The Apostrophe Blog
Tonight, I am finishing up a novel called Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey. Harvey won the latest Booker Prize for her excellent slim novel, Orbital. Last week I read a superb non-fiction book, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson; it shed new, compelling light on the 1955 lynching of the young Emmett Till a little over three months before I was born. I will turn seventy in a mere nine months. This history and my age both remind me how little the situation in this country really and truly has changed something Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of The 1619 Project, reminded us all during her excellent Oregon Historical Society lecture last Tuesday eve.
These books I have been reading recently are all ones I get from the public library—you know that socialist institution that allows us to pool and share resources with one another over and over again. It is beyond easy, the way I put the volumes I want on hold and wait in line until my turn in the queue comes up. A win-win, as they say. A system that makes complete and utter sense.
On the last day of last year, a friend and I visited the very much analog and old-school Tsunami Books in Eugene, Oregon. Accolades from their website: “In terms of book selection, Tsunami Books is one of the finest bookstores on the west coast. Yet books are only a sliver of the story…Tsunami has come to reflect the values, diverse interests, and moral compasses of an entire region. ” ~ Michael McGriff (Poet) A sign in their window caught my eye: “Our app is a book.”
These days, when the techno-fascists want to pretend that everything that ails a society, a country, this country, the whole world can be solved by technology, artificial intelligence, or a goddamn app on a smartphone, it felt good to be reminded that creativity and knowledge, joy and wisdom, insights and understanding can still easily be found between a humble book’s two covers. In spite of all the ugliness, the greed, the cruelty, the narcissism, the utter chaos and thus insanity, we can still read—and thus think—for ourselves. Now, more than ever, in this perilous moment, I think this is needed. So tune out the noise and quiet the mind. Refuse more and more to squander your precious attention on their addictive and destructive social media feeds curated by their rigged and often predatory algorithms. Keep asking questions and keep demanding answers. Refuse to obey in advance, as Timothy Snyder urges us, in On Tyranny. And remember they would not be going to these lengths to suppress and repress if their ideas and goals were what most people in this country truly want.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
- We Can Still Have (Some) Nice Things - February 19, 2025
- Keep on reading in the free (for now) world… - February 12, 2025
- Publication News: Passager - February 10, 2025
