Flu - More Reading

Nothing like airplanes and schools for disease vectors, so Ua and I got a strain of something back to back weekends and it was nasty enough to make me re-think my earlier incredulity about the millions that died in the 1918 influenza pandemic.  The world was a much scarier place before anti-biotics.  Every time I dragged my aching corpse out to do chores I broke into a cold sweat and retreated back under the covers asap, where I devoured some (more) books to keep my mind off the miserableness of it all.  They were some fine books that arrived just in time to save me from what would have been a sure case of Netflix poisoning:

 Wandering God - A study in nomadic spirituality/Morris Berman
I've been wanted to read this ever since I read Berman's Coming to our Senses, which was an electrifying book for me  Wandering God is as excellent, original, and fascinating as the earlier book.  Here Berman builds his case for the change in consciousness from a horizontal alertness associated with hunter-gatherer economies and cultures to a vertically oriented consciousness associated with agricultural economies and civilizations -what he calls the sacred authority complex. Berman is an immensely provocative thinker that will make you look at the world differently after reading him, which is a great gift that he gives the world.  Sometimes you have to give him the benefit of the doubt with some of his conceptual leaps, but I like him the better for not being a dry-as-dust, defend-yourself-from-all-directions academic.

The Scarlet Sisters/Myra McPherson -  The sisters being Victoria Woodhull and Tennesse Claflyn; these were some awe-inspiring Victorian-age gender-rebels, and all-time fearless women.  Victoria was the first woman to run for POTUS, with Frederick Douglas as her running mate, as well as the first woman to address a congressional committee.  Before that, the sisters opened a brokerage on Wall St. in 1872, and started a weekly newspaper where the The Communist Manifesto was published for the first time in the US.  They got called sluts and prostitutes a LOT, of course.  And maybe they were, but who isn't? 

Brown Dog/Jim Harrison - I would have laughed out loud a lot more reading this book if it didn't hurt so much to do so.  There was a lot of subsonic giggling going on.  Who knew there was a (much colder) cultural cousin of Ka'u up in the U.P. (upper peninsula) of Michigan?  A subsistence sort of place let's you see the idiocy of our overly-complex civilization much more clearly, and with a sense of humor because you're not right up entangled in it.  I usually circle most works of fiction sniffing warily, ready to pullback, because there is an awful lot of trashy fiction in the world, but after a few pages with Jim Harrison, I was just thanking and praising whatever for such a writer and beautiful human being.