AL CAPONE would have turned 100 this week, a milestone few people outside of his adopted home of Chicago have noted.

In a country that feeds with such frenzy on its popular past, this is strange. Over the past fifteen years, mainstream American culture has been greedily recreating the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and now even the ’80s. There are signs that our popular historical vision has begun to re-include World War II, if only for the breadth of its spectacle and the opportunity to make easy moral pronouncements. But the Jazz Age, prohibition and the Great Depression have disappeared, it seems, from our screens, large and small.

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I WAS IN WASHINGTON, about two blocks from the White House, in a meeting of writers, when an administrator came in from the hallway and said there had been “a terrorist event” in New York. The administrator knew we all knew people in the city.  Once she learned more details, she’d let us know.

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VIOLENCE IS WIDESPREAD IN THIS CULTURE, also in our drama. This is irrefutable, and it would be a waste of space going into the Roadrunner-Coyote type of example here. It’s pervasive, people complain. Serious or comic, ironic or melodramatic, too many writers–critics imply–turn to random bloodletting as an easy way out, a give-me-the-gun or exploding-head denouement. It’s desensitizing, they say, boring, and worse (and here they’re judging not only the writer but possibly his or her entire genre), it’s cheap. Why, they say, can’t we have more uplifting stories about relationships? Why aren’t our films and novels more like our real lives, which are rather average?

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Published in Outside, November 1998 as “Scratch the Island from the Map”

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THE PLANE COMES EVERY TWO WEEKS–weather permitting. The flight out is five hours from the Coast Guard base at Kodiak Island in an old C-130 Hercules, around 1500 miles. If fog socks in the airstrip or the rain stalls over the tip of the chain or the williwaws are blowing, you’ve got a five hour trip back. Tom Gauntt, our pilot, thinks we’ve got a fifty-fifty shot this morning.

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a speech for the Villa Gillet in Lyon, France

The subject I was asked to think about was the relationship between my writing and my country, the United States.  At first I thought the question was too large to answer.  After thinking hard about it, I came up with an even more impossible question:  What do I feel about the United States?  Do I love my country, like it, despise it, what?

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