1960’s: Yvon Chouinard, a competitive rock climber, takes up blacksmithing to improve the quality of steel pitons and climbing gear. He quickly establishes a reputation for worth and reliability, and begins selling climbing gear to other climbers out of the back of his car. 1970: Chouinard Equipment is the leading supplier ofContinue reading “Patagonia’s environmental activism: a timeline”
Category Archives: Books
Orwell and the earth
When [the critic] Woodcock compared Orwell to Antaeus, who draws his strength from the earth, he might have also meant that he drew his intellectual strength from the specific and the tangible and from firsthand experience. It set him at odds with an era in which ideologies led many astray, not least as doctrines defendingContinue reading “Orwell and the earth”
Beatrice Wood stars again
Beatrice, the artist and icon, still lives on in the hearts and minds of Ojai residents, despite passing away 25 years ago.
Soul-making is a crafting, said James Hillman
Soul-making is like any other imaginative activity. It requires crafting, just as does politics, agriculture, the arts, love relations, war, or the winning of any natural resource. What is given won’t get us through; something must be made of it. From The Dream and the Underworld, by James Hillman, a deeply informed exploration of theContinue reading “Soul-making is a crafting, said James Hillman”
“Radical Distraction” by Saul Bellow
From Saul Bellow, in an essay from 1975, published in Critical Inquiry: “We are in a state of radical distraction,” he writes in “A World Too Much with Us,” an essay for the journal Critical Inquiry, in 1975, the same year Humboldt’s Gift appears. “I don’t see how we can be blind to the politicalContinue reading ““Radical Distraction” by Saul Bellow”
Visiting Larry McMurtry at Booked Up
A few years ago, back in the days when the LATimes had a stand-alone Sunday magazine, Scott Kraft wrote a tremendous story about visiting Larry McMurtry, the writer, author of "The Last Picture Show," "Lonesome Dove," and "Terms of Endearment," among many other great stories, at his bookstore in tiny Archer City Texas. It's called The Loner.
A couple of noteworthy lines:
McMurtry lives in a majestic three-story home a few doors down from the single-story house where he grew up and not far from the high school where he graduated in 1954 among a senior class of 19. He moved back to Archer City, population 1,848, just five years ago.
He keeps mostly to himself, and locals know better than to try to engage him in chitchat. "He's a very conservative-type feller," says Max Wood, the town's 68-year-old mayor. Wood has known McMurtry since high school but doesn't consider himself a close friend. "Larry was always the type of person who was more of a loner."
Here's a picture of McMurtry, from a photo posted in one of his bookstores in Booked Up:
Well, to put it simply, to learn that one of this nation's greatest writers has a bookstore — a monster bookstore — in a famous (from "The Last Picture Show") little town in Texas, and what's more hangs out at his store, and can be talked to — well, I had to visit. So yesterday, after attending a reporting workshop that gave me the chance to visit Dallas, two hours away, I did.
More below…
Understanding Tennessee: how he projected his “wound”
Writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Greg Barrios (who has written two plays about Tennessee Williams and Williams' two great loves, Frank Merlo and Pancho Rodriguez) interviews John Lahr, who just published last year an award-winning biography of Tennessee Williams called Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. It's absolutely fascinating, "literary detection" as The Guardian says. What I likeContinue reading “Understanding Tennessee: how he projected his “wound””
Wild: What if I was never redeemed?
If Wild, the book, the movie, the world-wide phenomena, had no other virtue, the story would deserve praise for the sheer volume of reaction and thought that it has inspired.
On (almost) the same page: Virginia Woolf and Carl Jung
Great minds think alike, the nine zillionth example:
Virginia Woolf, from To the Lighthouse:
"She felt…how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach."
The freedom in walking lies in being no one: Philosopher
A delightfully light (but thoughtful) interview focuses on a new book — A Philosophy of Walking — written by a French professor who takes the subject so seriously he's nervous about answering questions from a reporter. From The Guardian: It is a sunny spring Sunday and – joy! – I am off to Paris toContinue reading “The freedom in walking lies in being no one: Philosopher”
Kit Stolz 