A Midsummer’s Dream: The Finale

Hurricane Ike claimed yet another innocent victim. Midsummer Books, in Galveston’s historical Strand district, drowned in eight feet of mucky brine that destroyed its eclectic collection of literature and homey interior. 

For years Galveston’s only new bookseller, Midsummer Books provided a literary mecca for Isle readers, tourists, academics and otherwise freethinkers. Unlike those corporate megastores that peddle everything from Kafka to coffee to CDs to comics to cosmetics, Midsummer Books carried — and displayed prominently –the latest fiction and fact from both people of letters and promising scribes.

Its shelves featured the top picks of the inspired Book Sense Indie Booksellers, not the “esteemed” New York Times Book Review, which too often hucks tripe from such literary gnomes as James Patterson, Danielle Steele, and Joel Osteen.  

Not that either Midsummer Books or its Galveston Isle home teemed with liberal agenda — this remains Texas, after all. But Midsummer Books never followed the popular but the profound. Camus not Coulter. Its shelves offered books on a wide variety of subjects including history, science, biography, architecture, philosophy, literature, natural history and Texas lore that I missed in Borders or B&N, simply because of the sheer volume of mass pulp that those stories purveyed. Midsummer Books shucked fluff to expose literary fruits. Sure, the store carried entertaining books, but those with droll sensibilities such as the best dog cartoons from The New Yorker, graphic novels (not comic books) and a lovely children’s collection.

Midsummer Books felt — and smelled — as a bookstore should. Walk in and you whiffed vellum anticipation mixed with the mustiness of Galveston humidity. The display shelves and tables were dark wood. Comfortable mismatched chairs and rugs over the hardwood floors invited browsing. And the orange bookstore cat snoozed comfortably near the poetry section (I do hope the kitty escaped safely).

Whenever another independent bookstore dies, America loses an irreplaceable aesthetic soul which every author, artist, academic. antiquarian, avid reader and citizen must mourn. Independent bookstores, no matter what their specialty, remain as vital to freedom of speech in this nation as the First Amendment — and as in the case of Denver’s eminent Tattered Cover often are called upon to defend it. 

These usually mom-and-pop booksellers wage the David-Goliath fight daily for independence of thought, creation, words, and views as well as for financial survival. Hometown newspapers no longer reflect local points of view, but rather the editorial and financial considerations of distant corporate conglomerates. Local TV and radio outlets focus on ad revenue for corporate owners which leads to sensational and nonsensical (and frequently politically extreme) news and public affairs programming. 

Instead, local independent booksellers, detached from the editorial flaccidity of corporate boardrooms, keep the dialogue and debate of current events alive. With profit margins teetering toward nonexistence, the indie book store becomes the true American commons of debate, discourse, democracy and dissent.

I last visited Galveston Island two days before Hurricane Ike hit. I normally enjoy lunch at my favorite restaurant Gaido’s, walk the seawall or beach, and finally settle down to browsing at Midsummer Books. That day I ran late, scratching the walk and the bookstore off my list. Since I planned to return to the Isle just two weeks later, I’d stop by Midsummer Books then, I promised.

But independent bookstores often die from reasons much less violent than hurricanes but frequently just as suddenly. For those of us who love them, the loss remains as traumatic. I missed Midsummer Books that day and now will forever. 

Please visit your local independent bookseller today. The literacy (and liberty) you save, may be your own!

 

Independent Bookseller Resources Links:

• American Booksellers Association
• IndieBound
• Tattered Cover – Denver, Co.

 

Local Houston Independent Bookstore Links:

• Brazos Bookstore 
• Blue Willow Bookshop
• Murder By The Book
• River Oaks Bookstore
• Shrine of the Black Madonna Cultural Center and Bookstore
• Light of Islam Bookstore

 

PLEASE NOTE: I did not include bookstores that sell used books. If you know of other Houston-area or national independent bookstore links, please add them in the comment sections.  Thanks!!

“Lost: The Sequel”

Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Ike pummeled the upper Texas coast, upwards of 400 of its residents cannot be located, according to today’s Houston Chronicle. Hopefully, many of the missing still may be without the power to contact worried family. Or some evacuees chose not to return. Or those who could afford to jet to Aspen or Paris to ride out the storm took a relaxing side trip before returning.

Or, as many family, friends and officials fear, maybe they were swept away into the Gulf of Mexico, Galveston Bay or buried in the new sand drifts carved by Ike. 

The Chronicle reported that the body of Gail Ettenger, 58, a Bolivar resident who attempted to ride out the storm, washed up 12 days later in a debris pile in Chambers County — 10 miles inland from her home.

As Ike hit land, the Coast Guard rescued about 100 Bolivar residents who remained behind, thinking the storm would take a southerly course. But as the hurricane intensified at least 150 people were still stranded on the peninsula, the Coast Guard reported.

They most likely weren’t the only beach dwellers taken by surprise by Ike’s furious path. Newscasts predicted ike to be a “minor” Category 2, a “weakling” many had ridden out without hassle before. But Ike pumped up into a Cat 3 packing Cat 4 storm surges when it punched in. Those who gambled may have lost everything.

Abandoned and overturned cars along marshes, debris fields and flood waters may harbor more ominous clues. Were the vehicles merely pushed by the surge from the safety of their garages, or were they transporting late evacuees who met the floods head on?

Many of the doomed areas rely on limited volunteer fire departments to spearhead rescues and they are literally swamped (no pun) with search and rescue — or recovery — efforts.  The professional local first responders also find resources exhausted.  Even so, the Chronicle reports that the Galveston County Sheriff’s office denied assistance from the respected non-profit Texas EquuSearch SAR teams from coming in to help locate some of the 200 lost souls in that county alone, even though many of the missings’ relatives requested such assistance. EquuSearch, by the way, has spearheaded search-and-rescue operations for missing persons internationally.

Who knows how many of the transient populations that live in Galveston and coastal compounds cannot be accounted for since no one possibly cares about them?

Yes, who really cares about them all — the transients and the other 400 missing souls? How come the national news hasn’t jumped on this story like a pit bull with lipstick?

Is it that the missing or dead are invisible — wiped out to sea or buried in tsunami-like debris piles or buried in unmarked graves underneath sand dunes? If we had those visibly shocking bloated bodies floating in what were once yards and streets of post-Katrina New Orleans, maybe Anderson Cooper would focus a camera on one as he motored by embedded with SAR teams? 

Perhaps Ike chose to leave no bodies, at least none we can find at present. Maybe no floating corpses exist. Maybe they will never be found. 

Nevertheless, their story needs to be told. They must not be forgotten because I see no reports on national news about the Lost 400.  I hear no debated words condemning the continuing ignominious and ignoramusful response of the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA to another natural disaster. That the Department of Homeland Security fails to make the disappearance of 400 US residents a top priority should send shivers of terror down our collective spines.

Unfortunately, these Lost 400 are invisible. No one talks about them on the network or cable news. Friends outside the area do not ask about the future of the Lost 400. That’s why I think we need to make a TV series about those still missing from Hurricane Ike. Let’s make it a sequel of the popular, Emmy-winning TV drama Lost.  We can call it Lost: The 400 about a bunch of people from all walks of life who, instead of crash landing in an airplane on a deserted island, are swept away from a populated island into parts unknown.

Maybe if we knew their names, faces, relationships, families, hopes and dreams as we do the fictional TV characters, the fan site blogs would pop up to help locate them, their plight would be discussed around water coolers at work, and the 24/7 TV news cycle would yak them up — of course, only as long as the ratings remain respectable.

© 2008 winkingbuddha.com

Enlighten Up, Already!

 

Enlightenment leads Buddhists to Nirvana.  However, here in the post-Hurricane Ike Houston area more than one-half million of us wait not for enlightenment but for any sliver of illumination to lead us to the bathroom after sundown.

The Galveston area is without essential utilities such as electricity, potable water, sewage (except that which is in streets and homes). The University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston’s largest medical facility as well as its largest employer, is shut, perhaps for months (I know, I tried unsuccessfully to get a prescription renewed from my doctor there). Texas A&M University’s marine branch will be land locked at College Station for at least a semester. Neighboring communities are in the same boat –literally with incongruous the sailing vessels in streets and yards.

In Houston, CenterPoint Energy, the regulated power company that handles power grids (or in our case, gridlocks), reports that more than 500,000 of residents are still without electricity, two weeks after Hurricane Ike attacked. According to a local TV report, CenterPoint may not have power restored to all its customers until November, so deep frying that Thanksgiving turkey outside may become a nutritional necessity rather than a Texas epicurean tradition.

By the way, CenterPoint Energy, one of the nation’s largest regulated energy utilities, is the step sibling of Reliant Energy, a deregulated electricity seller and wholesaler.  In other words, Reliant Energy is what you get when you flip your switch. CenterPoint gets Reliant Energy there. Therefore, I assume that neither Reliant Stadium — home of the Houston Texans so-called football team — nor Reliant Center — big profit-making convention center — both named for that unregulated power family ever worried about food rotting in their concession stands.

Zen teaches that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. However, in Houston the journey toward our post-Ike re-enlightment sometimes falls several steps behind.

Fractured trees abound in every Houston neighborhood. One clean-up team, pruning broken limbs to assist a CenterPoint fix-it crew, accidently severed a functional electric line. The hot wire fell on to the roof of a house which immediately caught fire, thus bringing long-lost illumination temporarily to the neighborhood until the fire department doused the blaze. On the plus side, that house escaped any storm surge flooding during Hurricane Ike.