To The Newcomer Who Has Not Learned

Seattle Is This Curious Liberal Island.

The North-south Line Of 'the Mountains,' Meaning The Cascade Range, Forty Miles East Of Seattle, Is A Rigid Political Frontier.

The Mythical America?that Marvellous, Heroic, Sentimental Landwas An Object Of Faith. It Challenged You To Make The Believer's Leap Over The Rude Facts At Your Feet.

Insofar As I Think About Postmodernism At All, And It Doesn't Exactly Keep Me Awake At Nights, I Think Of It As Something That Happens To One, Not A Style One Affects. We're Postmoderns Because We're Not Modernists. The Modernist Writers—pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams—spoke With A Kind Of Vatic Authority: They Were Really The Last Of The Romantics, For Whom Authorship Itself Was Like Being A Solitary Prophet In The Wasteland.

Lincoln, Steeped In The Bible And Shakespeare, Set An Impossibly High Bar For Presidential Prose.