Our cat Milo is a pretty good reader despite his limited vocabulary. He’s been seen prowling the shelves at Bookman’s (a favorite used bookstore in Arizona), the Pima County Public Library at both the Himmel Park and Woods Memorial branches, and the library book sale at Country Club and Grant, which has been postponed since the pandemic hit. And his favorite local book store with new releases and interesting gift items (and where he’s done most of his Christmas shopping the last several years) is Antigone Books on 4th Avenue near downtown Tucson.
Since 2006 he’s kept a record of books read with some notes and quotes sprinkled in and I’ve published them on my visual art website for you to peruse at your leisure (please feel free to browse the art while you’re there). Below are quotes from five of his favorites of 2020 and the entire list can be found here.
“Humankind: A Hopeful History” Rutger Bergman
What makes us so eager to believe in our own corruption? Why does veneer theory keep returning in so many permutations? I suspect it has a lot to do with convenience. In a weird way, to believe in our own sinful nature is comforting. It provides a kind of absolution. Because if most people are bad, then engagement and resistance aren’t worth the effort.
Belief in humankind’s sinful nature also provides a tidy explanation for the existence of evil. When confronted with hatred or selfishness, you can tell yourself, ‘Oh, well, that’s just human nature.’ But if you believe that people are essentially good, you have to question why evil exists at all. It implies that engagement and resistance are worthwhile, and it imposes an obligation to act.
“The Blazing World” Siri Hustvedt
I begged her to give it up. Show your work now, I said. Take it to the cooperative here in Red Hook. Forget about pseudonyms and figments, your ironies and philosophies. Who cares about the incestuous art world of dupes and phonies. But Harry couldn’t give it up. Drowning, she clung fiercely to that small, splintered piece of mast bobbing in the ocean we call justice. There is no justice, of course, or very little of it, and counting on it as a life raft is a big mistake.
“Night of the Jaguar” Michael Gruber
“Now, intelligence is rather more complex than people imagine. With us, it’s the ability to manipulate abstract symbols. That’s what we prize above all else, nearly to the exclusion of all else, with the result that we often put in charge of our civilization people who have absolutely no concrete intelligence at all, who are in fact entirely cut off from real life––economists and such. The greatest virtue of real science, in contrast, is that it constantly throws nature into your face, messy, solid, and complex nature, which often makes a nonsense of all one’s airy-fairy abstractions. Obviously, real education would draw out the particular intelligence of every individual, but we don’t so that. We think we need abstract symbol manipulators, and so we try to produce them en masse, and fail, and toss the failures into the dustbin…and, of course, there are modes of intelligence, broadly defined, of which our culture knows absolutely nothing. My mum was always going on about that, the truly remarkable range of what different peoples choose to do with their brains.”
“The Overstory” Richard Powers
“The psyche’s job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we’ll behave in any situation. We’re all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right. But even when the fog is pointed out, we’re no better at navigating through it.”
“Nobody’s Fool” Richard Russo
This late in the year, the well-scrubbed. well-mannered windbreaker men all wore sweaters beneath their jackets, and many wore scarves at the insistence of their wives, who, since their husbands’ retirement, had come to treat them like school-bound children, making sure their scarves were wrapped high and snug about their wattled throats, jackets zipped up as far as they would go. Toasty was the word these wives used. Toasty warm. In response to being treated like children, these husbands retaliated by behaving like children, unzipping and unwrapping as soon as they were safely out of sight. They shared the child’s natural aversion to heavy winter wear and could not be induced to don bulky overcoats until it snowed and the snow stayed.
And, just so you don’t think he’s such a serious cat all the time, he also enjoys psychobilly noir…you know, the rotting corpse, corn dog eating, freak show and fireworks stand greasy novels that your pappy had to hide away in his underwear drawer type of book. Here’s a paragraph from Joe R. Lansdale’s Freezer Burn:
“Perhaps, he thought, I am an alien abductee, and a moment from now they’ll have me on a cold table with salad tongs spreading my butt cheeks and a cold wet alien finger up my ass. You hear about alien abductions, the asshole is always a prime target. And they like to jack people off for sperm. He thought he could handle that part better than the finger up the ass. It might even be kind of restful.”
And here is today’s cartoon philosophy moment.
Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter…feel free to share with others and happy reading for 2021!
I love that you shop at Antigone’s! Such a great bookstore and a local treasure.