Bedside Manner: I Am Not a Scientologist!

Hey there, intrepid News staffer Wells Dunbar, turning those powers of perception inward today, for this voyeuristic glimpse into my inner sanctuary.

Well, at least it was a good excuse to tidy up.

The basket underneath the nightstand is the repository of old softbacks and periodicals. Currently in rotation, you'll see we have the holiday issue of The New Yorker, and a 2008 issue of Scientology News. This thing was on my desk one day when I came into the office; every now and then I leaf through it, vainly attempting to understand its inscrutable language with all the poetry of a 90-day toaster warranty – but that confusion is how they keep you coming back, I guess. I gave this bizarre totem close scrutiny one recent evening, and had all sorts of weird dreams about “ideal orgs” and “the bridge” and what not.

Out of the stack of four books, the only one I've read stem to stern is Commodify your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler. I'm a huge fan of Thomas Frank, and the essays he's penned in here – the latest being approximately a decade old, and therefore pre-Facebook, pre-YouTube, and pre-”content provider” jargon – flabbergast me with their prescient predictions of the “Cultural Trust”'s oligarchy-like power over entertainment and communications. The rest, quickly: Fodor's Spain 2009: Honeymoon time! Underworld: Breezed through White Noise and Libra last year, this one, not so much. Bird by Bird: Christmas present, looks intriguing, although I hope there's a quantifiable amount of writing advice over memoir-like reflections, which is what killed Stephen King's On Writing for me.

Another Christmas present: the Kindle. Far be it for me to look a gift tablet in the mouth, Amazon says the goal of the tablet is to disappear, to create a totally unobtrusive reading experience, like one was reading a real book. This has not been my experience yet. Maybe it's my choice of reading materials: I've pretty much used it exclusively to read The New York Times, which is somewhat conducive to skipping around. Still, I kinda feel the Kindle has all the drawbacks and distractions of a computer with none of the benefits and functionality. But who knows.

Now for the real doozy, Austin's Three Forms of Government, by former City Council member Stuart MacCorkle. A friend at City Hall told me about this tome a while back, which you can check out from the library. I did him one better and found a used copy online for around $14.

What are the three forms of government, you may ask? Mayor-aldermanic, commission-form, and our current council-manager form of government, starting in 1934. But that's just the outline, and it also includes a list of every government since the city's inception. Lots of good aliases in there.

And lastly, the remote. Who would wanna read in bed when you can watch TV?