An unlikely pairing of Rod Serling with craft beer narcissism -- and a glance back at 2013.

14 years and 13,727 posts into this writing experiment, I've long since given up trying to remember what I wrote and when I wrote it. Often I'll get a brilliant idea about a topic, start writing, then become overwhelmed with deja vu. Upon closer examination, it will be revealed that I certainly have "been there" before, perhaps ten years ago, often using an eerily similar pattern of words.

Earlier today I referenced a craft beer commentary.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Pokemonification? The beer market is plenty big enough for legacy brewers to benefit from segmentation.

The rest of the day something indefinable kept nagging at me. It wasn't until 9:00 p.m. that my YouTube feed disgorged the link (above) about the new Twilight Zone series, which in turn prompted me to search NA Confidential for the article about Rod Serling that I seem to have remembered writing.

I found it, and my leitmotif was "narcissism," or the very word that kept occurring to me as I read the Pokemonification screed. Consequently, I've been plunged into one of my familiar moods of contemplation with regard to then versus now. 

Obviously the world was a very different place for me in April of 2013. Trench warfare at NABC Bank Street Brewhouse was ongoing, and in retrospect the craft beer world outside our besieged perimeter was a confusing and fog-shrouded landscape.

Re-reading my words almost six years later, I stand by them. What I didn't know at the time was my eventual decision to deal myself out of the war and sidestep the narcissism (the Pokemonification?), resolving to navigate a course backward to the egg -- to hop off the tilt-w-whirl and find a quiet, clean, well-lighted spot to contemplate the universe with a mug of Pilsner Urquell or Fuller's London Pride.

As John Lennon sang, "I just had to let it go."

In 2016, I kept repeating to people that comebacks are impossible unless you go away -- and I did just that. While I was away, metaphorically, there was enough time and space to rediscover who I really am, as opposed to the role I was expected to play in an off-Broadway production of Craft Beer Nation. It was a role I'd become weary of performing, because my beer-related interests (along with numerous other topics having little to do with beer) were elsewhere. 

Every now and then we must shed our skins and evolve into the next iteration. The process can be gratifying and painful in equal measure, and my only complaint is that in the overall scheme of things for me, time is running short. How many reinventions are left?

Just the same, these past few tumultuous years have been worth it, all the births and deaths, ups and downs, and agonies balancing ecstasies. Most importantly, being involved with Pints&union has helped me understand that my life experience is still useful.

I'm not exactly fashionable, but I don't care. At the age of 58, I can show up with mismatched socks and not give a damn. Apart from a sliver of new music, popular culture utterly eludes me. The historic preservationists can deal with their buildings, and I'll embrace beer and beer-related culture. The re-educational "legacies" mission has only just begun.

Narcissism still annoys me, as it did Rod Serling. He's been gone for a very long time. I hope to stick around a while longer. Here's the column from April, 2013. 

Heavens, what a photo.

---

ON THE AVENUES: You gaze at your own reflection, all right.

“The ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling! Just drawing back and drawing in; becoming narcissistic.”
-- attributed to Rod Serling (1924-1975)

Science fiction isn’t my forte, but no matter. Even if I seldom indulge, it is evident to me that the genre has its strengths, among them the ability to harness the otherwise far-fetched to the greater cause of allegorical relevance.

Consider, if you will, Rod Serling’s scripts for the Twilight Zone television series, many of which remain fresh and thought-provoking a half-century after their inception.

Serling’s personal mission, one that he pursued with considerable skill, was to befuddle white-bread network censors by disguising progressive commentaries as seemingly harmless manifestations of the macabre – tales regarded as inhabiting the science fiction canon, with commensurate camouflage.

As Serling pithily observed, “Things which couldn't be said by a Republican or Democrat could be said by a Martian."

To which I’d add: Things which couldn’t be said by a Republican or Democrat or a Martian might be said by craft beer, but not if we insist on a narcissistic self-absorption.

---

Lately I’ve been thinking about Serling’s admonition to reject narcissism. A talented man possessing strong viewpoints and pronounced beliefs, he came of age as a writer in the 1950s, precisely at a time when the mass hysterics and delusions of McCarthyism rendered the intellectual climate quite dangerous for those with contrarian viewpoints. It may well have been a nadir for progressivism, even by America’s remarkably low standard in such matters.

And yet, Serling possessed the innate strength of character – a sheer, contrarian stubbornness – to find a way of speaking his mind during a time when the presumed ideal of “free” speech was being honored primarily in the breach. He found a way, because to him, narcissism wasn’t a career option. I couldn’t agree more.

As others did at the time, Serling might have chosen to withhold his talent and wait for the inevitable thaw, perhaps opting for self-exile in an entirely different professional venue. Rather, he resisted drawing back and inward, and continued challenging viewers by painting the corners of the plate with nuance.

What if Serling had shrugged and gone strictly commercial, eschewing the artful for the straightforward, indulging the low common denominator all around him, and giving television audiences more by-the-numbers entertainment? Then as now, safety is easily rationalized, and in the mainstream, there’s a greater probability that the paychecks won’t stop coming.

I’m not judging others, merely noting that for whatever reason, Serling elected not to follow the easiest path. He persevered. The message got out, converts were made along the way, and these many decades later, we’re still able to learn from his experience.

---

My chosen profession is craft beer, and I’m no happier seeing it corrupted by shoe-gazing narcissism than Rod Serling -- in his world, during his heyday, and according to the parameters of his calling.

Craft beer means many things to many people, and that’s as it should be. Speaking for myself, it’s a hobby that eventually grew into an occasional paycheck; it tastes great even though it’s often more filling; it is a wonderful device for promoting the life of the local pub; and it’s the final, best hope for sustaining local pub culture.

But to me, precisely because I’m not narcissistic, there is more to craft beer than just those attributes. Naturally, self-interest as a business owner brings with it certain promotional necessities and instances of self-aggrandizement, but these are not to be confused with staring at one’s reflection in a pond filled with Barrel Aged Black Kolsch while reaching for the Kleenex ... and not because one needs to blow his nose.

Beer, as writ large, may very well be a commodity suitable for the Financial Times, but craft beer specifically also is a symbol, an analogy – a metaphor. Craft beer’s very founding principle is active and points outward, not passive and shrinking toward the inside. It is expansive in the market sense, but more importantly, in profits from the larger sense of community consciousness.

Craft beer is revolutionary, the overt rejection of an established order commonly known as mass market beer, which profits by accumulating capital for the express purpose of thwarting competition in purely Mafioso capitalistic fashion, and substitutes slavish conformity for the broad panoply of life’s possibilities.

When craft beer lapses narcissistic, and whenever the circle geeking starts, we as a presumed culture of appreciation are only providing the multinational mockrobrewing hegemonists with head space to mislead the larger segment of the market, which we haven’t yet reached. The established order we first rebelled against hasn’t gone away. It’s fighting back, and the best way to confront the Goebbelsian lies it deploys is to break away from our narcissism, stop looking in the mirror, and engage those folks standing just beyond the tent flap.

That’s because many of them want to come inside. Let’s give them a reason to do so.

I can’t be sure that Rod Serling would have appreciated craft beer, but I believe he would quickly see the merit in purging narcissism from the culture of craft beer appreciation. It’s repellant, even to those of us who already get it.

ON THE AVENUES: If it's about learning and knowledge, then by definition it's a Gahan Free Zone. You're welcome.

ON THE AVENUES: If it's about learning and knowledge, then by definition it's a Gahan Free Zone. You're welcome. 

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

This week’s column begins with the famous words of Duke Ellington.

“Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one.”

It’s important we understand his intended meaning. Nowadays the noun “mistress” generally is used to reference an unsavory male power scenario in which the woman is subservient, but the primary definition of the word is different and more positive:

“A woman who has power, authority, or ownership.”

Ellington definitely did not view music as something he controlled and kept in its place, to be shielded from view in an efficiency apartment until he needed it to relieve his desires. If anything, it was the other way around. Music was his life, and it called the tempo.

Wait – it seems there’s a question from the cheap seats: Roger, who is this Duke Ellington fellow, anyway?

Ah, yes. I keep forgetting about the calendar. It’s 2019, and music comes from computers just like bread originates with Kroger.

Duke Ellington (1899-1974) was a musician and orchestra leader in the then-dominant idioms of jazz, big band and swing. To me, he remains one of America’s foremost composers in any musical genre.

My parents raised me on music like Ellington’s, and in 1971 they took me to see a concert in Louisville by his ensemble. The rock and roll bug subsequently bit me hard, but I’m eternally grateful to have been exposed to these old-school variants of American music. They remain huge daily components of my internal soundtrack.

We all hear music differently, and as noted oft times before, my own default calibration prefers catchier tunes. Ellington wrote his share of these, capable of being whistled while strolling or “interpreted” in the shower – and selling a few 78 rpm records in the process.

Music is a big tent, and a well-constructed pop ditty with a hook means as much to me as a classical concerto or Ellington’s own extended suites of conceptual music.

Moving along, there is no rational way to make the transition from “music is my mistress” to “living in the material world” so I won’t even try. Ten years after Ellington passed from the scene a talented woman by the name of Madonna Louise Ciccone had a hit with “Borderline,” a song written by Reggie Lucas.

I heard a snippet a few weeks ago while shopping for groceries, and devolved into a reverie amid the canned vegetable aisle. As surprising as it might seem for casual readers, “Borderline” is a favorite song of mine. Granted, I’d never seek to compare it to Ellington’s “Mood Indigo,” although “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good)” perhaps functions as a serviceable parallel.

“Borderline” always prompts a smile because from sheer serendipity it became a theme song for my early European trips. From the first expedition in 1985 through mid-1990s, it seemed as if whenever I was packing my bag for a trip “Borderline” would play on the radio.

(That’s an increasingly antiquated music dissemination device.)

Indeed, different strokes; lightweight ear candy to some, symbolic prelude to others. Borderlines are for containment, and also for crossing. I had an easy life growing up as a white middle-class male, with no wars to go fight, compulsions to attain wealth or lasting romantic ties (I’d quite likely have traded my imaginary kingdoms for a meaningful relationship, but that’s another whole story).

What I needed was a kick in the butt. It surprised even me when this became self-administered. For 1,001 tiny incremental reasons, my becoming obsessed with the idea of roaming Europe became the foundational theme tying together all the topics of the human experience that struck me as interesting.

Neither internal combustion nor deer hunting was among them. Selling insurance, widgets or houses? Nope. Math absolutely wasn’t a priority. The Arithmetic was a hideous curse, but reading and writing hit closer to the center of the target.

What excited me the most was history, geography, literature, music and art, as components of what we call the Western canon.

The Western canon is the body of books, music, and art that scholars generally accept as the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. It includes works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, music, art, sculpture, and architecture generally perceived as being of major artistic merit and representing the high culture of Europe and North America. Philosopher John Searle suggests that the Western canon can be roughly defined as "a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature".

My own “Borderline” was located and surpassed when I finally accepted that craving an ever greater exposure to this body of knowledge wasn’t a bad thing for a hick from somewhere near French Lick. In fact it was a very good thing, and the pursuit of culture made me happy. Maybe Rite of Spring would have been preferable to Madonna; to each their own.

I chased knowledge for its own sake, not because it would lead to a better job or a higher standard of living. Piles of excess money beyond the minimum required to get by, while allowing an escape every now and then, were never much of a priority or motivation.

Four decades later, an ongoing immunity to the supposed imperative of capital accumulation renders me only shakily American and utterly ineligible for membership in One Southern Indiana -- and that’s something to be extremely thankful for.

I was sure that knowing these things would make me a better person, and after college when funding was tight a lot of it came free of charge. Reading, studying and listening at local libraries (those vicious socialist institutions) were essential to preparing for trips as well as maintaining my sanity when the prevailing philistinism became too much.

Later, when there was more disposable income for books and CDs, the cash went for them and not fashionable clothing, hyper power tools or fancy sports cars. There isn’t anything wrong with any of these discretionary items; they just weren’t for me. These days books, music and art surround us at home, and they’re still representative of mental equilibrium when travel isn’t possible. I can’t imagine life without them.

There’s a sobering realization that in the end, for all one’s efforts, a lifetime of learning counts for little more than skimming the surface. However, this doesn’t deter me or intrude on my idealistic dreams. I’m eager to carry a few fragments of those past manifestations of thought forward for the benefit of the next generation.

If you tell the story in an engaging way, they listen. Indeed, the headlines lie, and the kids are alright.

---

When you’re a youngster, people ask you what you want to be when you grow up. I never had an answer for this question, at least one I was willing to concede aloud. It was different inside:

“Beats me. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.”

Looking back with all the benefits of hindsight, all I really wanted to be was well-informed about the world outside. Forever painfully aware of my own myriad social deficiencies, the simple aim was at least to be bright enough to ask intelligent questions and claim a bluffer’s knowledge about topics falling outside my circle of interests -- to be a competent concierge, barkeeper and conversationalist.

Blowing my life savings on a three-month backpacking trip through Europe in 1985 wasn’t about food and drink. Rather, travel would help me find myself by bringing into focus aspects of my character previously unchallenged, while cramming as much as humanly possible of the Western canon into my receptive skull.

Moussaka, Guinness, pickled herring and the joys of a genuine Bavarian beer hall were important, and yet secondary.

If you’ve stuck with me this far, thanks, and I know exactly what you’re thinking: the Western cultural canon omits so very much important about this planet. That’s absolutely true, and it’s something I’ve tried mightily to redress by broadening my exposure to the non-Western bearded white male aspects of “herstory.”

I’m the first to concede these results haven’t been very consistent, and this is disconcerting to me. Given the various biases of a Southern Indiana upbringing, and the fact that my first and abiding love is all things European, improvement requires persistence and an active effort to broaden the scope of examination. Perfection isn’t attainable, and so this campaign will continue. Reader suggestions are always welcome.

In closing, please understand that the preceding is not intended to be construed as “look at me – I’m smart.” At the end of the day, being “smart” means precisely one thing, and that’s realizing how little you really know. All of us must willingly concede the vastness of knowledge outside our immediate spheres, about which we can gather only little bits and pieces.

Ellington occasionally was described as “Duke Elegant,” and my own formulation does not achieve his level of poetry:

"An abiding obsession with knowledge is my mistress." 

In a year and a half I’ll be 60, with no firmer notion today about what I want to be when I grow up than way back when, during the presidency of Adam’s “tricky dickey” namesake Nixon.

But I’m comfortable with the journey. It's been a grand ride. I know what I know, and also what I don’t. Time is running short, and yet there’s no hurry, so let’s kick back, enjoy one or two nice beers, tell the hamster’s spinning wheel to go straight to hell -- and learn something.

---

Recent columns:

February 5: ON THE AVENUES: Our mayor hates non-elected boards -- except when they're his own, which is why "hypocrisy" is spelled G-A-H-A-N.

January 29: ON THE AVENUES: How has the 3rd district councilman fared since this question from 2015: "Et tu, Greg Phipps?"

January 22: ON THE AVENUES: Democrats should judge city council incumbents in districts 2, 3, 4 and 5 by their regressive deeds, not their progressive words.

January 15: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Jeff Gahan and Adam Dickey are Trumping the Donald when it comes to breathtaking moral turpitude. Have they no shame?

THE BEER BEAT: Your brain on coursework, or expanding the mind one pint at a time.

Just a few weeks ago, I happily contributed a segment to the IU Bicentennial Oral History Project.

I am the student worker of Dr. Elizabeth Gritter. Dr. Gritter is a Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Local and Oral History at IU Southeast. She is also supervising the IUS Campus Oral History Project, which is a part of the larger IU Bicentennial Oral History Project that is being done as a way to commemorate IU's upcoming bicentennial in 2020. For this project, we are conducting oral history interviews of faculty, staff, and alumni who have been a part of the IU Southeast community to learn about their experiences at the school. These interviews are then archived at the libraries at both IU Southeast and IU Bloomington.

It might help to know that from 1978 through 1982, I attended IU Southeast in New Albany. Somehow I emerged from there with a Bachelors of Arts degree (majoring in philosophy) and an impending career of It's Anyone's Guess (majoring in beer).

Majoring in beer?

Evidently. At one point in the oral history interview, I paused for breath following a rambling recollection of perhaps ten minutes' duration, all of it spent detailing fake IDs, Mario's Pizza, the family room at Steinert's, 4-for-1 Thursday nights at the Troubadour -- though omitting the famous case of Wiedemann smuggled into (and out of) the fraternity office via a trumpet case during the campus chemical cloud lockdown -- suddenly aware of my inability to remember anything substantive about any of my classes.

Or what happened to the trumpet.

1981.

I'm exaggerating, but only because even with the widespread availability of dirt-cheap rotgut beer, I couldn't possibly afford to stay drunk my entire college career.

Look, I know there have been times in my life when I drank too much, and college was one of them. I'm neither proud nor apologetic about the daze back in those days. It just was. My grade point average was B-ish, and there wasn't going to be a lucrative tenure in nuclear physics or municipal economic development waiting for me. At times, maybe we all get what we need.

By the way, here's a link. It may even be relevant.

E = mc^2 … and make mine a pint while you’re there, by Tim Adams (The Guardian)

A Cambridge professor forgets that a glass or two can expand the mind with amazing results

Some university professors have always made it their mission to keep their students out of the pub. Professor Eugene Terentjev, head of science at Queens’ College, Cambridge, last week provided a spectacular example of this impulse, in a note sent to his new intake of undergraduates who, he had observed, like a drink.

Professor Terentjev’s letter ran as follows: “Please be careful how you handle yourselves here; remember you are NOT at any other uni, where students do drink a lot and do have what they regard as a ‘good time’ – and you are NOT on a course, as some Cambridge courses sadly are, where such a behaviour pattern is possible or acceptable. Physical sciences is a VERY hard subject, which will require ALL of your attention and your FULL brain capacity (and for a large fraction of you even that will not be quite enough)… People who just TAKE the course, but enjoy their social life, can easily survive in many subjects, but not in this one…”

Because: your damned brain. Skipping ahead, it's delightful to learn that contemporary studies provide support for the notion of working a bit, then relaxing with the gang at a clean, well-lighted place.

Another apparent misconception in the professor’s remarks – that any kind of enjoyable social life would make it impossible to survive his course – sounded even more wrongheaded. We live in a country high in European league tables for working hours, and low in terms of productivity. Those habits are often ingrained in an education and exam culture that prioritises grind over balance. Bertrand Russell’s famous contention that human brains are capable of no more than four hours a day of serious concentration, and that the rest is best spent idling, is borne out in much of the recent science.

Recent studies of work suggest that all productivity declines sharply after 50 hours a week and that the most productive brains need about 20 minutes of inactivity for every useful hour. Crucially, the longitudinal studies show that the single key component of an engaged and productive life is the ability to forge and maintain strong friendship groups. Everything else flows from that.

Perhaps college taught me lots about pub culture, even if I didn't connect all the dots at the time.

"Locked with apparent ease into that distinctive Grateful Dead mosey."

I've never been a jam band kind of guy, and I know only a handful of songs by the Grateful Dead, these being the band's "hits," and thus largely unrepresentative of what made the group famous in the first place.

Steven Hyden's essay at Grantland strikes me as a genuinely fair and balanced overview of last week's coda, the Fare Thee Well concerts. It isn't negative, as the title implies. The good coexists with the monetized, and the notion of a band as a business should surprise no one.

While the music itself always has eluded me, the cultural milieu of the Grateful Dead's career is something I find disproportionately fascinating and worthy of exploration. For 50 years, a community; that's something to strive for in any line of work.

Full disclosure: I was listening to the new album by Florence + The Machine while reading Hyden's piece.

Not Fade Away: The Dubious End of the Grateful Dead

ON THE AVENUES: You gaze at your own reflection, all right.

ON THE AVENUES: You gaze at your own reflection, all right.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

“The ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling! Just drawing back and drawing in; becoming narcissistic.”
-- attributed to Rod Serling (1924-1975)

Science fiction isn’t my forte, but no matter. Even if I seldom indulge, it is evident to me that the genre has its strengths, among them the ability to harness the otherwise far-fetched to the greater cause of allegorical relevance.

Consider, if you will, Rod Serling’s scripts for the Twilight Zone television series, many of which remain fresh and thought-provoking a half-century after their inception.

Serling’s personal mission, one that he pursued with considerable skill, was to befuddle white-bread network censors by disguising progressive commentaries as seemingly harmless manifestations of the macabre – tales regarded as inhabiting the science fiction canon, with commensurate camouflage.

As Serling pithily observed, “Things which couldn't be said by a Republican or Democrat could be said by a Martian."

To which I’d add: Things which couldn’t be said by a Republican or Democrat or a Martian might be said by craft beer, but not if we insist on a narcissistic self-absorption.

---

Lately I’ve been thinking about Serling’s admonition to reject narcissism. A talented man possessing strong viewpoints and pronounced beliefs, he came of age as a writer in the 1950s, precisely at a time when the mass hysterics and delusions of McCarthyism rendered the intellectual climate quite dangerous for those with contrarian viewpoints. It may well have been a nadir for progressivism, even by America’s remarkably low standard in such matters.

And yet, Serling possessed the innate strength of character – a sheer, contrarian stubbornness – to find a way of speaking his mind during a time when the presumed ideal of “free” speech was being honored primarily in the breach. He found a way, because to him, narcissism wasn’t a career option. I couldn’t agree more.

As others did at the time, Serling might have chosen to withhold his talent and wait for the inevitable thaw, perhaps opting for self-exile in an entirely different professional venue. Rather, he resisted drawing back and inward, and continued challenging viewers by painting the corners of the plate with nuance.

What if Serling had shrugged and gone strictly commercial, eschewing the artful for the straightforward, indulging the low common denominator all around him, and giving television audiences more by-the-numbers entertainment? Then as now, safety is easily rationalized, and in the mainstream, there’s a greater probability that the paychecks won’t stop coming.

I’m not judging others, merely noting that for whatever reason, Serling elected not to follow the easiest path. He persevered. The message got out, converts were made along the way, and these many decades later, we’re still able to learn from his experience.

---

My chosen profession is craft beer, and I’m no happier seeing it corrupted by shoe-gazing narcissism than Rod Serling -- in his world, during his heyday, and according to the parameters of his calling.

Craft beer means many things to many people, and that’s as it should be. Speaking for myself, it’s a hobby that eventually grew into an occasional paycheck; it tastes great even though it’s often more filling; it is a wonderful device for promoting the life of the local pub; and it’s the final, best hope for sustaining local pub culture.

But to me, precisely because I’m not narcissistic, there is more to craft beer than just those attributes. Naturally, self-interest as a business owner brings with it certain promotional necessities and instances of self-aggrandizement, but these are not to be confused with staring at one’s reflection in a pond filled with Barrel Aged Black Kolsch while reaching for the Kleenex ... and not because one needs to blow his nose.

Beer, as writ large, may very well be a commodity suitable for the Financial Times, but craft beer specifically also is a symbol, an analogy – a metaphor. Craft beer’s very founding principle is active and points outward, not passive and shrinking toward the inside. It is expansive in the market sense, but more importantly, in profits from the larger sense of community consciousness.

Craft beer is revolutionary, the overt rejection of an established order commonly known as mass market beer, which profits by accumulating capital for the express purpose of thwarting competition in purely Mafioso capitalistic fashion, and substitutes slavish conformity for the broad panoply of life’s possibilities.

When craft beer lapses narcissistic, and whenever the circle geeking starts, we as a presumed culture of appreciation are only providing the multinational mockrobrewing hegemonists with head space to mislead the larger segment of the market, which we haven’t yet reached. The established order we first rebelled against hasn’t gone away. It’s fighting back, and the best way to confront the Goebbelsian lies it deploys is to break away from our narcissism, stop looking in the mirror, and engage those folks standing just beyond the tent flap.

That’s because many of them want to come inside. Let’s give them a reason to do so.

I can’t be sure that Rod Serling would have appreciated craft beer, but I believe he would quickly see the merit in purging narcissism from the culture of craft beer appreciation. It’s repellant, even to those of us who already get it.

Rare John Coltrane and diverse cultural experiences are things to be thankful for.

I followed this great link from the Twitter feed of New Albany native and rising young actor Josh "Once Upon A Time" Dallas, who many readers last saw serving as grand marshal during the 2012 Harvest Homecoming parade.

Listen to Coltrane today ...

John Coltrane Plays Only Live Performance of A Love Supreme

... but return to Open Culture's media collection again and again.

300 Cultural Icons: Great Artists, Writers & Thinkers in Their Own Words

Many thanks to Josh for alerting his thousands of followers to this treasure trove of  free cultural artifacts.