I'm the Slime.

We knew it would be sickening, and apparently so did Mayor Greg Fischer's henchmen, seeing as they fought hard to keep the Amazon giveaway proposal under wraps.

Has Fischer resigned yet?

'Camp Alexa' and $2.5 billion over 20 years: What Louisville offered Amazon in HQ2 pitch, by Darcy Costello and Ben Tobin (Louisville Courier Journal)

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — If Amazon brought its second headquarters to Louisville, city officials pitched the company, it could settle its employees on a riverfront campus spanning both sides of the Ohio River, retire to a "Camp Alexa" retreat location at General Butler State Park and enjoy $2.5 billion in incentives over 20 years "based on the sharing of future revenues."

The 137-page bid for Amazon's "HQ2" project, which Mayor Greg Fischer's adfarm-near-me/">ministration has refused to release for two years, offers city-owned land and facilities downtown for an urban headquarters and sells the city's affordability, spirit of "exploration" and ability to serve as a regional talent magnet.

"Louisville is THE place to live, work, create and innovate," officials write in the document. "Swinging for the fences? Invented here. We believe that the homestretch is just the beginning. Just like our hometown hero Muhammad Ali, Louisville is the Greatest of All Time."

Munich Tales 2018: "Mad" King Ludwig II and his Neuschwanstein Castle -- among others.

It has adorned thousands of postcards, jigsaw puzzles, screen savers and probably elementary school lunch boxes.

Unfortunately, Neuschwanstein Castle also served as an inspiration for Walt Disney's cardboard magic kingdom, thus launching another blue million zany delusions in the collective American psyche.

But was the real-life "mad king" Ludwig II really crazy? 

Mad King Ludwig? Study Claims Bavarian Monarch Was Sane, by Frank Thadeusz (Der Spiegel)

People have long believed that Bavarian King Ludwig II, the man responsible for building the famous castle of Neuschwanstein, was mentally ill. Indeed, he was dethroned for that very reason. But a recent study casts doubt on that diagnosis.

Rick Steves considers "The Castles of Mad King Ludwig II."

Touristy, glorious, and romantic, the mountainous borderlands of southern Bavaria house some of Germany's best attractions. My favorites are three of King Ludwig II's castles: stocky Hohenschwangau, his boyhood home; the nearby and fanciful Neuschwanstein, his dream escape; and Linderhof, his final retreat.

Ludwig was just 19 when he became king of Bavaria in 1864. Rather than live with the frustrations of a modern constitution and a feisty parliament reining him in, he spent his years lost in Romantic literature and operas…chillin' with the composer Wagner as only a gay young king could. From his bedroom in Hohenschwangau, Ludwig trained a telescope on a ridge to keep an eye on Neuschwanstein as it was being constructed.

snip

Ludwig was king for 23 years. In 1886, fed up with his extravagances, royal commissioners declared him mentally unfit to rule Bavaria. Days later, he was found dead in a lake. People still debate whether it was murder or suicide. But no one complains anymore about the cost of Ludwig's castles. Within six weeks of his funeral, tourists were paying to see the castles — and they're still coming.

Why the Christmas fantasies? Consumerism, that's why, and lots of pretending.

But Krampus I rather like.

By the way, in informal British English "poxy" means you do not like something, or do not think it is big or important. Last week I was having a blast on social media, which for me is variably poxy.

This probably will be an unpopular viewpoint, but I believe the vast majority of Christmas music is offensive. As such, I support a ban on offensive Christmas music. We must act with haste, because it will be Labor Day again before we know it.

Not everyone got the point, and that's okay. I may be a tremendous Grinch, and resent being compelled to listen to the music of others because it invariably interferes with my own internal soundtrack, but there remains a capacity to enjoy certain elements of Christmas within dual contexts of brevity and sanity. Christmas deluges on Halloween show signs of neither.

Two weeks? That's about right. I was hoping Trump might decree it.

Why do we endlessly re-enact this ridiculous Victorian fantasy for Christmas? by Suzanne Moore (The Guardian)

Every poxy advert on television features nuclear families and hilarity about socks. I don’t live like this. I never have – so who are we trying to fool? Ourselves?

Loneliness is an epidemic. It makes us ill, physically and mentally. It makes us age prematurely. It causes huge harm to the mental health of young people who often feel lonely at a time when they should be making the best of everything. And then there is Christmas, which is surely the biggest “trigger” for anyone whose life is not bloody well perfect. And, yes, I do take it personally: every poxy advert features nuclear families and hilarity about socks or something. I don’t live like this. I never have. Most of my friends don’t live like this (thank God). There are divided loyalties, exes, divorces, estranged relatives. There are the people who are bereaved. There are rows and disappointments because no one who is not some kind of fembot can live up to all these expectations.

The Bughouse: "Coming to terms with Ezra Pound’s politics."

Every now and then, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) bobs to the blog's surface, as in these three posts from 2016 and 2017.

"Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano," a biography by John Tytell.

Shane's Excellent New Words: Autodidacticism ... and a biography of the poet Ezra Pound.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Effluvium or effluent? Ezra's tree needs to know.

In one of them I wrote: "It is fascinating to contemplate a time when an artist could proclaim that poetry would change the world, and be taken seriously."

According to Evan Kindley at The Nation, such a time hasn't yet passed, and Pound continues to have an influence on the nation's discourse, although this fact owes to Pound's fascist politics more than his poetry -- and at any rate, these factors were intertwined from the very start.

The Insanity Defense

Coming to terms with Ezra Pound’s politics.

In December 1945, Ezra Pound was committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC. He was then 60 years old, internationally famous, and under indictment for treason against the United States. In an infamous series of broadcasts made on Italian radio between 1941 and 1943, Pound had declared his support for Mussolini’s regime and his contempt for the Allied forces. He parroted fascist talking points but also added a layer of byzantine anti-Semitic conspiracy theory all his own. “You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-Jewed the Jew,” he admonished the British on March 15, 1942. In other broadcasts, Pound spoke of “Jew slime,” warned of the white race “going toward total extinction,” suggested hanging President Roosevelt (“if you can do it by due legal process”), praised Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and urged his listeners to familiarize themselves with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Pound had arrived at this vicious ideological position gradually. His early work, while always concerned with the relations between art and society, had rarely been political per se. Over the years, though, his long poem The Cantos, started in 1915, had drifted from a preoccupation with mythological subjects to an investigation of economics and governance, influenced by heterodox economists like C.H. Douglas and Silvio Gesell. By the time the Second World War began, Pound had come to blame the practice of usury, propagated by a secret network of nefarious Jewish bankers, for all the evils afflicting the world ...

"In almost every way imaginable, the car, as it is deployed and used today, is insane."

It starts and ends with this. I've broken down the article into bullet points. If the author's thesis is valid, and I believe it largely is, then the corollary is that virtually every decision taken by city government begins with the acknowledgement of this fundamental, unshakable insanity.

Think about that.

The Absurd Primacy of the Automobile in American Life, by Edward Humes (City Lab)

Considering the constant fatalities, rampant pollution, and exorbitant costs of ownership, is the car’s dominance a little insane?

 ... But convenience, along with American history, culture, rituals, and man-machine affection, hide the true cost and nature of cars. And what is that nature? Simply this: In almost every way imaginable, the car, as it is deployed and used today, is insane.

• First and foremost, they are profligate wasters of money and fuel.
• While burning through all that fuel, cars and trucks spew toxins and particulate waste into the atmosphere that induce cancer, lung disease, and asthma. These emissions measurably decrease longevity—not by a matter of days, but years. 
• There are also the indirect environmental, health, and economic costs of extracting, transporting, and refining oil for vehicle fuels, and the immense national-security costs and risks of being dependent on oil imports for significant amounts of that fuel.
• Then there is the matter of climate. Transportation is a principal cause of the global climate crisis, exacerbated by a stubborn attachment to archaic, wasteful, and inefficient transportation modes and machines. 
• If the price of gasoline and the vehicles that burn it actually reflected the true costs and damage they inflict, the common car would go extinct. Gasoline would cost way more than $10 a gallon. That’s how big the secret subsidy is.
• And that’s not even counting cars’ most dramatic cost: They waste lives. They are one of America’s leading causes of avoidable injury and death, especially among the young.
• If U.S. roads were a war zone, they would be the most dangerous battlefield the American military has ever encountered. 
• The car is the star.

ON THE AVENUES: “The Drinker” (A Book Review).

ON THE AVENUES: “The Drinker” (A Book Review).

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

A respectable 40-year-old businessman returns home from a normal workday to discover the maid has neglected to replace the floor mat by the front door. Annoyed at the omission, he tracks mud into the entryway, is mildly chided by his wife and becomes uncharacteristically angered.

A short time later, he suddenly recalls the existence of a long-forgotten, stale and vinegary bottle of red wine stashed in the cellar. Although a virtual teetotaler, a glass of this rancid wine helps considerably to take the edge off his day, and he feels far better. The floor mat spat now forgotten, he gifts his wife with money to buy herself something special, and goes to bed.

Next thing we know, his permanent residence is an insane asylum.

---

For Americans of a certain age, to read Hans Fallada’s novel The Drinker is to immediately recall the Simpsons episode wherein a flashback depicts Barney’s very first drink of beer, as offered to him by Homer. With one swallow, the well-groomed and sober young preppie morphs immediately into a swollen, drunken slob, forever destined for dissolution, and hilariously so.

A similar downward trajectory awaits Fallada’s main character, Herr Sommer – and there is very little humorous about an amazingly detailed and poetically rendered descent into lunacy. However, the story of The Drinker doesn’t end with a gripping, frightening novel, because the circumstances surrounding Fallada’s work of fiction hardly were imaginary at the time of writing.

Hans Fallada’s real name was Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen. He was born in Greifswald, Germany in 1893, and died in Berlin in 1947. In 1944, with World War II still raging throughout the continent, Fallada managed to write The Drinker in two weeks flat while incarcerated … in an insane asylum. It would have been an incredible feat anytime and anywhere, much less one undertaken secretively in an institution run by the Nazis, who obviously were unbound by the inhibitions of Hippocratic oaths.

In fact, Fallada’s entire life was not easy. An severe injury to his head during adolescence seemed to have changed him, and it may have directly led to lifelong mental health issues, suicide attempts and drug addiction, and yet, in that strange way sometimes characterizing an artist’s process of creation, Fallada became an exceptionally gifted writer prone to frenetic periods of work activity followed by elongated spirals into madness.

During the 1920s, Fallada married and enjoyed an extended period of domestic harmony and commercial success, including a worldwide readership for his novel, Little Man, What Now? But a collision course with Hitler’s totalitarian regime was inevitable owing to its inclination to channel all manifestations of art into approved support for the regime.

The storm clouds gathered, and yet Fallada chose to remain in Germany and not seek exile, spending the war years walking a tightrope -- neither an overt collaborator, nor seeking involvement with the resistance. From our vantage point these many years later, cohabitation with repression does not seem the ideal path for a writer with only a fragile grip on sanity, who already was peering into the abyss with clocklike frequency.

Fallada tried waiting it out. Perhaps the pressures hastened his demise, but maybe he was just doomed, anyway -- just like the rest of us.

---

Does Fallada’s wartime work as a writer represent acquiescence with the various Goebbels party lines, or was he endeavoring to write between them? The debate persists to this day. Was The Drinker allegorical, suggesting the common man’s struggle to cope with oppression? Or, was it an autobiographical work so meticulously researched from personal experience that larger themes aren’t really necessary?

Of course, it’s up to the reader.

Getting through The Drinker is like watching a cat torture a mouse before killing it. As the pages turn, Herr Sommer’s layers of dysfunction are unsparingly peeled away by the first-person narrative, and the deep-seated rot exposed. It becomes clear that none of the character’s many difficulties originate with that first drink of wine; rather, the alcohol merely delineates them.

Sommer already has started losing grip of his business, and growing apart from his wife, whom he resents for being efficient when he is anything but. The lies and self-deceptions merely require readily available fuel to combust into elephantine self-destructive proportions, and bottles of schnapps and cognac consumed with the speed that most of us reserve for ice water after a hot afternoon in the garden couldn’t be better for ignition.

When describing the weeks-long binge embarked upon by Sommer, Fallada’s prose is hazy and replete with confusion, self-loathing and false bravado, but when he lands in jail and begins drying out, matters become quite clinical. Eventually transferred to the asylum to receive the “help” he quite clearly needs, the inmate offers a portrait of daily life there that is detached, detailed and thoroughly horrendous.

By novel’s end, has anyone been saved?

It’s unlikely. There are no Hollywood happy endings to The Drinker, a novel that I recommend unreservedly, although not without certain caveats: If you’ve ever wondered whether your most recent drink was one too many, owing not to ordinary intoxication but to extraordinary curiosity as to whether there might come a point when the altered state persists even after the alcohol’s all gone … well, Fallada’s tale will not be an easy read for you.

It wasn’t easy for me. So, is it Happy Hour yet?