Letter to the Editor / Civilized Living: Miss Manners

from Columbia River Reader August 2022

Dispatches from the Discovery Trail ~ Episode 16

Reading People+Place Then and Now

I read an interesting story in CRR about Long-Bell developing what is now Longview, Wash. I am new to your city and would like to learn more of the history. Could you recommend a book that would give a accurate account of its beginning?

Monty Williams Longview, Wash.

Until CRRPress’s own book, The Long View: A Planned City and America’s Last Frontier, by Hal Calbom, comes out Spring 2023, we recommend R.A. Long’s Planned City: The Story of Longview, by John McClelland, Jr.

Newcomers to Longview love CRR

We moved to Longview this year. We love the Reader. It has really helped us to get to know this great town. We do not get out often to places that carry the Reader. Is there any way to get a subscription that can be delivered or mailed to our house? Thank you so much for your great publication.

Abigail & Roger Gary

Editor’s note: Longview, Wash. Regularly-refilled pick-up locations are listed on page 8. For readers who would like the convenience of home or office delivery, CRR offers an annual subscription program, the Collectors Club. Subscriptions begin with the next issue and are renewable on the anniversary date. See page 2. Since their inquiry, the Garys have subscribed. CRR welcomes them to Longview...and to CRR’s Collectors Club ... they’ll never miss an issue!

By Judith Martin, Nicholas Ivor Martin and Jacobina Martin

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Should the man or the woman have the view of the dining room? GENTLE READER: Why? What are we looking at? There are all sorts of gender-based and sexist rules about where one should sit in a restaurant. (Miss Manners assumes that that is what we are talking about, but confesses that it took her a moment to get there.) For example, there is a rule that requires the (presumably male) person facing the room at large to survey it in case of danger. There is another that suggests the (presumably male) date only face his (presumably female) date, and the wall, in order not to be distracted by better prospects. Yet another suggests that the woman survey the room so that she can better enjoy and comment on the view -- undoubtedly rooted in her not having anything else about which to talk. Rather than defer to any of these outdated stereotypes, Miss Manners suggests that restaurant guests choose their seat based on preferences and practicalities, politely duking it out amongst themselves when they get their table. Miss Manners’ own preference is to sit at her dining table at home — for the very practical reason of being better able to hear her guests’ conversation unfettered by din.

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