“When I see three oranges, I juggle,” the then 24-year-old highwire daredevil Philippe Petit is supposed to have said in 1974 after his 110-story-high prance between the two unfinished towers of the World Trade Center. “When I see two towers, I walk.”
When Glenn Beck sees his foot, he inserts it in his mouth, and then [...]
I’ll be at Northwest Dance Project’s studio in North Portland this afternoon for an onstage chat with Luca Veggetti, the Paris-based Italian choreographer who’s in town to update his dance Ensemble for Somnambulists, which he created on the company dancers in 2006.
This should be interesting. I sat in on a rehearsal a few days ago [...]
My paternal grandmother’s name was Lizzie Lou Willingham. Not Elizabeth Louise. Lizzie Lou.
Lizzie Lou married Virgil Homer Hicks, a man whose naming signaled a certain familial aspiration. One of their offspring, my father, is named Irby Hicks. No middle name, and a first name that was a family surname. (Another of their children, my father’s [...]
Mr. Scatter understands an American football match of some importance is to take place this very afternoon. Squadrons from the midsized cities of Indianapolis, Indiana, and New Orleans, Louisiana will battle it out on a field called a gridiron to claim rights of municipal supremacy for the coming year.
All very manly. But Mr. Scatter would [...]
Today in Scatterville we’re taken with Dwight Garner’s review in the New York Times of Tony Hoagland’s new book of poetry, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty.
For one thing, that’s just a terrific title, even better than the review’s zinger of a headline (based on a quoted poem set in a grocery store), The [...]
This morning’s most fascinating read in Scatterville was Michiko Kakutani’s review in the New York Times of You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, the new book by Silicon Valley insider Jaron Lanier.
Lanier, one of the people who brought you virtual reality, has been worrying the past few years about something he calls “digital Maoism,” [...]
Mr. Scatter has never been much of a list-keeper, and although he reads a lot of books and other products of the printing press he finds it easy to lose track of them. Their ideas and images become part of some vast quasi-literary soup of the subconscious, like the broken-down bits of verbiage in Jasper [...]
Good news for travelers to that sprawling town on Puget Sound. Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company isn’t going out of business, after all: It’s relocating in the spring from Pioneer Square to Capitol Hill. Melissa Allison has the story in the Seattle Times.
At 20,000 square feet, the new building (at 1521 10th Avenue above downtown) [...]
A quarter-century after a literary landmark in Oregon, and the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Let’s see. Urban/rural split, with a vengeance. A recession in the city, which means a depression in the small towns and countryside. Newcomers wide-eyed with enthusiasm over their new home; old-timers narrow-eyed with suspicion and mistrust. Jobs [...]
Sartre’s “No Exit” on the tilt, at Imago Theatre. Photo: Jerry Mouawad
Who wrote that play?
I don’t mean, did the modestly talented actor Will Shakespeare really write all those great stageworks, or was he just a convenient front man for Edward de Vere or some other dandy of the ruling class?
I mean, is the production you [...]