Month: April 2020

What scares me almost as much as the pandemic itself is the idea that gun owner background checks are up over 40% in the US (where Cheeto in Chief has declared guns sellers an essential service — and this isn’t even including the people stockpiling illegal weapons.) Imagine: a population dumb enough to elect that clueless shit stain of a con man, but also armed to the teeth. Can’t they just stress eat like everyone else instead of prepping for their never-ending civil war?

• International Booker shortlist lead by women, including a 28 year-old debut novelist;
• NAC launches #canadaperforms with Margaret Atwood;
• This list of what your quarantine reading says about you has a great DFW burn at the end;
• Read the John Boyne kid-story-contest winners;
• Some writing prompts to get the rugrats prepped for the next contest;
• Did you want to know more about Thomas Hardy’s second marriage? Finally, your dreams have come true;
• Google map of bookstores willing to deliver;
• Goodnight with Dolly — bedtime stories by everyone’s cool aunt;

Instead of, you know, a real job, as my dad would say. This essay, which gets a little noodly and poetic for my taste, examines the neurological and psychological reasons behind the pain/pleasure divide of writing/having written.

The Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize for his pioneering work in the field of behavioral economics. His research is far-reaching, with many implications about how humans apportion their time and resources, and how they might make different decisions with a different understanding of the mechanisms of happiness. In particular, he divides happiness into two types: experiential happiness and reflective happiness.

These types are what they sound like, more or less. Experiential happiness is the pleasure we take in the moment-to-moment experience of living—moments that, according to neuroscience, last about three seconds and are more or less gone forever. Nonetheless, in aggregate, they constitute the fabric and texture of a life. Reflective—or, variously, in Kahneman’s research, “remembered”—happiness is the pleasure we take in thinking about our lives. This is the happiness that on vacation drives us to visit the Louvre when we would really rather sit at a café drinking red wine. We sacrifice that existential happiness for the prospect of remembering the museum in the future and deriving pleasure from that.

This mechanism also accounts for why we pursue many of our ambitions, and, arguably, for the fact of ambition itself. Ambition, very often, if not always, sacrifices existential happiness at the altar of reflected happiness. What, after all, is something like law school, but a three-year exercise in not having fun, for the sake of living a presumably better life afterward? Paraphrasing Kahneman, for various reasons, some of them neurological and some of them learned, we don’t intuit future experienced happiness as being as meaningful as future remembered/reflected happiness.

Bookstores and libraries have both tried to handle this by promoting a socially-distanced strategy of online engagement, through e-commerce and phone orders for stores and through ebook check outs and other programs for libraries. But it looks like libraries in the States are doing a little more in terms of public engagement. Not sure it’s wise to keep them open, but how do you shut them down given that they act as part of a safety net for a country that doesn’t seem to believe in safety nets? Lots of things being revealed with the rug pulled back, eh? Mostly roaches.

America’s public libraries have led the ranks of “second responders,” stepping up for their communities in times of natural or manmade disasters, like hurricanes, floods, shootings, fires, and big downturns in individual lives.

Throughout all these events, libraries have stayed open, filling in for the kids when their schools closed; offering therapeutic sessions in art or conversation or writing after losses of life; bringing in nurses or social workers when services were unavailable to people; and hiring life-counselors for the homeless, whom they offer shelter and safety during the day.

Today, interventions like those have a ring of simpler days. But libraries have learned from their experience and attention to these previous, pre-pandemic efforts. They are pivoting quickly to new ways of offering services to the public—the core of their mission. When libraries closed their doors abruptly, they immediately opened their digital communications, collaborations, and creative activity to reach their public in ways as novel as the virus that forced them into it.

You can be sure that this is just the beginning. Today libraries are already acting and improvising. Later, they’ll be figuring out what the experience means to their future operations and their role in American communities.

• COVID has heightened racism against Asians;
• Best translated book awards;
• Baek Heena wins the Astrid Lindgren award for kit lit;
• Virtual kidlit event listing;
• Book buddies vs loneliness? No offence, but books are for escaping buddies, etc.;
• Similarly: the rise of the online book club;
• LAT asks the tough questions: if pot dispensaries are considered essential services, why aren’t bookstores?
• Cory Booker wrote a Corona poema;
• Toronto poet laureate, and Bookninja pal Al Moritz, also wrote about COVID, but perhaps in a slightly more considered way;
• What’s your reading horoscope?;