Books & Ideas
Permaculturist Returns to Vineyard
Pornography is a $10 billion per year business that dehumanizes women, harms children, destroys relationships and is addictive. Because of widespread access to the internet and adult television channels in the privacy of the home or workplace, anyone can now access images that used to be limited to low lights and out-of-the way places. Faith Community Church will sponsor a two-part conference, called Hope for Parents and Men in a Sex-Saturated Society, Sept.
Technothriller writer, essayist, postmodern literary fabulist and Island resident John Sundman will discuss his work and the meaning of literature in the age of the Internet at the Vineyard Haven library at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 15. The talk, entitled Cheap Complex Devices, is free and open to the public.
On Thursday, Sept. 10 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. the Grant Resource Network: Martha’s Vineyard (GRNMV) will present a free grant funding workshop at the Oak Bluffs Public Library.
Called How to Approach a Foundation, it is for grant seekers that have identified potential funding organizations and want to learn how to effectively approach, communicate and build relationships with these foundations. The workshop will be run by Judith Margolin, vice president for planning and evaluation at the Foundation Center.
Preparing Oneself for Dying
Compulsively,
I strive to find a method
for a confrontation with what must be done
to save my children from the task of doing it when I die.
Make lists.
Make lists.
I sharpen pencils with an out-damn-spot intensity.
In shaded rooms,
on yellow pads,
I hide myself from sun
to settle my affairs:
For 21 years — from the late summers of 1874 through 1895 — a passenger train chuffed along a route that looks inconceivably imposing to us today: from what’s now the Oak Bluffs Steamship Authority wharf, over the very sands of State Beach, through the fairways and greens of the Edgartown Golf Club, perpendicularly across Upper Main street, along the border of not one but two cemeteries and into what are now the subdivisions and farmlands of Katama before terminating at two dead ends: the dunes of South Beach and a hotel at Mattakessett whose ugliness was rivaled only by its windswept isolation and self-evident vulnerability to fire.