How This Blog Came Into Being

This blog came into being yesterday after I had breakfast with Jason Smith, proprietor of The Book Table (Oak Park, IL), a bookstore which won the 2010 Best Bookstore accolade from The Chicago Reader.  We were banding about ideas concerning energy and the environment, and Jason says, "You should hear this thing I heard about the Netherlands.  They are planning for the next 200 years.  Which cities will have to be abandoned..."

Okay, I was intrigued.  Right up my alley.  I am an insurance agent, a stock market observer and investor, and a writer.  My claim to fame would be my friendship with Saul Bellow, who oversaw my development as a writer for 20 years or so.  Jason, I would describe as the thinking man's dropout.  Though technically, he is not a dropout, he never went to college.  But if you stop there, you miss the fact that his father is a Ph.D. from Yale, that Jason went to the University of Chicago Lab School, and that he spends most of his free time reading books from his store.  Well-read?  I'd say so.  Plainly, he could get a Ph.D. if that were his design.  It was his design to have a great bookstore, which he and his wife Rachel clearly succeeded in putting together.

Jason is one of those areligious Jews, who could be viewed a traitor his to sect, reminding me of a title I recently bought at his store, FDR, a Traitor to his Class.  Though pleased to be counted among intelligent Jews, he's not a particular fan of Israel, and would be happiest if it became a pluralistic, non-religious state.  He was raised in the liberal traditions of intelligent Jews at the University of Chicago, and votes mostly with the Democrats.  But his main concern, expressed at breakfast, was that of a small Republican businessman.  He was concerned about the funding of his large inventory of books, which turns over once a year, and cash flow.

My grandfathers were an FDR Democrat and a staunch Republican (perhaps not so much for Coolidge and Hoover as against Roosevelt), and I myself have voted for both parties.  I voted for Reagan in 1980 and Clinton in 1992, and am a fan of FDR and Eisenhower.  But I am a little bit prickly about being identified with either party.  My novel did include a character who was writing a science fiction, which of course, describes my own, forward-thinking bent.  But I think it is also just part of the times.  Science fiction is one of the important developments of the twentieth century (an off-shoot of the progress of science itself), and to avoid it you are turning a blind eye to the moment we live in.  Jane Austen refers to barouche-landau carriages, what would be so surprising about writing about a Lexus hybrid?

And it was Jason's comment about the Netherlands that set me to thinking.