Chris Hedges is one of the most thought provoking critics writing today. His weekly column on truthdig is one that I rarely miss.

Here’s some thoughts on the culture of self, from Hedges’ book “The Empire of Illusion”:

“The cult of self dominates our cultural landscape. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the commodities we buy or consume, has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and welth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked.”

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A great book will always introduce you to a couple of words that you either don’t know or haven’t thought about in a very long time. Here are a couple I picked up from Coetzee:

inchoate

1 Just begun, incipient, rudimentary; not yet fully formed or developed; Law (of an offence) anticipating or preparatory to a further criminal act

2 Chaotic, confused; (of thought or language) incoherent.

“Because of the inchoate passion for your young cleaning lady that you were so foolish as to declare.”

Chthonic

Dwelling in or beneath the earth or in the underworld; of or pertaining to the underworld.

“You know, there are those whom I call chthonic, the ones who stand with their feet planted on their native earth; and then there are the butterflies, creatures of light and air, temporary residents, alighting here, alighting there.”

Labile

1 Liable to lapse. Of a person: apt to err or sin; Theology liable to fall from innocence.

2 Liable to undergo displacement in position or change in nature, form, chemical composition, etc.; unstable; esp. in Chemistry (of an attached ligand or group) readily displaced by another, (of a bond) readily broken.

“If you find me labile, Marijana, it is not just because I suffered a knock.”

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Click the image below:

“But I’d rather be alone than pretend that I’m alright.”

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I can now mark Klamath County off my list of Oregon Counties visited. Klamath County, home of Crater Lake, the surprising robust town of Klamath Falls, and beautiful rolling dessert on the California Border. Only 13 counties to go.

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Mt. St. Helens is a psychic event as much as it is a physical one. I have not yet come to terms with the task of committing to language what it’s like to visit the mountain. Real photographs fail to capture its grandeur, so I will try again to represent it this way:

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There are 36 counties in the state of Oregon. The smallest county, Multnomah, also happens to be the most densely populated. At 435 sq miles, Multnomah County contains the city of Portland and much of the outlying area and is home to roughly 700,000 people.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Harney County in the southeast is 10,135 sq miles (a land mass that is larger than seven US States), and is home to less than 8,000 people—a population so sparse that the county still qualifies as a “frontier.”

This range gives you some idea of the incredible diversity of this state. Most of the states’ population lives west of the Cascade Mountains in the fertile Williamette Valley. In state and local politics this part of the state has tremendous sway, but the quantity of land that sits between the eastern slope of the cascades and the western edge of Idaho is immense and varied.

My goal is to visit all 36 of the Oregon counties, and in our first two years we’ve managed to reach into 22 of these counties. There are still 14 to go, and I can’t wait to see them all.

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I highly recommend Tony Hoagland’s new book Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty .

At the Galleria

Just past the bin of pastel baby socks and underwear,
there are some 49-dollar Chinese-made TVs;

one of them singing news about a far-off war,
one comparing the breast size of an actress

from Hollywood to the breast size
of an actress from Bollywood.

And here is my niece Lucinda,
who is nine and a daughter of Texas,

who has developed the flounce of a pedigreed blonde
and declares that her favorite sport is shopping.

Today is the day she embarks upon her journey,
swinging a credit card like a scythe

through the meadows of golden merchandise.
Today is the day she stops looking at faces,

and starts assessing the price of purses;
So let it begin. Let her be dipped in the dazzling bounty

and raised and wrung out again and again.
And let us watch.

As the gods in olden stories
turned mortals into laurel trees and crows
to teach them some kind of lesson,

so we were turned into Americans
to learn something about loneliness.

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My students are reading an article by Naomi Klein in the Guardian about BP’s Gulf Coast Disaster™. The accompanying video from Al Jazerra helps put the situation in perspective.

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My first day of teaching in over two years is today. Wish me luck.

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