jeffy

How'd it get to be December?

We went and saw John Gorka at the Tractor Tavern on Veterans Day. We have all of his albums. I'd come to think of him as being a little over-earnest, but after seeing him live I'm hearing a lot of the humor that I must have not been getting before. His stage persona was really funny. Plus I have huge respect for someone who plays a show that with a few exceptions was all audience requests.

I see I never even got around to writing about seeing Wendell Berry. It was just a couple of nights after the election. I took the bus into Seattle (there's a commute-time route that starts where I work and ends right downtown.) and walked up Madison to the church where he was speaking. They had large parts of the church blocked off when I got there, but by the time B met me and he started his reading, they'd opened it all up and every seat in the place was filled. Berry spoke in a soft slow voice with just a slight seasoning of a southern accent from his Kentucky home. He read a long passage from his latest novel, Hannah Coulter. It was set around the second world war and told how Hannah came to fall in love with and marry her husband, how she became pregnant shortly before he went off to war and how he did not return. In the wake of the election it was pure solace to hear this gentle gifted writer remind us not only that life continues unabated despite the rise and fall of political fortunes, but that the world still demands our participation in the hard work of keeping civilization civilized.