Episode 1 – Solomon Everta Finds a Dazzling Future

That Special Book Podcast

“With a tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before it.”

You’ve found That Special Book, brought to you by Eureka Books in Old Town Eureka, California. That Special Book is an occasional interview with folks who have a special book in their life. I tell you about our guest and they tell you about how that special book impacted their life. I’m your host, Solomon Everta.

For this first episode, I am introducing the structure of the show using myself as the subject of the “interview.” In fact, I will be releasing this type of show every once in a while. So now you know what to skip or seek out depending on your preference.

Each episode we will be giving away a bookish prize from Eureka Books. To win all you need to do is send a postcard to Eureka Books at 426 Second Street in Eureka, CA 95501 with the secret message from this day’s episode. The secret message will precede the sound of a clown horn. Write down the word or phrase preceding the clown horn and mail it to us. We will let you know if you won during our next episode.

Here’s the method of the show. I give you some background on the person (in this case me) and then some background on the book without revealing its title or author. Then we resume with an interview where our guest reveals the book and shares how that special book impacted their life. We wrap up with a quote chosen by our guest and a little bit more about the book.

Let’s find That Special Book.

In 1993, at the age of 21, I moved to Arcata, California from the San Francisco Bay Area. Upon arrival, I jumped right into community activism with a group called Food Not Bombs. This loosely knit anarchist network would gather food that might otherwise be thrown away and create vegan soups served hot to any hungry person on the streets of the city, whether that city was Boston, San Francisco, or Arcata. This was mutual aid with our political program right in the name. As with many other branches of Food Not Bombs, the Arcata chapter found themselves in legal trouble as the City of Arcata used health codes to insist that the activists needed to get a permit to serve food in public. Eventually the group would settle out of court, but not before years of trips to the county courthouse and city hall where much political theater would ensue.

Following these events, I helped open Crowatan Artworks an “Art and Activism Center” in Arcata for a year. Upon the closure of this center, I departed for a trip across country, ending up in New Hampshire where I would find That Special Book.

That Special Book is brought to you by Eureka Books across from the Gazebo in Old Town Eureka. Shop for any new book at BookShop.org, listen to audio books at Libro.fm, or find a large assortment of new and used books at EurekaBookShop.com. When you are in Eureka, enjoy perusing the tens of thousands of books in the beautiful J. Lowenthal Building in the heart of Old Town and remember we can order most new books and get them here in a few days. Stop by, call, or email and we can help you find That Special Book. We are looking forward to seeing you soon at 426 Second Street in Old Town Eureka when you find your story at Eureka Books.

Welcome back to That Special Book. Today’s guest is… me! Tell me then, Solomon for you, what is that special book?

Thanks for having me, Solomon. That special book for me is Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy.

In the year 1999 I was at a crossroads, somewhat burned out on activism and living in Arcata in general. I went on a cross country trip with my girlfriend to her home in New Hampshire. We went on a bike tour, visited her family, and we enjoyed the East Coast in the summer. I learned a lot about myself that summer.

We stopped by a small bookshop in the small college town she grew up in and I found a book that I had heard of but had never read. I picked it up and got the chance to read it in between canoeing on a lake and enjoying some great relaxation time that summer — something that is rather rare for me.

Bellamy’s vision of the future was a revelation for me. Despite my rantings and activism I was not well read in the classics of leftist thought. Frankly, I still am not. Anyway, Looking Backward provided — in a narrative — a vision of how the future could be. It laid out socialist philosophy without the heavy handed rhetoric or complicated jargon. It was just an example of how the world should be. I loved it.

I went to the World Trade Organization protests in November of that year after I had started back at college — after a 10 year break — and felt myself slowly becoming disengaged from community organizing. I felt like an outsider there and slipping away, just as I was discovering the literature behind the movement.

So, did you dive into the literature of social movements, then?

Not really. I got married, had kids, bought a house, moved away. Life happened.

Now I’m divorced, my kids are teenagers, I bought a bookshop, and I live up above said bookshop. Life continues to happen.

Always in the background as I continued to develop my personal politic, Bellamy’s vision of a possible future has informed my approach to the work of making a better world. My work with The Land Office of the Imaginal Services Bureaux and The Future Is Now [clown horn honks] videos that came out of that are evidence of my continual search for a positive, future focused activism, rather than a “stop the bad stuff from happening” activism. Even in Food Not Bombs, the focus is on what might be called a prefigurative type of work. We attempt to live the world we want to see. And in situations where we can’t just make that happen, we imagine a better future. That all traces back to Bellamy for me.

And Bellamy’s vision was a template for you to use?

I’d say parts of it are, but Looking Backward is a goofy little book, full of cliche and dated interpersonal relationship stuff. Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach is similar in that it shows us a world that is possible now, despite being set in “the future.” As most of your listeners may have heard — science fiction tells us more about the time it was written than the future.

But still, envisioning the future was important to you…

Perhaps I have the privilege of being rich, white, straight, male presenting — though each of those labels fall further short of describing me the closer you get to the front of the list. I’ve never been rich, with the caveat that Americans are super financially privileged compared to much of the world. But anyway, I know I have privilege to focus on just envisioning a better world as I can just blend in and not be a target of frankly unhealthy minds with a disposition to find what others are doing as wrong when it really isn’t any of their business. I need not fight to reassert my right to exist — or so I thought. More on that in a future episode.

In any case, I love utopian visions of the world. I think we would be better off if more folks envisioned what they wanted rather than just going along with what we have grown accustomed to.

Thank you. After the break we will hear a certain special quote from that special book and a bit more on the background of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward.

Welcome back to That Special Book, brought to you by Eureka Books. Now for a quote from Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy.

There is neither private property, beyond personal belongings, now, nor buying and selling, and therefore the occasion of nearly all the legislation formerly necessary has passed away. Formerly, society was a pyramid poised on its apex. All the gravitations of human nature were constantly tending to topple it over, and it could be maintained upright, or rather upwrong (if you will pardon the feeble witticism), by an elaborate system of constantly renewed props and buttresses and guy-ropes in the form of laws. A central Congress and forty state legislatures, turning out some twenty thousand laws a year, could not make new props fast enough to take the place of those which were constantly breaking down or becoming ineffectual through some shifting of the strain. Now society rests on its base, and is in as little need of artificial supports as the everlasting hills.

Looking Backward 1887 – 2000 written in 1888 by Edward Bellamy became the most widely read book of its day, spawning hundreds of “Bellamy Clubs” throughout the United States which hoped to make the vision of the future therein a reality. Indeed, several communes sprung up to begin the work of putting into practice the ideals of the book.

While we may in this present day scoff at the naivety of the offering, we can understand that new times require new stories of how the world can be. At the same time, we can marvel at how Bellamy’s predictions came to pass, particularly the technical innovations, such as credit cards, a kind of telephone radio, and warehouse stores cutting out the middle man.

On That Special Book, our task is not to summarize a book, review its technical merits, or even make predictions as to whether you or anyone else will like it. We hope to show how a book has impacted one person’s life. In the process, we trust you will determine for yourself if you would like to know more. Additionally, you get to learn more about our guest and how That Special Book helped make them who they are today.

You can find out more about today’s guest, including the variety of things he is working on at SolomonEverta.com.

With that we hope you will join us next time when we host another member of the reading community as they find That Special Book for themselves.

Thanks for listening.

You can find this special book and YOUR special book at Eureka Books in Old Town Eureka or used at EurekaBookShop.com, new at BookShop.org, or perhaps as an audiobook at Libro.fm. Thanks for supporting independent book stores.

And now for a chance to win a bookish prize from Eureka Books. To win all you need to do is send a postcard to Eureka Books at 426 Second Street in Eureka, CA 95501 with the secret message from this day’s episode. If you didn’t hear the clown horn while listening to the episode, here it is again.

My work with The Land Office of the Imaginal Services Bureaux and The Future Is Now [clown horn honks] videos that came out of that are evidence of my continual search for a positive, future focused activism…

That’s right. The secret message is

The Future is Now

Thanks for listening. We do so hope that you continue to find That Special Book.

Click on the image below to order Looking Backward directly from bookshop.org or come by Eureka Books to pick up your own copy.