'rage' Is The Word That Most Often

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.

When Traveling, I Usually Keep A Notebook: When Home At My Desk, The Notebook Serves Mainly To Remind Me How Little I Saw At The Time, Or Rather How I Was Noticing The Wrong Things. But The Notes Do Spur Memories, And It's The Memories I Trust. The Wine Stain On The Page May Tell Me More Than The Words There, Which Usually Strike Me As Hopelessly Inadequate.

Spells Of Acute Loneliness Are An Essential Part Of Travel. Loneliness Makes Things Happen.

'dreams From My Father' Reveals More About Obama Than Is Usually Known About Political Leaders Until After They're Dead. Perhaps More Than It Intends, It Shows His Mind Working, In Real Time, Sentence By Sentence, In What Feels Like A Private Audience With The Reader.

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.