Ahh, I well remember my long-ago Fridays in publishing, when we sat at our desks until noon and then hopped a jitney out of town or flew to Tortola. (Well, people with houses in the Hamptons hopped a jitney; I took the train back to Brooklyn and spent the weekend looking out my third-floor window into the inaccessible row of back gardens behind my apartment, but same-same.)
In deference to that most noble tradition, Summer Fridays, this post will be readable in a few short chunks as the wi-fi on the bus flickers in and out or the captain makes you turn off your electronic device.
First, a simple haiku (actually, a senryu, since, unlike true haiku, this one doesn’t hint at the season):
Opening a book
before take-off: real paper
never powers down.
Next, a lowku (so-called because I couldn’t even stick to the simple traditional U.S. haiku rules of 5-7-5, but instead had to borrow a syllable from the first line to use in the third). And I don’t so much hint at the season as hurl it out there, but hey, it’s Friday morning and I have an imaginary jitney to catch:
Ingredients
for a perfect summer day:
Lemonade. Hammock. Book.
Finally, a comic-strip musing on the recent buzz that dystopia is dead, long live mysteries or contemporary realistic YA fiction or cowboy space opera or whatever genre will next explode/resurge:
Bookselling Life #3: The End of Dystopia? by Elizabeth Bluemle
by: EHB

(My previous bookselling life movies can be found here and here.)