After all, what is comfort food for?


Fried barley biscuit with fixin’s

Especially on a diet, there is only so much that a mortal can do to fend off the heathen craving for bread and wine. Yesterday, a friend in California who had no idea that I’m on a diet sent me this text:

“I got a loaf of organic sourdough batard, some organic avocado oil mayonnaise, some Irish Kerry Gold butter, and some prosecco from Spain. I also got a bottle of organic Merlot.”

That, and the news, sent me over the edge. I tried to work out how to get maximum comfort from, say, 900 calories or less.

Fried barley biscuits were the solution: flour made from hulled barley, a little olive oil, and nonfat milk. Frying the biscuits in a little peanut oil made the biscuits a little less dry than if I had baked them.

Ignorance and folly

One of the most horrifying images I’ve seen in months was the White House photo of Trump, Vance, Rubio and Hegseth lying their ignorant asses off for the cameras. It would be hard to find four greater fools and sicker souls anywhere on the planet, and yet there they were, in the White House.

MAGA types probably still believe Trump’s lies and triumphalism. But I give the media high credit for starting to get the truth out so fast that by Sunday morning, on the talk shows, Trump’s goons had to start walking things back.

One of my biggest concerns is terrorism. Iran doesn’t have the capability of a military response far from their own borders. They’ll have to retaliate on the cheap, and that means terrorism. The Washington Post took up that subject this morning: A weakened Iran could turn to assassination and terrorism to strike back.

I hope gasoline prices jump to $11 a gallon. Gasoline prices are one of the few things that the American ignorati can understand.


Fools, rushing in

Take that, Ezra Klein


Ezra Klein in attention-seeking mode. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

All liberal pundits have an inherent conflict of interest, a constant temptation that tends to lead them astray. Those of us who read the output of the punditry must always be alert to that conflict. It’s that competing for attention may sometimes override their integrity and wisdom. They have to be at least a little provocative.

We’re all familiar with the extreme versions of this on the right. Think Rudy Giuliani, or Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Lauren Boebert. They have no integrity at all. Their entire schtick is about theatrics for the sake of getting attention. Ezra Klein, certainly, has too much integrity to go that far — though I think it’s true that part of what led formerly serious pundits such as Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald off the right-wing edge of the earth is that they went where the attention is.

Klein’s bid for more attention was his book Abundance, published earlier this year. He apparently calculated, quite correctly, that there was a lot of attention to be had, as a liberal, for arguing that regulation was behind shortages of things such as housing.

Klein got his butt kicked in an interview this morning in the New York Times. It’s Ross Douthat interviewing Lina Kahn, who was head of the Federal Trade Commission under President Biden.

Douthat says: “There’s been a really stark division between people who want to organize liberal thinking around antimonopoly, anti-corporate power thinking, and people, like my colleague Ezra Klein, who have been arguing basically that the Democratic Party doesn’t have a strategy for dealing with the intense thicket of regulatory obstacles to building things and homes and factories in America.”

Khan (who I think is much smarter than Douthat, by the way), says: “Look, we need to talk in a market-by-market way, but if you are offering a diagnosis that is also suspiciously quiet about the role of corporate power, I think that should raise some questions as well.”

Some examples

Kahn is being subtle, and she is being fair. She is saying that Klein is ignoring the many ways that corporate power, in addition to regulation, leads to a shortage of affordable housing. I asked ChatGPT 4o to list some of the ways corporate interests inflate the cost of housing and the cost of renting:

• Large corporate entities — private equity firms, real estate investment trusts (REITs), hedge funds — have increasingly purchased single-family homes and rental properties, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis.

• Large developers and investment firms often buy and hold land (especially in growing urban fringes) without building, waiting for values to rise.

• Corporate developers increasingly construct entire neighborhoods of single-family homes intended solely for rent, not sale.

• A handful of large firms dominate sectors like building materials, cement, and lumber distribution, contributing to inflated construction costs.

• Corporate landlords and real estate lobbies (e.g. National Multifamily Housing Council) invest heavily in lobbying to block rent control, eviction moratoria, and tenant union protections.

• Some large landlords use rental pricing software (e.g. RealPage’s YieldStar) to algorithmically set rent levels and discourage undercutting.

Klein is on probation now

Klein, in my view, has traded a chunk of his credibility in trying to buy more attention. To me, this calls into question his integrity as well as his credibility. This can be a slippery slope, the slope that corrupted Greenwald and Taibbi so badly that only the right-wing mediasphere can stomach them.

This is happening at a time when corporate-owned media are increasingly pressuring their liberal pundits to compromise themselves to increase their appeal to right-wing readers. This is why Paul Krugman left the New York Times. It’s why Lillian Rubin left the Washington Post.

Let’s hope that Klein comes to his senses and doesn’t slip down that slope.

I have bonded with my ATV


The meadow across the road. Click here for high-resolution version.

I was embarrassed for even wanting an ATV. I was embarrassed when I bought one. It seemed like a trashy thing to have. But I’ve had it for two months now, and I haven’t regretted it for a minute.

It gets me outdoors much more. I don’t zoom around and make a lot of noise. I even installed a “silencer” on the muffler to make the ATV run quieter. I go slow to see what I can see. I have never even used fifth gear. I go places I would never go during snake season for fear of stepping on a snake. I’m getting to know individual trees. I’m learning where the blooming things are. It’s even a social thing, because sometimes a neighbor and I ride together.

The valley in which I live, with its two ridges, is a lot like a tiny state park. There are between two and three miles of roads and trails, two small bridges suitable only for tractors and ATV’s, and two fords across small streams. There are two springs with deep pools where frogs and tadpoles live. There’s an observation tower on one of the ridges that neighbors built. I’ve helped install antennas on top of the tower for emergency use. There is solar power in the tower. A VHF radio that I provided is installed there permanently. I have a rugged HF transceiver that I can take to the tower in case the electrical grid ever goes down (far from impossible during my lifetime).

The ATV is a 2001 Honda Rancher 350 with four-wheel drive and electric shift. I was extremely lucky to find a classic 25-year-old ATV in like-new condition. It’s a beast, though it feels friendly. It often reminds me of riding a horse — sitting on a saddle, feet on foot rests that feel like stirrups, knees clamped against the machine’s chest, watching out for overhanging limbs that might slap me in the face, sometimes rising in the stirrups for a better look up ahead.


⬆︎ Rose of Sharon in my backyard. Click here for high-resolution version.


⬆︎ Butterfly weed in the meadow. Click here for high-resolution version.


⬆︎ The backyard at the abbey at 7:20 a.m. Click here for high-resolution version.

Trump’s trashy, and revealing, parade


Click here for larger version. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

What did we learn yesterday? When the time comes (and it certainly could), will Americans take to the streets in numbers great enough to do a proper Mussolini on Trump?

Halfway to the tipping point?

Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard political scientist, says that nonviolent protests lead to change once 3.5 percent of the population join nonviolent protests.

It has been very hard to find a total for the number of people who participated in “No Kings” protests yesterday. Axios reports 5 million. Other news source just say “millions.” How many people were at Trump’s parade in Washington yesterday? The White House itself said that 250,000 “patriots” attended.

Alt National Park Service said on Facebook that there were 11 million people at No Kings protests. I am highly skeptical of that number; we don’t know how it was derived. I also don’t know how Axios arrived at the 5 million figure, but it’s probably conservative. We easily seem to be halfway to what it would take to drive Trump out of office.

We’re just getting started.

If Trump’s parade cost $45 million, and 250,000 were there to watch, then the parade cost $180 per person. I hope they had a miserable time.

Trump must be furious

I watched ABC’s evening news to see how they played yesterday’s events. ABC correctly led with the assassination in Minnesota and the manhunt for the killer. Next was Israel-Iran, and after that the No Kings protests and Trump’s parade. Trump no doubt wanted violence in Washington so that troops could crush it and make him look strong. He didn’t get it. Instead he got upstaged by other events, bigtime.

There were reports that Trump was savaged in social media because his parade was a $45 million flop. Fox News quoted someone in the White House, who said that the No Kings protests were “a complete and utter failure with minuscule attendance.” Outside the Fox bubble, it was very much the other way around.

Who is more angry?

I have not been able to turn up any reports of violence yesterday by those taking part in the No King’s protests. The violence was from the other side — the shootings in Minnesota; vehicles driven into crowds in San Francisco and Culpepper, Virginia; and shots fired in Salt Lake City. Something happened in Portland, Oregon, but as far as I can tell it didn’t amount to much. The photos I’ve seen from inside the No Kings protest don’t show angry people. It looks more like a party. But we’ve still got three long, hot summers of Trump to get through — 2026, 2027, and 2028.

Trump is weak

Increasingly Trump is exposed as an idiot surrounded by radical but feckless idiots. Their batting average of successes to backfires, walk-backs, and back-downs is hilarious.

They wanted leftist violence in Los Angeles but instead got up-close video of a U.S. senator wrestled onto the floor and handcuffed by Kristi Noem’s goons. Putin ignores Trump. Natanyahu ignores Trump. Instead of the instant peace Trump promised, there is escalating war. China outmaneuvers him. Europe outmaneuvers him. Economists say we should brace for price increases this summer. Oil prices are up 7 percent because of Israel and Iran. Trump has started chickening out on deportations after corporate America somehow managed to remind him how much corporations depend on immigrant labor. His glorious parade fizzled. Violence by his brownshirts only stokes, rather than intimidates, the resistance. “Trump is wrapping up 100 days of historic failure,” Dana Milbank writes in the Washington Post.

I can imagine a scenario in which Trump more or less gives up, in which his hotheads such as Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem quit and go home in a frustrated rage, and in which Trump just surfs out his term and concentrates on sucking up money rather than destroying the American democracy. But I also can imagine a scenario in which he doubles down and continues to deploy the the authoritarian playbook.

But, based on what happened yesterday, I think the American people understand that, working together, we are much stronger than Trump.

The consequences of truth-telling


Terry Moran interviews Trump, April 29, 2025. Official White House photo.

The Washington Post has reported that Terry Moran will not be returning to ABC. Moran was suspended after a post on “X” that was critical of Trump and Stephen Miller.

As a retired newspaperman, I well understand why news organizations (other than, of course, right-wing propaganda organs such as Fox News) must defend their reputation for objectivity. Those are the rules, and according to those rules Moran went too far.

But we have rules, and we have truth. One of the reasons we are where we are today is that the responsible media, for years (ever since Fox News came on line in 1996), have been unable to tell the truth because of their rules about bias and objectivity. The lords of right-wing propaganda strangled the responsible media with its own principles. Thus the fascist movement could lie constantly and laugh all the way to the bank, and to the White House. The responsible media could not bring themselves to plainly call a lie a lie and then explain the purpose of the lie (which they understood perfectly well but wouldn’t say). The right wing has to lie. To them their lies are beautiful. Ethically they couldn’t care less. The responsible media avoid it at all costs.

The pathetic irony is that Terry Moran told the truth, a truth that is so perfectly obvious to rational, morally sane people that it hardly needs to be said.

There’s another thing. In reporting on Moran’s post on “X,” the responsible media were squeamish about even reporting what Moran said. They’d quote some of the post, but the context was never clear, and it was never clear whether they were reporting the complete post.

I’ve included a screen shot of the complete post.

I am terrified about what is going on in Los Angeles. I’m also terrified that things could be even worse on Saturday, because of Trump’s military parade (which Gavin Newsome rightly called “vulgar”) and the protests. Over the next few days we stand to learn a lot about the intentions of the Trump White House and the current appetite of the American people for putting up with it.

A glimpse of the post-Trump future?


Source: Wikimedia Commons

As Karis Nemick in the television series Andor reminded us, authoritarianism is always brittle. Though Trump is surrounded by some of the most eager and rabid — but also the most incompetent, the most deranged, and the most corrupt — lackeys in American history, the future of authoritarianism in America is tied to the fate of one and only one person — Donald Trump. Authoritarianism in America has a single point of failure.

Trump is 78 years old. For his last year or so in office he will be a lame duck. In 42 months he will be gone (if he doesn’t die first from too many cheeseburgers and milkshakes).

There will be (there already is, actually) a fierce competition to become the next Trump and to keep the movement going. J.D. Vance, of course, wants to be the new Trump. I’m skeptical that Vance has got what that would take. Trump, it seems to me, wants a dynasty, not a functional movement. Don Jr. would like to be the next Trump, and it’s hard to imagine Trump supporting anyone else. I’m also skeptical that Junior has what it would take.

One of the things we learned from this week’s grotesque warfare between Trump and Elon Musk is how much Trump is hated by elites. Only Musk, at this point, has the power to turn on Trump. But, inevitably, that’s going to change. In three years or so, Trump’s power is going to be gone. Either his term will end, he will die in office, he will be assassinated, or unexpected and unpredictable events will somehow bring him down. Either MAGA creates and anoints another charismatic leader, or MAGA fragments from schism and goes into decline.

Whatever happens, once Trump is perceived as weak and vulnerable, an ugly tide will turn against him. A thousand savage wolves will come for Trump, both to hasten him off the stage and to extract revenge. Trump will be torn to pieces unless a MAGA successor loyal to Trump can be found. Historically, the picture is rarely pretty when authoritarians leave office or lose their power.

A great weakness of the Trump regime is that it is dangerously deficient in cold, pragmatic competence. The Nazis, without their cold, pragmatic competence, would never have gotten as far as they did. The Trump regime, on the other hand, is a pig circus of incompetent narcissists trying to generate video for Fox News. Without the pig circus that feeds the media, there’d not be much left of the Trump regime — not much that could get anything done, anyway.

Here I must add that my predictions about Trump have always been too optimistic. I just could not imagine that he could outlast all the many things that should have destroyed him politically and put him in prison. And even though I have a low, low opinion of at least half of the American population, my opinion was not low enough.

As the commentariat have pointed out, in the Trump-Musk pig circus we are seeing a struggle between MAGA, which wants to control us and dominate us, and the tech oligarchs, who want to own us, control us, and dominate us. Working together, their power is horrifying. But they have shown that their alliance is brittle. We must hope that they continue to try to dominate each other rather than work together.

Revisiting a lost era


The former home of the Winston-Salem Journal (a morning newspaper) and the Twin City Sentinel (an afternoon newspaper), built in 1926-1927. The building is a reduced semi-replica of Constitution Hall and Congress Hall in Philadelphia. It’s no longer a newspaper office. The building’s interior has been renovated for other uses. Click here for high resolution version.

The Winston-Salem Journal

Today, like most newspapers that manage to hang on in diminished form, the Winston-Salem Journal can’t even be considered a real newspaper at all. But once upon a time it was considered to be one of the great Southern newspapers. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for environmental coverage having to do with a plan to bring a huge strip-mining operation to northwest North Carolina.

The newspaper already had a great staff. But, after the Pulitzer, applications for jobs poured in from recent graduates of Ivy League universities, because the Winston-Salem Journal had a well deserved reputation for being one of the best “training newspapers” in the country.

The Journal was my hometown newspaper. In 1966, when I was a senior at Reynolds High School, I was chosen by the journalism teacher to be the “teen page correspondent” for the two-page spread of high-school news that the Sentinel ran every Friday. The managing editor of the Journal at the time, Fred Flagler, instantly recognized me as a nerd and therefore as copy boy material. That was my first job, part time on weekends. I subsequently did four summer internships at the Journal, and after that I was a Journal copy editor up until 1991 (when I moved to San Francisco and went to work at the San Francisco Examiner and then the San Francisco Chronicle).

The Journal’s staff moved out of the old building to smaller offices almost twenty years ago. Like many defunct newspapers, the newspaper’s real estate became more valuable than the newspaper. This building now houses a law firm on the first and second floors, and an architectural firm on the third floor. There is an ongoing project to renovate the building’s basement and repurpose an adjoining (but un-historic) building nextdoor.

I went on a tour of the building yesterday sponsored by Preservation Forsyth. There were about forty other people on the tour, but only three of us had ever worked for the Journal.


⬆︎ When I was a copy editor and “slot man,” I sat pretty much in the same place where this new occupant of the space is sitting. There’s a balcony outside the windows.

In a newsroom, all copy works its way toward the copy desk. The “slot man” is the copy editor who gives everything one last check before putting it into a pneumatic tube and sending the copy to the composing room. Lawyers call the slot man the editor of last resort. That’s not entirely true. The slot could always appeal to the managing editor if he or she thought something was not ready for publication, when, say, the city editor disputed the slot’s judgment. The Journal never got sued over any of the thousands of stories that passed through me as slot, though the Journal was a defendant in libel cases several times over the years. Click here for high resolution version.

The Shaffner Inn


⬆︎ After the tour of the Journal building, I had dinner downtown with an old friend who also used to work at the Journal. I stayed at the Shaffner Inn, a 1907 banker’s mansion that is now a bed and breakfast. Click here for high resolution version.


⬆︎ The living room. Click here for high resolution version.


⬆︎ Looking down the entrance hall. Click here for high resolution version.


⬆︎ The main staircase. Click here for high resolution version.


⬆︎ The dining room. Click here for high resolution version.


⬆︎ The landing of the main staircase. Click here for high resolution version.


⬆︎ The dining room set up for breakfast. All five rooms were occupied the night I was there. The breakfast was lavish and very well done. Click here for high resolution version.


⬆︎ This was the first traditional breakfast I had had since I was in Scotland last fall. There was yogurt and fruit. But if I’m somewhere near eggs, bacon, grits, and toast, then that’s what I’m going to have.

About Winston-Salem

Winston-Salem has always had a bit of an inferiority complex, because Raleigh, Charlotte, and now even Greensboro are bigger. Winston-Salem has grown relatively slowly, spared the ugly growth and some (but only some) of the corporate brutality that has caused the explosive growth of Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham. In my judgment, there are really only two cities in North Carolina worth visiting — Asheville, and Winston-Salem. Asheville is sometimes called the San Francisco of the South. I’d say that’s far too generous. Asheville doesn’t really have much to offer other than the mountains.

Whereas, culturally, Winston-Salem has always punched above its weight. Its history is deeply intertwined with the Moravian settlement of Salem in 1766. The Moravians came from Germany, a protestant sect that brought with it quite a lot of German technology and German high culture. Winston was a prosperous tobacco and textile town. The University of North Carolina School of the Arts is in Winston-Salem. In 1946, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation (tobacco money) pretty much bought a college for Winston-Salem. The foundation built a campus for Wake Forest College and paid to move the college 100 miles from Wake Forest to North Carolina. That’s now Wake Forest University. The university’s medical school and regional medical center are now a key part of the city’s economy.

As for corporate brutality, Winston-Salem has had it share but survived. I won’t go into it here, but it involved R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (Barbarians at the Gate), Wachovia Bank and Trust Company, and Piedmont Airlines.

When I chose to retire in the Blue Ridge foothills, part of the calculus was knowing that Winston-Salem is less than an hour’s drive away.

Diet theory


A diet burger made from mashed pinto beans, whole-grain (hulled) barley, wheat germ, and seasonings

There is a movement that argues that diets don’t work, and that people don’t have to be lean to be healthy. Diets don’t work, they say, because, when people lose weight on a diet, they almost always gain it back.

Of course they gain it back! What would be the fun of eating lean all the time? There’s a fix for gaining the weight back: Do another diet.

Thus I often say that I’m an experienced dieter. The real trick with dieting, though, I would say, is to not wait too long to start a diet when you need to start a diet. For most of my adult life, my weight has cycled up and down by about ten pounds.

Gaining ten pounds is great fun. One feels lean after a successful diet, and one wants to celebrate. But eventually that will catch up with you, and another diet cycle must begin. The relative length of the cycles, for me anyway, is not that bad. A diet usually lasts for three to six months. Whereas a live-it-up spree can last from two to four years. If I had better discipline, I’d start a diet after gaining five pounds. That doesn’t work for me, though, probably because at five pounds I can still pretend that my belt isn’t getting too tight.

My first rule for dieting is to count calories, aiming for 1,200 calories a day. That’s enough to have a reasonable chance of getting enough protein. It would be possible to have a doughnut-only diet and lose weight on 1,200 calories a day. But that would be miserable, because one’s glucose level would cycle wildly.

It’s the simple carbs that have to go — bread and pasta, for example. Then, each day, one must figure out how to get enough protein and stay under the calorie target. Fiber is the dieter’s friend. You can have pretty much as much low-carb vegetables as you can eat. The fiber keeps the microbiome well fed, and I think that helps keep the appetite under control.

On a diet, you’re going to be hungry for part of the day. But that’s not so bad if you keep the carbs down, and thus the need for insulin. The current trend in dieting is intermittent fasting. I aim for 19-5 — two meals a day between noon and 5 p.m. I’m moderately hungry in the mornings, but I never go to bed hungry.

There’s pasta, bread, and potatoes in my future. But not yet.

Retailoring a sack jacket: Can that be done?


A thrifted Jos. A. Banks sack jacket gets a new life masquerading as something more British. Click here for high-resolution version.

I feel guilty writing about trivialities, given the state of the country and the state of the world. But life must go on.

I have long known that I prefer the look of British tailoring to American. Maybe from watching all those BBC period pieces? The most beautiful suit I ever saw was in a tailor-shop window at Oxford. The fabric and cut almost took my American breath away.

But it was only fairly recently that I was able to put some names to certain styles of tailoring.

The standard American suit is the “sack suit.” It sounds derogatory, but it’s not meant that way. The cut goes back more than a hundred years (to Europe). But it was in America where it became the standard.

The sack suit is cut with straight sides that ignore the waist line (if any). British suits are cut to emphasize the shoulders (with padding!) and flatter the waist and V-shape of men whose waists are worthy of some flattery. If you look at a photo of even a portly English gentleman such as Winston Churchill, you’ll see that his jackets have some taper.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I got into the bad habit of collecting Harris tweed jackets after visiting Lewis and Harris in 2019. I bought my first Harris tweed jacket in a second-hand shop in Stornoway. I have about eight jackets that I like enough to have had altered. All but one came from the U.K., from eBay. They’re all suitable only for cool weather. I also have some Islay tweed and some Donegal tweed.

I buy a jacket only if I’m confident that the shoulder width is right for me. They can be altered easily enough to tighten the chest and waist (usually too loose for me in thrifted jackets) and adjust the sleeve length.

Recently on eBay I came across a jacket made of silk tweed. It’s a two-button, light-weight American jacket, from an old-reliable menswear company, Jos. A. Bank, made in Portugal. It was, of course, a sack-cut jacket. Madeline, a tailor trained in Hong Kong who had altered all my other jackets, had retired. So this time I went to a place at the mall. They actually did a good job, and they were less expensive than Madeline was. The young woman who pinned the jacket understood what I was looking for. The result was not exactly British-style tailoring, but it’s close enough. Once a sack jacket, always a sack jacket, I suppose.


⬆︎ Its previous life as a sack jacket is more visible from the front. Click here for high-resolution version.


⬆︎ Just up the road from me is a pasture in which two old horses live, Pete and Buddy. Just now there are millions of daisies in the pasture. Pete sneaks out at night when he can, and he often comes down to eat some of my clover. Click here for high-resolution version.

Do unto books as you would have them do unto you


Undergoing radical surgery to get a new cover and a new life. This was a cookbook that had been heavily used, though not very gently.

If you were a book, how would you want to be treated?

If you have a lot of books, as I do, and if you have books that had previous owners, then you will learn a lot about the (sometimes long) lives of books, including things that will make you sad.

When I was in elementary school, we were taught how to treat books kindly. Rules included not turning down corners as bookmarks and not writing inside the books. We were taught how to relax the bindings of new books so that the binding wasn’t damaged. We were often given book jackets for textbooks so that the books would last longer.

I think that there are, though, some things that books don’t mind very much. Some signs of previous owners add charm to the book’s history. Some things, though, reveal that a book has been abused.


Click here for high-resolution version

⬆︎ Abuse by cold-blooded defacement

Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum. Lee Smolin, Penguin, 2019.

I bought this used hardback from an online bookseller because a new hardback was expensive. These pencil and highlighter marks are on pages xviii and xix in the preface. The defacement continues for two more pages, and then stops completely.

This reveals a lot about the previous owner. He or she started the book with an aggressive determination to understand it, then didn’t even make it through the preface! The book was published in 2019, so the previous owner didn’t keep the book very long, either. So the book was orphaned into the used-book market and was sold to me for a humiliating $2.16.

I will write about this book soon. Lee Smolin is one of my favorite physicists.


Click here for high-resolution version

⬆︎ Loved and left behind

Winnie the Poo. A.A. Milne, Dutton, 1961.

This book is a little dog-eared, but it was treated kindly. The book clearly was a Christmas gift to Gabriel in 1971 (see next image). If we assume that Gabriel was six years old, then he would have been born in 1965. There are several Gabriel Behringers in the world, so I can’t be sure (from Googling) who the previous owner might have been. But I hope it was the Gabriel who is now an upper-school English teacher with a master’s from Dartmouth.


Click here for high-resolution version

⬆︎ Merry Christmas, Gabriel

There are no marks in this book other than the book plate and the gift inscription, but there are dark-colored stains on pages 3 through 7. Perhaps Gabriel spilled some chocolate milk?


Click here for high-resolution version

⬆︎ Librarians, fickle friends of books

Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Edited by A.L. Rowse, Harper & Row, 1964.

This book’s first life was in the library of David Lipscomb High School. From Googling, I see that that’s a private prep school in Nashville, Tennessee, affiliated with Lipscomb University and Lipscomb Academy. These are Christian schools!

It’s hard for me to doubt that this book is very happy to be away from a bunch of young Christians and into the hands of an old heathen who actually cares about Shakespeare’s sonnets. The book’s last due date was October 23, 1997.

I wonder why it was removed from the library, since Shakespeare’s sonnets are eternal and the Rowse edition is a classic. Maybe someone complained to the school’s administration that some of those sonnets are very, very naughty?


Click here for high-resolution version

⬆︎ Books, like cats, like a little petting

Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Robert D. Richardson Jr., University of California Press, 1986.

Many of Ken’s books are mingled with mine, though of course he started a new library after he moved to Scotland. In books that Ken has read, I often find tiny little X’s in the margin, in light pencil. This is how Ken marks his books. I have a somewhat different method that is a little heavier-handed than Ken’s method. If I were a book, I don’t think I’d mind light pencil marks.


Click here for high-resolution version

⬆︎ I plead guilty

Oscar Wilde: A Life. Matthew Sturgis, Knopf, 2021.

When I make notes in books, I prefer to put them in the same place. That’s on the left side of the back guard sheet. I always use light pencil marks so that when the book outlives me a new owner can erase me.


Click here for high-resolution version

⬆︎ How to make sure a book has a long life

Ender’s Game. Orson Scott Card, Tor, 1985.

When a book has become a classic, and the first edition has been signed by the author, you can be sure it will have a long life. Orson Scott Card and I were friends back in the 1980s, but after that our lives went in very different directions. I doubt that he’d give me the time of day now.

His reference to “a true marketplace of ideas” refers to a computer bulletin board that I ran back in the 1980s, Science Fiction Writers Network.