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Vice President ?

August 20, 2008 – 7:20 am

“The man with the best job in the country is the vice-president. All he has to do is get up every morning and say, “How is the president?””

At least in America, many of us are on the edge of our seats wondering who presidential candidate Barack Obama will choose as his running mate. Will Rogers said that funny sentence. But, how important is the chosen vice president during the election? The reaction to Obama’s choice may tell us today.

Hopefully Obama’s choice will be smarter than past Vice President Dan Quayle who evidently had trouble counting when he said, “One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice-president, and that one word is “to be prepared.”

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Same Old Politics

August 19, 2008 – 8:18 am

“McCain would venture forth on the back of his bus, going places other Republicans don’t go, saying things politicians don’t say, offering the country the vision of a different kind of politics — free of circus antics — in which serious people sacrifice for serious things. It hasn’t turned out that way.”

Political speak is fascinating. Today messages are inspected and dissected so intensely that a candidate speaks off-the-cuff at their peril. Here New York Times Columnist David Brooks is discussing how John McCain is now sticking with the daily party line message points and running a traditional presidential campaign. McCain’s attempt at doing things his own maverick way didn’t work. Where is the change many of us had hoped for? Perhaps once one of our candidates is in the White House, they can buck the system just a little bit.

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Old Proverb

August 18, 2008 – 8:14 am

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

I said this to my daughter, then wondered where it came from. The proverb has been traced back to ‘Teacher’s Manual’ (1840) by American educator Thomas H. Palmer. It was originally intended to encourage students to do their homework. Today, it has the much broader meaning of general persistence. It has been around long enough that people have tweaked it to their own version. The funny examples include, “If at first you don’t succeed, try new batteries.” “If…, then cheat.” And “If…, try to hide your astonishment.”

For my readers outside of America, is there a similar saying in your culture?

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Weekend Words: Family Fun

August 17, 2008 – 9:00 am

“If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable — each segment distinct.”

So said feminist and writer Letty Cottin Pogrebin. Pogrebin, founding editor of Ms. magazine, has written several books including Growing Up Free and Stories for Free Children. I like her together-but-separate sentiment in this sentence. We saw distinct personalities in our children from the earliest days.

This weekend, we’ve been like the orange together – running through the sprinkler yesterday when it hit 104 (yes, the big people too), making Lego vehicles, and eating root beer floats. In a few weeks, my two little orange segments will go off to kindergarten. Like an orange, bittersweet…

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Weekend Guests

August 15, 2008 – 7:26 am

“Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.”

Funny, but not very nice! I had heard this quote and was surprised to find out Benjamin Franklin said it. How often did he have house guests I wonder? One of my friends said she was so thankful to have guests or she’d never clean her house. I know what she means. I’ll be vacuuming and dusting today getting ready for a wonderful friend of ours to visit for the weekend. I enjoy hearing about “the outside world,” fixing a company meal however casual, and learning what friends have been doing since we’ve seen them. Franklin was a wise man… but I can’t agree with this sentiment.

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Pink Martini

August 13, 2008 – 10:14 am

“At one moment, you feel like you’re in the middle of a samba parade in Rio de Janeiro, and in the next moment, you are suddenly in a French music hall of the 1930s or in a palazzo in Napoli. It’s like an urban musical travelogue.”

That’s how Pink Martini founder Thomas Lauderdale describes his band’s style of music. I heard Lauderdale play a rousing interpretation of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue last night at a Pops Concert with Oregon’s Sunriver Music Festival. Lauderdale comes by his global music perspective from experience having been raised in a multicultural family. I was captivated by his powerful and playful piano playing — he is at the top of his game.

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Gardner’s Writing Advice

August 12, 2008 – 7:06 am

“The good writer sees things sharply, vividly, accurately, and selectively (that is, he chooses what’s important), not necessarily because his power of observation is by nature more acute than that of other people (though by practice it becomes so), but because he cares about seeing things clearly and getting them down effectively.”

That’s just one of the wise sentences in John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist. I’ve long thought that keen observation is a key to good writing and here, Gardner makes the point that this talent can be acquired. Gardner was a writing teacher who published novels including the award-winning October Light, children’s books, poetry and short stories. His two books on the craft of writing, On Becoming a Novelist and The Art of Fiction, are considered classics. Student Raymond Carver wrote that he was lucky to have had Gardner’s “criticism and his generous encouragement.”

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John Edwards Honest Words

August 11, 2008 – 9:51 am

“In the course of several campaigns, I started to believe that I was special and became increasingly egocentric and narcissistic.”

This sentence is stunning for its honesty. I had begun to think this above-the-masses attitude was partly behind the recent string of politicians admitting affairs. And here John Edwards comes right out and says it. When your face is plastered across the media, you zip around in jets and have people reaching to shake your hand and hold your baby — you could begin to feel the average rules don’t apply to you. A stunning admission and a truly sad one.

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Huckleberry Finn

August 7, 2008 – 8:01 am

“I hadn’t had a bite to eat since yesterday, so Jim he got out some corn-dodgers and buttermilk, and pork and cabbage and greens—there ain’t nothing in the world so good when it’s cooked right—and whilst I eat my supper we talked and had a good time. . . We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.”

I’ve read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn several times; it’s one of those books that you get something new out of with each reading. Here in Mark Twain’s great novel, Finn and Jim are enjoying the simple pleasures on their raft away from the rules of society. Many essays and reviews have been written about this American classic, I’ll just add it’s a great re-read for summer.

You can visit the Mark Twain’s House and Museum in Connecticut.

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Leibovitz’s Lens

August 6, 2008 – 10:34 am

“I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed. “

Which perhaps is why Annie Leibovitz is known for her portraits of famous people rather than for landscapes. Leibovitz began her career at Rolling Stone in 1970 and later moved to Vanity Fair. Her famous subjects said they forgot about her camera, leaving her able to capture them in a different and striking way than they had been shown before. Also, Leibovitz said she always looked at the moments between the supposed photo ops — another reason for her success.

She’s known for the cover photo of a naked John Lennon wrapped around Yoko hours before he was killed, for placing Whoopi Goldberg in a milk bath, a young muscled Arnold Schwarzenegger, a naked and pregnant Demi Moore, presidents and everyday people. She’s pushing 60 and still traveling the world with her camera. As she said, “I still need the camera because it is the only reason anyone is talking to me. “

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