TIME FLIES · PRINT ENDURES
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“Marshal South and the Ghost Mountain Chronicles”
The extraordinary tale of old-school “primitivist” Marshal South. In the 1930s and 40s, he and his wife Tanya made the monumental decision to move to a hand-made home on a rocky outcropping in California’s desolate, yet eerily beautiful Anza Borrego desert. They started a family and lived there entirely “off the grid” for 19 years. […]
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1960s library pamphlet: “Opportunity beckons”
My wife found this pristine California library pamphlet from the 1960s in a box of memorabilia from the old barn. The pamphlet is folded in a way that offers a sneak peek of the illustrations within. A hand beckons from behind a door of “opportunity.” Unfolding the sheet reveals that the owner of the hand […]
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“Killers of the Flower Moon”
Black gold. Texas tea. So goes the old “Beverly Hillbillies” sitcom rhyme. In this case, the tea is underground in Oklahoma, in the early days of American oil exploitation. Years before, the Osage native American tribe had been invaded and driven out of their ancestral lands into a remote corner of Oklahoma which was thought […]
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“Everybody Lies”
The Google search box is the new confessional box for a digital age. A place where deepest fears and forbidden wishes find new, unfiltered expression. In this new confessional, we don’t seek salvation— we seek information. And the questions we ask it often reveal things about us that were previously hidden, or misunderstood. Subtitled, “Big […]
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“Rise of the Robots”
What I’m reading : “Rise of the Robots,” by Martin Ford. Humans have a love-hate relationship with automation. We love automation when it gives us dishwashers, washing machines, and robot vacuum cleaners to relieve the drudgery of menial labors. But we hate automation when it enables telemarketers to endlessly spam our phones, corporations to displace […]
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Books I skipped this week
I had every intention of reading these books, but after reading the first some-odd pages, I became consumed in other things, and skipped…. Is it acceptable to recommend a book one hasn’t read? That’s neither here nor there in this moment. I liked what I read in the opening pages of each book. For reasons, […]
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“A Gentleman in Moscow”
Imagine being a member of the wealthy aristocracy in a grand city in the early 20th century. Your days and nights are filled with social encounters and clever repartee in every breathing moment. Servants are all around you, never betraying any hint of resentment at their confinement to a lower station, nor anything but utter […]
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“The Secret of Thunder Mountain”
The photos tell the story of this vintage adventure from 1952. Set in the deserts of the American Southwest, at the dawn of the nuclear era. A land of grit and desolation, where bold and wild characters search for rocks worth more than gold. Fran Striker’s journalistic writing style lends credence to the stark comic […]
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“Little Fires Everywhere”
Where do we follow the rules, and where do we justify breaking them? Do our pasts determine what we deserve in the future? And is it ever possible to leave your past behind? These are some of the questions I hope the novel raises. —Celeste Ng, from the Penguin Readers Guide Little Fires Everywhere, by […]
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“Lost in a good game”
Is it worse for young people to experience killing and death IRL (in real life), or in a video game? This is not merely an academic question. Deranged individuals now regularly commit IRL mass shootings using IRL weapons of war to murder innocent people. Yet those weapons of war only exist because they are used […]
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“What is not yours is not yours”
I’m loving this collection of dreamlike short stories that turns on the idea of keys as a metaphor for our hidden perceptions. A refreshing stream of clear, evocative, sparse yet mesmerizing prose that ebbs and flows into ever deeper locks of subconscious meaning and insight as each story unfolds. The tales are interlocking, but in […]
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“Barracoon”
The story of Oluale Kossola, survivor of the last known slave ship to cross the Atlantic, told in his own words. In 1927, famed anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston spent three months with the then-eighty-six-year-old Lewis to preserve his story. Kossola vividly describes being captured by a rival village in Africa as a young […]
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“The Soul of an Octopus”
Strange and beautiful, weirdly intelligent, cold yet emotive, octopuses are in a word, fascinating. Octopuses see and feel the world around them in profoundly different ways then we do. Each tentacle has its own network of neurons—a mind of its own. What I love about this book is how the author describes her interactions with […]
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“The Man in the High Castle”
Conquered. Occupied. Stripped of power and privilege. Dick’s classic 1962 novel imagines life in an America that lost World War II. The Nazis and Japanese fascists have conquered the United States and divided it into territories, the spoils of war, over which they rule supreme. The Pacific States are controlled by fascist Japan– the South […]
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“Cadillac Desert”
California has had abundant rainfall this year. Reservoirs are full and snowpacks are impressive. We’ve had so much rain that complaining about it has become de rigeur. So why am I reading this 30-year old treatise on “the American West and its disappearing water”? Partly because I recently spent a week in the Mojave desert […]
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“Zardoz”
A gigantic stone head levitates over a futuristic grass-covered landscape, spewing guns from its cavernous mouth to its bloodthirsty followers below. Sean Connery (a.k.a. the original James Bond) is among them as Zed the Exterminator. He’s bare-chested in a red loincloth, and sports a black ponytail and 1970s handlebar moustache. A dazzling menage of bizarre […]
