Stop! in the name of love

Desperate times can lead to fast, foolish solutions. I’ve been fuming all day since getting the news that the Oregon legislature is trying to push through a bill that would allow the State to raid millions of dollars in funds that individual citizens specifically donated for the arts.

The bill’s big idea, of course, is to spending these contributions on badly needed operating expenses, rather than on the arts. The long-term damage of this tactic is obvious; why should anybody contribute to this fund again, when it can be reallocated at any time to become the State’s mad money? What a galling breach of public trust.

Once again the arts finds itself cast into an unfair dichotomy: arts vs. education, arts vs. health care. It’s a false spectrum that has to be shattered once and for all, but anyway:

Others have sounded the alarm already, including the Oregon Cultural Advocacy Coalition, Art Scatter and Culture Shock, and they all provide us with the means to speak out against this shameful proposal. Please visit these sites for information about what you can do. The outcome of the protests – an outcome which may come as soon as this weekend -- will tell the nation whether Oregon is really run by progressives, as we like to think, or by a panicked passel of yahoos.


Meanwhile, Nancy Lublin has a money-making proposal I can actually support. Based on the fact that the average wedding costs 20K, she says all we have to do is legalize gay marriage and an estimated 60 million megabucks will flood the economy. How….stimulating.

Nancy, I like the way you think. And Cousin Tabitha, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Read your heart out

To fete Oregon’s sesquicentennial in fine style, the Oregon State Library has compiled a list of 150 books with something important to say about our young region. The list includes books for young readers as well as "older."

A delllllllllllicate undertaking, in a state as literary as ours. Once you’ve counted the dead writers and must needs pass into the land of the quick, you’re likely to incite squabbles. But our fearless librarians have forged on undaunted.

Along with the books you’d expect – Ramona the Pest (which is set on Klickitat Street, one block away from where I’m scribbling right now) and The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek for the kids, and Sometimes a Great Notion and Honey in the Horn for the grown-ups – there are some pleasant surprises.

Molly Gloss gets two nods, for The Hearts of Horses and The Jump-off Creek, as does Ursula LeGuin, for The Lathe of Heaven and also for Searoad. There’s a collection of Floyd Skloot’s poems as well as Kim Stafford’s A Thousand Friends of Rain. Most gratifying is to see Chuck Palahniuk represented, even if Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon is surely his least scabrous writing.

No one’s going to be totally happy with such a list, of course. I’m a tad gruntled to see no mention of any graphic novel, a form in which Portland is abundant. And the omission of Tom Spanbauer is perplexing – or not, depending on just how faint of heart you assume a State library organization is likely to be.

Still, it’s a worthy list – one I’ll refer to as I start to work my way through it. After all, to paraphrase James Joyce, it took these authors a hundred years to write all these books, the least I can do is take a hundred to read them.