You're Gonna Need Somebody When You Die.

It's a book review of The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War, by Michael Gorra, and it reinforces the maddening complexity of all things Southern.

What to Do About William Faulkner, by Drew Gilpin Faust (The Atlantic)

A white man of the Jim Crow South, he couldn’t escape the burden of race, yet derived creative force from it.

 ... How should we now regard this pathbreaking, Nobel Prize–winning author, who grappled with our nation’s racial tragedy in ways that at once illuminate and disturb—that reflect both startling human truths and the limitations of a white southerner born in 1897 into the stifling air of Mississippi’s closed and segregated society? In our current moment of racial reckoning, Faulkner is certainly ripe for rigorous scrutiny.

Michael Gorra, an English professor at Smith, believes Faulkner to be the most important novelist of the 20th century. In his rich, complex, and eloquent new book, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, he makes the case for how and why to read Faulkner in the 21st by revisiting his fiction through the lens of the Civil War, “the central quarrel of our nation’s history.” Rarely an overt subject, one “not dramatized so much as invoked,” the Civil War is both “everywhere” and “nowhere” in Faulkner’s work. He cannot escape the war, its aftermath, or its meaning, and neither, Gorra insists, can we. As the formerly enslaved Ringo remarks in The Unvanquished (1938) during Reconstruction-era conflict over voting rights, “This war aint over. Hit just started good.” This is why for us, as for Jason and Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury (1929), was and again are “the saddest words.” As Gorra explains, “What was is never over.”

In setting out to explore what Faulkner can tell us about the Civil War and what the war can tell us about Faulkner, Gorra engages as both historian and literary critic. But he also writes, he confesses, as an “act of citizenship.” His book represents his own meditation on the meaning of the “forever war” of race, not just in American history and literature, but in our fraught time. What we think today about the Civil War, he believes, “serves above all to tell us what we think about ourselves, about the nature of our polity and the shape of our history.”

The core of Gorra’s book is a Civil War narrative, which he has created by untangling the war’s appearances throughout Faulkner’s fiction and rearranging them “into something like linearity.” From the layers and circularities and recurrences and reversals of Faulkner’s 19 novels and more than 100 short stories, Gorra has constructed a chronological telling of Yoknapatawpha’s war, of the incidents and characters who appear in the writer’s extended chronicle of his invented “postage stamp” world. Faulkner took liberties with the historical order of events; what he sought to depict was the “psychological truth of the Confederate home front” and the war’s aftermath. This is work, Gorra argues, that actual documents of the period would be hard-pressed to do. And that psychological truth certainly could not have been derived from study of the racist historiography of Faulkner’s era, which he insisted he never even read. Instead, this understanding is the product of what Toni Morrison once called Faulkner’s “refusal-to-look-away approach” to the burden of his region’s cruel past.

Faulkner enacts this refusal through his practice of looking again, of revisiting the same characters and stories, and through the prequels and sequels and outgrowths of those he has already told, digging deeply into the hidden and often shocking truths of the South he portrays. Gorra endeavors to unknot and clarify Faulkner’s oeuvre by reconstructing it himself, but his act of literary explication is also one of participation—a joining in the Faulknerian process. Gorra renarrates these Civil War stories as he seeks to come to terms both with America’s painful racial legacies and with William Faulkner ...

Alabama Song.

How does the search for the next whiskey bar factor into Bourbonism, Greg Fischer-style?

Has Fischer resigned yet?

Brecht Was a Revolutionary, by Marc Silberman (Jacobin)

Not only did Bertolt Brecht transform German drama, but his work captured his radical commitment to socialist politics and the emancipation of working people.

... Brecht was no rosy-eyed utopian, but an artist-intellectual who developed his critical faculties through the experience of political reversals and historical ruptures. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the ossified socialism identified with it is a powerful indictment of traditional left utopianism. But Brecht’s project of a more just, egalitarian society never sought to provide answers on how to make the world better. Rather, his writings are scripts for how to ask questions, how to formulate the right questions for a given situation that is untenable and therefore must be changed.

While Brecht believed in the power of reason that enables people to recognize the problems around them and to solve them, he was neither a narrow-minded rationalist nor a naive believer in the inevitability of progress and human emancipation. Thus, his critique of emotions, which is frequently misunderstood or implemented as a dramaturgy of “coldness,” was not directed against feeling or spontaneity as such but rather against the function of emotions in traditional theater. Like interventionist thinking, Brecht’s belief in reason is a functional concept that enables individuals to determine their interest and to act on its behalf, in other words, a principle of reasoned action excluding neither passion nor emotion ...

ON THE AVENUES: Daniil Kharms, Marina Malich, and writing for the drawer about nothing ... pre-Seinfeld.

A while back one of my friends suggested a book. At first I had my doubts, but then decided I shouldn't reject such a gesture without at least a few minutes of browsing.

I did so, and a tad intrigued, proceeded to purchase Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms and to read the book cover to cover in a week's time, proving yet again how much there is for us to learn, even when it comes from unexpected or obscure places.

And Kharms (1905-1942), a Russian writer from so far away that it might as well be a different galaxy, was the very personification of obscurity.

To be perfectly honest, I hadn't heard of Kharms at all until now, even though a big chunk of my life 35 years ago was consumed by studying Russian and Soviet culture. Then again, Kharms wasn't really known by his own countrymen until the post-Soviet era, a mere 60 years too late for this recognition to matter.

As an aside (or else there won't be enough words to fill this column) I might have gotten serious back then about learning the Russian language, and perhaps taken the youthful obsession further, but for whatever reason it didn't happen. My interests shifted, and that's the way it goes.

The fascination remains, albeit muted; pushed back a bit to one side, waiting to be aroused again, as it was a few years back when the brewery at Bank Street Brewhouse was active, and we began receiving regular e-mails from locales in the former USSR asking us to send them bottle caps, labels and various collectibles -- at our expense, naturally.

However, it struck a chord with me. This request is from 2014; I described it in a brief series at my beer blog.

---

If you own a brewery or work for one, you've probably fielded e-mail inquiries from overseas asking for keepsakes ... to me, there is something compelling and yet haunting about these foreign requests, which tend to come from Central/Eastern European locales, places of longtime personal interest to me historically and geographically. They speak to my inner melancholic. Lately, I've been pasting their addresses into Google Maps and seeing what their places of residence look like.

Yekaterinburg lies a thousand miles to the east of Moscow, and is the fourth-largest city in Russia, now boasting 1.3 million inhabitants and a skyscraper-filled city center. You may remember Yekaterinburg as the place where the Romanov dynasty came to a barbaric close.

Oleg lives in one of the classic "rabbit hutch" blocks of flats constructed during Soviet times.

"I collect souvenirs from various beer companies and brands," writes Oleg. "I'd love to get some items from you, if it is possible. I am interested in labels, stickers, crown caps, beer mats, openers, lanyards and other branded items."

Ironically, given that only recently I name-dropped Klement Gottwald (the first Czechoslovak Communist kingpin), Oleg lives on Gotvalda Street.

Is there a Tsar Nicholas II Street in Yekaterinburg?

---

Kharms (the name was his own later invention) was born in St. Petersburg, later recast by the Soviets as Leningrad before changing back when the USSR disintegrated.

His father was a revolutionary who eventually was incarcerated, emerging from prison as a sort of born-again Orthodox Christian. Still, St. Petersburg was one of the most cosmopolitan locales in Tsarist Russia, and perhaps because of this Kharms displayed artistic inclinations from the start.

As a writer, Kharms eventually became somewhat known for authoring children's books, although he was said to have disliked children. Any income stream in a storm, because Kharms' times were tumultuous, and he could never be sure of a paycheck.

It is often forgotten that during the very first post-civil war years of Soviet rule in the 1920s, there was a flowering of the progressive and avant-garde in literature, art, music, even architecture. After all, Russian society had been liberated from Tsarist and capitalist repression. Freedom had arrived. Artistic expression wasn't necessarily counter to Marxism, was it?

As time passed and the screws of Communist Party control tightened, the answer to this question changed radically, from "not necessarily" to "yes, in fact it is -- always."

The gray areas yielded to black and white, and if artistic expression was not precisely suiting the party's present needs, then by definition it was hurting them. Middle ground didn't exist with outright sabotage.

Unfortunately Kharms chose the role of the eccentric, roaming the streets in a sort of Sherlock Holmes outfit, staging counter-cultural events, poetry readings and various other stunts. The authorities were not amused, but Kharms managed to stay upright on thin ice until the late 1920s, when Stalinism began.

After Lenin's death in 1924 it wasn't clear who would succeed him at the apex of the apparatus. Amid a group of aspirant Bolshevik intellectuals, the peasant Joe Stalin wasn't expected to be in the running, but Stalin, like many a psychopath, specialized in precisely the sort of rules-free amok scrums that many of his better qualified comrades shunned as beneath their skills.

In a classic case study of divide-and-conquer, Stalin quickly climbed the ladder and instituted a dictatorial career of eliminating rivals, from the highest communist apparatchik to the lowest dishwasher at a dumpling dispensary in a Siberian province. The idea was to instill fear via the sheer randomness of cruelty.

Stalin's charges against his victims routinely were trumped-up and fictitious, although with Kharms they didn't really need to be imagined. Artists of his obtuseness and spirited independence weren't Stalin's cup of Joe. Unwilling to toe the line, Kharms was doomed in the workers' paradise, and the only question was how the end would come -- quickly or slowly, with bureaucratic creativity, or just the standard, requisite bullet to the brain in a KGB cellar somewhere.

---

In 1931 Kharms was sent to prison, survived the sentence, and returned home to start over again, whereupon he ran headlong into one of the perverse ironies of the Soviet system. Marxist-Leninist ideology decreed universal employment. It was illegal to be unemployed, and everyone was required to work; otherwise, those without jobs were parasites subject to arrest, but since the the government was in effect the only employer, it decided who worked and who did not.

As such, the state owned the printing presses, newspapers and publishing houses, denying access to these by Kharms, who was not sent to the gulag to break rocks, but isolated at home, blackballed from being published. The hoary "publish or perish" dictum became literally true, and the ensuing impoverishment grew increasingly desperate during the 1930s. Hunger was a constant specter hovering above Kharms and his second wife Marina Malich.

We all understand that chronic malnutrition is a ticking time bomb, affecting mental health as well as physical well being. Consequently Kharms' output was erratic. His exhibitionist behavior always had been calculated. Now it wasn't as clear that he had complete control over it.

Accordingly Kharms' short stories, poems and notes ("absurdist" may or may not be the correct term) were written for "the drawer" alone, this implying the desk drawer, and those surviving writings of his from the period prior to World War II, some fully formed, others just fragments, were lucky to have been saved from Leningrad's devastation by Malich and friends -- or else there'd be almost nothing to remember him by.

When the Nazis invaded the USSR, the gloves came off. Stalin quickly rounded up those viewed as potential liabilities in wartime. It is thought that Kharms had at first avoided conscription by being declared mentally ill; he'd already spoken openly against the coming war and vowed to avoid military service, leading some to surmise that by this point the many years of physical deprivation really had led to Kharms losing his mind. We'll probably never know for sure.

As the war turned dire for the Soviets, Kharms was jailed in an insane asylum in Leningrad, which promptly was surrounded by the Germans in what became a 900-day-long siege, human history's longest and most costly in terms of civilian lives lost. There was a feeble plan to try to evacuate mental detainees, but Kharms already was gone. Officially the cause of death was starvation, although in truth, at the age of 36 there wasn't much left of him, anyway.

This calls to mind one of Kharms' most enjoyable, brief jewels, referred to now as "Blue Notebook No. 2."

Once there was a redheaded man without eyes and without ears. He had no hair either, so that he was a redhead was just something they said.

He could not speak, for he had no mouth. He had no nose either.

He didn't even have arms or legs. He had no stomach either, and he had no back, and he had no spine, and no intestines of any kind. He didn't have anything at all. So it is hard to understand whom we are really talking about.

So it is probably best not to talk about him any more.

---

For an idea of Kharms' literary range, interested readers can visit the Google Books repository and see enough there to get an impression. There is a lengthy introduction by the translator, who provides much biographical information. At the end of the book is a small section of notes providing explanations for certain people associated with Kharms, concepts, geographical references, and the like.

One of them is about Kharms' wife, Marina Malich, which left me wanting to know more about her.

Marina Malich

Kharms married his second wife Marina Vladimirovna Malich (1909-2003) in 1934 soon after they had met through her sister Olga, whom Kharms had been courting. In 1942, after finding out that her husband had died in prison, Malich managed to escape the blockade of Leningrad, but was later taken captive by the Germans. Through a series of seemingly miraculous events, she escaped Germany to Paris as the Allies were bombing Berlin. Her mother, who had abandoned her as a child, lived in Nice with a man named Wycheslavzoff. When Marina came to see her mother in Nice, Wycheslavzoff took a liking to her, and soon she becae pregnant. She moved with him to Paris, and later Venezuela. After they separated, malich married Yury Dournovo, a taxi driver of Russian aristocratic lineage living in Caracas in a community of Russians and other displaced emigres. Malich lived more than half her life in South America. She left a memoir about her life with Daniil Kharms and about her miraculous World War II journey (co-written with Vladimir Glotzer). She died in Atlanta, Georgia, shortly after the millennium.

What a story! It's an amazing life. For more background on Malich, read "Together in love, work and legacy" at Rossiyskaya Gazeta, where the essay includes information about Nadezhda Mandelstam and Elena Bulgakov, the wives of poet Osip Mandelstam and novelist Mikhail Bulgakov.

Let's drink to the life of Daniil Kharms, who fully anticipated social media during a pandemic.

I am interested only in "nonsense"; only in that which makes no practical sense. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestations.

---

Recent columns:

July 9: ON THE AVENUES: Mask up, folks. Pints&union is coming back, and we're taking precautions.

July 5: ON THE AVENUES took a week off. Here's what I've been writing while on holiday.

June 25: ON THE AVENUES: I’m invisible, so will you stop insisting you see me?

June 18: ON THE AVENUES: Anything except common, that Kentucky Common.

ON THE AVENUES: Hemingway in a time of mercifully silent thunder.

It would be churlish and quite possibly childish of me to point out that after carefully considering all the episodes of Thunder Over Louisville occurring these past few seemingly endless decades, as always filled to the brim with superfluous noise and inanity, I’ve decided the one last Saturday was absolutely, positively my favorite … well, at least since 1988, when we were too busy gazing at Barry Bingham's surreal Falls Fountain to notice there weren't any pre-Derby pyrotechnics.

Tact isn’t my strong suit, so I’ll say it anyway: best Thunder ever. 

Officially this exercise in mass garishness has been moved to August, helpfully enabling far higher levels of drunken heatstroke as a corollary of wretched hard seltzer and salmonella-laced potato salad. Of course if social distancing is still being maintained, we’ll be compelled to stretch the crowd along the riverbank at least from Bethlehem to New Amsterdam, and this would be highly amusing.

But if Oktoberfest in Munich already has been canceled owing to the coronavirus, how can we even be sure there’ll be a Kentucky Derby in early September? Granted, Bavaria isn’t Buechel even if both of them have Bosnian connections.

I know many of you enjoy Louisville’s springtime slate of fireworks, warplanes, horse pimps and mint-borne despoliation of perfectly fine bourbon. Yes, I understand all about the economy, and your precious portfolios; a certain number of us must die so Trump might live, just as with Pinochet and Idi Amin.

Still, the prevailing peace and quiet amid the pandemic suits me just fine, and if we’re lucky, a returning black bear will defecate in the parking lot by the hotel atop Summit Springs.

Now THAT would be public art. Can someone send a drone and get the photo on Instagram?

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Speaking of failed states, as we grow old and our brains begin unraveling, a strange sort of free association comes to grip vast tracts of our subconscious.

People, images and occurrences long forgotten suddenly are disgorged, to be examined while scratching one’s noggin and muttering, WTF?

Last week in my inner world this randomness turned to books. Out of nowhere the thought came to me that I’ve been unfaithful to Ernest Hemingway, which is to say it hasn’t seemed necessary for a very long time to revisit Papa’s seminal works, even though he might well have been my single most important formative influence during the period between college graduation and the first voyage to Europe in 1985 -- apart from Arthur Frommer, of course.

I dimly remember that around the year 2000 someone gifted me with a collection of Hemingway’s short stories, and I read a few of them. Prior to that, perhaps the last time I’d read one of his novels was the late 1980s.

So, why would Hemingway come bobbing back to the surface after all this time?

Because Josh Turner brought up Hemingway during a barroom chat two months ago, and I’m guessing the seed was planted then, requiring time to slowly gestate.

Lately I’ve also been thinking quite a lot/far too much about Europe, or more precisely, the likelihood of COVID mandating an enforced absence from the continent this year. In 1985, prior to treading the soil, everything I knew about Europe came to me from secondary sources, whether classes, books, movies or television. Back then Hemingway was an inspiration to a youthful traveler. He had gone THERE and done THAT.

Papa was a Midwesterner like me, raised in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. He’d gone to Europe seeking adventure, and found plenty, first as a volunteer ambulance attendant in Italy during the Great War, then as a newspaper correspondent amid troubled times afterward. He married and the couple headed for Paris to live among the expatriate writer, artists and musicians during the roaring twenties.

Subsequently the English-speaking world learned about Spanish bullfighting culture from none other than Hemingway, the American who somehow instinctively grasped it. Later he experienced the Spanish Civil War up close, and rode with American troops following the D-Day landings.

Even without obvious historical touchstones like these, there were Hemingway’s many compelling descriptions of eating and drinking, like this passage randomly plucked from A Moveable Feast:

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

Think so? Oysters and alcohol always dispel the emptiness for me. Crusty bread and salami work, too.

By the time my plane touched down in Luxembourg in 1985, I’d read most of Hemingway’s novels and a good many of his short stories, as well as a collection of his newspaper dispatches and at least two biographies. It took until 2005, but we made it to the family house and museum in Oak Park.

Perhaps someday his homes in Key West and Cuba will be crossed off the bucket list, too, although at the present time let’s not talk about travel. It makes me wistful, which urges me to drink.

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There always were other components of the Hemingway ethos that I found less salutary. Fishing and hunting never did much for me, and for all his endless talk of rugged male values, the writer himself could be shrill, vain, bullying and a backstabber.

The fact that the late Hemingway -- he committed suicide in 1961, perhaps as a result of instability brought on by brain injuries similar to those afflicting contemporary football players -- remained very much alive as a writer well into the 1980s probably is a result of school curriculums of the era based on white American male writers.

This is far less the case today, which is good.

At this point in time there is little use attempting to salvage Hemingway’s cloddish and destructive personal peccadillos, which have been explored at length during the period of my own lifetime. He was as he was. Maybe I’ve also moved on, although his authority at a certain time in my life remains indisputable.

When I began thinking about Hemingway last week, the first of his books to come to me wasn’t The Sun Also Rises or For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was Across the River and Into the Trees, a poorly selling novel from 1950, prior to Papa rallying to produce The Old Man and the Sea, arguably the finest distillation of his artistic credo sans bombast, and a final triumph.

While not as dire as the reviews at the time suggest, Across the River and into the Trees surely is not Hemingway’s best effort. Married to his fourth wife at the time, and ardently (embarrassingly?) pursuing an Italian girl less than half his age, the author decided to base the novel’s plot on his own fevered imagination.

In an autobiographical sense, it wasn’t pretty, and yet there are moments of evocative description of people and places.

The novel is set in Northern Italy, in and around Venice, and near the battlefront where Hemingway served during WWI. This also is very close to Trieste, where we gloriously vacationed last winter, surely accounting for my selective recall about a book I last bothered opening some 35 years ago.

Bizarrely it still is there, lodged in a hidden cranium nook, waiting for something to extract it, or, as in the current period, subject to weirdness and whim ensuing from a societal template almost none of us have ever experienced.

I conclude with this thought from Papa.

All I must do now was stay sound and good in my head until morning when I would start to work again.

If only it might be that simple.

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Recent columns:

April 16: ON THE AVENUES: Bunker mentalities, bunker abnormalities; bunker dreams, bunker screams.

April 9: ON THE AVENUES: #VoteEwwNoMatterWho, or when being realistic means being radical.

April 2: ON THE AVENUES: Pandemic, pornographic, pecksniffian. Just three random words until the booze kicks in.

March 26: ON THE AVENUES: It's a tad premature to sing the healing game.

Learn about Freya Stark: "As an explorer, Stark was an acute observer, and a connoisseur of people."

Photo credit: The Idle Woman blog.

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town, is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”

This quote by Freya Stark appeared recently in The Economist. With much embarrassment, it occurred to me that while the name sounded familiar, I actually knew nothing at all about her.

So, I've been reading. When there is time, I hope to read one of Stark's books. Until then, this essay is a good introduction.

EAST IS WEST: Freya Stark’s travels in Arabia, by Claudia Roth Pierpont (The New Yorker; 2011)

Although the British had ordered their wives and daughters out of Baghdad, there were nineteen women among the crowds who found shelter in the British Embassy, in late April, 1941, soon after the Iraqi government went over to the Germans. A pro-Nazi coup had occurred a few weeks earlier, in relative calm, but an increase in anti-British hostility and the sudden appearance of armed Iraqi soldiers had brought tensions in the city to an intolerable level, especially since the British—heavily engaged in Libya and Greece—had few reinforcements to spare. The Iraqi Army had already surrounded the nearby Royal Air Force base when, at dawn on May 3rd, the well-known explorer Freya Stark raced through the deserted streets, arriving just in time to make it through the Embassy’s side door.

The main gates had been locked; sandbags and barbed wire were frantically being placed within; and a mountain of documents was burning in the courtyard. The Persian gardeners, however, continued to water the flowering verbena and, as days and then weeks went by, kept the lawn (despite the number of people sleeping on it) brilliantly green. Living quarters were uncomfortable, with some three hundred and fifty people enduring intense heat, sniper fire, and the not so distant thud of bombs as British planes attempted to retake the airfield. News over the wireless was grim. Yet there was no end of attempts to cheer the trapped and frightened population. One night, there was a lecture, given by Stark; another night, there was a concert. (As a bonus, a cache of rifles was discovered in the grand piano.) Basic provisions were allowed in daily, and Stark, adept at chatting up the Iraqi guards who monitored the prisoners’ fate, boldly requested a quantity of soap and face powder for the women. The extra packages were duly delivered. This small victory for Western womanhood was marred, however, by the policeman at the gate, who remarked that he couldn’t imagine how the harem could think about such things, since they were all to be murdered in a few days.

Freya Stark had come to prominence a few years earlier, with the publication of her first book, “The Valleys of the Assassins” (1934), a study in Islamic history and geography related with the excitement of an adventure story. The book was a popular hit, as were two books that she wrote, along similar lines, soon thereafter—“The Southern Gates of Arabia” (1936) and “A Winter in Arabia” (1940). All these books were about the contemporary Arab world as well. Stark had travelled through Syria, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Yemen at a time when national borders retained a fictive quality, and no one could be sure what political or cultural forces would prevail. British power, just beginning to show the strains of its extended glory, still held firm regional sway—although Stark’s more dangerous explorations were conducted in spite of its warnings and behind its imperial back.

Stark could talk her way into any situation and, most of the time, out again, in a remarkable number of languages. She had just talked her way back to Baghdad from Tehran, when, hellbent on safety among her friends and colleagues in the Baghdad Embassy, she was stopped by Iraqi police at the frontier. All British citizens were barred from proceeding further, and she was officially in custody; others, she learned, had been put in prison camps. Yet she cajoled the station attendant into bringing her tea and her police guard into sharing it, and informed the guard of the sheer impossibility of staying on without a ladies’ maid. Surely he could see her problem and wished to be civilized? His people were not, after all, Germans. And the policeman—no longer guarding a prisoner but protecting a lady—put her on the next train to Baghdad. “The great and almost only comfort about being a woman,” Stark reflected, in a maxim that encompasses many such events in her illustrious career, “is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.”

As an explorer, Stark could claim no major discoveries, but her acute observations and her surveying skills had earned her professional respect and, for cartographic contributions, a Royal Geographical Society award. She had located unmarked villages and unsuspected mountains, taken compass bearings and photographs. Once, she had re-situated an entire misplaced mountain range to the correct side of a valley. But this was not why people read her books then, or why they continue to read them now. Stark did not even reliably make it to her intended goals: the routes—usually travelled by camel or donkey—were astonishingly harsh, malaria was rife, and a host of other ailments took their toll. Yet for Stark, despite the bitter disappointment of being beaten to a destination, the cliché that the journey is more important than the goal was irrefutably true. She was a vivid describer of scenes and landscapes. More, she was a connoisseur of people: she knew how to draw them out and listened closely when they spoke. Today, one may be able to gain more scholarly and updated history from other authors. Bernard Lewis’s “The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam” covers much of the same material as Stark’s first book (and its subtitle is guaranteed to catch the modern eye), but it would be a mistake to think that she has been replaced.

Readers of Stark’s reissued works—Modern Library offers the two earliest books, and I. B. Tauris is in the midst of publishing nine others—will find a writer who endows everyone in her field of vision with the heightened interest that she felt herself. Peasants, Bedouins, tribal leaders, guides, soldiers, and slaves make up a society that is both impossibly strange and palpably near, in the simple and not so simple human sense. Stark was not an objective observer—how could she have been?—but, far more sophisticated than the surveying tools she carried, she was a finely calibrated recording instrument in a land that was just awakening to the changes being wrought by paved roads, nation-states, and oil ...

R.I.P. John Bierly.

Two decades ago John Bierly was a Public House regular, hanging out with late afternoon coffee drinking students. The exact circumstances elude me, but this is how I met him. 

A few years later, we bought the house adjacent to the Stemm dental office, where John worked for two decades. Consequently for the past 16 years, I've seen him coming and going almost every day.

John always waved, and occasionally in nice weather we'd have a chat standing in the driveway.

In all this time I can't recall John having anything bad to say about anyone; he always was polite, pleasant, and friendly. While I can't claim to have known John very well -- I readily concede to being oblivious to John's national recognition as a writer and reviewer of Batman (see below), Star Wars and other such creative genres -- it's not hard at all to see why he inspired love and devotion on the part of his friends.

It's going to be very strange not seeing John bounding from his car at lunchtime carrying bags of food for the folks at Stemm's. I don't know what else to say except to wish peace and love to his family and friends.

In Memoriam, John Bierly (1975-2020), by By Bill "Jett" Ramey (Batman on Film)

Yes, John Bierly was the best damn writer BOF has ever had, and I don’t think anyone who has written for me — including yours truly — would disagree. But most importantly, John was an awesome human being.

Whenever I had some bad times with BOF for various reasons, John always reached out to make sure I was OK and to tell me he was there for me and had my back.

He was — as we say in Texas — “good people.”

John Roger Bierly Jr. 1975 - 2020

Hello to Hello Louisville, which is good because Kevin Gibson is part of it.

Hello Louisville is a new place to read about the Louisville scene, except that it's an old place, at least according to the web site's description.

In late 2017, we started a project of highlighting Louisville, Kentucky in the way we saw it and began posting these short stories on our social channels. What began as a passion project, geared toward the local modernist, has now evolved into something more. We wanted to create a place where people in Louisville could come and find information on local eateries, breweries, farmers markets, new restaurants, old restaurants, trendy places, dog friendly places, and so much more—without the hassle of all the negative stories one may have to sift through. Don’t get us wrong, the bad is just as important as the good, but we’re here to focus on the good.

What matters to me is that Kevin Gibson is back into the mix. I'll be reading.

Hello ... from Hello Louisville (and me), by Kevin Gibson (Hello Louisville)

I started writing about the Louisville and Southern Indiana area in 1987. Yep, more than three decades as a writer, covering everything from local sports — my first assignment was a Bullitt North High School football game — to government, business, music, the arts, food and drink. Thirty-three years. (I know, I don’t look that old, do I? But I digress.)

Anyway, anyone who knows me probably knows how disappointed I was last summer when Insider Louisville abruptly shut down operations. We were literally told in a Monday morning meeting that we had to be out of our offices by end of day on Wednesday. Insider Louisville had become part of my identity in a way. I realized only when it disappeared that’s not something one recovers from quickly.

Now there’s Hello Louisville. Part of the mission here is to fill some of the void left by Insider simply by seeking out and sharing some of the best things in the city, from new restaurants and breweries, to cool events, people, new business news and anything else we think people will want to know about.

Eric Hoffer, the Longshoreman Philosopher.

Eric Hoffer (1898-1983) was an "American writer on social and political philosophy," dubbed the Longshoreman Philosopher. In fact, even after his writings were published, Hoffer continued to work and retired as a longshoreman at the age of 65.

Hoffer was an interesting person and an independent thinker; even if I'm not in agreement with everything he wrote, his thoughts inspire discussion.

Hoffer always reminded me of a working man's H. L. Mencken, or Mencken if Mencken were a longshoreman and not a newspaperman: "An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head."

This article explores Hoffer's enigmatic nature. Where did he really come from?

Eric Hoffer, Genius—And Enigma, by Tom Bethell (Hoover Institution)

... Hoffer’s place in American politics and intellectual thought is an enigmatic one. Much of his writing was in the form of aphorisms: short, pithy remarks that touched on eternal truths. But he was also capable of the sustained thought and expression that went into The True Believer and some of his other books and newspaper columns. Hoffer was interested in probing the depths of human behavior and discovering the motivations behind the twentieth century’s wars and revolutions. Wary of public praise, he resembled the prophets of the Old Testament, free to make people of high and low estate uncomfortable with his insights.

A Hunter S. Thompson documentary: Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride.

A 2006 New York Times review is here, and it's accurate. The documentary is entertaining but superficial. The decidedly unromantic "flip" side to Hunter S. Thompson's declining years is discussed in greater detail by Joe Rogan and his guest, author Timothy Denevi.

Amid the vapid intellectual carnage inflicted by pay-to-play Gahanism, it's worth thinking about George Orwell's fundamental truthfulness.

(adapted from a 2016 post)

The embedded video above, complete with photo of George Orwell wearing a bizarrely uncharacteristic Hitler mustache, features Christopher Hitchens and George Packer (circa 2009).

George Packer and Christopher Hitchens talked about George Orwell and his work. Mr. Packer selected the pieces that appear in two recently published volumes of George Orwell’s work: Facing Unpleasant Facts and All Art Is Propaganda. Mr. Hitchens, essayist for The Atlantic Monthly, is the author of Why Orwell Matters.

Hitchens and Packer manage to stay on task for most of the program, though things start coming off the rails near the end, when Hitchens indulges in Iraq War apologetics. Overall, it's a thought-provoking hour with two erudite men.

At YouTube, there is a five-part BBC Arena series on Orwell's life. The segments are just shy of an hour, each. It's a bit dated, but invaluable for the testimony of interviewees now long dead.

Part 1 - Such, Such Were the Joys

Part 2 - Road to Wigan Pier

Part 3 Homage to Catalonia

Part 4 The Lion and the Unicorn

Part 5 Nineteen Eighty Four

Finally, here's something I wrote back in February, 2010: New York Times: "Why Orwell Endures." 

It strikes me as the stuff of wretched cosmic injustice that Orwell and Hitchens died far too young, while Franklin Graham will remain to torment us with drivel for so many years to come.

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A collection of George Orwell’s essays proved to be the surprise reading hit of my Christmas vacation. I picked it up at the library book sale, and tossed in the carry-on bag as an afterthought. It's a good thing I did, seeing as the remainder of my magazines and books were stowed in delayed luggage.

Essay topics in the ancient paperback, which became shredded into unbound pages soon after opening, ranged from memories of shooting a rampaging elephant while posted as a policeman in Burma to researching the origins of bawdy English postcards. Orwell wrote not only of lofty topics such as his service for the Republic during the Spanish Civil War, but also described in excruciating detail his recollections of boyhood boarding school days, experiences so quintessentially English that they might be lampooned by the likes of Monty Python without we Americans never really imagining the real-life sources.

As a piece in today’s New York Times by Geoffrey Wheatcroft makes clear, Orwell may not have been right 100% of the time, but his pursuit of truth and unwavering intellectual honesty remains noteworthy by comparison to many of his ideologically compromised peers. They are qualities worth cherishing.

As a postscript, this insightful passage from Wheatcroft's 2010 NYT article. Orwell glimpsed impossibly early that a culture of consumerism falls short of supplying certain basic human needs.

Whenever perplexed Americans fret over Osama bin Laden or suicide killings, and delude themselves that material progress will cure these ills, I think of what Orwell wrote in 1940 about another charismatic monster. “Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice. . . . However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.”

Read these two essays written by Erica Rucker.

Erica Rucker and I are acquaintances, mostly through social media. To me, Erica is one of Louisville metro's finest writers -- and the next time she ducks a tough issue will be the first. 

Allow me to draw attention to two of Erica's recent essays. Pertaining to the restaurant ejection of Sarah Huckabee Sanders ...

Trouble the Water: To shame or to shun

To act in the conscience of the public good, for the citizens of the country and the values we claim to hold dear, is what it means to be civil. So any calls for civility need to be met with this refrain, We are already being civil.

 ... and Greg Fischer's signature gutlessness.

Those of us residing in New Albany, observing the personality cult nurtured by mayoral mediocrity Jeff Gahan, wonder if Gahan ever will get around to considering the needs of real people, as opposed to bright shiny (and expensive) objects.

As such, there is special relevance in Erica's pithy assessment of Fischer's political cowardice over the issue of sanctuary.

Of course, Fischer remains Gahan's idol, and it's easy to see why. As in Gahan's shambolic commitment to human rights -- but just for so long as he can create a symbolic commission sans actual content -- both mayors believe in words alone, followed by crickets chirping. 

Amazingly, the gestures-alone brigade hangs on every non-action.

MAYOR MILQUETOAST THINKS “SANCTUARY” IS JUST A POLITICAL TERM

I believe that Fischer does get it. He just doesn’t give a damn and refuses to do anything that might mean loosening his necktie and rolling up his sleeves to protect vulnerable people in our community. He wants to claim Sanctuary is just a term because he doesn’t want to have skin in the game.

Sanctuary is” just a political term” like “vote” is just a term. It has action at its root. Fischer doesn’t want to take any real or bold action.

Fischer expects Louisvillians to come to his aid at the ballot box this fall and my gut says that because his opponent is Republican Angela Leet, he feels that he’s already won in Liberal Louisville.

That's why it will be time for a change in the 3rd council district in 2019. Leadership ... not lapdog.

One more thing: the News and Tribune will continue to underachieve until Publisher Milquetoast grasps the necessity of incorporating a voice like Erica's among its columnists.

Tom M(m)ay have to lose one of his many slots, though.

And who defines this truth? "Bookmark: Sex, Lies and Jerzy Kosiński."

A recent oblique reference ...

What do you know? Chance the gardener was right, after all.

 ... led to refresher about the life of Jerzy Kosiński, author of Being There.

This clip repeats midway through, but contains an interesting conversation about television and the passive act of watching.

He was an actor, too. Here's a clip from the only Warren Beatty film that really matters, Reds, with Kosiński appearing as Zinoviev.

A strange and contradictory figure, indeed.

Sex, Lies and Jerzy Kosinski

The BBC documentary on the life and art of enigmatic novelist Jerzy Kosinski. Through interviews with his second wife Kiki von Fraunhofer-Kosinski, friends and fellow authors, and Polish villagers who knew Kosinski when he was a child hiding from the scourge of Nazism, this program attempts to assess the verity of Kosinski's "autobiographical" fiction, the need for him to maintain a nebulous mystique about his early life, and to understand his obsession with S&M sex clubs in Manhattan during the 1970s and 1980s.

Time to learn something: Happy birthday, Maya Angelou.

Maya Angelou was born 89 years ago today. Her obituary from the print edition of The Economist (June 7, 2014) is more than a death notice. It's an artistic rendering in itself, something for which the publication is renowned.

To this very day, when I receive my weekly copy, I turn first to the obituary.

Of course, there is more at Maya Angelou's web site. As The Economist observes, "it's hard to overstate her place in American culture life."

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou, née Marguerite Johnson, writer, dancer, singer and civil-rights activist, died on May 28th, aged 86

WHEN she was eight, Maya Angelou stopped speaking. That was the year her mother’s boyfriend raped her. But worse than that, worse than the terrible pain in her stomach, worse than the blood or the feeling that her thin hips were coming out of their sockets, was the knowledge that her voice had killed him. After she cried out against him in court, he was found kicked to death. She did not speak again, except to her brother, for five years ...

Evidently Saki did not write about Asian sky burial sites.

Carol, a poem by Saki.

While shepherds watched their flocks by night
All seated on the ground,
A high explosive shell came down
And mutton rained around.

One of the things I enjoy most about our contemporary electronic information paradise is the ability to find immediate answers to vexing questions that formerly were the stuff of months-long (and on occasion, irreconcilable) bar bets.

One of the things I hate the most about growing old is the unreliability of my memory during those times when a stubborn recollection refuses to correspond with the verdict of the search engines.

The search engines are to blame, because I'm positive there was a short story by Saki (Hector Hugh Munro), in a paperback collection from elementary school times that I possessed, in which an Asian sky burial tower figured prominently.

This came into my mind when I saw the headline of the Atlas Obscura essay linked below. Now, in an effort to prove what I surely have gotten muddled somewhere amid the cranium's cobwebs, the past hour has been lost reading about Munro and his work.

Untameable Saki, by Fatema Ahmed (Prospect)

One hundred years after Saki's death in the Great War, his stories are still wickedly funny

What Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916), or “Saki,” thought of his life and work is a mystery. After his death, his sister Ethel destroyed most of his papers and instead wrote a short biographical sketch of her brother, which was published in 1924. The most vivid detail is her first memory of him, which has Saki running around the nursery with a blazing hearthbrush yelling, “I’m God! I’m going to destroy the world!” The second most vivid detail is their final encounter, when in the summer of 1916, Ethel declared “Kill a good few for me!” as Saki returned to the front in France. In November that year in the trenches near Beaumont-Hamel, Saki was reported to have shouted, “Put that bloody cigarette out!” only to be shot and killed by a German sniper.

H. H. Munro was 46 at the time of his death. He was past the age limit, but joined anyway. Refusing offers of promotion, Saki died an enlisted man.

As for the vultures and decomposition borne of the elements, of which Saki evidently did not write ...

What Remains of Asia’s Traditional Sky Burial Sites, by Kavya Ram Mohan

Five dramatic places dedicated to returning corpses to nature.

The ancient ritual of leaving corpses exposed to the elements has long been believed to be a sacred method of interment. In this traditional practice, bodies are left outdoors atop towers or mountainside platforms, where they can decompose in the open air and carrion birds can feed on the flesh until only the bones remain.

While this may sound extraordinary to some modern ears, defleshing was considered a natural and efficient means of disposing of the dead for thousands of years. It’s been practiced in Zoroastrian communities in Iran and India, and in certain Buddhist regions of Tibet, China, and other nations throughout Asia.

As populations have grown in these regions, corpse exposure sites have became more scarce, and more modern forms of burial have gained in popularity.

The legacy of James Baldwin.

The article isn't about the video, but I'd advise watching the video.

The fire this time – the legacy of James Baldwin, by Lanre Bakare (The Guardian)

His work fell foul of civil-rights-era binary racial and sexual politics but, as a new film shows, now Baldwin’s ideas are used to explain everything from Trump to Black Lives Matter

 ... For Baldwin scholar, professor of English at Yale and author Caryl Phillips, the return of Baldwin to mainstream thinking isn’t surprising at all. For him the big issues concerning American life now – the rise of crude, racially charged politics, killings of unarmed black men by the police, an apathetic public – repeat a history from which Baldwin’s critiques still offer some solace. “People are looking for someone who can articulate these issues,” says Phillips. “I think the person who has probably articulated what it means to be an American and what it means to be black, with more eloquence than anybody else in the last century, is Baldwin.”

George Monbiot, and exploring "the ways in which we could restore political life by restoring community life."

These things sneak up on you, and it's all part of the unceasing learning curve -- and if you really believe you learned everything you need to know in kindergarten, you're doing it wrong.

George Monbiot has been writing for The Guardian for two decades, but only during the past two or three years (sadly, belatedly, stupidly) have I found myself seeking not to miss a word he writes.

Perhaps this paragraph at Monbiot's web site sums it up.

Here are some of the things I try to fight: environmental destruction, undemocratic power, corruption, deception of the public, injustice, inequality and the misallocation of resources, waste, denial, the libertarianism which grants freedom to the powerful at the expense of the powerless, undisclosed interests, complacency.

Monbiot introduces yesterday's column.

This is the third in my occasional series on possible solutions to the many crises we face. It explores the ways in which we could restore political life by restoring community life. This means complementing state provision with something that belongs neither to government nor to the market but exists in a different sphere, a sphere we have neglected.

Here they are, in reverse order.

3. This is how people can truly take back control: from the bottom up

Our atomised communities can heal themselves. Through local initiatives we can regenerate our culture and make politics relevant again

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2. Our democracy is broken, debased and distrusted – but there are ways to fix it

Trump and Brexit are responses to a political system that’s imploding. But could a radical redesign wrest it from the liars?

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1. The case for despair is made. Now let’s start to get out of the mess we’re in

There is no going back, no comfort in old certainties. But reviving common ownership is one possible route to social transformation

Under the Volcano ... and an inquiry into the life and death of Malcolm Lowry.

And now he saw them, smelt them, all, from the very beginning—bottles, bottles, bottles, and glasses, glasses, glasses, of bitter, of Dubonnet, of Falstaff, Rye, Johnny Walker, Vieux Whiskey blanc Canadien, the apéritifs, the digestifs, the demis, the dobles, the noch ein Herr Obers, the et glas Araks, the tusen taks, the bottles, the bottles, the beautiful bottles of tequila, and the gourds, gourds, gourds, the millions of gourds of beautiful mescal.
-- Malcolm Lowry, in Under the Volcano

In 2015, I had the pleasure of reading the novel 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, a substantial portion of which takes place in Mexico. At present, I'm wading through Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer, another hefty novel centering on Mexico, and also writing a column about mezcal for Food & Dining Magazine.

It was only a matter of time until an old fascination came back to seize me: Under the Volcano, the legendary novel by Malcolm Lowry, telling the story of the doomed, self-destructive Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, stumbling drunkenly through his last day on earth, amid the Day of the Dead, in the shadow of two Mexican volcanoes.

Booze flows through Lowry’s writing. It’s a way of escape, as much as the sea voyages and plane journeys he wrote about. In Medieval times, a definition of possession included drunkenness, and Lowry was well aware of drink’s shamanic association:

“The agonies of the drunkard find their most accurate poetic analogue in the agonies of the mystic who has abused his powers.”

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of this 1976 documentary film about Malcolm Lowry, arguably the English-speaking literary world's most infamous alcoholic, is that Richard Burton, himself a legendary drinker, was both willing and eager to act as conduit for Lowry's voice.

This feature-length Oscar®-nominated documentary focuses on Malcolm Lowry, author of one of the major novels of the 20th century, Under the Volcano. But while Lowry fought a winning battle with words, he lost his battle with alcohol. Shot on location in four countries, the film combines photographs, readings by Richard Burton from the novel and interviews with the people who loved and hated Lowry, to create a vivid portrait of the man.

The excellent short essay at Dangerous Minds offers this disclaimer:

(The documentary) does create a vivid portrait, but one under the shadow of Lowry’s last wife Marjorie Bonner, and it was not until after her death, in 1988, and the publication of Gordon Bowker’s top class biography, Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry, that a complete picture of Lowry came to fruition.

D.T. Max's 2007 essay in The New Yorker provides more information on Lowry's "mysterious demise."

Margerie at first told friends that there had been a suicide note but then said that there wasn’t. The lack of a note surprised them. Alcohol would hardly have stopped his pen—he wrote while drunk all the time. And he was someone for whom written words accompanied nearly every moment of life; he even scrawled observations as he sat drunk in bars. Some four hundred jotted notes to Margerie are in the British Columbia archive—messages from El Leon to Miss Hartebeeste. “Lowry was always saying, ‘Make notes,’ “ Markson told me. Lowry’s despair was always part theatre; and, for such a person, self-destruction practically demanded documentation.

To me, the film's early 1970s footage of England, New York City, Mexico and Vancouver is what resonates. The dive bars in the Big Apple? Those are pre-gentrification. The Mexican urban vistas wouldn't have been altered much from Lowry's period of residence prior to WWII. The "beer parlor" in Vancouver -- well, who among us knew there was such a thing?

Having read Kunstler's forecast for 2017, it's obvious that we're headed back ... toward Lowry, not away from him.

But look at that sunlight there, look at the way it falls through the window. What beauty can compare with that of a cantina in the early morning? This cantina has been open all night and so cannot compare with the beauty of one which has just opened, which most of them do in a couple of hours, and not even the opening gates of heaven could mean as much to me as the iron screen that rolls up with a crash, as the unpadlocked, jostling, jalousies which admit those whose souls tremble with the drinks they unsteadily carry to their lips. All mystery, all assuagement of hope, all disappointment is here, beyond those swinging doors. "And do you see that old woman from Tarasco over there playing dominoes?" he asked aloud. But his glance implied: how, unless you drink, can you understand the beauty of an old woman from Tarasco who plays dominoes at seven o’clock in the morning?

FINAL REMINDER: In case you missed the Louisville Magazine feature profile of "a small-town dissident."

It feels odd to tout an article about me, so instead, here is the writer Dylon Jones to introduce his feature article in Louisville Magazine.

I spent the last year getting to know Roger Baylor. After months of political humor, debates, cigars, Communist cats, and a good many beers, I give you this: The Independent, my profile of a small-town dissident with the whole world spread out before him.

It's flattering to be featured, but more importantly, my aim is to draw your attention to Dylon Jones as a writer. He spent countless hours taking notes and making recordings, distilled this unruly mass of information to its essentials, then formed an accurate, entertaining narrative. As a journalist, he gets it right, and as a writer, he tells the story well. Writing is damned hard work, and Dylon does it well. Keep your eyes on him.

The Independent, by Dylon Jones (Louisville Magazine)

New Albany craft-beer pioneer Roger Baylor drained his glass and left his brewery to run for mayor last fall. The path ahead is littered with obstacles -- contentious former business partners, the two-party system, "garbage trees." Good thing he brought shears.

Also, kudos to Chris Witzke for his photography and informed chat. The link takes you to the interactive issue of Louisville Magazine (June 2016), which is easy to use.

Fear and loathing on the campaign trail, 2015 -- or, the Louisville Magazine feature about the independent pirate's bid.

It feels odd to tout an article about me, so instead, here is the writer Dylon Jones to introduce his feature article in Louisville Magazine.

I spent the last year getting to know Roger Baylor. After months of political humor, debates, cigars, Communist cats, and a good many beers, I give you this: The Independent, my profile of a small-town dissident with the whole world spread out before him.

It's flattering to be featured, but more importantly, my aim is to draw your attention to Dylon Jones as a writer. He spent countless hours taking notes and making recordings, distilled this unruly mass of information to its essentials, then formed an accurate, entertaining narrative. As a journalist, he gets it right, and as a writer, he tells the story well. Writing is damned hard work, and Dylon does it well. Keep your eyes on him.

The Independent, by Dylon Jones (Louisville Magazine)

New Albany craft-beer pioneer Roger Baylor drained his glass and left his brewery to run for mayor last fall. The path ahead is littered with obstacles -- contentious former business partners, the two-party system, "garbage trees." Good thing he brought shears.

Also, kudos to Chris Witzke for his photography and informed chat. The link takes you to the interactive issue of Louisville Magazine (June 2016), which is easy to use.

A diary entry about video documentaries and the personal process of recovery.

Photo credit: The Red Egg, by Oskar Kokoschka.

Starting just before Christmas of 2015, I commenced an obsession with YouTube documentaries. First came a wave of videos about Eastern European history during the Communist era. Then I shifted into more current events in and around Estonia, where we have a holiday booked later this year.

Reading a biography of poet/crackpot Ezra Pound shifted my gaze to documentaries about writers, first Englishmen (Larkin, Burgess, Amis), then expatriated Americans in Europe (Hemingway and Fitzgerald), but also a few Americans remaining in America (Philip Roth, John Steinbeck).

In turn, this recently yielded to visual artists, primarily painters: Kokoschka and Schiele from Austria; Englishmen Sickert, Bomberg and Nash; Magritte and de Lempicka in Paris (1928). For the first time, maybe ever, modern trends in painting that began with impression are beginning to make sense to me. There's hope yet.

Admittedly, apart from a film about the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, these various immersions are occurring within the familiar outline of the "Western" canon. There have been far too few about women. I'll need to do something about this, and will. It's a start, nothing more.

Previously I likened being at loose ends after 25 years in business as feeling as though I'd awakened from a coma. Now it's becoming even clearer, in the sense that dormant personal interests submerged beneath the weight of My Life in Beer are bubbling to the surface again. They never went away. There simply was too much drama and distractions to indulge them properly.

It's like picking up where I left off in 1990, and being back in school; not the required courses, but the electives. I get out of bed each morning enthused by the opportunity to learn. It's priceless.

Yes, I'm damned lucky to have this time to think. Not everyone gets the chance, and I recognize my good fortune in having it.

Introspection is one of those hackneyed double-edged swords, because it leads you to good places as well as bad. The following essay, published at my beer blog earlier in the week, is an example of what I think will be arriving more often as post-business time passes. It's time for me to write the history of that 25-year span.

If I'm up to it. After all, I'm a posterity kind of guy.

THE POTABLE CURMUDGEON: Can I get a “do-over” on Naughty Girl?

... Previous generations of humanity, living and dying prior to the advent of mass communications, missed the sheer thrill of screwing up, watching one’s screw-up instantly become grist for a potentially global audience, and then be reminded of it at regular intervals forever after.