Another Postcard: Weird Chicago Gothic

Posted on May 18, 2012 by literarylee

From my twenty-second floor hotel room window, I have a great view of some of Chicago’s most interesting downtown buildings.  I call the architectural style here Weird Chicago Gothic.  Tall 100 year-old stone structures wear spires, buttresses, ornate carvings and even a clock tower or two.  The look reminds me of a seminary or a cathedral.  I wonder what god these exuberant buildings were built to praise: American hard work, commerce and success maybe?  New York City still feels a little European to me, a tad restrained and proud of its lineage, but Chicago proclaims with unselfconscious brashness, “Behold my greatness, my wealth!  Know my vast success.”  I enjoy marveling at this place but I could never live here.  (As if the architecture where we live now is humble and not self-consciously grandiose too?)

Why, this eccesiastic-looking architecture on commercial buildings?

The towering, buttressed spire of the Chicago Tribune Building just outside my window

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Habits: Another Postcard from Chicago

Posted on May 16, 2012 by literarylee

Habits and coffee: I need both.  Though the latter refreshes for the moment, the former contributes to a happy life.  How difficult the discipline to form habits, maybe especially living out of a hotel room.  I’m wanting to set up routines to spend time well and, frankly, feel good about being here.  Ripped out of my happy home for two weeks, everything’s different: eating, sleeping, bathing, dressing and even my daily cup of joe.  This morning, my fourth here, I asked myself why I’m still drinking coffee from a paper cup?  Not a good habit.  Tomorrow I’ll buy a real mug, allowing a better coffee drinking habit and doubling as a Chicago souvenir.  My dear, you are certainly not a habit, but a thousand habits involve you.  Being here, you-less, makes building two-week habits a challenge.

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Postcard from Chicago – By The Lake

Posted on May 15, 2012 by literarylee

Since I should write at least one postcard sitting by the Lake, well, here I am doing just that.  Ironic that the Sea of Galilee looks so lake-like but Lake Michigan, so like the sea.  Its impossibly blue, turquoise, sometimes even green waters stretch to the horizon.  The morning sun makes a bright shimmering patch from here to forever.  Sounds serene and it would be but for the rush hour traffic streaming up Lake Shore Drive not twenty feet behind me and scores of cyclists and runners zipping by on the bike path before me.  A half dozen retrievers and their masters enjoy fetching and throwing sticks out of and into the Lake.  I’m feeling the right-side of my face heat up from walking and now sitting north.  Time to head back south and fetch some coffee.

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Expressing Their Viewpoint in a Literary Way

Posted on April 29, 2012 by literarylee

I’m jotting this down with about an hour left of Sunday.  I started today in New York City, the Borough of Brooklyn to be exact, and to save money and for whatever other high-minded reason, I didn’t buy a Sunday New York Times which costs more here where I live, eight miles south of the Washington Monument, than it does in New York City itself where I actually, physically was present.  Online, glancing through my Really Simple Syndicated (RSS) Reader just now, I realize I would have been clipping articles from that paper today, one after the other, snip, snip, snip, preserving juicy chunks of literarily expressed wisdom.  I thought about posting the articles on Facebook but  is that any place to put something important to you?

I wanted to preserve three articles each written by an author, Margaret Atwood, a Canadian, Martin Amis, a Britain, and E.L. Doctorow, an American, in which each were asked to “consider the question of America and its role in global political culture.”   Never mind that I agreed with the politics behind the articles: I make it a point to avoid politics on this blog.  I immortalize the pieces here, spill my own ink on this page, because each is a well-written, literary expression of opinion, of commentary.  One is fiction, one memoir, and one satire.  This blog celebrates the literary, whether by offering ways anybody can act literarily any day they feel like it, or by showing off examples of literary writing.  Here are links to the articles.  Let me know what you think.

Marty and Nick Go to America  (Martin Amis)
Hello Martians.  This is America  (Margaret Atwood)
Unexceptionalism – A Primer  (E.L. Doctorow)

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Who Stole Spring?

Posted on April 27, 2012 by literarylee

 I’m glad I started writing about my garden and about spring flowers last year when everything happened perfectly, beautifully as (I think) it should have.  Gradually the winter cold loosened its grip, allowing the warming ground to admit crocus flowers first, then forsythia, then narcissus, then early daffodils, then later ones, then early tulips and later ones, and on through daisies, Black-Eyed Susans and beyond.  I started my garden accordingly, too: seeds tucked into their small cells, solitary, monastic, under lights as they broke the soil’s surface and grew.  Lettuces and broccoli, pea and leek seeds were first, then after they had vacated their cells for their new home in the garden, tomato and pepper and okra seeds took up their positions, awaiting their moment in the sun.

This year was different from last, all confused, haphazard.  Spring lurched clumsily along like a parade where the floats and bands and antique cars and horse troops leave the staging area whenever they feel like it, long before the Grand Marshall’s driver even starts the car that should lead them all.  The person with the clipboard and whistle and walkie-talkie, who usually tells the Easter parade of spring flowers and showers and blossoms and gradually warming temperatures when to take their turn, was home with a cold or the flu or dropsy or sinusitis, maybe pleurisy or hay fever (tree pollen appeared before Palm Sunday: impossible!) or maybe just malaise.  No one seemed to be taking charge of Spring’s appearance.  The mishmash jarred me.  Continue reading →

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Postcard From 6,000 Feet

Posted on April 25, 2012 by literarylee

How did I end up more than halfway up 11,000 foot Mount Hood?  Nearly two weeks ago we toured Portland, an urban jewel set in a mossed-tree temperate rain forest.  Then, a drive south along the Oregon Coast oohing and aahing at dramatic waves crashing into steep rocky shores.  Then back north up the state’s flat, fertile mid-section.  Is this Indiana?  Next, a drive along the Columbia River’s gorgeous Gorge, from the dramatic green west to the dramatic brown east.  Now, we are exploring the glories of this large, circa 1937 stone and log lodge called Timberline, both a museum and a place to sleep.  Thirty foot snow drifts keep me from seeing out many of the first floor windows.  A cloud keeps me from seeing Mount Hood, but I trust its still there.

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Another Postcard: Donuts in Portland

Posted on April 23, 2012 by literarylee

We ate donuts our last day in Portland at a famous shop called Voodoo Donuts.  Their tasty products, cake and yeast goodies unusually and richly colored and flavored, labor under thick swaths of icing encrusted with colorful sweet cereals, mini candies and treats.  They ain’t health food.  Along with one bountiful dozen of these beauties we picked up to share with our hosts, we procured a Maple and Bacon special, a straight yeast donut clothed in thick maple icing with two strips of well-done bacon firmly embedded on top.  Colorfully sitting in large pink box, they were an apt ending to a sweet vacation.

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Postcard From Court

Posted on April 17, 2012 by literarylee

We developed a new style of trip: a court vacation.  Spectated all day yesterday at this town’s superior court.  Enjoyed our ring-side seat to this constitutional democracy’s rule of law practiced by the judge, lawyers, correctional professionals.  We  watched with worried family members old, young, adoring, grim.  We were gripped by the human drama playing out before us, sober vignettes, each a snapshot of human pain, sorrow, brokenness and how our civilization tries to resolve, limit, punish, heal.  Definitely not beach or theme park, but a day of our time away that sure flew by.

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Another Postcard: More From the Oregon Coast

Posted on April 14, 2012 by literarylee

Hotel room cable television can not compete with the programming on the Pacific Ocean Live Network in living color outside our hotel room windows.  We clicked through a vast heaving palette of channels a thousand grays, blues, greens, whites.  On one show the waters frisk brightly and on another, pound the beach angrily, and still another, calm evening waters.  The early evening broadcast: darkening rows of waves frozen, for a time-suspended instant in place.  The late-morning program: a view down the wide, frothy coastline where whitecaps rush to the shore while their long white tails rush to the sea, an illusion of the water stretching it self out in two opposite directions.  We sip wine and watch, hardly able to pull ourselves away.

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Postcard from the Oregon Coast

Posted on April 12, 2012 by literarylee

We found a lovely hotel built right along the beach.  We look out from our room to see a full frontal view of the Pacific.  We watch storms blow in and then away, blue skies and water to gray and back again, and the sun sinking red into the sea.  After another day exploring the coast, we will become reacquainted with friends we have not seen in twenty years.  Old, new, past, present, grand and simple combine to refresh and renew.

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