Alaskan Range: Bookstores vs. Internet
Greg Hill says that e-books and other communication toys are not going to go away, but "for now I'm content with print, which requires no electricity to operate, will endure for centuries, and never "goes down," when the Internet glitches.''
"The modern mind is in complete disarray," Albert Camus opined a half century ago. "Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold." Makes you wonder how Camus would handle today's Internet and the new "must-have" communication toys. Would he bemoan the facts that e-book readers and iPads need a steady infusion of electricity, require frequent updating, grow quickly obsolete, and he can't actually buy e-books for his reader; he buys licenses to view them. Moreover, they can't be loaned to someone else's reader, and the e-book provider can edit or withdraw the e-books at their discretion when the reader connects to the provider's website.
Such devices are certainly useful, convenient, and not going away, but for now I'm content with print, which requires no electricity to operate, will endure for centuries, and never "goes down," when the Internet glitches. And as John Balguy, the 18th century English divine put it, "Contentment is a pearl of great price, and whoever procures it at the expense of ten thousand desires makes a wise and happy purchase."
That's how a venture to Forget-Me-Not Books worked out. This used bookstore raises money for the vibrant Literacy Council of Alaska, which has been doing good work across the state for decades. Make Forget-Me-Not your FaceBook friend or check their website (www.forget-me-notbooks.com) and learn about their frequent sales, like last week's half-price on history and vintage books. I walked in with $25 and left with an armload of reading pleasure: eight books ranging from "Pickwick Papers," my favorite Charles Dickens work, to a collection of hilariously creepy Gahan Wilson cartoons.
Regular readers will recognize some of my predilections when I report also acquiring a collection of jokes, "A Guy Walks into a Bar …", an autobiography by one of the Band of Brothers characters, "Easy Company Soldier," and the surprisingly moving "The World According to Mr. Rogers." Fred Rogers is a personal hero, and one of the wisest men I've encountered, saying things like, "When I say it's you I like, I'm talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed."
Walt Kelly, whose "The Pogo Papers" I also acquired from Forget-Me-Not Books, is right there with Fred Rogers in my personal pantheon of Great Men. Kelly's "Pogo" comic strip featured a possum who physically resembled Kelly himself, and assorted critters in Georgia's Okeefenokee Swamp. Along with "Peanuts," "Pogo" is widely considered the best comic strip ever. Both were post-WWII products, but where "Peanuts" was introspective and gently humorous, "Pogo" was raucous and focused on big issues of the day. Kelly was hard to peg in some respects, supporting both the Truman and Eisenhower presidential campaigns, and lambasting JFK, LBJ, and Nixon. He insisted he opposed "the extreme Right, the extreme Left, and the extreme Middle," and he frequently boosted his possum's fictional presidential campaigns as a way of urging citizens to vote.
Kelly was an outspoken supporter of free speech and opponent of segregation and McCarthyism in a time when doing so was dangerous. It's worth noting since National Banned Books Week is underway. "Pogo Papers" contains the strips in which he satirized powerful Senator Joe McCarthy, turning him into a vicious, mean-spirited bobcat named Simple J. Malarkey. Kelly knew the power of laughter can reveal political venality of all flavors of candidacy, and his comics helped prove it.
Pogo was often banned, and I'll be reading from it when I join other First Amendment defenders at Forget-Me-Not Books' Banned Book Reading to read our favorite banned books. I'll cover Kelly's famous "Word to the Fore" from "Pogo Papers," in which he wrote, "There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things that make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground … we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us."
