The Clinton Foundation

The first person you should ask, where do you get your information, is yourself.

It's a really good question to an even better answer.

I get information from people I admire, like Mary Risley who said the other day of San Francisco, we're in the middle of a gold rush.

That made so much sense to me. I now look at real estate For Sale signs in San Francisco with new perspective. When one of them flaps in the wind as one did yesterday in front of a 2-bedroom, 1-bath Victorian condo on Baker between Washington & Clay, I calculated that each flap pushed the sales price of the condo up 1/4 of 1%.

Most of the people I admire, however, are no longer living. And had I known them I might not have liked them as much as I like Mary Risley. 

Wallace Stevens, a writer I admire immensely, our great French poet, died in 1955 when I was five years old and had never read a poem.

Admiring his poems as much as I do now, having gotten so much information from them over the years, I wish Wallace Stevens was alive so I could ask him, where do you get your information?

The remarkable piece by Steve Kemper on Stevens' actual life is all the information I need to know; that had I asked Wallace Stevens where he got his information I wouldn't have received the information I was seeking:

http://www.stevekemper.net/searching_for_wallace_stevens_66805.htm

It seems that Wallace Stevens was a man so completed by what he was doing--by making such wonderful poems--that he wanted or needed virtually no one other than himself.

Reading the big story front page story in the New York Times yesterday about The Clinton Foundation, I came to the conclusion that people who think they can actually improve the world are the neediest people in the world, and virtually all of them have a great need to act as if they aren't.