Broke out the City Light's Bookstore t-shirt today in honor of the great beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of the legendary bookshop, who passed away this week at age 101. RIP LF. A legendary poet and purveyor of literature. He will be missed.
Just finished The Places in Between by Rory Stewart. This was the third time I've read this excellent book about Stewart's walk across Afghanistan two months after the Taliban fell. The cultural interactions are fascinating. Also, perspective is key. Afghani villagers often suffer through sub zero degree winters in mud walled buildings with no electricity, little heat and little food. Extreme violence is always lurking. Reading this during a Texas Winter Storm encouraged self-reflection. Now I'm focused on The Ministry For The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson which is blowing my mind.
Back to work today after a week off due to The Great Winter Storm of 2021. It wasn't the snow or ice that was especially devastating. Rather, it was the sub zero temperatures that wreaked havoc on Texas infrastructure. I've lived in Texas for 24 years and had never seen it so cold. Below zero temps are an extreme rarity in this part of the country.
The Texas electrical grid couldn't handle it. My Mom's house lost power and was dark for over 36 hours. I drove out on the terrible roads to pick my Mom and Sister up so they could stay at our house which amazingly never lost power. The Jeep made traveling these roads possible.
This grid failure exposed the fallacies of energy privatization and the greed of un-regulated capitalism. All the loss of power was entirely preventable. The grid was supposed to be winterized after our last big storm in 2011. But nothing was done. Now our Republican government officials try to cast blame elsewhere, unless they're too busy fleeing to Cancun to ride out the storm while their constituents literally in some cases freeze to death. But the Republicans have been governing Texas for 30 years. There's no one else to blame.
My family was lucky. We never lost power or water. We live next to a police and fire station so our neighborhood was not subject to the rolling blackouts.We had stocked up on groceries right before the storm. I had cleared out the mud and dirt around our water meter and had the water key ready in case we needed to shut down the water. I had gassed up both vehicles. We had winterized as much as we could. We had collected water in coolers and water bottles.
We had one pipe that led to the kitchen sink freeze up but we caught it early. I was able to put a small space heater, borrowed from my Mom, under the sink next to the wall which de-thawed the pipe before it burst. That little space heater saved us from a real hassle and expense. My kids got to spend quality time with their Grandmother and Aunt. We had a vehicle that could travel on horrible road conditions. We were lucky. Others were not.
A couple of weeks ago I finished Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. The book is well known and is considered one of the great works of modern American literature. It won the National Book Award in 1992 and a big Hollywood movie adaptation with Matt Damon was made. I picked it up months back on the clearance shelf at Half Price Books for two bucks. What an excellent steal.
All the Pretty Horses is grand and epic although that kind of sneaks up on you. McCarthy lets the scenery slowly engulf you and the book becomes much like one of the epic poems of old. It was another one of those rare books that once done, I just had to sit in my easy chair and exhale.
I greatly enjoyed it. I live in Texas, but the 1940's west Texas described seemed almost as foreign and exotic to me as central Afghanistan. Mexico seemed a different world. This was a nice, powerful read.
So right now I'm reading a couple of books. I'm still plowing through Marcel Proust's Swann's Way in my long form way of reading four pages a day. I hope to be done with Proust by April at this pace. I'm also re-reading Rory Stewart's The Places in Between (hence the Afghanistan reference earlier). I'm also Kindling Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future. I'm sure I'll ruminate on those here down the road.
i know i haven't posted much here lately. maybe i'm just lazy. i can't even bring myself to properly punctuate these sentences. i'm not really depressed or anything. it does make me sad that one of my few committed readers, my Grandfather, died a year ago. hard to get motivated. i will try to do better. not that it really matters all that much. thanks for reading.