Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, January 03, 2019

Pages Not Screens

It's been a lovely break so far, my first in a couple of years not haunted by the thresher of insomnia. I've spent much of the term reading pages, not screens. I was reading Vile Days for a bit, an anthology of Gary Indiana's art columns from the mid-80s, then turned to a recent anthology of his short stories, Fish That Only Want to Kiss, many of which were already collected in Scar Tissue and in the chapbook White Trash Boulevard which I read right after I discovered his first novel Horse Crazy back in the early 90s. I always loved Indiana's voice, a kind of campy yankee Thomas Bernhard. A random whim sent me back to re-read good ol' Lest Darkness Fall in the tub a couple of days ago. That nudged me to pull down Robert Graves' Count Belisarius from the shelf, which I mean to read next, tho' right now I'm fifty pages into Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. After that, if my break isn't up, I think I may read Tales from Earthsea or N.K. Jemisin's new short story anthology. I haven't read in this spastic spontaneous sort of way in years, not since grad school, really. It is just as delightful as I remember.

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