Category: Culture

The unenchanted travel of the here and now


A medieval inn. Source: ChatGPT 5.1. Click here for high-resolution version.

It’s an odd paradox — to very much want to know what’s happening in the world, but very much not to want to be in that world. When you’re both introverted and old, like me, then all the more does one want to be away from the world. It’s why I live in the woods now. This almost certainly has something to do with why I no longer read stories set in the here and now.

It wasn’t always that way. Back in the 1970s, Armistead Maupin’s series of Tales of the City novels changed my life. They were very much set in the here and now, in San Francisco. Those novels were a big factor in my deciding to move to San Francisco back in the late 1980s. And by the way, by an unplanned stroke of fortune, I ended up at the San Francisco Chronicle, where Maupin wrote those novels in serial form in the Chronicle. I even, at last, met Maupin at an office Christmas party. By that time Maupin was rich enough from the novels that he no longer had to work at the Chronicle.

Still, the urge to travel has never completely left me, and I hope it never does. I’ve seen most of the places that I ever wanted to see, so it’s Scotland now that best suits my anything-but-the-here-and-now attitude. In Scotland, especially in certain places, the realities of today’s world can easily be imagined away — pubs, little villages, farmland that probably looked very little different 400 years ago, moors and bogs, castles, and the sea crashing against rocky cliffs. San Francisco suited me well when I was younger, but not anymore.

But: one has to get there from here. From where I am in the Appalachian foothills, that’s 24 hours or more of the most miserable sort of immersion in the here and now — the noise and discomforts of airports, being packed into airplanes, paying through the nose for a taxi or Uber ride, and sometimes an ugly and time-wasting layover in an airport hotel. No doubt this is inevitable in an era when people travel by the millions, requiring great efficiency. The economics of travel today, it seems, have been fine-tuned to keep the level of misery just short of the level at which people will refuse to bear it. The misery is twice as great on the way home, because everything that one was looking forward to is now behind rather than ahead. Though, to be sure, being home at last is awfully nice, too.

I was unable to find any new fiction that interests me, so once again I’m re-reading The Lord of the Rings. My favorite parts, really, are the traveling parts, especially in Book 1 when Frodo and friends set out from Hobbiton and travel cross-country to Bree and to the inn named the Prancing Pony.

I’ve often been curious about what travel was like in medieval times. There were Roman roads, of course, going in all directions from Italy into the heart of Europe as well as into Britain. There were a good many people on those roads, which means that there had to be a support system for travelers. For what reasons did people travel? How safe was it? Were there a great many inns, or too few? Who walked, and who rode? What kind of wagons and other conveyances did they use? Did they travel much during the winter?

It seemed very likely to me that scholars have a great deal of information about medieval travel, so I asked ChatGPT for suggestions. I’ve ordered a 1997 reprint of Norbert Ohler’s The Medieval Traveller. It’s an English translation of the original German, Reisen im Mittelalter.

I’m hoping the book will provide some fuel for my imagination — staying right here in the woods while traveling in my imagination, and not in the here and now.

Burlap! Camellias! Verdi!


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I regularly order wheat berries and hulled barley from Amazon, five pounds at a time, to grind into flour. This time the wheat came in a beautiful burlap bag. It’s a tiny burlap bag, but I haven’t seen a burlap bag in years.

My camellias are blooming. Camellias in bloom always make me think of La Dame aux Camélias, the 1848 novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, which I read in French some years ago. Verdi turned the story into an opera, La Traviata. It’s a tragic story, but Verdi included a happy piece, which also is a waltz.


⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

Getting by in a pub-deprived culture


Vegetarian fake chicken pie. Click here for high-resolution version.

To those of us born into a Northern European culture, there is no food more magical than a pie. Pies have ancestors in the ancient Mediterranean, but I suspect that it was in medieval England where the magical pies of fairy tales (and now, pubs!) came into existence.

Regular readers know how much I like the British and Irish pubs, and how deprived I feel because America does not have a proper pub culture. And, in pubs, it’s not just about the drink. It’s also about the food. I’m recently home from Scotland, and fall weather has arrived. So I can’t stop thinking about savory pies.

I kick myself for neglecting to photograph the seafood pie that Ken and I had in a pub in Peebles, near the John Buchan museum. Every pub is different, of course. Many pubs don’t have savory pies with a complete top and bottom crust — a lazy compromise. Instead, the filling is poured into a baking vessel, and a round piece of crust is laid on top. The pie is still good, but the magic isn’t very effective. The best pies, really, come from high street bakeries.


⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.


Cream of mushroom soup and whole wheat bread. Click here for high-resolution version.

⬆︎ Bread and soup

And then there’s bread and soup. Somewhere in Scotland there must be pubs that can beat me at bread and soup. I haven’t yet found those pubs, though.

⬆︎ Wood for winter

The photo is from my morning ATV ride. An old oak up on the ridge had died. Neighbors sawed it up and split it for firewood. I wish I had the option of heating with wood. But I don’t have a chimney.

The awful 17th century


Source: Wikimedia Commons

Witch Wood. John Buchan, first published 1927.

Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples. Francis Young, Cambridge University Press, 2025. 432 pages.

The history of witch-burning in Scotland is horrifying. Between 4,000 and 6,000 people were tried for witchcraft in Scotland, far more than in England. The trials continued into the late 1600s, but the panic over witches had pretty much subsided by 1707.

How in the world do we understand how a century of witch trials in Scotland was so quickly followed — in the very same Scotland! — by a century of the Enlightenment? How was it that these prominent elements of Scottish history were mirrored so quickly in America?

I am no historian, and I don’t have any thorough answers for these questions. For one, the history of Scotland is bafflingly complicated. By comparison, it seems to me that the histories of England and America are much easier to get one’s head around. But I do think I can see just a glimmer of how the sudden transition from witch trials to the Enlightenment unfolded in Scotland.

I often read two books at once, one fiction and one nonfiction. By coincidence, I was reading John Buchan’s Witch Wood at the same time I arrived at Chapter 4 of Silence of the Gods. (A hat tip here to Chenda, for recommending this book.) That chapter is about the 17th Century, with the title “Antiquarians and Witch-Hunters.”

Silence of the Gods limits itself to places farther north and more remote than Scotland. But it’s clear that, though Scotland excelled at burning witches, the witch panic was everywhere in Christendom during the 17th Century. But it’s only in Scotland where a particular zeal for witch-burning was immediately followed by the work of the Enlightenment. Surely one set the stage for the other, in some strange way?

I had a long discussion with ChatGPT about this. ChatGPT’s bottom line was: Religious zealotry built the roads that the Enlightenment ran on.

There are a couple of key points to understanding this. The first is that, during the 17th Century, Scotland’s kirk had far too much civil power. That is, as we Americans would understand it, there was very little separation between church and state. Scotland was divided by religious conflict and was in great turmoil. In ways that I don’t understand very well, the deposition of James VII, followed by William III and Mary II (1689) set the stage for important changes in how Scotland was governed. The Settlement of 1690 preserved the church but handed civil power in Scotland back to civil authorities.

Americans learned an important lesson from this. To quote ChatGPT: “Seventeenth-century Scotland showed what happens when a church (whether presbyterian or episcopal) fuses with state power—persecution, ‘enthusiasm,’ and civil strife. Scots-Irish Presbyterians who emigrated carried that memory and became key allies of Baptists in the push for disestablishment in the states (notably in Virginia).”

John Buchan’s Witch Wood is a fictional account of what village life was like in Scotland in 1644. Buchan knew this history. At the time he was writing Witch Wood, he also was writing a biography of James Graham, the 1st Marquess of Montrose, who figured prominently in Scotland’s religious conflicts of the 17th Century.

Buchan probably expected his readers of a hundred years ago to know much more about Scottish history than most of us do today. That lack of knowledge of Scottish history makes Witch Wood harder to appreciate. One thing that strikes me about Witch Wood, though, is Buchan’s harsh treatment of the kirk, its theologies, and the zeal of the men who held power in the church. To put it coarsely, Buchan did not find it necessary to kiss the church’s feet, which makes me think that by 1927 Scotland was well along in losing its religion. That draws our attention to yet another mystery about the problems of America: How was it that England, Scotland, and even Ireland lost their religion, while Americans are now dealing with an attempted takeover by Christian nationalists? In disturbingly many ways, what’s happening in America today resembles what happened in Scotland in the 17th Century (bitter, even violent division with the empowerment of fanatics), fused with some political innovations developed in Germany in the 1930s.

I’m only halfway through Silence of the Gods, but one thing is perfectly clear. The Christianization of the far north — Norway, Sweden, Finland, parts of Russia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania — was just as violent and ugly as what happened to the south.

All of this is horrifyingly relevant today, because it’s still going on, in America at least. What will it take for people to remember that to be governed by zealots is to be governed by the devil?


Witch Wood, Chapter 2. Click here for high-resolution version.

21,000 steps before supper


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Probably the most written-about hotspot for food in Edinburgh is the Sheep Heid Inn, especially their Sunday roasts. This inn lies some distance from the more trafficked parts of Edinburgh. If you walk down the Royal Mile to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, you’ll be right at the foot of Arthur’s Seat, a high, steep hill with stunning views. The walk up Arthur’s Seat will burn some calories.

Then if you descend from Arthur’s Seat in just the right direction, you’ll find the Sheep Heid Inn, hidden among some trees and a high stone wall. According to my watch, I had gone more than 21,000 steps in Edinburgh that day before we had Sunday roast at the Sheep Heid Inn.

Dunrobin Castle


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Most of Scotland’s castles are in varying stages of ruin. An exception is Dunrobin Castle, which is about an hour’s drive north of Inverness. The castle is in beautiful condition, and it’s fully furnished. It must cost a fortune to maintain.

Cèilidh!

If you want to know how to pronounce cèilidh, you’ll probably need to ask someone in Scotland. It’s KAY-lee. But I suspect that anglophone pronunciation is approximate, because most of us don’t know how to make the sounds of Scottish Gaelic.

I was ever so happy to be able to go to a cèilidh while I was in Scotland. It was at the West Barns Village Hall in East Lothian. The jig in the video is “The Flying Scotsman.” I believe that’s a 19th Century jig, meant to evoke the movements of the famous train with that name.

The dancing isn’t exactly perfect. But this is how children learn these things. As for men, I imagine more men would participate if their prospects in courtship still depended upon it.

Leakey’s Book Shop


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I’m back from Scotland. On this trip, I spent two days in Inverness. The first stop after checking into the hotel was Leakey’s Book Shop, which is said to be the largest seller of used books in Scotland.

It would take all day, and then some, to explore the entire store. I made do with the literature section, looking for older editions of Scottish writers, books that would be pretty much impossible to find in the United States. I bought two novels by John Buchan and a copy of Nigel Tranter’s Man’s Estate that had been signed by Tranter — a steal at £30.

I’ve written a great deal here about Sir Walter Scott, and I already have a complete set of the Waverley novels, a gift from Ken that he schlepped all the way from Scotland, in a box, as checked baggage. I bought only three books at Leakey’s, no more than I could fit into my suitcase. Scottish novelists, I suppose, have always had to live in the shadow of Sir Walter Scott, and none have achieved Scott’s fame. I will have a separate post soon on John Buchan. Nigel Tranter, like Buchan, must be on any reading list of Scottish fiction.

The inscription in the book makes me think that Dorothy was a friend of Tranter’s, as opposed to someone who bought the book after a bookshop reading by Tranter.

I have a ton of photos from Scotland, including castles, castles, and more castles, and of course some food and seascapes. I’ll post some of them during the next week or so.


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Traditional values??


From my morning walk: a happy goat

David Brooks

Show me a conservative intellectual and I will show you someone who is insufferably morally smug, with blind spots half a galaxy wide.

I do give David Brooks credit for halfway recognizing that everything he has flacked for for many years has gone to the devil. Still, he identifies as a conservative, and periodically he writes a piece intended to sustain his moral smugness and to flatter conservatives and conservatism.

His column in the New York Times this morning is a masterpiece of self-deception: Why I Am Not a Liberal. Brooks writes: “As a society, we are pretty good at transferring money to the poor, but we’re not very good at nurturing the human capital they would need to get out of poverty.”

It is conservatism, he would have us believe, that knows how to nurture this human capital. Then he shoots himself right between the eyes by citing a study on how Swedish culture protects people of Swedish descent from poverty, even though Sweden is always at or near the top of the list of the world’s most liberal countries.

Because of his blind spot, it doesn’t occur to Brooks to ask himself who conservatives throw money at: the rich and the super-rich. Did the trillions of dollars redistributed upward, and the creation of hundreds of American billionaires, make the rich virtuous? Is it more virtuous to throw money at the rich than at poor people who can barely afford to feed their children?

I have a fantasy of running into Brooks in an airport restaurant while he’s having his $78 hamburger. “You’re a pretty nice man,” I’d say to him. “But you’re an idiot.”

Ken is in the New York Times again

Ken has an article in the Aug. 30 New York Times, The Era of the American Lawn Is Over. On his Substack page, he also has a short video showing his wee front and back gardens near Edinburgh.

The price of silver

One often hears it said that people who grew up during the Great Depression remain frugal for the rest of their lives. Those of us who remember the stagflation of the 1970s and early 1980s will never forget it. I’m convinced that I can smell a financial calamity well before it happens, because of the irrational exuberance and the obvious unsustainability. That unsustainability never unwinds gradually. It always comes crashing down.

On January 17, 1980, silver reached a high of $49.95 per ounce. Two months later, the Hunt brothers (who were trying to corner the silver market) missed a margin call, and the price of silver fell to $10.80 per ounce.

This morning, as I write, silver is priced at $41.46 per ounce, having risen by around $10 an ounce in the past few months. If you have some silver, that’s nice. But it is not a good economic indicator. Irrational exuberance continues in the stock market, but many warning signs are flashing in the bond market and in gold and currency markets.

As I see it, there is a calamity in our near future. Irrational exuberance tends to last much longer than a rational person can understand. When bubbles will burst is impossible to predict.

The August jobs report was just released. “U.S. labor markets stalled this summer,” writes the New York Times. Yet the stock market is up, apparently because the weakening labor market means that the Fed will reduce interest rates. We should ask ourselves: Who benefits more from low interest rates than from a healthy economy? (Hint: people who play with other people’s money — the people who always cause financial crises.)

To my lights, it’s time to fasten our seatbelts and prepare for turbulence. A financial crisis is never good, even when governments are wise and rational in managing it. But we Americans are now passengers in a ship of fools and con men, who, given choices, will always choose the worst, then double down.


Originally published September 5, 1957. Charlotte, North Carolina. Photo by Douglas Martin, the Charlotte News, via Wikimedia Commons. This photo was selected as the 1957 World Press Photo of the Year. Click here for high resolution.

The deplorables, an anniversary

The photo above was first published 68 years ago today. We must never forget who the deplorables are, what they are, what their values are, and what they are capable of. The photo is of Dorothy Counts, taunted by white students at Harry P. Harding High School.

Beans for breakfast?


A modest version of a Scottish breakfast: Barley scone, beans, fake bacon, grilled tomatoes, fried egg

It’s less than a month until my trip to Scotland, and that got me looking forward to those enormous and irresistible Scottish breakfasts. How did it come to pass, I wondered, how beans are served for breakfast (to tourists, anyway) in both England and Scotland? I even have had breakfast beans in a hotel on Connaught Place in Delhi, which made me wonder if the idea came from India.

Nope. According to ChatGPT, breakfast beans came from America.

The H.J. Heinz Co., said the AI, started shipping its tinned Boston baked beans to Britain as early 1895. “By the 1920s,” AI wrote, “Heinz had adapted the recipe for British tastes, making it less sweet and more tomato-forward. These beans were cheap, easy to store, and didn’t require cooking from scratch, which made them popular in working-class homes — and eventually a fixture in the full English breakfast after WWII.” Breakfast beans arrived in Wales and Scotland a bit later, AI said — the 1960s-70s.

When I was making the breakfast in the photo, I tried to figure out the minimum number of pans required — (two). In a commercial kitchen, I’m sure, those big British breakfasts are cooked on a griddle. That made me realize than an electric griddle would be a nice thing to have, if I had a place to store it.

Democrats always get blamed for what fascists do

If I made a short list of the biggest lies ever told, one of them would be that there are two sides to every story. But there are not two sides to fascism — not two truthful sides, anyway. But that’s not how the mainstream media play it. We have a word for it — “both-sidesism.” It’s an ugly cousin of radical centrism, and it’s a foolish and deadly way of describing a world that has wicked people in it. Both-sidesism requires that lies have to be treated as though they’re true, or at least might be true, or at least that some people think they’re true.

There is a huge industry that blames Democrats for what Republicans do. For example, how many times have we heard that “Democrats abandoned the working class.” But Democrats didn’t abandon the working class. Republicans won over the working class with propaganda and con men that appeal to the deplorables’ ignorance, their racism, their gullibility, their awful religion, and their meanness.

The moment someone dares to point this out, the propaganda and con men have a ready answer: See there! You call them ignorant, racist, gullible, and mean but you claim you didn’t abandon them! No wonder they don’t like you! This is thought to be a real clincher of an argument that really owns and bedazzles the libs.

This so-called clincher of an argument also belongs on a short list of the biggest lies ever told. That lie is that educated elites are the real cause of fascism and that the deplorables are really just wonderful, wonderful people, if only we understood them. As for educated elites, as much blame gets heaped on liberals for failures to stand in the way of fascism as on fascists for their fascism. But if the deplorables saw fit to hand both houses of Congress, and the White House, to Republicans, just what magic wands do we expect Democrats to use to exert control, especially since fascists have packed the courts? Gavin Newsom of California is finally getting some traction with ridicule and plain talk.

Those who blame liberals for fascism apparently think that there exists some political strategy in which the deplorables can be won back from fascism with flattery, sweet talk, and “understanding.” That is nonsense. We have passed the tipping point. The only solution is to remind the deplorables that there are more civilized people in the world than there are deplorables, and that civilized people have a bigger stick, once they decide to use it. If the deplorables want a war, then ask them whose side half the American people (the smarter half), plus Europe, Canada, and Mexico would be on. Gavin Newsom and Beto O’Rourke are now, at last, being heard above the noise of both-sidesism.

One of most beautiful things we’ve seen lately was seven European leaders — five of them heads of state — descending on Washington to let Trump know where some lines will be drawn. The American media pretended not to understand, because it would feel oh so very harsh to have to explain to the American people that they now live in a rogue country that the world is preparing to deal with. That visit was a warning.

Trump and company know that this is their last chance. They’re going to go for full-on fascism that no law and no election can depose, counting on never being held accountable, free to loot and to dominate. They don’t have the cards to do that. Someone should remind them of Nuremberg.

Summer is winding down


A spicebush swallowtail butterfly was kind enough to pose for me on a Mexican sunflower. Click here for high-resolution version.

After a hot and humid month, Hurricane Erin moved up the East Coast, followed by weather than feels like early fall, with nighttime lows in the 60s and even 50s.

What a relief.

Yearning for hell to freeze over


Surely we must be in hell: March 19, 2025. Official White House photo via Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

The news of late has been so surreal that it feels like living in a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, set in a fascist America from which there is No Exit. How the hell do we get out of this place?

A lifelong criminal, con man, and creep of the highest order struts on the world stage like a king, dispensing commands to hellify the world. Half the population, eager and true-believing citizens of hell, are so depraved that they see this king as God’s agent on earth, even as he hastens to light their little lives, too, on fire. The other half of us see what is happening, stunned, bewildered, and near paralyzed by the spectacle of it.

In this hell, freedom is the right to dominate and exploit. Truth is whatever serves the king. Virtue means doing whatever the king wants done. Empathy is toxic. Justice is retribution and persecution. Fairness is at the top of the list of things that must be reversed because fairness can no longer be allowed. Any act of fairness is a crack in hell’s foundation.

In philosophy and literature, there is a well developed idea that this world is hell (even before Donald Trump came along). Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.”

Time after time people like me have bought into hopes that this criminal, con man, and creep would be neutralized and brought to justice. Time after time he has slithered out of it, not least because there are so many who are afraid of him or who long for a piece of the perks and power in a hellified world — hell’s courtiers, sold souls, connoisseurs of the practice of domination, exploitation, and cruelty.

A new hope?

The Epstein scandal gets more interesting every day. Dare we hope that it will be the Epstein scandal that finally causes hell to freeze over? This morning, the New Republic has this piece by Alex Shepherd: Is This the Turning Point of Trump’s Presidency? It’s early yet, but the Epstein story has all the makings of a defining scandal that could grind Republican rule to a halt.

It’s asking a lot of MAGA fools to comprehend that reality is pretty much a complete reversal of all the lies they have believed. A thousand smoking guns pointed right at their tiny brains may not be enough. We can only hope.

Meanwhile, even if Trump manages to slither out of this, the subversive beauty of the truth trying to come out, while the king and his court struggle to keep the scam going, is a sight to see.

The media and some of the punditry, bless their timid little hearts, are ganging up now to come up with scoops that fry Trump’s ass in the grease of his own guilt. Here’s an example of a good one this morning, from Midas Touch. The link is below.


A screen shot from the video at Midas Touch.