Hello {{first_name | Reader}},
I’ve just posted a new Low Visibility Ahead entry, “Yet Another Riff on Mortality.”
“Ever since the baseball star Ted Williams’s head was cut off and frozen in the hope that medical science could one day restore his body, his youth, and his .400 batting average, I’ve been worried by the thought that I might live forever.…”
You can read the rest on my website at johnrember.com/blog/yet-another-riff-on-mortality.
Reading About Old Ketchum
I am among a dwindling number of students who attended the old pink brutalist structure known as Ketchum Elementary School. It sat where Giacobbi Square sits now, and I went from first grade to eighth grade there. I’ve written several entries in Journal of the Plague Years about that experience, and a week ago I read them to an audience at The Community Library in Ketchum. It was a history lesson that will never make it into the history books, but you can access it with the link below.
I’d like to thank Martha and Jenny and the rest of the Library staff, and the Library itself. I noted that I’ve been checking books out of that library for 70-odd (very odd) years, and of all the educational institutions I’ve attended, it has been the most influential. My education began and will end at The Community Library, the place that taught me to love books.
The recording of the reading is now available at The Community Library's Event Archive.
What I’m Reading
I have two recommendations this week. The first is a 1968 coming-of-age novel, Red Sky at Morning, by Richard Bradford. Set in New Mexico in 1944, this book shows how eloquent, understanding, and intelligent an adolescent narrator can be about his world. I credit it with showing me how to write about my own adolescence and preserve the deep look at the world it afforded me.
The second is a bit shameful. I have been reading Anthony Berkeley, a once-popular, very British writer of between-the-wars mystery novels. I paid 99 cents for 1,734 pages of reading, which is as good an explanation as any of authorial poverty. Berkeley, whom I had never encountered before as a reader (or as a person), is an excellent writer, a wonderful puzzle-plot technician, and a keen observer of a lost aristocratic world. His books give insight into the unconscious confidence-cum-ignorance and misogyny of 20s and 30s London, and I found them cautionary tales for America in the Trump era.
If you’re an independent bookstore owner, please know that I’m urging my readers and my friends to patronize independent bookstores as much as possible, and if Anthony Berkeley had published anything this century, I’d be telling them to buy his books from you.
I’m sorry for owning a Kindle, and I’m sorry to be a writer in the current publishing climate, and I’m sorry that Anthony Berkeley is dead. I’m sorry about a lot of other things that I feel helpless to do anything about, but we’ll leave those for another newsletter.
Take care,
John
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An otter track in this morning’s snow just off the deck