David Matthews

Thoughts at year’s end…strictly personal, leaving political, social, and the rest for another day…nothing profound, perhaps of some interest, perhaps not…

Only tops of the tallest buildings across the river downtown were visible through morning fog as I ran up onto Hawthorne Bridge. The sun was out and the fog quickly burned away, the morning become bright and clear, by the time I crossed over the Steel Bridge to the west bank. Temperature 34 degrees. A woman ran barefoot at a fair clip headed south along the Eastbank Esplanade as I went north. A young fellow ran in singlet and shorts. He did wear a stocking cap and gloves, which I suppose made him only about 90 percent crazy. We start with the gauge at 50 percent, half crazy, just for being out there and calling it fun. A woman on a park bench ate noodles with her fingers. The barefoot woman and I met again on the other side of the river as we looped around. Perhaps she smiled.

The eight-mile run was the first at that distance since I rolled my ankle two months ago. The ankle and foot are all but fully recovered, about as good as they are apt to be with the mileage on them. Much the same might be said of my spirit as the year sprints to the finish, a year that brought a few new poems, not enough and not good enough, they never are, but a few. Two poetry readings in Seattle, four in Portland, with small audiences that I think enjoyed what they heard. Read some books, saw some movies. Much alone, on occasion lonely, cherished friendships old and new and renewed. Christmas was with Trani and the family in Tulsa, hanging out at the store, running with the Tulsa Runner crowd, dinner at India Palace, raking leaves before a Christmas afternoon run, Midnight in Paris on DVD at home Christmas night, Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre at Circle Cinema. All in all, a pretty good close to a pretty good year.

Prospects for 2012 are problematic. Life is problematic, a circumstance we are often at some pains to deny or at least avoid acknowledging. Employment is uncertain, about which I suppose I should be more concerned than I am. Retirement does not loom in any plausible scenario. Most likely I will find myself in some job or other for which I am ill-suited until I keel over from a work-related stroke or heart attack, to a considerable extent consequence of a lifetime of foolish choices, dubious moves, regrettable decisions, and values to which I have tried to hold true. It is late in the day to forsake those values now, not that I would or can.

I turn 60 in August. If all goes reasonably well Trani and I will run a fall marathon—26.2 to celebrate 60. I do not think of myself as old, yet I know that I am a ways beyond young—as ever my goofy self, curious, caring, reticent, ambitious, uncertain, anxious, fearful, flaws a-plenty and passion too oft too well hid, poet by choice and by chance, student for the duration, still so much to learn, read, say, see, do, and never time enough for it. If all goes reasonably well 2012 figures to bring running, reading, poems, film, study of French and Italian, travel, and who knows what else that for now lies unseen. If fortune smiles I will do these things more with companions and less alone than in the past, to which end I should endeavor to be more forthcoming and open myself, something that has never come naturally or easily. Between doing alone and not doing, I do alone. I remain without expectation, given to hope, susceptible to enchantment, with a taste for the marvelous. We shall see what comes of it.

David :: Dec.31.2011 :: House Red: Miscellany, House Red: Running :: 6 Comments »

“I’m interested in the stuff I do being seen as widely as possible but I’m not interested enough to lie.”–John Sayles

John Sayles is a remarkable figure, maybe not quite unique or alone, but one of a small number of contemporary American filmmakers who have created substantial and distinguished bodies of work while working independently of the Hollywood system. Woody Allen and Spike Lee come to mind as in some sense kindred figures. No doubt there are others but not many who join Sayles, Allen, and Lee as American auteurs in the tradition of the French nouvelle vague. To be sure, each has distinctive concerns and vision that are manifest in his films, just as Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol, and the rest were distinct one from the other, with perhaps as much difference as there was common ground beyond a shared love of film.

Sayles is set apart from the others by ventures into the literary realm. Yes, Allen has published several collections of fine short pieces that show him to be a master of satire and parody, particularly adept at skewering the pretensions of intellectuals. Sayles, however, has cranked out full-fledged novels, including the recently published A Moment in the Sun, which I will not take up here but offer these passages from Nathaniel Rich’s essay in The New York Review of Books (“A Passionate Storyteller,” NYR, 18 August 2011) to give you some idea of vast scope of this novel and its themes:

[In six novels and twenty films] Sayles has proved himself a connoisseur of American shame. He has found his theme in the exploitation of West Virginia miners in the 1920s (Matewan), the 1919 Black Sox Scandal (Eight Men Out), electoral politics (Silver City), the Bay of Pigs (his previous novel, Gusanos), and rapacious real estate developers in Florida (Sunshine State) and New Jersey (City of Hope).

* * * * *
A Moment in the Sun runs 955 pages, but the number is deceptive. The designer has narrowed the margins and reduced font size; with a little breathing room the page count might easily drift beyond 1,500. The novel is an encyclopedic portrait of an America era [at the end of the 19th century] when imperial, racist, and plutocratic power were asserted with exceptional force.

Besides the novel about Wilmington [where the city's white aristocracy staged a coup d'etat to overthrow a local government coalition of Republicans (of that era, not the 21st century version) and populists elected by black voters, who made up a majority of the population], Sayles also intersperses two separate war novels: the first follows a regiment of black soldiers during the Spanish-American War; the second embeds the reader on both sides of the Philippine-American War (also the subject of Sayles’s new film, Amigo). There is a novella about the Klondike Gold Rush, and what amount to stand-alone short stories about the assassination of President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, a tense baseball game between black and white soldiers in a Chattanooga army camp, the travails of a sickly Lower East Side newsboy, and a Chinese peasant girls’ flight form a rural village in Shandong province to a Hong Kong whorehouse.

* * * * *
Sayles can lose control, but over its 955 pages A Moment in the Sun is almost never dull. Though he is fascinated by the era, he doesn’t idealize it, as the excruciating accounts of nineteenth-century medical practices make clear. Ultimately, the nostalgia is not for a lost time, but for a type of novel that one rarely encounters anymore. In his historical epic—a forgotten genre itself—Sayles relies on a number of neglected conventions: a roving, omniscient narrator; an unambiguous political partisanship; a Manichaean approach to characters in which the heroes struggle to earn their daily bread and the villains preach white supremacy; and capacious, messy, impassioned storytelling. In the right hands, these strategies still retain the ability to excite and transport. A Moment in the Sun is evidence, and a reminder that this form of fiction needn’t be relegated to the rendering vat.

Anyone as prolific as Sayles is not apt to be a great stylist, and the aesthetic choices made by any filmmaker are always to a degree contingent on the resources available, which is say, funding. Sayles himself notes that “[A movie] may not look the way we’d like it to look, or sound the way we’d like it to sound or get seen by as many people as we’d like to have see it but at least it will say the stuff we want it to say.” Sayles is far from indifferent to matters of aesthetics and style, but what matters for him is content, that it “say the stuff we want it to say.” From John Sayles–Independent:

John Sayles was the original do-it-yourselfer. Even though his budgets have increased over the years — from $40,000 for Secaucus 7 to $4.5 million for Limbo (1999) — his basic MO hasn’t really changed. His methodical, buccaneering approach to film has become something of a legend in the Hollywood system.

From the beginning he has made his living and partly financed his own productions by working as a screenwriter for hire on commercial projects. In the early days, the films he polished or rewrote were mostly low-budget shockers like Piranha and Alligator. In recent years, he has worked as an uncredited “relief pitcher” on such high-profile releases as Mimic and Apollo 13. (Sayles gets the save if not the win.)

Amigo opened to harsh reviews. Some of the criticism has merit. Several of the soldiers are young boys from the deep South whose naïveté and lack of sophistication are believable, but the Southern accents, laid on way too thick, are not. They come off like actors in a mediocre sit-com trying to sound Southern. Nor are the lines always delivered well. Even Chris Cooper, a perfectly competent actor, as the cranky Col. Hardacre, comes off on occasion like an earnest but not especially capable amateur doing community theater. Here I expect better from Sayles. He settled for less than he ought to have been able to get from his cast.

The pace is slow and it takes a while for the characters, relationships, intrigues, and subplots to develop. Here, too, Sayles settles a bit, relying on stock types from countless war novels and films: the lifer colonel with not a doubt in his military mind that the way to subdue the insurgents is not with the carrot but with the stick; the good-natured but generally inept drunk we sense early on will come to a bad end; the kid with the clap; the innocent country boy who falls for a young village girl who does speak a word of English; the brainy one with the glasses who operates the telegraph; the lieutenant, an architect in civilian life, who gradually comes to respect the villagers over whom he has the power of life and death. The allusions to Vietnam and the present wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are apt but heavy-handed.

Character and plot develop through gradual accretion of details that requires the viewer’s patience and at times makes for a slow slog as the tale plays out with the inevitability of classic tragedy. The village headman is doomed the instant the Americans arrive. He tries to look out for his people, older men, women, and children, for all the young men, including his son, have left to fight with the insurgents. The Americans are convinced the headman is feeding information to the insurgents, while the insurgents, led by his brother, a former seminarian, believe he is collaborating with the Americans. There is no way he can win.

Yes, Sayles could deliver his content more effectively if it were done with a bit lighter hand, and we are generally well advised to be wary of historical parallels that are too easy and obvious. Yet the American experience in the Philippines does presage later misadventures in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Sayles’ soldiers are strangers in a strange land, clueless about the native people and their culture, convinced of the righteousness of their actions, truly puzzled as to why they are not welcomed as liberators bringing democracy, freedom, and a better life. Not one American speaks the language of the villagers. They rely on a Spanish priest whose translations reflect his own bias. How could things possibly turn out well?

Near the end the lieutenant, by now sympathetic not just with the villagers but also to a degree with the insurgents, asks rhetorically why they keep fighting when it clear to everyone on both sides they cannot win, to which the telegraph operator replies, “It’s their country.” Just as Amigo is Sayles’ film. A film with shortcomings, yet one where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is the stuff Sayles wants to say that matters, and if he makes demands of the viewer along the way, that is fine as long as he holds up his end of the bargain with the reward of a deferred pleasure at the end that makes it worthwhile. Sayles holds up his end of the bargain. I left the theater not transformed or profoundly moved, no I could not say that, but I was happy that I had walked in two hours earlier.

David :: Sep.12.2011 :: House Red: Film, House Red: Miscellany :: No Comments »

The weekend of the 22nd began with the customary Saturday morning run. I set out on a loop that takes me down to Hawthorne Bridge and past OMSI to pick up Springwater Corridor along the river. At Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge I cut up to Milwaukie and on home by way of Ladd’s Addition. My estimate of the distance is nine miles. Since Christmas I have used the Garmin GPS gadget Trani gave me to measure the exact distance on runs I previously estimated. Thus far I have been pleasantly surprised by the accuracy of my estimates. Rounding off the distance calculated by the GPS to the nearest quarter mile gives my estimate for each one measured thus far.

Alas, my efforts at precision on Saturday’s loop were thwarted when I hit a flooded area about halfway up the path through Oaks Bottom. The water presented no problem for two ducks happily paddling across the trail, but I saw no reason to slop through it, nor did three other runners who arrived there from the opposite direction at the same time I did.

Contrary to my nature I opted for the reasonable course, which is to say, I doubled back to Springwater Corridor, turning my nine-miler into something a tad shy of 10.5. It was a lovely morning, the sun shining, temperature in the low 40s when I left home, with the morning warming up noticeably by the time I headed through Ladd’s Addition and hit that character-building hill on Harrison between 20th and 30th.

This was my longest run since the marathon in November, and I was pleased with my splits. Cranking out the miles up to 15 or so is comparatively easy for me. Maintaining my focus so that I am running at a decent pace is the challenge. It is not about seeing how hard I can push myself, though that is a good thing to do from time to time. Rather, I have tendency when running alone, which is how I run most of the time, to fall back into a dawdling pace that goes beyond comfortable to something more near catatonic. Too often, without any intention to do so, just how it plays out, I slack off at a 10:00 – 10:15 minutes per mile pace when I can run a 9:20 – 9:30 pace fairly comfortably. Speaking in these terms is itself a bit of a blow to my foolish pride, but I can handle it. Way past are the days when I ran a weekly 15-miler with a couple of ultramarathoners who disdainfully considered eight-minute miles junk miles. For 2011 I will try to get my routine, comfortable pace on long runs down around nine minutes per mile, maybe think of them as recycle miles instead of junk miles. It is enough within the realm of possibility to merit taking a crack at it.

The remainder of the day fell into place rather nicely, through no plan or program, just doing whatever it is I do. After the multigrain, buttermilk-yogurt pancakes with real maple syrup for breakfast, I checked the film schedules at Hollywood, Laurelhurst, and NW Film Center. Two offerings at Hollywood caught my eye: Claude Chabrol’s final film, Inspector Bellamy, starring Gerard Depardieu, and Akira Kurosawa’s magnificent Kagemusha in a newly restored 35mm print. I passed on both, though not without hesitation, just not quite in a mood for either on that particular day. The morning I closed out with home office admin, making a batch of pots de crème, doing a load of laundry, and reading a bit on Heraclitus from Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, and a bit of the Henning Mankell novella The Pyramid.

In the afternoon I strolled up to Hawthorne and 37th Avenue, stepped into Powell’s for a quick look around, then walked west on Hawthorne, thinking I would make my way to Ladd’s Addition and stop at Palio for a latte. The heart of the Hawthorne district made for a lively scene on a sunny afternoon, a mix of young couples with infants in strollers, kids hanging out to see and be seen, aging hipsters, the chic and the shabby, small-business merchants and sidewalk vendors and musicians set up on street corners playing for tips.

Palio is a dessert and espresso place that bills itself as a little bit of Europe in the center of Ladd’s Addition. I frequented the establishment on occasion when I first came to Portland at the end of the twentieth century and lived nearby. Several years have passed since last I was there, and it seems to have become quite the happening place to be. Every table was occupied at 2:30 on Saturday afternoon. C’est la vie. Good for Palio, if not so good for me at that particular moment.

Undaunted by this minor setback, I continued on to Division, then back east along a stretch that is almost quintessentially Portlandish in its mix of fashionable, newer establishments and relics of other eras that are  maybe a little shabby and not all that hip except possibly after a retro fashion. Pizzicato now occupies the space at Division and 21st that was previously the short-lived home to a Starbucks whose presence was not welcomed with open arms by a neighborhood already graced by a number of locally owned coffee shops, not least among them Palio, Red and Black, an anarchist café just up the street a block, and K & F Clinton Street Coffee House. Red and Black subsequently moved down to SE 12th and Oak, and the space on 22nd and Division is now Bar Avignon, a pleasant spot for a glass of wine and good conversation. Pok Pok and Lauro Kitchen are thriving restaurants a hop, skip, and jump from the venerable barber shop at 24th, the Reel ‘m Inn tavern, Clay’s Smokehouse Grill up near 30th, and just beyond Clay’s a little second-hand store whose name I do not recall. Somewhere between Bar Avignon and Clay’s, I experienced an aha! moment and thought that Pix Patisserie on 34th would be an excellent place to pause in my wanderings for a latte and a bit of journal writing.

Once upon a lifetime I regularly engaged in minor wanderings about the city, bound for no destination in particular, but not altogether aimless either. My excursions may lead to an enchanting moment along the way, an unanticipated meeting with a friend or acquaintance from another world, a rendezvous with the marvelous. More often nothing special happens, but even then there is about it something that satisfies and perhaps even nurtures that best part of who I am.

When I arrived back home, I put some time in at my desk, making notes for two essays I have in mind. The notes may or may not bear fruit. That almost does not matter. What matters is faith that if I keep at it sooner or later something will come of it. This is real life, going in to the office a bad dream. Perhaps someday I will wake from that dream.

That evening I enjoyed dinner at India Oven on Belmont across from the old fire station. The people there remember me even when I have not dined with them in quite some time. Restaurants bloom like flowers in spring only to pass from the scene like leaves falling in autumn. A restaurant or café that endures, one where they remember you and make you feel welcome, as if you are a friend come to dine with them, now that is a treasure.

Then came Sunday, overcast, not forbidding, but far from inviting. The aimlessness that served me well the day before birthed only doldrums. Maybe it was too much football in the afternoon that did me in. They were good games, and I rather enjoyed them, as two of the NFL’s most storied franchises, Green Bay and Pittsburgh, claimed their conference championships on the way to the Super Bowl. Yet there was afterward a gnawing sense that I could have put the time to better use. I am not convinced this is a good thing. It may be all too easy to fritter our lives away on frivolities, but the sense that one must always be putting the time to better use strikes me as counterproductive to living a good life, whatever exactly our notion of a good life for human being may entail.

It is not as if the day was altogether unproductive. There was grocery shopping, more home office admin, a load of laundry, the Sunday housecleaning. I read a little more Heraclitus and polished off the Mankell and made arrangements for trip to Seattle in April for a poetry reading at the Green Lake branch of the public library.

In the middle of the afternoon I yelled at a man. I walked downstairs to dump some old magazines into the recycle bin I had pulled out to the curb earlier for the Monday morning pickup. A forlorn-looking fellow, possibly homeless, was about to walk away after spilling some plastic containers onto the ground as he rummaged through the recycle bin. I shouted, “Hey, pick up the stuff you knocked out on the ground.” He yelled back, “Yes, master,” and picked up the containers and tossed them in the bin. I said, “Thanks.” He ignored me and shuffled away. If I had it to do over, I would have said, in a slightly different tone, “Hey, man, you mind picking up the stuff you knocked out on the ground?” However he might have responded to that, I think I would have felt better about the encounter.

It seems that life grows ever coarser. One morning recently a poorly dressed, older-looking fellow, maybe my age, boarded the MAX Yellow Line a stop after I did. He asked the woman seated behind me if she had any spare change. She handed him some coins. Then he asked what I was reading. I said, “Greek drama,” without specifying Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound. He stared, said nothing, then turned to the young man seated at the front of the car, held out a box, and asked if he liked chocolate. The young man declined the offer, which irritated the fellow no end. He cursed and pulled some trash out of his pockets and threw it onto the floor and walked to the doors and got off at the next stop.

In the mornings I pass people sleeping in doorways as I walk downtown from the bus stop at SW 5th and Washington to the MAX Yellow Line stop at SW 6th and Pine. On Saturday morning I run past people sleeping under bridges and camped along the river. This is the state of the union, America in the 21st century. I do not know their stories. My guess is there are many stories. Some are where they are through misfortune, bad luck, no fault of their own, others as a consequence of choices none of us would recommend. Drugs, alcohol, and mental illness are at least part of the story in many cases. Is the man who threw a tantrum and littered the train car one of those cases? If he is, does he bear responsibility for his acts? If he is not responsible, how can we not ask when it is meaningful for any of us to speak of responsibility for our acts? And where does that leave us when we try to consider right and wrong, ethical and moral actions, what it might mean to live a good life? However that may be, I do not believe the general coarsening of life relieves us of responsibility for our conduct. I am responsible for the kind of person that I am. Perhaps this belief is just an anachronistic superstition. Nonethless, I hold to it.

After dinner I went to my desk and worked a bit on a piece of fiction, tentatively titled Until We Remember to Dream. The story draws on Fellini’s 8½ and La Dolce Vita, more a matter of mood than anything concrete, and occupied me a for short time back in 2010 before I drifted away after some 12 thousand words and never got back to it. That night I went back to page one and revised part of the first chapter and think perhaps I will get back to it.

It is funny how the writing goes sometimes. Wednesday the 19th Ric Vrana emailed to offer a ride to the January Paper Tiger poetry reading the next night. I considered it before declining for reasons not worth getting into. Before I reached the decision, I looked through the 2010 poems for something I might read and to my surprise found a few that might be keepers. Granted, I could have read the 2010 oeuvre in its entirety at Thursday’s open mic. That anything at all turned up in the files is a pleasant surprise. I close with one I kind of like, nothing major, but it does not have to be.

Blank the page seems
So much more truthful
Or at the least less false
When each orphaned thought
Conjures its contrary
To birth a mess
Of equivocation and backpedaling —

David :: Jan.30.2011 :: House Red: Miscellany :: No Comments »

David :: Oct.04.2010 :: House Red: Miscellany, House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: 1 Comment »

Spring comes to Portland cool, damp, and incredibly lush. Alas, the names of trees, flowers, and plant life generally, like French vocabulary, have never stuck in my mind the way sports trivia does. For instance, off the top of my head, starting line-up for the 1964 UCLA national championship team coached by John Wooden: guards Gail Goodrich and Walt Hazzard, forwards Keith Erickson and Jack Hirsch, center Fred Slaughter, sixth man Kenny Washington from Beaufort, SC. (I confess to a momentary brain cramp that led me to google the roster to confirm I was correct about Hirsch.) But what is that tree across the street? The vine crawling up the fence? The incredible wine-dark leaves of what I have in my mind is a Japanese maple but could be mistaken. Absurd, isn’t it? To my good fortune, the capacity be moved by these wonders is not diminished by the limits of my knowledge, though I believe knowing more is generally better and more delightful than knowing less and appreciation is enhanced by it.

With spring comes the transition out of the winter running routine, when I cut back my mileage a bit. I do not recall when I began doing this. It was not so much a conscious decision as something I sensed was happening only after the fact and thought, yes, that seems reasonable. The weather is less than optimal, cold and often as not in Portland raining, runs on workdays are in the dark, and there is almost without fail at least one ratty cold that causes me to take enough time off to lose a little conditioning and some of the mental edge that comes with routine.

The challenge in winter is getting myself into the running clothes and out the door. It is way too easy to come home from the office tired, cold, and damp and think this would a good day to take a day off. Once out and putting one foot in front of the other, most days it is good even in cold and rain as long as it is not too cold and the rain holds back to that Portland drizzle we know and love, but there is an element of that which is to be endured in even the best of the winter runs. They are worth enduring, and more, if only as preparation to enjoy running in the early mornings and late afternoons of spring, summer, and autumn.

Backing off a bit from time to time also gives my body a break, and it is not just the body that benefits from it. By late winter when we are tantalized by brief spells of warmer, sunnier weather, I find myself eager, anxious, excited at the prospect of jacking up the mileage and getting back into those longer runs that are qualitatively different from the shorter ones. Talk of mileage is always relative. I have run at a pretty low level for years. Thanks in part to Big T’s Memorial Day visit when he tried to peer-pressure me into training for a marathon, I put in more miles in 2009 than any year going back at least to 2004, and that was largely due to a fairly modest 25-30 miles a week July through September, as satisfying a period as I have enjoyed in a long time.

Ten days into May and I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I’ve run in t-shirt and shorts. I’m looking forward to more of those days, but I’ll take the ones I’m having. Temperature was around 45, not cold but coolish, when I set out on the Springwater Corridor to Sellwood run the last two weekends, a glorious loop somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve miles. Yesterday marked only the third time I have gone that distance since September. The run started off somewhat problematically with discomfort in my right Achilles tendon area. This first cropped up Thursday, toward the end of a 5.5 mile run. I stopped to stretch a bit then and was okay the rest of that run. Yesterday the discomfort appeared not a half a mile into it. I paused to stretch, continued a few blocks, then stretched a bit more, and was fine until near the the end when I felt it again as I built some character coming out of Ladd’s Addition up Harrison to 30th, but heck, I’m supposed to feel discomfort on that mother of a hill. Aches and pains and injuries are part of the deal. It is important to pay attention and back off when it’s called for, difficult as that may be this time of year. There is a fair chance the current discomfort is nothing serious and can be resolved with some special attention, a little extra stretching. We’ll see how that goes.

The sky was blue and cloudless, the streets quiet, the air bright and fresh. I sighted a dragon boat on the river at the Hawthorne Bridge as I turned south along the Eastbank Esplanade and another as I ran down past OMSI to pick up the trail that would take me on to Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge and Oaks Amusement Park with fellow runners, bicyclists, walkers, three kids with fishing poles clambering up from the river bank, two geese with three little ones in the grass. Two cats were there at the food and water bowls just the the other side of the fence that separates the trail from the railroad track where the week before I saw two women filling those bowls.

I have yet to encounter two women I regularly met last summer coming up the trail as I approached Sellwood. One was a tiny Asian woman a bit older than I am, the other a middle-aged woman who runs like a fury. Both women ran alone, as do I. We smiled and waved as we passed and continued on our way. A gesture, a small thing, yet each week I found myself looking forward to that part of the run. Maybe some Saturday soon we will meet again.

David :: May.10.2010 :: House Red: Miscellany :: No Comments »

House Red will follow in the footsteps and tradition of Memo from the Fringes, my former blog, now officially retired. My thinking at present is to devote more space to literary topics, film reviews, and the like and less to political rant than I did on Memo. We will see how that turns out.

At Memo I aimed to post at least once a week so that those who came to the site regularly might have some idea when they could reasonably expect to find new material. The down side of this approach was that it led to a lot of filler, which I hope to steer clear of on House Red. I will try to post regularly and will announce any extended absence but will not attempt to keep to a set schedule. I hope this will enable me to produce a higher quality blog.

Memo had a good run on Blogger from Memorial Day weekend 2005 to January 2010. It will remain online for the time being.

upcoming on House Red

the winter project: those Brontë girls

poets who matter: Keats, part IV; or, I like to think my soul is not a clod

David :: Jan.10.2010 :: House Red: Miscellany :: No Comments »