She started out all excited and impressed... (She took an immediate dislike to Bill, who struck her as a narcissistic snake.)
Because she was very upset and I was trying to do the gentlemanly thing.
They don't understand that in the West, there are many groups that have not yet made their peace with the rest of America.... People came to the West to be left alone, as the Mormons did. The West continues to be an experimental American culture.
A hundred and fifty years ago, this was just a continent. You could move to the borders and start a whole new country.
[Most writers' view of the New West is] either phony - obsessed with the same tired mythology - or it's obsessed with anti-mythology,.. There's not a lot of realistic, observant writing about the West right now.
What should be, is.' As my grandmother explained it to our family the winter she lost three fingertips to frostbite when the furnace in her little house broke and she fell and cracked a hip while trying to light it, 'Accepting life's imperfections is not the secret. The secret, dears, is to understand life has none. How could it? We've got nothing to compare it to. We can dream something up, of course- some pretty maybe life where fingers are very hard and indestructible- but that's pure mischief, darlings. Fingers freeze. It's one of the things they like to do sometimes.
I wasn't above having thoughts of God's wrath.
Literally, while I was writing, the town eccentrics were looking over my shoulder, asking about what I was writing, listening to my explanations, offering their two cents. It had gotten around town pretty quickly that what Walter was doing inside his house could be viewed easily on a computer. I thought, 'This is more interactivity than I can stand!' But it was interesting too.
I've been told my old city possesses a 'thriving arts scene,' whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks.
art artists
The mist just keeps on lifting and soon I'll be able to see all the way, as far as the earth's curvature allows. It's a blessing, that curvature, that hidden hemisphere-if we could take it all in at one, why move?
inspiration
When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, 'Gnome Chomsky,' Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what?
2011-tuscon-shooting blame-game emanuel-bronner jared-lee-loughner noam-chomsky politics presumption spiderman taylor-swift twitter
Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?
2011-tuscon-shooting enemies friends partisanship politics twitter
@bobbybaird i'm a writer, so are you. We try to compose our thoughts and words for effect as well as sense. Vain of us? A bit.
robert-l-baird twitter vanity writing
Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault
2011-tuscon-shooting blame-game jacques-derrida jared-lee-loughner language michel-foucault twitter
Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented the sword.
literature