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Day 5: April 20, 2020 Bookstores and Reading in Place

If you want to read more while sheltering in place, you could go about it by reading a little quite often or a lot all at once very quickly. You could even play the long game and build a reading habit so you will do it everyday without thinking about it. But maybe you should think about reading everyday, because reading affords busy people moments of “forced meditation” to slow down and reflect. This mini-documentary on bookstores offers these perspectives and more on how to read more, faster, and better when so many more forms of passive entertainment are constantly vying for our attention. In between interviews and thought experiments with productivity gurus, university professors, and the world’s fastest reader are luscious pans and drone shots of the most beautiful bookstores and cities across Europe and South America to take your breath away.

When you’re ready to come back down from traveling the world from a safe distance, consider checking in on your local bookstores. They’d always been there for us to supply us with good reads, good company, and good-enough last-minute gifts. Now, many are relying on our donations to keep them afloat. Since opening its doors in 1960, Marcus Books, the oldest black-owned bookstore in America, has been the lifeblood of Oakland’s proud and vibrant communities of color. According to this interview with Marcus Books’ co-owner Blanche Richardson, like most independent bookstores its troubles began long before the pandemic, with Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and gentrification encroaching on its business and locale. Things then took a sharp downturn, with the conveniences of centralized online shopping and free or fat shipping even harder to resist during a total lockdown. It may be worthwhile to look into which of your favorite local businesses you can support from home before you start running low on things.

But if you haven’t been in the mood to open a book since all of this started, you’re not alone. This article in the Chronicles of Higher Education has found that professors and students alike have been struggling to manage their usual amount of reading due to stress and monotony. This universal struggle with focus and communication has been encouraging some students and professors to revisit old material for a deeper dive and diversify their modes of learning instead, as well as to practice deeper empathy and compassion with one another. To sample the likes of such empathy and kindness, take a moment to listen to author George Saunders’ heartfelt letter to his creative writing students at Syracuse University (from 5:50; transcript included).

Jerkins, Morgan. “The Campaign That Saved the Oldest Black Bookstore in America.” Zora (blog). Medium. Published April 16, 2020.

Max Joseph. 2019. “BOOKSTORES: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content.” April 23, 2019. YouTube Video.

Pettit, Emma. “A Side Effect of the Covid-19 Pandemic? Reading Got a Lot Harder.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 20, 2020.

Strayed, Cheryl. “Everything is Always Keep Changing.” Sugar Calling. Produced by The New York Times. April 3, 2020. Podcast. 41:16.

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Day 4: April 18, 2020 On Knowing Thyself

Youtube Originals. 2020. “David Sedaris: On Being an Open Book | BookTube.” April 16, 2020. YouTube Video. In this YouTube Original series episode hosted by Joel Kim Booster among others, guest author David Sedaris opens up about his lessons and success with characteristic wit and candor. I’ve been a fan of David’s for years. What strike me about him are his unflinching self-awareness and self-assuredness. He recalls being a student of visual arts at the Art Institute in Chicago and realizing he’ll never be great at it. So he quit and eventually started teaching writing there instead. He is unafraid to admit he is rich and doesn’t care for gifts that don’t go with his beautiful home (“if you want me to keep it, give me something good!”), and you love him for it. You always want to hear what he has to say because you know he will always tell you the truth (“there were people who said [I] had no right to write about my sister’s suicide. Well, I can’t write about my own.”). Finally, he leaves us with the one takeaway from his lifetime of writing, and that is to never be lazy. If something is hard to write about, it is probably worth writing about.

Mayer, Jane. “How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-in-Chief.” The New Yorker Magazine, April 20, 2020. This was an unbearably long litany of ways in which the senate majority leader has lied, swindled, and even married his way into power, incurring irreparable damage to the environment and our democracy. Living by the maxim “you can’t get in trouble for what you don’t say,” McConnell has quietly adhered to his personal legacy projects and very little else throughout his career. “Who do you think you are?” has never been a more pointed question, and I’m not sure McConnell himself has an answer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “1837: Cambridge, MA (excerpt from ‘The American Scholar’)” Lapham’s Quarterly 11, no. 1 (2018): 39. In this excerpt, Emerson argues that nature and the soul are of the same source but opposite--essentially, they are mirror images of one another. Nature follows no laws other than its own, while our understanding of nature follows our minds’ order of operations: we isolate our observations, recognize patterns in chaos, and divine rules and meanings from them. To Emerson, to “know thyself” is to become students of nature.

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Day 3: April 17, 2020 The Platform (2019)

Gaztelu-Urrutia, Galder, dir. 2019. The Platform. Accessed April 8, 2020, on Netflix: This. Was. Sick. In every sense of the word. You will be engrossed, and you will be grossed out. Each floor of this dystopian correctional facility is occupied by a pair of inmates, each with their own reason for being there and one item they were permitted to bring in. Once daily, a platform piled high with everyone’s favorite foods is lowered down its center; those on top eat well and those lower down do not--some, not at all. After a month, each pair of inmates wakes up on a different floor. In another month, they will wake up on yet another. With such ruthless and clever premise, the film explores human desperation, group sabotage, and shady governments alongside a litany of inequities present in our world today. The film seems to climax at a revolt led by a bookish volunteer Goreng (Ivan Massague) and his faithful sidekick (Emilio Buale Coka), only to descend into a twist--from which point viewers are left aghast and gasping for sense and meaning long after it is over. 

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Day 2: April 16, 2020 Birds and Tiny Rooms

The Art Institute of Chicago, “The Thorne Miniature Rooms: Pennsylvania Kitchen, Japanese Interior, French Salon” Youtube videos, 2:37; 3:24; 3:39 (respectively), Apr 13, 2020: Three delightful stop motion videos panning in for closer looks at three examples from the museum’s Miniature Room collection. Each room is a 1” to 1’ scale miniature of period rooms meticulously crafted for historical and aesthetic accuracy by Chicago miniature artist and socialite Narcissa Niblack Thorne (1882-1966). These videos focus on individual features, like the height and configuration of a door, and lay animated intricate paper cut-outs over them for scale and example scenarios. The experience is all very whimsical. And why shouldn’t it be? They’re tiny rooms from the past, frozen in the basement of a museum! Even though these rooms are unoccupied, their adorable petite-ness and accompanying sound effects and stop-motion trivia invite you into the space and period they represent with a sense of intimacy that I’d missed while viewing them in person last June.

Peabody, Lizzie. “Birds, Birds, Birds!” Produced by PRX. Sidedoor: A Podcast from the Smithsonian. April 14, 2020. Podcast, 27:21: Sidedoor ushers you through the Smithsonian’s very own side door for a closer look at its treasures, many of which are off-display. It is a true celebration of my two favorite modes of learning: podcasts and museums. In this episode, we are invited outdoors for some socially-distanced bird watching with the host Lizzie and guest conservation biologist Pete Marra, whose genuine passion for birds can be measured in the number of times he interrupts himself to point them out as they come and go. After listening, I went for a run outside with birds on my mind. I was delighted by the number and variety of birds I encountered along the way: a robin, a blue jay, four chickadees (unconfirmed), and a duck couple just casually sitting by the side of the road. Marra remarked that nearly 3 billion birds had gone missing in the last fifty years. I wondered if the recent sheltering-in-place of humans have allowed birds and other critters to thrive alongside coyotes that have apparently taken over a few miles up north in deserted San Francisco. I’ll be counting for more of my South Bay bird neighbors on my daily sanity outings.

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Day 1: April 15, 2020 Periodicals

The New Yorker, April 13, 2020 Issue

Ariel Levy, “A Missionary on Trial” (reporter at large): A white Christian woman from America is accused of causing the deaths of malnourished children at her feeding rehabilitation center in Uganda. In this article, Levy explores post-colonial white savior complex, ethical ambiguity in assigning blame when the sick die receiving last resort care, and steep ambivalence with which the locals regard NGOs and their services. Most locals mistake such NGOs to be hospitals with real doctors and nurses. More often, they are short-staffed rehab centers filling immediate needs with no bandwidth (or motivation, depending on who you ask) to follow up or attack the root of the problem. To some, this reality is proof that international charities and volunteers consider their work in third world countries as self-gratifying projects rather than earnest vocations.

Peter Schjedahl, Mortality and the old masters. (art scene): Schjedahl is one of my favorite art critics to read, which is why it saddens me to know he is currently quarantining from the virus with advanced lung cancer. In this piece, he recalls studying Velazquez’s “Las Meninas” (1656) in the Prado shortly after receiving his cancer diagnosis. Now stuck at home months later, he ponders the creative essence in the works of the Old Masters, art history’s most iconic painters and sculptors before the 1800s. Perhaps their talent was forged in the hellish fires of the plagues, civil unrest, and actual fires rampant in their day and repeating in ours. How will surviving today’s global pandemic color our experience of their works in museums (with luck) someday soon?

Casey Cep, The Radical Faith of Dorothy Day. (books): Reviews of multiple Dorothy Day biographies wrapped up in Cep’s deliciously tangled yarn of her life as an activist, anarchist, and a Catholic. Day grew up poor and fought against poverty and racism, but also against abortion rights and birth control (both of which she had used before her conversion at age 30) with equal fervor. Weighing such contradictions, liberals and believers alike are contesting the Church's steps toward her canonization. This is where her biographies become crucial. When I was a Jesuit Volunteer, I’d noticed Day’s quotes adorning the walls of other volunteers’ homes and retreat centers. It seemed everyone came in knowing who she was and it was just too late for me to ask. Reading this was a welcome education--gratifying, even--to know people can be fiercely dedicated and dichotomous in their fight for a better world.

Dan Chiasson, Joyelle McSweeney’s Poetry of Catastrophe (books): A review of phonetically biting (those T’s C’s and X’s, ma’am!!) and viscerally cutting sonnets written by a poet who is pregnant again after losing a previous child so soon after birth. Poetry has never been my go-to but after reading this piece by Chiasson, I may try to get my hands on a copy soon. In “Toxicon and Arachne” (Nightboat), McSweeney’s metaphors are chillingly suited for the pandemic; they illustrate a mood of anger, grief, self-blaming, and doomsaying that I can taste like blood on my teeth from a cut on the inside of my lip--wincing but with great relish. Based on Chiasson’s descriptions and the excerpts he chose to examine, I couldn’t help but picture the illustrations in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, whose obsession with the grotesque manifested with jarring grace and serenity in decadent black ink (always black ink!), accompanying her lines in print. If only Aubrey, who died in 1898, could conjure hand grenades, nuclear fallout, and modern surgical equipment from thin air.

Doreen St. Felix, “The Crass Pleasures of ‘Tiger King’” (TV): ...Honestly, even after reading this review, I couldn’t tell you anything about this wildly popular true crime series that you haven’t already gathered from all the memes. Chances are, you’d already seen it and feel strongly some way about it. While I had a hard time grasping the plot and intrigue (which I suspect had to do with my unshakable disinterest in the subject matter and not at all with St. Felix’s writing) I did marvel at our ability to find comfort in the strangest places even in these most bizarre times. 

Tessa Hadley, “The Other One” (fiction): At twelve, Heloise loses her father in a car crash. This is how she and her mother find out about his affair--the crash also involved his lover and her friend. When the woman she believes to be the friend of her father’s lover (and the sole survivor of that fateful crash) enters her life at a dinner party 30 years later, she feels a cosmic connection to her. She keeps this revelation to herself until she finds out through a chain of serendipitous events that the woman isn’t who she thought she was. Side note: The story itself is fairly straightforward and easy to appreciate on its own, but the follow up interview Hadley gave on this story online tops it off beautifully--I strongly recommend reading both in tandem!