A new start

Jenn and I wanted to see the inauguration near my office in Soho—but preferably not in a bar. Jenn thought of calling McNally Jackson, one of our favorite independent bookstores. It turned out that they planned to set up a big screen with a TV projector in their cafe. It was the perfect place to see the inauguration of a president who, among other things, is one of only a handful of presidents who have been really good writers. (Lincoln, Jefferson, and Teddy Roosevelt are the others that I think of first.)

Once the singing and the oath of office and the inaugural address were over, the store gave out free copies of Obama’s two books, plus the collection Change We Can Believe In. I’m old enough to remember Jerry Ford’s inaugural, when he said “our long national nightmare is over.” Those words seemed to apply even more today than they did then.

Flight 1549

It was cold outside on Saturday, and I had a cold myself, but I wanted to get a look at US Airways flight 1549, which made a miraculous emergency landing on the Hudson last Thursday. NY1 had reported that the plane had been towed to Battery Park, but when I got there it was nowhere to be seen.

I walked a few blocks up the river, past the Holocaust museum and the boat harbor, and finally came upon a collection of fire trucks, police cars, EMT vans, hazmat vehicles, and other emergency response vehicles. The scene was blocked off with metal sawhorses and yellow tape, and tourists and New Yorkers were crowded around with their digital cameras, trying to get a glimpse of the plane. This was the best view I could get myself. I suppose I should have guessed that once the emergency was over all the emergency personnel in the city would gather around.

Go, Jenn!

My partner Jenn, whose blog is A Bookseller’s Tale, sold her first short story the other day. Her story “The Executioner” will appear in the second volume of the sci-fi anthology Warrior Wisewoman. You go!

Open Society by George Soros

George Soros has a new book out about the current global financial meltdown. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m finding that his older book Open Society, published in 2000, contains some timely warnings about what we’re going through. Soros thought then that the world was headed for a global crisis, and he believed that it would be triggered not by national policies or the actions of particular corporations but by the financial system itself. He thought at first that the Asian currency crisis of 1997-1999 would mark the crash. Though he freely admits he was wrong about that, his belief that factors such as inflated housing prices, reckless lending, and poorly regulated new securities would lead to catastrophe now looks prescient.

Open Society, however, is less about Soros’ financial wizardry than it is about his life as a philanthropist. The book is intended to be his central work, and it is a disarming combination of enormous ambition and surprising humility. Soros believes his Open Society Institute can accomplish what national governments, the World Bank, and the UN cannot in terms of advancing democracy, human rights, and the free flow of ideas. Yet he is far from believing that he himself has all the answers. As he describes it, each of the foundations in his international network has wide latitude to set its own priorities. The central headquarters appears to exist more to coordinate than to direct them.

Soros is so far from worshiping certainty that he has turned fallibility itself into a philosophical principle. Unlike the truths of science, he argues, the truths of human life are subject to what he calls reflexivity. Just as a physicist cannot determine the position of an electron without changing that position, each of us changes society through our actions and beliefs, and in an open society we are constantly reassessing and renegotiating the values we live by.

A closed society lives by a ruling ideology that stifles dissent, whether that ideology is Communism or (a greater threat today) what Soros calls market fundamentalism, the belief that the bottom line is or should the measure of all that is good. An open society makes it possible for us to disagree and to make the mistakes we need to be creative and to find solutions to the problems that face us.

From blog to book

I was pleased to see the other day that The Blog of Henry David Thoreau is now a book. Editor Greg Perry has a fine eye for the gems to be found in Thoreau’s Journal, and although it’s a pleasure to see them one at a time on his website, I’m sure there are insights to be found from seeing them together. I’ve ordered my copy and look forward to delving into it.

The Journal may be Thoreau’s greatest work, which would made it one of the greatest ever produced by an American. Yet I’m sure there are few readers who will ever burrow through all 14 volumes of the 1906 edition.

But just as Thoreau used the Journal as the source for for his own published works, since his death many others have mined it to create other works. These include I to Myself, Men of Concord, Thoreau’s World, Elevating Ourselves, Of Woodland Pools, Spring-Holes & Ditches, and a couple of projects of my own. I am grateful whenever someone finds a new way to explore the Journal and shed light on a different aspect of Thoreau’s great enterprise.