For this week’s scribble, Colleen related to us this interesting review she read of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea by Stephen Marche, a postmodern novel of an imaginary place. Here’s my attempt at starting something similar:
Kim’s travelogue of the Amelian coast has always held an ambivalent position for the little country’s imagination as it puts Amel in a problematic status within our own imagination, that of the world-at-large. For as much as it has brought the land into the ken of awareness, literary — and in many other senses beside — it has forever defined the country within this framework of fundamental agonistic tumult. And as it’s been that epic, mythic melodrama that Amel came into celebrity, concomitant with Kim’s own rising star, the essential lack of mooring in literal truth has given way to an elemental literary veracity that perhaps in some way has filtered down into empirical, historical reality. The subsequent bizarre recursion between public and private repercussions in Kim, Amelian politicians, Cortland, and other Amelian writers, artists, artisans, and even Conde Nast publications has thus led to the infamous Gordian knot of political identity, journalistic integrity, and fictive epistemology that now accompanies any critical discussion of the tiny Mediterranean country. I propose here that the way to navigate beyond the morass is through a consideration past Kim’s coast reveries into the country’s largely untouched — and unpopulated — heartland.
Dana and I went to our first parenting class last night, an hour and a half session on Harvey Karp’s techniques to soothe your child called 
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