the U-505

Chicago Celebrates Father’s Day Weekend: 104 shot, 14 Fatalities

Have you been desensitized to Chicago?

warning… death is about to happen

It’s been decades since I been to the windy city , got to hear some really blues

also walked in history

No, I’m not desensitized to what’s happening in Chicago for I see the problem

I say a few words about escapism

I hear the term bandied about as if it’s a bad thing. As if “escapist” fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds themselves in.

If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn’t you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.

JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

Ever been in a book mobile?

Those people like books and they liked the books being read!.

They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed kid who loved to read, they would talk to me about the books I was reading They treated me as another reader, nothing less or more, which meant they treated me with respect. Was dad who always had the time to take me to the book mobile.

I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old

Here is a picture of a public library in Detroit

our clearest example of slow-motion downfall of a great city, not to barbarians, but to our democratically elected economic politics.

The chairs and lights were stripped out, and the books were left to rot.

Be it the 505 or statues

those are lessons from history

What makes a Great library?

there’s something in them that will piss off everyone

EQUALLY!