April 2020

SF/F Commentary, The Bookening

Dreaming of Uncle Hugo’s

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Bookstores bookstores bookstores! All book dorks love them, and yet not enough of us have easy access to them. Up here in Bemidji, the closest thing we have to a bookstore is the used games and DVD store, which has a fairly meh book collection and a business name that doesn’t really fit what it is, and the comic book store, which, as you’d guess, mostly carries comics and has a fairly small but reasonably OK book collection (the comics collection is awesome, though). Beyond that, the next best thing is a trip to Park Rapids for Beagle & Wolf or to Brainerd for Emily’s or CatTale’s, all decent small bookstores. Otherwise, you gotta go to Duluth or Minneapolis for a really big bookstore experience! Since I’m stuck up here in Bemidji during a pandemic, I’ve started reminiscing about some of my favorite bookstores in Minnesota — of which they are many. When it comes right down to it, though, there is one bookstore that stands above them all: Uncle Hugo’s!

SF/F Commentary

The Arts are the Glue that Holds Civilization Together

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Something I have been thinking about a lot since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and its profound impact on American (and global) society is the place of the arts in our everyday lives. So many of us are binge watching Netflix or other services, reading far more than we used to, downloading comics or writing our own stories, perusing fine art or setting up easels of our own, or doing all manner of creative and artsy things, both for amusement and to keep ourselves busy. I’ve been cramming in a metric ton (officially weight) of Star Trek across four decades of the franchise, blogging (as I am here), and cataloguing my books (not so artsy, but still nice). For myself, this has been part of an effort to keep me from the more destructive behaviors I might engage in (ranting on Twitter, for example) and to help me adjust to what will surely be 2 or 3 months (at least) of near total physical isolation for others. And in doing all of this and seeing all of what is happening around me, I’ve started to answer a crucial question out loud to myself: why do the arts matter yesterday, today, and tomorrow? And I think I’ve got a decent answer to that. I’d argue that the arts are the glue that holds civilization together on both the personal, national, and global scale. It’s the thing that allow us to express ourselves, to find joy and relief, to be human and explore what that even means. The arts are everything.

Announcements

The Blog Challenge Project Begins!

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Yesterday, I put some feelers out to see if folks would be interested in a collective of bloggers and booktubers to support and encourage one another to create new content. And if the existence of this post is any indication, a lot of folks responded! So, I’m officially announcing this here: The Blog Challenge Project begins! What is the Blog Challenge Project? In short, the project aims to create a community of bloggers and booktubers who will encourage one another to create content, support one another in their blogging ventures, and provide a giant list of prompts and ideas for posts that folks can complete on their own time or challenge one another to explore. The idea is to provide some positivity and community in a time of immense stress. You can click the link to read the full info page and see our current list of prompts! Anyone may join the project, either by tagging along or requesting to be part of the official pages, which comes with access to a special Discord server! So who is going to get involved?

Random Stuff

I Have A Mouth, and I Want to Scream

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If there’s one thing that I’ve been trying to do in the last three weeks of self-isolation, it’s doing almost anything to distract myself from the nightmare timeline that we’re living in. While everything has been chaos in the United States since at least 2010 (probably as early as 2000), the alternate timeline in which all reason has been purged from U.S. society began in earnest in 2016 and has reached astronomical proportions of absolute batshittery since the emergence of COVID-19 as a major threat to our way of life. Everything from the administration refusing to take it seriously, failing over and over again to get the ball rolling on creating more supply to meet medical demand, the absolutely mind-boggling audacity of the admin telling state governors they shouldn’t get aid because they weren’t nice enough to the Orange Mussolini, to states outright declaring the need for inter-state collaboration because the fed refuses to do its job, and on and on and on. It’s honestly impossible to keep up with the absolute shitshow that is this administration and its response to the pandemic.

Book Reviews

A Not Quite History: The Great Courses’ “The History of Ancient Egypt”

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For the past week, I’ve been listening to a series of lectures from The Great Courses on the history of ancient Egypt, which I must have grabbed on an Audible sale many moons ago. The series is presented by Dr. Bob Brier, a notable Egyptologist and mummy expert. I say notable because much of his popularity stems from his extensive popular work with mummies, including reconstructing tombs for museum exhibits, reproducing the Egyptian mummification process, and other mummy-friendly things; he also has some 30 years of experience “in the field.” Given that the presenter of these lectures is most notable for his popular work, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the lectures themselves are packaged accordingly. Yet, in listening to these lectures, I found myself wondering about those credentials. An ardent fan of ancient Egypt and apparent mummy expert Brier certainly is, but do these lectures represent someone who could be called an expert of ancient Egypt’s history? The answer is “not really,” and I don’t know if that’s due to The Great Courses’ educational philosophy (this is my first TGC experience) or Brier’s insistence on a casual, heavily anecdotal, and meandering series of lectures. Whatever the reason behind it, I have to say that I have been greatly disappointed in this series. I assumed going in that I would get a comprehensive history of ancient Egypt with at least a degree of scholarly depth, but overall, the lectures are devoid of what I’d call “useful material.” Indeed, I don’t know that I’ve learned anything I couldn’t have easily picked up by reading the wiki page (Brier’s personal anecdotes aside), which to me seems to decrease the value of these lectures as a “history of Ancient Egypt.” Mind you, Brier is noticeably enthusiastic about his subject; indeed, it’s clear from his voice and anecdotes that he absolutely loves ancient Egypt. Yet, that enthusiasm, for me, doesn’t translate to a history of an entire culture.

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