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Boredom Books is a wonderful tiny bookstore located in the Foster Powell neighborhood in Portland. The passion project started a few years ago, tucked into a meeting hall on a side street off Foster, a sole clapboard, the only signage for what was then known as Word Virus Books. My wife and I had lived in the hood for over two years before we even noticed it. Then we when a barber shop moved a few blocks closer to Powell, the bookstore took over the slightly larger and more easily findable location. Like many business owners in Portland, marketing does not seem to be their forte. And then at some point, Word Virus became Boredom, though I'm not sure if it's under the same ownership or they just changed their name. Word Virus reopened in Southwest. Nothing else about the store has changed since it opened on Foster, however. Dax Devlon Ross, who's been a guest on this podcast four times and is one of my closest friends, was visiting from D.C. last weekend. He stopped by en route to a speaking engagement in San Francisco, as well as to record the audiobook for his new novel, the Memory Palace. After the Sunday recording session, we got some air and walked over to Boredom. Wherever we live and whenever we've traveled together, we always hit up bookstores. And we Boredom is the type of store where you don't go looking for anything in particular. You go in to look around and see what you discover and like a great curated record shop. That's exactly my favorite kind of bookstore. I've read most of Column Macan's novels, my favorites being Zoli and Let the Great World Spin. I had yet to pick up his 2020 book, A Paragon, which was on hand at boredom for $9. So score. Then I discovered two books I had never heard of. The first was Defending Science Within Reason by the philosopher Susan Hack. The book explores the value and limitations of the scientific method, which seems like it would be a very valuable resource for my work. Eight bucks sold. Then I stumbled into the Cooking Gene, a journey through African American Culinary History in the Old south by culinary historian Michael W. Twitty. I immediately thought of the wonderful Netflix series High in the Hog, and as it turns out, Twitty was featured in that series. Besides that one Netflix series, which was hosted by Steven Satterfeld and was based on Jessica B. Harris's book I Know very little about the origins of Southern Cooking. My curiosity kicked in, and for $8 I'll soon know a lot more. That might be my favorite aspect of bookstores walking in with no expectations, leaving in excitement, knowing I'm about to be educated in something I don't know. It's why I have a low tolerance for online book shopping. Sure, I use biblio and bookshop.org when I read about a book I want Mostly the Art of Discovery is just more rewarding. I know the cost of this. I'm not a specialist in any one field because I like to know a little about a lot and books have allowed me that pursuit more than any other medium. I think about my love of bookstores often when I'm scrolling through social media. It amazes me how uncurious people can be when confronted with topics they don't know anything about. The latest example, which I'll get to in a moment, concerns the murders by ICE in Minneapolis. And in this case, the lack of curiosity isn't just on the right because last Wednesday a whole lot of well meaning people got fooled by AI that wasn't actually AI. All this speaks to a larger point. When you face something you don't know, do you immediately judge and react? Or do you step back and think, huh, I want to take a moment and learn about that before I speak up. And you're probably aware where this is going already. The latter is so often lost in online and in real life discourses. And I want to step back and think for a moment about taking a step back once in a while. I'm Derek Barris and this is a Conspirituality Bonus episode, an ode to curiosity. You've been listening to a Conspirituality Bonus Episode sample. To continue listening, please head over to patreon.com conspirituality where you can access all of our main feed episodes ad free, as well as four years of bonus content that we've been producing. You can also subscribe to our bonus episodes via Apple Subscriptions. As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
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