How I Read at this Moment in Time

MSW — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 04:35:15 +0000

Here’s how my reading goes these days: I have a book, Victor Navasky’s Naming Names, which I’ll comment on elsewhere or another time, but if you don’t know it, is a history of the Communist Hunting HUAC hearings in Hollywood in the early nineteen fifties. Essentially a grim and depressing story of the multiple ways people can betray each other and argue about it for their rest of their lives.

First, I got the book by trading, online, at the terrific site Paperback Book Swap that allows people to list books and trade.

So, I got the book via an online service, and now I am sitting and reading its small-print crisp yellowing paper. Beside me is my two pound Acer Aspire netbook computer. I read about Dalton Trumbo, who did not name names and did some jail time and wrote many famous movies with a “front” because he was blacklisted. Navasky refers to Trumbo’s cigarette holder and thin moustache. I am intrigued. I open the Acer and google Trumbo images and find a hilarious picture of the old guy with the thin moustache and the cigarette holder, writing on a board while in his bathtub. I look him up on Wikipedia. I return to the paperback book and its appalling and wonderful world of the fifties and sixties. I move back and forth, Internet, book, and back.

I expect this is a time of transition, and I have no idea what we’ll be doing in the future. But this is how I am reading right now.

Literature and the Web » Victor Navasky

How I Read at this Moment in Time