Newsletter – July 26, 2024
I’ve always said that if I had the ability to draw I would have been a cartoonist. Especially the one-panel variety. “The New Yorker” has been emailing cartoons without captions for several years and, as you can see, the one here is my submission from a few years ago. It still makes me chuckle when I read it so I thought I’d share it with you.
I’ve done a few more, but their new rules for submitting includes signing up for a free trial that evolves into a full-blown subscription. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of great articles and tons of terrific cartoons in that magazine, but I have so much to read I just don’t have the time to devote to it.
When I was growing up I discovered that my parents had a big coffee-table-sized collection of New Yorker cartoons covering about fifty years of politics, culture, and life in the Big Apple. I think it taught me more about Twentieth Century history than anything I ever learned in school. In fact, some of my ah-ha moments in college were related to cartoons that I suddenly understood in context. (Picture 20-year-old Eric at the back of the room grinning at a remembered cartoon published decades before he was born.)
* * * * *
Speaking of devoting time to reading, I recently finished reading a book by a friend of mine and posted my review on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. I recommend his book and encourage you to seek it out. Here’s what I wrote:
Effacement by Hieronymus Hawkes
“Exciting and Ingenious Story”
In the near future, humanity is steeped in internet connectivity, where everyone wears implanted chips as required by law. A disconnection from the lifelog is punishable by a fine and jail time. When Cole, who works for the company that writes the software, is assaulted, drugged and disconnected, he wants to find out who was responsible. And find out why people are dying from the latest lifelog upgrade. Was his life just splintered or saved?
This exciting and ingenious book does a marvelous job of bringing the reader into Cole’s altered reality, challenging us to examine his experience of effacement—like our current reality—and consider our own future. We wade with him through a tangle of relationships and a cluster of trust issues as he attempts to stay out of jail and prevent the software from harming anyone else.
* * * * *
Reviews are like tip jars for authors. It’s only spare change for you, but it adds up to something important for the author. Most books are only accepted as legit when they reach 100 reviews. Even low scoring reviews are part of that total because they lend legitimacy to the top scoring reviews.
If you’ve read The Most Amazing Museum of Los Angeles you’d be doing me a big favor by writing a short review and posting it on one or more of the websites I mentioned above. Amazon, of course, is the 600 pound gorilla in the room and carries the greatest weight in the U.S. Thanks in advance for your time.
TTFN
Eric Margerum 