old Drama Of The Fall Is Ready To Start All Over Again.

Insofar As I Think About Postmodernism At All, And It Doesn't Exactly Keep Me Awake At Nights, I Think Of It As Something That Happens To One, Not A Style One Affects. We're Postmoderns Because We're Not Modernists. The Modernist Writers—pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams—spoke With A Kind Of Vatic Authority: They Were Really The Last Of The Romantics, For Whom Authorship Itself Was Like Being A Solitary Prophet In The Wasteland.

Trouble Defies The Law Of Gravity. It's Easier To Pick Up Than To Drop.

Seattle Was Built Out On Pilings Over The Sea, And At High Tide The Whole City Seemed To Come Afloat Like A Ship Lifting Free From A Mud Berth And Swaying In Its Chains.

Heartbreak Comes In Different Sizes, And The Departure Of An 18-year-old Child For A Far College Has To Be Treated As A Very Benign Form Of The Disease.