One book read:

Press, Eyal.  Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times.  New York: Picador, 2013.

Another begun:

Soldatov, Andrei and Irina Borogan. The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB.  New York: Public Affairs Books, 2010.

Online publisher blurbs plus abundant media and reader reviews would seem to make adding my own voice redundant.

My inclination is to wean myself away from the World Wide Web and my own exuberant but increasingly pointless networking, Facebook “chatyping”, and self-promotion, but not even a writer’s (musician’s, photographer’s) retreat comes easily as I’ve built and invested in quite a world online.

Of course I’ve learned that one might starve online as well as anywhere else.

My library continues to grow, and despite my owning a Kindle, I still prefer hardcovers for shelf reference and permanence with the thin possibility of seeing the collection developed as a specialized kernel or, more modestly, as a home’s central library-and-theater location.  In a small apartment, the whole thing IS a library, theater, studio, office, bar, garden, grill, kitchen, and lounge.

🙂

Lucky enough to own my time today, not comfortably but just the way it is, I wonder if I have misspent it.  Working on that, of course, is a part of what retreat (to the slower pace of real space plus the enjoyment of real space relationships) might be about.

It’s hard telling about that, though, the online habits have been so extensively and thoroughly developed.

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