Greetings from the Far Left Coast as we move into autumn with the days getting shorter and cooler, overnight lows lower, an especially lovely time of year in our city. Temperature was sixty degrees on a bright, sunny morning when I set out on the Saturday run. Walkers, runners, bicyclists were out in numbers, more than a few with baby carriages, dogs, or both. I paused midpoint on the Tilikum Crossing bridge to take in the view, crews rowing on the river below, the succession of bridges to the north, downtown Portland and the hills to the west. Tables were filled outside cafés and coffee shops along the waterfront. As I headed homeward back up Belmont a man of my generation, eying my sweat-soaked Tulsa Runner shirt, asked if I live on Tulsa time. We exchanged greetings and smiles.
The run was disrupted a few blocks shy of the designated endpoint outside Stumptown Coffee Roasters at Belmont and 34th when I ran into the Belmont Street Fair: music stages, food carts, beer gardens, a kids zone with Reptile Man, baby races, an art challenge. The street was filled with people casually checking out arts and crafts booths, strolling unhurriedly, paying no heed to the ancient runner. A pair of burly young security guards looked bored. Activist groups and charitable organizations had tables up and down the street along with the ubiquitous signature gatherers on behalf of good causes. One asked if I wanted to support gay rights. I said, “Not at the moment” as I walked past. Then my brain clicked in. Turning quickly I explained, “In principle, yes; I didn’t mean that like it sounded.” We shared a laugh. I tell you, it is “like living in hell” here in Portland.
Claire Rush, Trump threatened Portland with troops to quell protests. The mayor says it’s not needed, AP, September 12, 2025
Courtney Sherwood, ‘Like living in hell’: Trump hints Portland could be next city to see National Guard on streets, OPB, September 5, 2025
Memo from the literary desk. The Vulnerables (2023) is another fine novel by Sigrid Nunez, this one set in New York during the covid lockdown and its aftermath. Like The Friend, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 2018, The Vulnerables opens with remembrances of a friend who recently died. Another friend, pregnant and locked down in California where she and her husband had gone to celebrate her father-in-law’s birthday, enlists the narrator to take care of her parrot, Eureka, after the college student who had been bird-sitting split for his family’s home in Vermont. As with Apollo the Great Dane in The Friend, the narrator, to her suprise, soon bonds with the pet.
In common with The Friend and another Nunez novel, What Are You Going Through?, the narrative is anything but straightforward. There are numerous diversions and anecdotes, many of them literary and cultural, often amusing, laced with acerbic wit and a dose of dark humor. The closed-in sense of life during the pandemic has the narrator thinking of the poet Joseph Brodsky’s recollection of “the tiny space he carved out for himself while living in the single room that was the whole of his and his parents’ Leningrad home: ‘These ten square meters were mine, and they were the best ten square meters I’ve ever known.’” On the subject of love, she remarks that Wagner was “said to have composed his opera Tristan und Isolde because he wished to write about a great love such as he himself had never experienced. Which for him meant a violent tragedy of epic proportions in which both lovers go through anguished suffering and end up dead.”
And there are passages like this one where she could have been writing about me:
By day I may have been so forgetful that I couldn’t recall what I’d had for breakfast, but in the dark hours of the night I was a memory genius. I could recall every regrettable moment of my life. Every mistake I’d ever made, every humiliation, every failure, every sin, every harm I’d ever caused another person, deliberately or by accident, every bad or stupd thing I’d ever said or done.
Veering dangerously close to self-pity here: not good.
Return to the McCarthy era. The University of California at Berkeley gave the Department of Education’s office for civil rights the names of 160 faculty members and students suspected of committing antisemitism. Already I can picture Elise Stefanik rehearsing for a congressional hearing. Are you now or have you ever been antisemitic? Are you now or have you ever been anti-Zionist? Are you now or have you ever been a member or fellow traveler of a pro-Palestinian group? Are you prepared to name names?
Sam Levin, UC Berkeley shares 160 names with Trump administration in ‘McCarthy era’ move, The Guardian, September 12, 2025
A few days ago I commended elected officials (First Thoughts on an Assassination) across the political spectrum who in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination call for lowering the temperature and dialing back the rhetoric. I singled out Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and James Comer as notable examples. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox is another. Yesterday he told Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” that “the White House asked us to come on and to talk about this because they’re worried about the escalation that’s happening out there.” Cox did not specify the source of the request from the White House or indicate that the current occupant of the Oval Office intends to dial back his own rhetoric.
Precisely what Ocasio-Cortez, Comer, Cox, and others have mind when they speak of lowering the temperature and dialing back the rhetoric has been notably absent in reports I have seen. Perhaps they have not thought it through themselves. They are, one hopes, aware that while we can agree on the principle, there is bound to be considerable difference of opinion even among people of good will about what specifically lies beyond the pale.
Many of us get carried away from time to time. It would not require an exhaustive search of this space to turn up invective written in precipitious haste that I would prefer to have put differently.* I am aware of this and try to be better. That does not, however, entail restriction to anodyne language or retreat from vigorous dissent and disputation. It will not hold me back from calling a blockhead a blockhead.
Cheyanne M. Daniels, White House urged Gov. Cox to preach nonviolence after Kirk shooting, Politico, September 14, 2025
Political figures with good intentions continue to speak of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. A growing number of countries have recognized Palestine as a state. In a better world I would celebrate these as positive developments. In the world in which we live, they may amount to little more than empty gestures in light of Netanyahu’s declaration last week: “We are going to fulfill our promise that there will be no Palestinian state; this place belongs to us.” He spoke from the Ma’ale Adumim settlement in the West Bank “as he signed an agreement to push ahead with the controversial E1 settlement expansion plan that will cut across West Bank land Palestinians seek for a state.” Around three million Palestinians and about 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank. Look to Gaza if you are wondering what Netanyahu and the fanatics in his governing coalition have in mind for those Palestinians.
Agencies and TOI staff, ‘There will be no Palestinian state’: Netanyahu signs plan for E1 settlement expansion, The Times of Israel, September 11, 2025
Memo from the cinema desk. Water and Sugar (2016), directed by Fariboz Kamkari, is a documentary about Italian cinematographer Carlo Di Palma (1925–2004). Adriana Chiesa Di Palma, his widow, is credited as producer and features prominently in the film. Trailer.
Di Palma’s father repaired and operated cameras; his mother was a flower seller at Rome’s Spanish steps. The family was poor. The documentary’s title comes from his childhood. His mother would put the little boy on the tram to stay dry when it rained. The conductor would let him ride until the rain stopped. When he cried, the conductor stopped the tram and gave him water and sugar to cheer him up.
Di Palma got his start in film at the age of fifteen as an assistant on Luchino Visconti's Ossessione, hired because he knew something about film from working with his father and older men were away fighting in the war. He went on to work with Bertolucci, Antonionni on Red Desert and Blow-up, Woody Allen on Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, Husbands and Wives, and, I think, nine other films, and with other renowned directors of the 20th century dating back to post-World War II Italian neorealist cinema, e.g., Rossellini's Rome, Open City and Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief. He was by all accounts a genius working in black and white and in color.
There is wonderful commentary by directors Bertolucci, Allen, Lina Wertmüller, Wim Wenders, Mira Nair (coincidentally, mother of the present Democratic nominee for mayor of New York), actors Giancarlo Giannini, Michael Caine, Alec Baldwin, and numerous others.
Water and Sugar includes clips from some of the great films of the 20th century, among them scenes it was a pleasure to recognize and remember. I love this kind of thing. A great joy.
Peter Bradshaw, Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, the Colours of Life review – radiant tribute to a cinematic maestro, The Guardian, July 21, 2017
Peter Tonguette, Carlo Di Palma: An Appreciation and a Remembrance, Senses of Cinema, October 2004
Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, the Colours of Life, Film Review
Keep the faith. Hold the line. Stand with Ukraine. yr obdt svt
*Memo from the editorial desk Sept. 16. A minor edit was made in the third paragraph of the section about lowering the temperature and dialing back rhetoric: at the end of the second sentence “to have dialed back” was replaced by “to have put differently”. This better expresses how I see it.