Local interests

The weather is getting cooler, and they have high hopes that this will dampen the fires. I hope they're right.

Went to the opening of a school based health clinic this morning, which was nice. 10, 000 students and their siblings will be served by this clinic, in an area that is criminally underserved. There are more underinsured children in the San Fernando Valley than anywhere else in the United States. Health Care should be available and accessible to everyone. I am a diehard Democrat, although I'm looking disgustedly at my party and at the part lines, and I want to know why its not a priority, why health care and education and social services are something that my party feels comfortable compromising on. I want to know why we didn't put up a fight over the passage of No Child Left Behind.

I also wanted to talk, briefly, about being a girl in this society, because my snippet yesterday touched a nerve in kernezelda and it's not that I want to explain myself so much as talk about where that comes from.

( Ranting about being a girl - in which I sound arrogant, and political, and like I'm towing the party line like no one's ever heard any of these complaints before )

Fires are raging, and we should all huddle in corners and read books

Because someone's subject line reminded me.

I talk about Wallace Stegner, because he was a big, bold, brassy symbol of Western writing. He is not, in any way shape or form a brassy writer, lyrical and practical and sometimes even a little wistful, but not flamboyant, and also not dull, not endless. He's the end all be all of Western writers, and while there are new ones who shimmer and shine, he's the pinnacle.

But, and I say this with emphasis, let's not forget Norman MacLean in the deifing of Stegner. Because A River Runs Through It is a purely beautiful book, and Young Men and Fire is also, fighting nature and growing up, and how those things do seem to interweave and intertwine.

And fire, I guess is the theme, because I think of the scene in Always, which I know is a merely adequate Spielberg movie that I nevertheless loved passionately as a teenager because it's about death and loss and bravery and Audrey Hepburn was an angel without wings, but I giggle even now thinking about John Goodman sitting under his unbrella, watching the planes try and put out a little fire on the runway, getting pelted with the chemical dump because Richard Dreyfuss is a ghost with a sense of humor.

ETA: LJ seems to be having some peculiar issues today. My posts that had comments, no longer have comments. Not all of them, but some, and it's odd. And yesterday it deleted, or tried to delete a post that hadn't posted yet.