Active Rig Count In North Dakota Up To 31 -- July 20, 2016

Active rigs:

	7/20/2016	07/20/2015	07/20/2014	07/20/2012	07/20/2011
Active Rigs	31	70	195	207	184

RBN Energy: a "spotlight" report on Energy Transfer Partners Midstream & Liquids.

Beating a dead horse: back to the cost of a natural gas pipeline. Remember this post? The SRE natural gas pipeline that California regulators disapproved: 65 miles; $621 million.

An end of an era. Of all the stories I happened to come across in the last 24 hours, this probably affected me the most -- the passing of Garry Marshall. Although his shows were filmed decades ago, these are the shows I grew up with -- "Happy Days," "Laverne & Shirley," "The Odd Couple" -- and the movies, "Pretty Woman."

I can only say that I feel so fortunate to have grown up in the Golden Age of Television, and perhaps the Golden Age of Hollywood, but that's yet to play out.

It's very possible I never would have ended up in California had it not been for television. I grew up in North Dakota, and had spent very little time outside North and/or South Dakota. But an invisible hand pulled (or pushed) me out to California where I went to graduate school (Los Angeles) and ended up spending seven consecutive years in California -- four years in southern California, and three years in what is called northern California.

"Mulholland Drive" and "LA Confidential" are probably closer to the truth regarding the film industry than my myth of Hollywood but that's fine.

*************************************

A Note to the Granddaughters

Without question, Modern Critical Views is perhaps one of the best, if not the best hardcover series on "literary criticism." The series has been around forever and is edited by perhaps the preeminent literary critic of all time, Harold Bloom, a one-man department at Yale:

Bloom, the most original literary critic in America; Bloom, who has been a member of the English department but has divorced it (or has it divorced him?) to become a free-floating ''professor of the humanities''; Bloom, who talks of being an academic pariah but who is so well-connected that he brunches on Sundays with A. Bartlett Giamatti, Yale's departing president. Bloom is a one-man band. For years, he has called himself a Jewish Gnostic.

During the 1960's and 70's, Bloom's hot-blooded readings of the 19th-century Romantic poets helped melt the authority of the New Critics (an intellectually cool group that distrusted Romantic enthusiasms). His dark, agonized, Freudian speculations over the process known as ''literary influence'' - over the ways writers creatively misread and try to outdo their artistic predecessors - became the theme of his career.

Bloom did more than anyone else to add Wallace Stevens to the ''canon'' of the best 20th-century poets, and Stevens's work has since become entrenched in the nation's English departments. Bloom's tastes in more recent poets have been influential as well; John Ashbery, James Merrill and A. R. Ammons are at the top of his list.

Like some Crazy Eddie of lit crit, Bloom has been editing and writing introductions for hundreds of volumes of criticism being published by an outfit called Chelsea House (he explains the project by saying it's ''insane,'' that he can't sleep anyway and that he's outdoing Samuel Johnson). Last summer, he won the rich MacArthur, or so-called ''genius,'' Award.

Most recently, he has begun teaching and writing on Shakespeare and the Hebrew Bible, two literary monoliths outside his areas of academic certification. As a teacher, he's known as sage, genius and comic rolled into one - Zarathustra cum Zero Mostel. 

I have read several in the series. But today, I was blown away to see that Harold Bloom has included Amy Tan among the series, published in 2000.

I had not heard of Amy Tan until a few years ago when Chuck Wilder, proprietor of "Books On Broadway" in Williston, recommended I read The Joy Luck Club. I have yet to read it but now that Amy Tan has made Bloom's inner circle, perhaps I should.

My wife, a daughter of a Japanese woman, born in Japan, is technically Issei, I guess, along witt her mother, since both were born in Japan and emigrated to the United States. Her daughters, though not full-blooded Japanese, would be second-generation, Nisei. And, of course, that would make Arianna, Olivia, and Sophia Sansei. Whatever. I assume they have to be full-blooded Japanese to be considered Issei, Nisei, or or Sansei, but if nothing else, I've ... well, I've digressed.

My wife great up with the Amy Tan books, and loved them because she could identify with Amy Tan her Oriental mother. 

I have fond, fond memories of May's Japanese mother.

**********************************

Amy Tan

From Ben Xu's essay in Amy Tan, Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom, c. 2000:

What the four families in that book, the Woos, Jongs, Jsus, and St. Clairs, have in common is mother-daughter relations. The mothers are all first generation immigrants from mainland China, speaking very little English and remaining cultural aliens in their new world. The daughters are all born and educated in America, some even married to "foreigners." With the microcultural structure of the family, the only means available for mothers to ensure ethnic continuity is to recollect the past and tell tales of what is remembered. 

Wow.