Rumble Fish: Keep Cooly-Cool, Boy

Posted on October 19, 2026 by smellincoffee
“Rumble fish. They’d kill each other if they could.”

Many years ago, when the Earth was young and dinosaurs roamed the land, I encountered a book called That Was Then, This is Now at a Waldenbooks in Montgomery, Alabama. It proved to be my introduction to S.E. Hinton, and I later read everything I could find by her. The three titles I remember most, though, were my introduction, plus The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. Rumble Fish was especially startling.

Rumble Fish is the story of Rusty James, a troubled young man who has no place wherein he belongs. Much of his life is staked on being the little brother of The Motorcycle Boy, an impossibly cool, somewhat eccentric, and undeniably Tuff member of Tulsa’s population of undesirables. (Tulsa is not named, but given that Hinton’s other gang works appear to be rooted there, I’m going on assumptions.) Readers familiar with The Outsiders will remember its gang culture, particularly the constant fights between Greasers (working class boyos) and the Socs, the prep-school toughs. By the time Rumble Fish rolls around, the gang wars have died off, both those between the prols and the bougies and the internecine greaser wars. The Motorcycle Boy gets credit for ending them, but as he said it was mostly the dope that did the rumbles in.

Rusty James wants nothing more than to be like the Motorcycle Boy, but he’s caught between his admiration of his brother and the fact that the Motorcycle Boy is…weird. Their father was a lawyer who might have amounted to something: his formal diction is an anomaly in a world of tough-talking street types. As a kid, the father didn’t too much matter; he was odd, but that was it. As an adult reader, I wondered what makes a lush of a lawyer fail so dramatically in life. One could say the booze, but there are a great many members of the bar who have been members of other bars and still flourished.The father has imparted his unusual ways of thinking to the Motorcycle Boy, culminating in references to Greek mythology that Rusty James does not understand and inwardly despises.

Rusty James is, despite being an unpleasant person – he fights too quickly, he has no conception that lovin’ on a girl at a party would offend his girlfriend, and he has no interest in a productive life whatsoever – sympathetic. He is a lost boy whose icon will, in the course of this little novel, fail him. The Motorcycle Boy has his own issues, and in the end Rusty James will see him fall – to his own confusion.

This is a fascinating novel. Its sentences have lingered with me for over two decades, especially Rusty James’ friend’s weary question to The Motorcycle Boy – “Why is it that no one has taken a rifle and shot you yet?” – followed by the response, that every society no matter how primitive has an innate respect for the insane. There is something uncanny and eerie about the Motorcycle Boy, as if he does not quite belong. Rusty James’ frustration over him can be reflected by the reader’s own confusion. Who is the Motorcycle Boy? What’s his deal?

I still don’t know. This is one of those novels I’ve never stopped thinking about, and I’m glad I found a used copy of it while exploring an indie bookstore so that I could ride with the Motorcycle Boy again. I continue to marvel at Hinton’s ability to create complex and damnably interesting characters at a young age.

Quotations

“That ain’t fair!”
“When the hell did you start expecting anything to be fair?”

“Man, those guys would have followed you anywhere. Hell, most of them still would.”
“It would be great,” [The Motorcycle Boy] said, “if I could think of somewhere to go.”

“California,” he said, “Is like a beautiful wild kid on heroin, high as a kite and thinking she’s on top of the world, not knowing she’s dying, not believing it even if you show her the marks.”

“Pass me the wine,” Steve said.
“There ain’t anymore.”
“That”, he said, “is the most depressing thing I have ever heard.”

“Progressive country, integrated mugging.”

“What a funny situation,” said the Motorcycle Boy after a long silence. “I wonder what I’m doing here, holding my half-dead brother, surrounded by bricks and cement and rats.”

“An acute perception does not make you crazy. However, sometimes it drives you crazy.”

“Your mother, “ he said distinctly, “Is not insane. Neither, contrary to popular opinion, is your brother. He is merely miscast in a play. He would have made a perfect knight in a different century, or a very good pagan prince in a time of heroes. He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river, with the ability to do anything and finding nothing he wants to do.”

“I wonder,” Steve said wildly, “Why somebody hasn’t taken a rifle and blown your head off.”
“Even the most primitive societies have an innate respect for the insane.”

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Short rounds…LBJ and FDR

Posted on October 19, 2026 by smellincoffee

While I’ve been excellent this year at keeping my number of un-reviewed books to practically zero (one exception being Bruce Thornton’s Greek Ways), in the last couple of weeks several have piled up.  Thus, I wave my magic wand: the short rounds post! Be ye warned: I have just returned from several days spent in the deep woods, communing with Ents and dead presidents. I have two Big Ol Biographies to write reviews for, and a smaller work of fiction. Fiction! Fiction, you say? Yes. But I’m afraid this will be a Very Presidential Week with the one relief thrown in.

Launching LBJ, Helen O’Donnell.    Launching is rather a presumptuous title, but the memoir itself is interesting. Ken O’Donnell was JFK’s chief of staff, and one of the few New Frontier boys who was not hostile toward the Old Guardsman LBJ. Accordingly, he became a bridge between the JFK and Johnson administrations, and his daughter here claims credit for her dad in helping Johnson find his footing and then forge ahead in his own name after ‘64. Considering that Johnson was a political titan before JFK asked him to join his administration, the idea that O’Donnell “launched”  the Texan is ridiculous.  Still, for my presidents project seeing Johnson in this in-between spot was interesting. There was an interesting LBJ/RFK anecdote in here which maintains that the animosity began when RFK, working on the rackets committee, arranged to have a hearing conducted in a room that Everyone Knows that the Senate Majority Leader controls. It’s not an official thing, but Everyone Knows it. LBJ, on finding out that some little staffer was using His Room, kicked them out. Did he have anything planned? Nope. It was the principle of the thing: no one uses LBJ’s Room without The Leader’s say. The more common version of their enmity, however, is that LBJ liked to tell a story of hanging out with FDR and hearing him talk to Joseph Kennedy in the friendliest of tones, then hang up with a grin and say, “I’m going to fire that bastard when he gets home”. RFK heard this story mocking his father many times, and while Bobby and Joe Sr did not exactly get on, Joe viewed RFK as a hater after his own heart and Bobby certainly loathed Lyndon.

The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes. A political history of the Great Depression addressing both Hoover and FDR in turn, and highlighting some loud personalities of the period like “Father Divine”.   A recurring theme in the book is that while many Hoover and Roosevelt policies were well-intentioned, they nevertheless undermined recovery by undermining incentives toward investment. Roosevelt also catches flak for his ‘bold experimentation’ being gross excesses of power, and often arbitrary exercises; at one point Roosevelt declared that gold should be revalued by $0.21 because twenty-one was “a lucky number”.  The book abruptly ends with the 1940 election, which I found odd.  I was amazed by how invasive a lot of New Deal legislation was, particularly the National Recovery Admin which had ‘codes’ for different businesses and forbade so much as planting crops without state permission — small wonder it was attacked and destroyed in court.

Over the weekend I finished two large biographies and a small novel. I would tell you when to expect them (“tomorrow, when the bell tolls one!”) Marley style, but I’m rather tired after reading ~2000 pages the last few days. I’m also close to finishing a radio adaptation of The Two Towers and hope to finish Return of the King before the week’s end.

The White House is small. But if you’re not at the center, it seems enormous.

Quotations

“Frankfurter could influence young Roosevelt and others because, even in Babbitt times, he was able to transmit a wonderful sense of possibility to those around him. Student after student after student came to him and stayed, sometimes simply for the pleasure of going mind against mind. One of those students was Adolf Berle, who, like Frankfurter, was not accustomed to coming in second. Berle attended Frankfurter’s course two years in a row. ‘What, back again?’ Frankfurter had asked. ‘I wanted to see if you’d learned anything,’ Berle replied.”

Father Divine’s power was impressive. By now, a letter addressed simply “God, Harlem, USA” would reach him.

Under Wagner Act rules, a union, once in place at a company, might keep out workers who did not join—the so-called closed shop. The same union need not ever again be subject to election by ratification but could represent the workers more or less in perpetuity. The effect was the most coercive of any law passed in the New Deal.

Even those who did not like the new projects and new buildings often supported them. As the country told itself, there could always be something worse: if not Huey Long, then Father Coughlin, or the communists. That year Hitler was staging Germany’s first war games since its defeat in World War I and calling up its first draftees.

The New Deal was causing the country to forgo prosperity, if not recovery. The wealthy, after all, were in a position to take risks with new ventures precisely because they were wealthy—they could invest in several projects at once. Under the new 1935 law, a very wealthy man would see more than three-quarters of any profits from new ventures taken by income tax. Any loss, however, would be the same man’s to bear. This man would try to hoard his capital and wait—thus coming to fit the very stereotype of the idle rich man the New Dealers were hoping to propagate.

Divine’s eclectic platform included an end to installment purchases for consumers, and a ban on tariffs. He also sought a ban on the salutation “Hello”; this should be replaced by “Peace,” and the phone company should be forced to comply.

Father Divine was an angler, just like Huey Long and Coughlin, and he had legitimate additional goals: an end to lynching, for example. He, unlike Norman Rockwell, feared that government help might make citizens more dependent. In 1936 he would write directly to Harold Ickes about a government law that required people to apply for relief before they could be hired for public works positions. Divine argued that the law damaged self-esteem and the will to work, and thus “lowers the standard of a person for the present, and for his future generation.”

Willkie also loved helping his subordinates. One of them, an executive at the Georgia Power Company named John Marsh, was married to a Smith College dropout. The wife had written a 1,037-page romance novel about the Civil War. Willkie liked the book and the author so much he sent out a memo to Commonwealth and Southern employees, plugging it. Her name was Margaret Mitchell, and her book, Gone with the Wind, would go on to sell four million copies. Willkie believed such success created an unhealthy gap between man and wife. To make Marsh feel manly, Willkie promoted him at the power company.

Willkie’s publishing and his time with Irita were about more than history. In discovering the old British Whigs, he discovered their liberalism —a liberalism that antedated Wilson and focused on the individual. It resembled the liberalism of Europe that he had heard about in childhood. Revisiting that old liberalism, he could see that while Roosevelt might call himself a liberal, the inexorable New Deal emphasis on the group over the individual was not liberal in the classic sense. Liberalism had historically included liberal economics, and Roosevelt had turned away from that. Willkie was finding the intellectual ammunition for his battles, and Irita was helping him do it

What the Depression had been to the Roosevelt candidacy in 1932, the war was to the Roosevelt candidacy of 1940: the single best argument to reelect Roosevelt and give him special powers. Even Time of the Luce empire, the very empire that had advanced Willkie, understood. That year Time’s editors had written, “Whether Mr. Roosevelt is Moses or Lucifer, he is a leader.”

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Reagan: The Life

Posted on October 15, 2026 by smellincoffee

Unlike many of the presidents on this list,  I approach Reagan: The Life with a fair bit of familiarity.   Reagan was just a name to me until he died in 2004: my parents and I were taking our last vacation together and we arrived in Vicksburg to the news that the president had passed away. I was bothered by their grief enough to look into Reagan, and would read his autobiography as well as start listening to his speeches: to this day, I can still quote portions of “A Time for Choosing”. I tend to like him a great deal as a man, and that’s probably a good thing: I don’t know that I would have survived a thousand pages of H.W. Brands otherwise. 

One thing I have learned from my presidential reading project is that I greatly prefer character-oriented books over policy-oriented ones;  Brands definitely focuses on the sausage-making aspect of politics, with extensive coverage of Congressional hearings, Cabinet back-and-forths, and press conferences. This is an extremely detailed political biography, which should be attractive to policy wonks but I suspect would struggle with the average reader. I wound up reading this because the leading alternative, Dutch,  appears from the outside to be more about its author than its subject! 

We meet Reagan as the young son of a struggling alcoholic, a fate that gave Reagan an early sense of insecurity and a drive to make it good. He realized fairly early on that he could entertain people, and that he liked it. He wanted to do more of it. He wanted to go to Hollywood, in fact, and to that end he got into radio as a means of building an audience. Reagan as baseball-announcer is one of those bits of trivia that has endeared me more to him, especially after learning that one night when the telegraph news service failed, Reagan was forced to improvise to keep his radio audience listening; for several minutes he brought to life entirely fictional events until at last the telegraph started transmitting actual details of the game again.  Reagan was among the multitude who looked on FDR as a godsend, idolizing him and quoting him for the rest of his life, even as he became a Republican who was more hostile toward the expansion of big government that FDR embodied. To Reagan,  FDR embodied optimistic leadership and the willingness to try; that was something Reagan would impart on his own, especially during his presidency when he declared that it was morning in America again.

Reagan was able to put his face before the public through the film industry, both in commercial movies and government work;  he often appeared in patriotic war movies. His association with the film industry led to politics in another way when, when as president of the Screen Actors Guild, he defended it against both Communist infiltration and the government’s desire to meddle: he insisted that SAG could and would keep its own house in order.  I did not realize until reading this how much Reagan’s ease with the media marked his life; I knew it got him started, as he gave lectures for General Electric (one of them growing into “The Speech”, or his “Time for Choosing” piece that is now a canon of Goldwater-period Movement Conservatism), but even after he’d served as governor he returned to radio.  He said people would get tired of him on screen, but not on the radio – and I suspect he knew what he was talking, because Reagan had a superb speaking voice. Like Obama or Roosevelt, I enjoy listening to him even when I disagree with the contents of the speech. 

Reagan’s time as a governor appears to be largely marked by fiscal policy and law-and-order. He governed California when student revolts were taking over campuses like UCLA, and he took a hard line on protesters and strikers who threatened the public good; this also marked his presidential tenure, as he fired air-traffic controllers who went on strike under the Coolidgean principle that there was no right to strike against public safety – by any one, at any time, any where. He was not as successful as POTUS in reining in fiscal policy:  while he was able to push through changes to the tax code to simplify things,  his belief in supply-side economics did not produce the revenue windfalls he’d hoped for. Instead, in conjunction with enormous increases in defense spending, deficits soared. 

The largest part of Brands’ coverage of Reagan’s presidency is focused on foreign policy, which was rather lively in the 1980s. The Soviets were waist-deep in Afghanistan;   Iraq had attacked Iran and the two powers would throw warm bodies at one another for nearly a decade, both partially supplied by the United States. It was Iran that got Reagan in a bit of trouble, as he authorized selling Iran limited amounts of equipment in order to rebuild relationships with the new regime, as well as pressuring them to twist elbows to release American hostages in  Lebanon;  because Reagan had a detached leadership style,  giving his subordinates objectives and then letting them go,   this resulted in Iran being sold arms and the money then being funneled to fight Commies in Nicaragua. Neither selling weapons nor giving money to fight Commies is inherently bad  but there were explicit laws against selling weaponry to Iran and supporting the contras in Nicaragua. Brands believes that Reagan’s subordinates genuinely took liberties with their general instructions,  but that in the end it never amounted to the Watergate-esque scandal it could have been. Even the designated fall guy for Iran-Contra, Oliver North, was a free man by the mid-1990s.  The biggest part of foreign policy, though, was Reagan’s relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev;   Gorby came to power as Reagan was being reelected, and both were interested in nuclear arms reduction. They came very close to a commitment  at Reykjavík that would have removed both countries’ stockpiles, limited only by Reagan’s commitment to SDI, which Gorby saw as tantamount to weaponizing space. 

There is an enormous amount of detail about Reagan’s administration in this book, but as with some other books I was frustrated by not seeing more of the man. Admittedly,  that owes in large part to my preference for characters;  it’s the reason I’ll read multiple books on minor figures like Franklin Pierce, because I find it fascinating that a former president would willingly make himself a pariah despite his sorrows by repeatedly defending his friend Jefferson Davis.  I always like it when I get a glimpse of a president’s inner life, like Truman devotedly reading books on Lee and Stonewall Jackson, or Reagan reading Coolidge biographies: we don’t get that in this book.  It’s more about Reagan the politician rather than Reagan the man, and while there’s an awful lot of content, it didn’t quite deliver what I was looking for. Good read on the whole, though. Other audiences may find it absolutely stellar. 

Coming up: Launching LBJ and a possible short-round. I’m house-sitting in the deep woods with no internet and anticipate doing a LOT of reading this weekend. I am hoping to take out McKinley (um, not like Czolgosz) and Polk this month so LBJ can get the last hurrah.

Quotations

“In this country, if you decide to play ball and use an umpire, you obey his decisions.”

[Reagan] added that he would be more respectful of the rights of the states. “All of us need to be reminded that the federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government.

“I believe the government is supposed to promote the general welfare,” [Reagan] quipped, “I don’t believe it is supposed to provide it.”

The MAD concept never made anyone very happy.

‘I have to believe the Russian people are no different from Americans,’ [Reagan] would tell [his son]. ‘Hell, they’re victims of their own government. Why should millions of them have to die, along with millions of our people, because leaders on both sides couldn’t work things out?’

Reagan wasn’t calculating, but he was canny. He was, in his own way, sincere, but he understood the difference between words and actions. Other administrations have played the bad-cop, good-cop routine by assigning the separate roles to different actors. The brooding John Foster Dulles was the heavy in Eisenhower’s administration; smiling Ike was the one the people liked. Zbigniew Brzezinski tried to stiffen Jimmy Carter’s spine; Cyrus Vance sought to make it flexible. Reagan played both roles himself: one in words, the other in deeds. He thundered against Soviet perfidy for the television camera, and he meant everything he said. But the substantive measures he took against the Soviets were remarkably modest.

“A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

“Yet Reagan’s insistence on seeing the good side sometimes worked against him. His staff bouyed their boss by sharing favorable responses and arranging appearances before friendly crowds. They told him he ‘done good’ even when he hadn’t. This kept the spring in his step and the smile on his face, but it also kept him from hearing bad news he needed to hear.

IN HIS DAYS as chief of staff, James Baker had kept in his files a document titled “Rumsfeld’s Rules.” Donald Rumsfeld had been Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, and he shared with Baker what he had learned in the job. Rumsfeld’s first rule was “Don’t play President.” Twelve pages of additional rules followed, culminating in the last: “Don’t play President.” Baker himself added his own précis of what a chief of staff must never forget: “Nobody elected you.” If Don Regan ever read Rumsfeld’s rules or heard Baker’s version, he didn’t take the lesson.

“I am increasingly convinced of something I knew previously only second-hand,” Gorbachev said. “The president of the United States does not like to retreat.”

Posted in General, history, Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews, World Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

WWW Wednesday

Posted on October 14, 2026 by smellincoffee

WHAT have you finished reading recently? I finished a Fellowship of the Ring radio adaptation, but I don’t know if that counts…..so there’s also Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. I know I need to review it, but I’m so very sick of thinking about monetary policy. (It showed up in my Carter, Roosevelt, and Reagan books!)

WHAT are you reading now? Reagan: The Life by H.W. Brands is my lunchtime read, and I’m more than halfway through. It’s extremely detailed. Also technically reading Into the Planet, a memoir of a cave-diver.

WHAT are you reading next? I need something fun. Yesterday I received an email that after a year and a half, I was finally next up to read Dune: Messiah. So, it’s possible I will begin that in advance of SF Month 2026.

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Top Ten Fall Covers + Teaser Tuesday

Posted on October 12, 2026 by smellincoffee

“My God, he must have thought, here I am the head of the largest, most powerful banking system in the world and the very first thing this guy — who is going to be the president of the United States for at least the next four years — says to me is to justify my existence.” – REAGAN: THE LIFE, H.W. Brands.

I am roughly halfway through this book, but still fairly early in Reagan’s administration. Al Haig just left and the Falklands War came to an abrupt end when the Argentines gave up. Possibly done by the weekend: Brands loves backroom details. I’m learning (35+ books into this project) that I definitely prefer biographies that are more character-oriented.x

Today’s prompt from Artsy Reader Girl is book covers with autumn colors, but I’d rather show what happens when I search for “fall” in Google Photos. (GP uses a mysterious under-the-hood tagging system.)

The Pumpkin Patch at St. Paul’s in 2011 or so. it was as vexatious as it was beautiful.

I…don’t know where this was. I must have been out riding.

Dallas Academy framed by some fall colors.

Homestead Hallow in middle-of-nowhere Alabama. It’s a living history museum that also hosts craft days.

Hay, watch out! A farm truck’s load caused a major road closure last year.

A friend of mine found a closed campsite on a bank of the Alabama river.

Drive-through daiquiris? Vidalia, Louisiana, across the river from Natchez.

Parnell Library and its park, autumn edition. I love this place in Montevallo.

A bank in Florence, Alabama, modeled after a historic mansion that burned down, the Forks at Cyprus. The columns of Forks still stand, but the site is only opened once or twice a year.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have miles to go before I sleep. Rails-to-trails project.

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A weird weekend

Posted on October 12, 2026 by smellincoffee
A doe, a deer, a fe-male deer!

On Friday evening the library closed an hour early, because Hurricane Isaias had ramped up to Category 3 and was hanging out on the Gulf Coast, pondering where to go for dinner. It destroyed one of Flounders’ signs in Pensacola, so probably not them. I considered myself reasonably prepared — food, water, flashlights — and kept my phone fully charged until the power failed at 8:30. I simply lay down in bed and texted a few friends the news — “So it begins” — and tried to sleep. The next few hours were rather odd, as I kept hearing popping noises outside like someone was firing artillery. This could have been trees — I heard a LOT of trees popping during Hurricane Ivan in 2004 — but it could have also been transformers. At some point a third of the county was without power. I also heard some unnerving electronic sounds that repeated but were very short-lived. I described it as “Like if someone was starting a synthwave track with a serious bass sound, but they only let it start for like 2 seconds three times in a row”. Still have no idea what that was.

We will rebuild

As I lay in bed, I resolved to look for a battery-powered stereo. The weather radio I have has the virtue of being hand-cranked and functions as a flashlight, but its radio reception is crap. I can live without lights and my computer, but the lack of music and feeling of isolating were a lot more grating. In the morning the lights were still out, but I have natural gas so I was able to fry up a wee bit of bacon (it’s allowed in natural disasters) and read a bit of Asimov’s guide to the New Testament. My Reagan read is on my phone, and for some reason its battery had been tanking all night despite my not using it aside from a 3 or 4 am post and occasionally looking for damage reports. I turned off wifi and Bluetooth so the phone would stop looking for signals, but I don’t think it helped too much. (It’s a Pixel 6 whose battery is aging.) Astonishingly, power was restored midday Saturday. The yard was absolutely littered with small limbs, baby pine cones, etc, but nothing had hit my vehicle. I did take pains to park it away from trees. My plans for the day — funeral, followed by a bookstore opening and Swede Fest in Thorsby — had all been scuttled, so in the drizzle I listened to a BBC adaptation of Fellowship of the Ring, instead. I did sally forth to check on my parents’ church at their request; they’re the only members who actually live in town and were under the weather, so I checked its electricity and looked around town en route. There’s one major tree down in Old Town that has caused transmission problems to two houses I dogsit for. I saw a lot more damage the next day, though, driving around in the country.

St. Francis Chapel

The storm cancellations caused major social issues for Sunday, since two events (the funeral + bookstore opening) had been shuffled to a Sunday that was already a bit of a sticky wicket: I’d intended on going to my church’s Fall Fling, then running up to north Alabama (Nauvoo) with friends for a Cursillo closing, but the hurricane forced me to choose between honoring the living and the dead. I went with the living. I’m glad I did, because it involved carpooling with friends and enjoying their company, then the Cursillo closing itself which is an event — think of it as combination family reunion + costume party with church in the middle) and then a ride back with the same friends, including my godsister who is due to deliver in the next two weeks. We also went onsome backroads I’ve never gone, so I got to do a fair bit of leaf-peeping well away from the interstates. Returned home very late in the evening enjoying the whiplash between the dread and gloom of Friday-Saturday and the joy of Sunday.

I finished listening to a BBC dramatization of Fellowship of the Ring, but I may wait on posting about it until I’ve finished the other two collections (Two Towers / Return of the king), since I’ll probably say the same thing about them. Perhaps throw in The Hobbit remarks, too, though it was made for NPR rather than BBC. The road goes ever on!

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In re: the whole hurricane thing

Posted on October 10, 2026 by smellincoffee

Its the middle of the night but Isaias has moved northwards. I lost power around 830 last night. Although I didn’t use my phone after I laid down, I apparently left an app open and so I’m hovering at 60% right now. There are a lot of trees down and about ten thousand in my county without power. Once daylight comes we will know more. Power trucks were already staging yesterday, though, so I am hopeful I won’t be in the dark for too many days. Riding out the storm wasn’t as scary as Zeta but it was certainly weird. More when I am behind a proper keyboard!

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Can’t post, hurricaning

Posted on October 9, 2026 by smellincoffee
A vertical two-panel meme. In panel one, Gulf Coast residents say "We wish the leaves fell in autumn". In panel two there is a hurricane path, projected to carve through Alabama, and a caption that says "Mother Nature: The Best I can Do is the Whole Tree".
I’m literally in the line of fire. I hope two hundred miles of pine forests slows things down.

After a dormant hurricane season, the Gulf has produced its first storm and decided to interrupt Game Day in Alabama. Half of my dog sitting gigs for the next two weeks were cancelled, alas, as were my plans to visit a new indie bookstore’s grand opening and drop by a Swedish fest. (A funeral may or may not still be on.) Honestly, can’t these hurricanes interrupt the workweek instead of the weekend? While at first we were thinking it wouldn’t amount to too much — it was tracking well east of my area — overnight it strengthened into a Category 3 (same as Ivan, which brutalized us in 2004) and moved west so that now we’ll be close enough to smell not only its cheap cologne but the hamburger it had for lunch. I was already getting Hurricane Zeta vibes yesterday, but now things look worse. The odds are very good that I’m going to lose power for a few days, so you may have to do without presidential biographies for bit. (I’m kidding — I’m close to finishing Forgotten Man, and in my Reagan biography I’ve only gotten him elected.) Fortunately I’ve no shortage of physical books to read, and the weather has been cooling off so we won’t be absolutely miserable.

Just for historical reference, our last hurricane experience:

Trees fallen on either side of a county highway, reducing it to a single lane in the middle

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Nine Books I’ll Never Forget

Posted on October 8, 2026 by smellincoffee

A “Nine Books I’ll Never Forget” meme is going around. Considering how much I have read in the course of my life — close to three thousand books on this blog alone — that’s a daunting challenge, so consider this list only tentative. It lacks any CS Lewis, which horrifies me, and I know there are other books whose influence is so great I can’t even step back and contemplate properly.

Nine books the author will never forget: Meditations, Death and Life of Great American Cities, A Life of Her Own, The Righteous Mind, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Jayber Crow, Cathedral Forge and Waterwheel, Geography of Nowhere, Bowling Alone

.

Probably no surprises here for people who read me often, but I’ll try to precis each:

  • The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius introduced me to Stoicism, which has been a bedrock of my spiritual-philosophical life for nearly 20 years now.
  • Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs was reccommended to me on urbanism grounds, but it introduced me to the concept of emergent order and one sentence in it completely changed my life
  • A Life of Her Own by Emile Carles was a pivotal part of my political evolution, though I’m sure I’d argue with it now. It’s the memoir of a teacher in a rural French village who was disillusioned by the state, religion, etc, and taught her students to think critically. We see the First and Second World Wars unfold through her eyes. This was my introduction to ‘democratic’ leftism, as I associated leftist/Marxist thought only with authoritarianism. It led to me reading deeply into the left for a few years, but at an oblique; I like to joke I went so far left I popped into right field with Ayn Rand and Russell Kirk
  • The Righteous Mind is a hard book to summarize, in large part because it covers so much ground. One of its core subjects is morality, which the author explores from philosophy to natural history.
  • Amusing Ourselves to Death is really a Neil Postman stand-in: I couldn’t decide between this and Technopoly. I remember reading Postman in the university library and copying long passages into a commonplace book & journal that I subsequently lost in a move, a loss that disappointed me so much I fell away from keeping a journal. Postman is the reason I didn’t have a smartphone until 2018, because he made me think about how technology shapes us and society
  • Jayber Crow was my introduction to all things Berry, and Berrian thought is a cosmos into itself.
  • Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel overturned the ‘chronological snobbery’ I’d inherited from textbooks and began my interest in the Medieval epoch’s intellectual life
  • The Geography of Nowhere. Oh, where to begin with Jim Kunstler? Geography is a history and scathing critique of American urbanism since 1945. It made me think about why I was fascinated by cities; it gave me a vocabulary to understand why I found prewar cities fascinating and postwar cities utterly without interest; it led me to exploring more of Kunstler and starting to think about energy, food, and transportation infrastructure and policy.
  • Bowling Alone was one of the many books I read in that oh-so pivotal year of 2013 when my worldview was shifting from college’s ideological purity to my present conflicted mess. It gave me the concept of society as an organic thing, not simply an abstraction — and like other organic things, it needed to be fed and protected lest it wither and die.

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WWW Wednesday + Fantasy Occupations

Posted on October 7, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “occupations from fiction we’d like to try”. I would like to be a member of the Idle Rich, like Bertie Wooster. I feel very strongly I was meant for a life of reading and writing and pondering the Cosmos under trees, but someone made a mistake.

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Human Errors, a bit of biology; an a four-hour adapted audio drama of The Hobbit. A friend of mine reads the Lord of the Rings every autumn (appropriate for a story that ‘begins’ on September 22), and I’m trying to join him in my way. The version I found was on Audible, and it appears to have been adapted for use by NPR. Most of the accents are American, and there’s music included — including dwarvish singing. Smaug talks like he’s drooling, which made the last hour or so unpleasant.

WHAT are you reading now? Into the Planet, a cave-diver’s memoirs which will hopefully have enough science content for me to list it as Geology in the science survey; a radio drama of The Fellowship of the Ring on audiobook; The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression; and Reagan: The Life.

WHAT are you reading next? That question is more “Which of the items you are currently reading are you going to focus on next”, since I’m not particularly locked-in on anything. I’m reading Reagan an hour a day at lunch; Forgotten Man at home; and listening to Fellowship on drives. I’m about to start two weeks of dog-sitting at different houses (October is apparently a nice time for people to travel), so odds are I’ll get a LOT of reading done. Yesterday I stumbled onto a Civil War book that I think — my hand to General Lee — I can list as a PHYSICS TITLE. I should finish Forgotten Man before Friday, but I’m only 250+ pages into Reagan and Brands’ work on him is almost a big a door-stopper as McCullough’s Truman.

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