There's An Enduring American Compulsion To Be

Seattle Is Not An Overly Friendly City. It Is A Civil City, But Not Altogether Friendly. People From Outside Mistake The Civility For Friendliness. Seattle Is Full Of People Who Have Their Own Lives To Live. They Won't Waste Their Time Being Friendly. But They Are Civil.

It's Been So Long Since A Talented Writer Last Occupied The White House; No Wonder, Then, That American Writers Have Been Among The Most Prominent Of All The Demographic Groups Claiming A Piece Of Barack Obama For Themselves.

Interstate Highways Dull The Reality Of Place And Distance Almost As Effectively As Jetliners Do: I Loathe Their Scary Monotony.

Sociology And Anthropology Are Not Disciplines Which Take Easily To Situations Where People Are Able To Live Out Their Fantasies, Not Just In The Symbolic Action Of Ritual, But In The Concrete Theater Of Society At Large.

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.