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Living In Cities Is An Art, And We Need The Vocabulary Of Art, Of Style, To Describe The Peculiar Relationship Between Man And Material That Exists In The Continual Creative Play Of Urban Living. The City As We Imagine It, Then, Soft City Of Illusion, Myth, Aspiration, And Nightmare, Is As Real, Maybe More Real, Than The Hard City One Can Locate On Maps In Statistics, In Monographs On Urban Sociology And Demography And Architecture.

-Jonathan Raban

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Living In Cities Is

Jonathan Raban

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Living In Cities Is An Art, And We Need The Vocabulary Of Art, Of Style, To Describe The Peculiar Relationship Between Man And Material That Exists In The Continual Creative Play Of Urban Living. The City As We Imagine It, Then, Soft City Of Illusion, Myth, Aspiration, And Nightmare, Is As Real, Maybe More Real, Than The Hard City One Can Locate On Maps In Statistics, In Monographs On Urban Sociology And Demography And Architecture.

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Over Emphatic Negatives Always Suggest That What Is Being Denied May Be What Is Really Being Asserted.

The Trouble With Ghostwriting Is That It Raises The Issue Of Whether The President Is In A State Of Diminished Responsibility For What He Says. Does He Actually Grasp The Implications Of The Words He Speaks?

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

There's An Enduring American Compulsion To Be On The Side Of The Angels. Expediency Alone Has Never Been An Adequate American Reason For Doing Anything. When Actions Are Judged, They Go Before The Bar Of God, Where Mom And The Flag Closely Flank His Presence.

Simply As A Writer Of Books I'm Thrilled And Proud That Seattle Should Have Raised, On A Public Vote, Sufficient Money To Build A Central Library, And Moreover To Rebuild Every Other Library In The City: 28 Of Them.

When New Yorkers Tell One About The Dangers Of Their City, The Muggings, The Dinner Parties To Which No One Turns Up For Fear Of Being Attacked On The Way, The Traffic Snarl-ups, The Bland Indifference Of The City Cops, They Are Unmistakably Bragging.

Democrats Inhabit The Low Shores Of Puget Sound, Mostly On Its Eastern Side, In A Ragged Trail Of Port-cities That Stretches From Bellingham, Close To The Canadian Border, Through Everett, Seattle, And Tacoma, To Olympia, The State Capital, At The Southern End Of The Sound.

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 Writerspound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williamsspoke 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.

One Of The Oddest Features Of Western Christianized Culture Is Its Ready Acceptance Of The Myth Of The Stable Family And The Happy Marriage. We Have Been Taught To Accept The Myth Not As An Heroic Ideal, Something Good, Brave, And Nearly Impossible To Fulfil, But As The Very Fiber Of Normal Life. Given Most Families And Most Marriages, The Belief Seems Admirable But Foolhardily.

The Falklands Held A Mirror Up To Our Own Islands, And It Reflected, In Brilliantly Sharp Focus, All Our Injured Belittlement, Our Sense Of Being Beleaguered, Neglected And Misunderstood.

In Rural Areas The Majority Of The Victims Of Violent Crime Know Their Assailants (indeed, Are Probably Married To Them); In Cities, The Killer And The Mugger Come Out Of The Anonymous Dark, Their Faces Unrecognized, Their Motives Obscure.

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Seattle Is A Liberal City, Its Politics Not So Much Blue In The American, Not The British, Sense As Deep Ultramarine, And Its Manners Are Studiously Polite.

I've Taught The Better Class Of Tourist Both To See And Not To See; To Lift Their Eyes Above And Beyond The Inessentials, And Thrill To Our Western Nature In Her Majesty.

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Because Washington State Now Votes By Mail, Elections Here Tend To Play Out, At An Agonizingly Slow Speed, Over Many Days And, Sometimes, Weeks.

Washington State

Good Travel Books Are Novels At Heart.

The [travel] Writer, Looking Back At The Journey From A Distance Of A Year Or Two (or Three), Is A Different Character From The Hapless Character Who Undertook The Trip: Wise After The Event, With The Leisure To Tease Out Meanings From The Experience That The Distracted Traveler Never Had, And Often Impatient With His Alter Ego's Blinkered And Unsatisfactory Version Of Things.

Seattle Is Not An Overly Friendly City. It Is A Civil City, But Not Altogether Friendly. People From Outside Mistake The Civility For Friendliness. Seattle Is Full Of People Who Have Their Own Lives To Live. They Won't Waste Their Time Being Friendly. But They Are Civil.

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By The End Of The 1980s, Seattle Had Taken On The Dangerous Lustre Of A Promised City. The Rumour Had Gone Out That If You Had Failed In Detroit You Might Yet Succeed In Seattle - And That If You'd Succeeded In Seoul, You Could Succeed Even Better In Seattle... Seattle Was The Coming Place. So I Joined The Line Of Hopefuls.

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'rage' Is The Word That Most Often Attaches Itself To The Tea Party Movement, And It's True That, From The Outside Looking In, Their Public Demonstrations Appear To Be More Enraged Than Any Political Events In America Since The Race Riots And Anti-war Protests Of The 1960s.

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Rules And Regulations

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Make Things Happen

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I Ain't Sleeping. I'm Just Taking A Good Look At The Insides Of My Eyelids.

Funny Inspirational

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No President Has Come Near To Rivaling Lincoln As A Writer.

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