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Stephen Sparks

@ssparks.bsky.social

“To disappear, but not completely, so that you can know it.” - Elias Canetti Point Reyes Books (pointreyesbooks.bsky.social) & Wayfinder Bookshop in Marin County, CA | Bad at email

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Stephen Sparks@ssparks.bsky.social · 2d ago

A lot of people prefer to log on to get pissed off. I find it salutary to do it the old-fashioned analog way: by reading books like @parismarx.com's forthcoming Hyperscale, an expose on what our tech overlords are stealing from us in their quest for ever more compute.

A picture of Paris Marx's forthcoming book, Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech's Data Empires.
Stephen Sparks@ssparks.bsky.social · last wk.

There's new Alice Oswald coming: “I’m looking for the voice of poetry before it knows it is poetry, when it is still improvising itself out of human emergency and memory and the song of the seed-sower and the bone violin... The word poetry is not wild enough to hold them all."

Rhapsody: A Manifesto

A daring, genre-defying work of nonfiction from one of our greatest poets. Alice Oswald goes in search of poetry in its original, wildest form—before it was written down, before it belonged to a single voice—and finds it still speaking all around us. “I’m looking for the voice of poetry before it knows it is poetry, when it is still improvising itself out of human emergency and memory and the song of the seed-sower and the bone violin. . . . The word poetry is not wild enough to hold them all,” she writes. What begins as an attempt to “interview” Homer becomes a wide-ranging exploration of an anonymous tradition that exists beyond authorship, spanning a world of singers, storytellers, mourners, and listeners, of nightingales, grasshoppers, and rivers. Zigzagging through ballads, riddles, pibrochs, drama, interviews, artificial intelligence, and sonnets, Rhapsody is a restless, miraculous exploration of poetry in its most vital form, and a resounding manifesto for the oral tradition. At once intimate and expansive, Oswald invites us to listen to the voices that shape us, and to recognize poetry not as a solitary, written art, but as a communal, essential human inheritance.

ptreyesbooks.com

Stephen Sparks@ssparks.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"What lore of a last extraction would get passed down to the next generation staring into a new abyss, this one blasted out by a force of a far graver magnitude, this one infinitely wider and deeper, a plunder of all things that made the human race human?"

Welcome to California: land of plunder and hypocrisy | Mark Arax

From gold to water, California’s wealth was built on extraction. The AI boom is reviving an old question: who pays the price?

theguardian.com

Stephen Sparks@ssparks.bsky.social · 2mo ago

For the past few years, I've judged a nonfiction book prize and the contemporary trend of using what I can only refer to as "podcast voice" in writing is not at all a style I enjoy reading.

Stephen Sparks@ssparks.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I love Keith Waldrop's 'Light While There is Light' so much that I ignored the publication date and put it on the staff picks the moment it arrived. (Forgive me, @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social!)

Light While There is Light: An American History

A moving poetic memoir about a family on the fringes of religion and society, this unforgettable story about a mother's destructive involvement with Christian fundamentalism pulls the curtain back on the darker side of American religious experience.Keith Waldrop's account of his mid-twentieth-century Midwestern upbringing opens a window on a uniquely American landscape of desolation and desire. Waldrop's mother, central to the book, was a devout Christian, consumed with the question of just what a Christian was. Divorced from his father—a railway man, a Mason, coming and going with the Santa Fe railroad, then gone—she moves from place to place and from sect to sect, suffering migraines and speaking in tongues, teaching piano, and sinking ever deeper into apocalyptic reveries about tribulations lying in store and the advent of Christ's return. Then there are Waldrop's siblings: his sister on the hunt for a husband, and his loud, lounging, scapegrace older brothers in search of the next dollar and a good time, cooking up scams and leaving a mess behind. As for Waldrop, the narrator of what he describes as a fictional memoir, he looks back at those days with a peculiar detachment of his own, compassionate, quietly humorous at times, in light of which the simple facts assume a stark, near hallucinatory clarity, while scenes of life spool by like a home movie to no sound. "Neither the joys of heaven nor hell's worst prospects," Waldrop writes, "provide as forceful a motive as the mere emptiness of the world."In Light While There Is Light, Waldrop writes in a tradition that extends back to Hawthorne, Poe, and Dreiser, as he reveals the fear, madness, and destruction lurking behind the makeshift and make-believe of American life.

ptreyesbooks.com

Stephen Sparks@ssparks.bsky.social · 3mo ago

My dad's cousin, a man who had "more bad ideas than most people have ideas," passed away this week. I hadn't seen him since I was a teenager, but this fond reminiscence in his local paper (the Ocracoke Observer) certainly makes me wish I'd gotten to know him a little better.

Alton Scarborough: 1940 to 2026

Al Scarborough has sailed on. Stories, no doubt, will continue to be told. Some of them will even be mostly true…

ocracokeobserver.com

Stephen Sparks@ssparks.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Replace "newspaper" with "bookstore" and this gets at the heart of what makes good bookstores valuable. (This is from Becca Rothfeld's piece on the undoing of the WaPo's Bookworld.)

"A newspaper is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing. It assumes that there is a range of subjects an educated reader ought to know about, whether she knows that she ought to know about them or not. Maybe she would prefer to scroll through the day-in-the-life Reels that Instagram offers up to her on the basis of the day-in-the-life Reels that she watched previously, and so much the worse for her. The maximalism and somewhat uncompromising presumption of a newspaper, with its warren of sections and columns and byways, is a quiet reproach to its audience’s most parochial instincts. Its mission is not to indulge existing tastes but to challenge them—to create a certain kind of person and, thereby, a certain kind of public."
Stephen Sparks@ssparks.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Bookshop's brand relies on cute posts explaining how indies are morally superior to Amazon, but with news that Bookshop is partnering with Spotify, whose CEO is deeply invested in an AI military startup, it's fair to ask where the line of morality is drawn.

Spotify Adds Bookshop.org Links, Page Sync

Spotify Premium users in the U.S. and U.K. will soon be able to purchase physical books through its new affiliate partnership with Bookshop.org. The company also added a feature that syncs audiobook l...

publishersweekly.com