The Post-Partisan Emporium

The Journey to Zero Risk is paradoxically risky Chris Bray Edward Abbey’s burial was a reflection of his life: He asked friends to wrap him in a sleeping bag and bury him in the desert, as illegally as possible, to the sound of gunfire and bagpipes. All of which  they more or less did , apparently minus the bagpipes, stopping at a liquor store (with his body in the back of their truck) to buy some whiskey to pour on the grave. Abbey was another one of those great men who weren’t invariably good men, and his laundry list of wives often didn’t enjoy being married to him. But he lived in pursuit of beauty and with indifference to discomfort and the possibility of death, in ways that show up in most of the stories he told. His life becomes a serial account of a decades-long journey through the arid Southwest, usually undertaken without enough water. Here’s a paragraph from  Desert Solitaire  about a trip through Glen Canyon with a friend: Afterwards as we pack and load the bo...

Literally Figuratively Judd Garrett Have you noticed lately that the word “literally” has slowly morphed to mean “figuratively”, like when someone says, “I literally died laughing.” They did not actually die. They were speaking figuratively, but they used the word “literally”. This is not merely a common grammatical mix-up that has somehow become adopted into our language like “affected” and “effected” or “then” and “than”. This seemingly innocuous substitution is representative of how our collective mindsets have changed; we are now living in a figurative world, and this figurative world has become our new reality. The literal, the authentic no longer matters. The figurative is the only thing that is important these days. No one is interested in the facts, no one is interested in the truth, we are only interested in the narrative and the spin which only alleges a certain version of the truth. Like literally and figuratively, the word “truth” has replaced the word “opinion”. The expres...