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Deep in your brain, at the back of your skull, lie two small bits of matter, each about the size of a pencil eraser, buried roughly equally in each of the two hemispheres of your brain. Their job is to recognize faces. Called the fusiform face area, it is such a hard-working little department, it will sometimes see faces where there are none.

Faces are so important for the survival of the species, that as soon as a newborn can focus — not even focus, but begin to do so — it can make out faces from other shapes, and by three days old, it can recognize its mother’s face.

And through life, the human face remains one of the most engaging visual forms we know. And it is why it is the most frequent subject for art. It covers everything from family snapshots to emojis to political cartoons to the formal portrait. And the portrait has settled in to be one of the conventional genres of art, along with landscape, still life, nude, and abstraction.

But not all images are the same, or made with the same intent. There are, by my calculation, four overarching categories of pictures of people. The family snaps are the most common. Most of us have a shoebox filled with old pictures, some going back as far as the late 19th century.

Rowan Steele and family, Sandy Ridge, N.C. ca. 1890

Nowadays, most family pictures exchange the shoebox for the cellphone and cloud. But still, a ton of pictures, most of little significance to anyone but family.

The second group are the more formal photos, like school pictures, wedding photos, or those grinning Olan Mills family shots, as stiff as plywood and just as expressive. Those, usually in Sunday best, with billboard smiles, is how you would prefer people to see you.

Jennifer Lopez by Annie Leibovitz

Then, there are the celebrity portraits, by the likes of Annie Leibovitz or Harry Borden. These are made when an actor or author has some new project to sell, and they need a clever image for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine or Vanity Fair. Or the cover of a band’s new CD. In a sense, these are not pictures of people but rather portraits of brands. They are selling us something.

I don’t want to demean these pictures. The photographers who make such images can be tremendously talented, and their work is often memorable. But they are not usually true portraits, but rather, a form of marketing.

Carole Steele

Finally, there are the portraits I am writing about, images that attempt to capture something genuine about the sitter. To tell you something about the actual person. It is in their eyes; their ancient glittering eyes.

I have been making such pictures for more than 50 years, beginning back in the 1970s, when I worked at a camera store in Greensboro, N.C. I photographed like a demon, making records of friends, family and colleagues. At our home, I had one wall of the dining room covered with something like 30 or 40 photographs, held to the wall with small bits of masking tape on their backs. Some of these may have simply been snapshots of friends, but most were attempts at capturing something real or genuine about those subjects.

Judy Crawford; Ron Pierce; Carole Steele

What most of the images shared were their eyes. I usually tried to get my subjects to look directly into the camera, forcing the viewer to make eye contact and creating a psychological bond with the sitter. Judy Crawford had eyes that were pools of infinite sadness. As Cicero wrote, “The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.” There is intelligence shining from some, caring and feeling in some, suspicion or cynicism in others. The eyes have it.

I am now too long in the tooth to mount any more gallery shows, or attempt to publish a book, but I thought I might use this blog to present a sampling of the portraits I have made over the years. Indulge me.

Aimee Groulx

One of the first portraits I still show is of artist Aimee Groulx, who ran the Groulx School of Art in Greensboro, N.C. Actually, his wife, Adele, ran it. Aimee was the kind of free spirit who could not likely run a bath, let alone a business. I taught at the school briefly. Aimee always dotted the “X” at the end of his name when signing anything. “To prevent forgeries,” he said.

Hank Hackett

Henry Parrish Lippincott Hackett was born to a mainline Philadelphia Quaker family and was great grandnephew to artist Maxfield Parrish. He was one of my closest friends from college. He was a frequent toker, and once I worried he might be doing too much weed. He assured me he had cut way down. “Only four or five joints a day,” he said. Once, he came to our home, a little bleary, and sat on the floor and said with complete earnestness, “Y’know, I feel more like I do now than I did when I came in.”

Kacey Lamb

Kacey Lamb always refused to be photographed. By anyone. Maybe she was shy, or maybe she just thought it made her seem more mysterious. One day, when her husband, Larry, was out of town, she took revenge for being left alone by letting me take her picture. “Only one,” she insisted. One click of the shutter, one negative.

Judy Crawford; Judy with her friend, Minnie

Judy Bryson Crawford was one of the most beautiful beings ever, both outside and inside, and spoke with an engaging drawl from the Blue Ridge Mountains. I first met her in the early 1970s when she lived on Cedar Street in Greensboro, N.C. with Junie Norfleet and Dara Llewellyn. Together they were known as “The Girls,” and their house was a meeting place for many of the more creative-minded young people of the city. She later moved back to her home near Balsam, N.C., just under the shadow of Waterrock Knob.

In 2003, in Phoenix, working at my newspaper, I scrolled the Associated Press wires and accidentally came across her obituary. It was one of the saddest days of my life. She was 56.

Alexander and Mary Lou Barker

When I was a freshman in college, a rangy young man knocked on my dorm door, hearing that I was listening to a Beethoven quartet on my portable phonograph. We shared a passion for classical music and became lifelong best friends. About once a year Sandro and I drove to the Outer Banks to camp, usually in the winter, when the beaches weren’t crowded. He later married another Guilford alum, Mary Lou Hinton, and eventually moved to the Maine coast. There, always athletically inclined, he took up crosscountry skiing and especially loved skiing uphill.

Sharon Vernon

Sharon Vernon was my unofficial wife for seven years in the 1970s. She had red hair that shone the sun like copper. We saved money for a year so that we could take the next year off work to hike the Appalachian Trail to Maine. We got as far as northern Virginia when she sat down beside the trail and announced, “I’m not taking another step.” We were worn out, and destination hiking can be more tedious than it promises, always looking for the next trail marker and the next lean-to to spend the night. Little time to soak in the glories of nature. So, instead, we spent the rest of the year traveling around the Northeast by car.

I intended to spend the rest of my life with her, but she decided otherwise, and we split in 1978. I took the train across the country to Seattle.

Doug Nufer; Linda Olson; Ken Baker

In Seattle, I moved into a house with “The World’s Most Obscene Man,” Doug Nufer, and two lesbian doctors known as Cam and Clink. The house sat across the street from the Woodland Park Zoo, where I wound up working.

He was a Bucky, which meant he was a bicycle delivery guy, taking mostly legal papers from law firm to law firm, pedaling roughly 50 miles a day up and down the hills of the Emerald City. His Bucky handle was Banana.

He had previously been writing porno novels (Sixty-Nine In-Laws was his magnum opus), but now writes avant-garde novels, including one that never uses any word more than once. Unreadable, but that never seemed the point. It is often that way with the avant-garde.

Linda Olson was my girlfriend’s roommate and a deltiologist, or collector of vintage post cards. For years after I left Seattle, we would mail each other tacky post cards we found. Ken Baker was a zookeeper, one of many I got to know there. When zoo management sent out a memo requiring keepers to wash their hands after visiting the bathroom, he got miffed. “Do they even know what zookeepers do? I wash my hands before going.”

Alice Gilliam; Bill Marshak; Colin Murray

Before I had a straight girlfriend in Seattle, I dated gay Alice, a Bucky like Doug, and we went out together often, and to symphony concerts. She had once been a violinist in a touring Christian orchestra. Marshak was a grad student in Chinese studies, and it was always fun to go to a Chinese restaurant with him and order off-menu, while he chatted with the waiter. Colin (pronounced like Colin Powell) was briefly a housemate and wanted to be a male model, asking me to make some audition shots for him. He never seemed to grasp the irony that his boyfriend’s name was Dick.

Robin Reid

Robin Reid was a zookeeper in the Childrens’ Zoo at Woodland Park. Her hair was blonder than the sun. I fell wildly crazy about her. She was bright and lively, and had been a professional swing dancer at a local hotel. I was hooked, but I found out months later that she was not. “It’s all just hormones,” she said. When she dumped me, I was heartsick and decided to move back East.

Carole Steele

After a few years of sulking, I was invited by the ex-wife of an old friend to visit her in the North Carolina mountains. We soon married and lived together for 35 years, until her death nine years ago. There has been a hole in the universe since then. Carole was the warmest person I ever knew, and also the smartest. She did not think outside the box; for Carole, there was no box. Widely known to friends as “Queen of the Universe,” she prompted me to everything that made me better.

Craig and Carole

Eventually, I found some work as adjunct faculty at the same school where my brother, Craig, taught, in Virginia Beach, Va. Carole became an art teacher with the Norfolk school system. I have boxes of 5X7 prints of demonstration prints I made during my six years teaching, many of them from portrait class.

Craig Nilsen and his wife, Terry

Craig is my brother, and the human being I am closest to. He is an artist, painter and printmaker, and taught full-time at the same school. He got me my job. He is now retired in the Virginia mountains with his wife, Terry. Brothers, like sisters, can have an almost mystical bond that can’t be explained. Perhaps it is shared DNA, or shared experience.

Anne Iott; Pam Lassiter; Eva Dixon; Steve Wolf

Anne Iott was department head at the school, and bent rules to hire me, and allowed me to teach more hours of class than was technically legal. Her support was enormous, and she arranged for me to begin writing art criticism of the local Norfolk daily newspaper. She and the art staff, including Craig, and painting teacher Steve Wolf, would often have potluck dinners together. Those gatherings could get boisterous. Steve was a body builder and could consume huge amounts of food at a sitting, and once got thrown out of an all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant. Pam Lassiter was ceramics teacher. Eva Dixon was briefly Craig’s amour. She told him she had always wanted to ride an elephant, and so he entered and won a contest when the Barnum and Bailey circus came to town, and gave her his seat on the beast for the parade.

Charles Williams; and his sketch of Carole and me

Carole’s boss in the Norfolk school system was dating artist Charles Williams, and we became friends. I photographed him, trying to get as close as I could, framing just his face and eyes. He, in turn, made a quick sketch of Carole and me.

Richard Avedon; Lee Friedlander; Bob Haozous; James Turrell

Carole’s boss moved to Arizona and offered Carole a job there, and so in 1987, we moved to Phoenix, where I got a job writing for The Arizona Republic, mostly as art critic. I have made fewer photographs since then, but I did make my own photos for most of my interviews. I talked to a lot of artists, famous and not. Lee Friedlander was as matter of fact as his pictures. Bob Haozous, son of famous Apache artist Allan Houser, seemed suspicious of whitey critic; James Turrell took me up to the top of the volcano he was modifying outside Flagstaff. I once spent 24 hours in one of his skyspaces to watch it change with the light. There were many others I met and interviewed.

When I reviewed Richard Avedon’s retrospective at the Whitney in New York, he sent me a note of thanks. “Not all the New York critics were so kind,” he wrote. And when he came to Phoenix in 1994 to photograph boxer Oscar de la Hoya for The New Yorker, we went out to lunch. Sitting across the table, enjoying the Salvadoran food, he said, “In a sense, I am writing my autobiography through other people’s faces.”

I suppose that is my excuse for this blog entry.

Mel Steele

Over the years, my style has changed. Less formal, more relaxed. I photographed my brother-in-law Mel Steele in the 1980s, when he was a motorcyle-racing, gun-shooting, goat-raising artist, whose work sold in the thousands as prints. He grew older; I grew older. His country-nostalgia rural scenes became serious abstract paintings — among my favorite in the world — and my goal of being the next Avedon or Penn dwindled down to trying just to be honest and real. Mel turns 87 in October. He has slowed down, no longer rides motorbikes, and I have slowed down, writing less and making fewer images.

And the effect on my being part of an inseparable bond with Carole, led me to pay way more attention to the interactions between people, and the number of dual portraits increased.

Carole and Julie Ross

The interaction between people is the essential valence of existence. It breaks the dam of isolation and opens the world up. Carole broke me open.

Carole and Ruth Haggerty

When Carole was a little girl, Ruth was her best friend, living across the street. They lost touch for most of their lives, but became reacquainted something like 60 years later. But you can see in their eyes the connection had never fully been lost.

Curtis Beckman and Isabel Fierros

I saw that warmth and connection in our friends Curtis and Isabel. I believe, but can’t prove, that my own age, my own intense partnership with Carole, softened me, made me more open, aware of others and their richness and complexity.

Rob Lehman and Hank Hackett; Ursula McLaughlin and her daughter, Mia

As I look back through this sampling of portraits over 50 years, I see that those pairs have always been there. Hank and Rob from the ’70s; Ursula and her daughter from the ’80s.

John and Alice Nilsen

And when I revisited a photograph I made many decades ago of my parents, John and Alice, I recognized something I didn’t see when I first took the photo. It’s in their eyes.

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YouTube — MyTube

August 24, 2026

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In Genesis 18, when Jehovah was still on speaking terms with humans, He negotiated with Abraham over the fate of the city of Sodom. Jehovah had decided to destroy the place, and all its wicked inhabitants, but Abraham said, “Whoa, there,” and asked, but what if there are 50 righteous men in the city (women apparently didn’t count), will you destroy the righteous along with the wicked? Jehovah paused, perhaps stroking His whiskers. “OK, then, if there are 50 righteous men…”

“But what if there are only 45?” asked Abe. Jehovah pondered. “What if only 30? Or only 10?” The Almighty allowed, most likely in a voice of pique, since He was not accustomed to pushback: “I will not destroy it for the sake of 10.”

(Let the record show that in Genesis 19, Jehovah rained down His fire and brimstone anyway and flattened the cities of the plain, saving only Abraham’s brother, Lot, and Lot’s family. Not quite 10 of them.)

I thought about this haggling between the patriarch and his boss, and I realized that whole thing might apply to YouTube as well. What a sewer of AI slop, ignorant ranting, political bloviating, fanboy nonsense and religious sophistry.

Should we destroy the whole shebang? But what if there are 50 sites that have value? What if only 45? Or 30, or 10?

I have enjoyed YouTube for years, but I have to avoid almost everything offered by my new Almighty Deity: the Algorithm. Most of what It thinks I might find interesting is pointless, useless, misleading, stupid and downright wrong.

But there are a few sites that I go to frequently, either because I learn things from them, or I like the presenter, or they are genuinely entertaining. I thought I’d discuss a few of them and recommend them to likeminded individuals, pace the Algorithm.

THE GREEN BOYS

The brothers Green, elder John and younger Hank, can be said to have justified the existence of YouTube all by their lonesomes. They have contributed to the “reduction in world suck” more than most can have dreamed of.

In 2007, they began posting videos on YouTube as “letters” back and forth, from one brother to the other, mostly twice a week, one from John, in Indiana, to Hank, in Montana, and another from Hank to John. That took off as the Vlog Brothers, and became not just a family news catch-up, but each brother talking about whatever interesting thing had caught their fancy. And they were a very thoughtful pair.

John was an enormously successful author of Young Adult Fiction, and Hank was a budding science explainer. More than that, Hank shot out ideas like a Roman candle, and soon, they started up a host of other YouTube sites. They developed a devoted online following for their endeavors, informally called “nerdfighters.”

Hank and John with the Nerdfighter hand gesture

Nerdfighteria was largely made up of young idealistic people, wanting to make and inhabit a better world. In the Brothers Green, they found two young men who could be non-ironic and sincere without ever becoming sentimental or mawkish (the concomitant sins of earnestness).

They have since become an industry, pumping out scads of entertaining and educational content, and managing to do practical good in the world.

Together, in 2012, they developed Crash Course, a series of educational videos, meant primarily for high school students, that explained episodes of world history, and concepts of biology. Crash Course was eventually picked up by PBS and expanded to series on English literature, U.S. history, chemistry, psychology, anatomy, physiology, astronomy, government and politics, economics, and philosophy. Each series used animation and cleverly written explanations and video to make the major points of the discipline clear and entertaining. Eventually, there were some 50 Crash Course series made. They are commonly used in classrooms across the world.

Parallel to Crash Course came SciShow, a group of series more specifically aimed at science education. There was also The Brain Scoop, with Emily Graslie, which looked at the practical side of science and research; Sexplanations, with Lindsey Doe, about human sexuality; Crash Course Kids, for younger viewers; PBS Eons, a history of life on earth; The Art Assignment, with Sarah Urist Green (John’s museum curator wife); and my favorite, Journey to the Microcosmos, in which Hank Green narrates microphotographic video footage of protozoan life, one of the most hauntingly beautiful and hypnotic series on YouTube.

(It should be mentioned that Hank Green has also performed and recorded five albums of his own music, written two science fiction novels, performed a stand-up comedy show, and created Focus Friend, an app designed to temporarily block other apps, to allow easily distracted people to focus on the task at hand — an app named “App of the Year” in 2025. He has also devised a series of fund-raising not-for-profit businesses, selling everything from designer socks to artisanal coffees. The man is a dynamo.)

Hank Green’s “Hanklerfish” logo — “Don’t Forget To Be Awesome”

The brothers set up a not-for-profit company, called Complexly, to oversee all their projects, including over 10,000 videos and has built a substantial audience on YouTube, with more than 32 million subscribers and 55 million views per month. It collaborates with institutions and organizations such as PBS, Arizona State University, the National Science Foundation, and The Poetry Foundation to expand its reach and, according to industry sources, as of July, 2026, Complexly employs 134 people.

Meanwhile, directed by the brothers, Nerdfighteria has raised millions for philanthropic causes, including some $50 million toward the construction of the first maternity hospital in Sierra Leone, which opened earlier this year. That country had the highest infant mortality rate in the world, but that rate has now been halved.

There are other fundraising and charitable organizations the Green boys have created, including the annual Project for Awesome event, that has, since 2010, raised more than $30 million for various charities, under its parent organization, The Foundation to Decrease World Suck.

And there’s Pizzamas, a two week event each September when Nerdfighter merch is sold and the receipts given to various charities. (The insignia for Pizzamas is a shirt with the image of John with his ill-advised — and temporary — mustache.)

John also led a Nerdfighter campaign to persuade pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson to allow generic versions of the tuberculosis drug bedaquiline to be produced, for sale in countries with high TB rates, making it cheaper for poor countries. (He also wrote a best-selling book, Everything is Tuberculosis, about the history and epidemiology of the disease. A best-seller — did I mention that?)

When they started online, their target viewership was ages 13 to 30, but both brothers are now in their 40s, and perhaps their fans have aged along with them, but younger audiences have continued to sign on. Their attitude and vocabulary skews young, but I’m 78, and I’m hooked.

I’ve only skirted the bounds of Nerdfighteria. There are also the podcasts, and the books (and the films made from John’s books). When I say they are an industry, I am not exaggerating.

Journey to the Microcosmos

BUT WAIT — THERE’S MORE

There is no end to YouTube videos. Most are of limited interest, at least to me. But there are a bunch I regularly check out when they post new entries. These are not all of them, but a recommended sample.

DAVID HURWITZ

The Green brothers are frighteningly prolific, but David Hurwitz is no slouch, producing an average of three new videos every day. He is a classical music critic and editor of the online magazine Classics Today.

His videos are uniformly produced, as he sits at his desk in front of shelves and shelves of CDs, occasionally interrupted by his cats, and he talks about classical music recordings, both historical and current. He is lively and engaged. I have thousands of CDs on my shelves, but his must number in the hundreds of thousands, and he seems to have instant recall for all of them.

I find myself simpatico with most of his taste, although he has a few blind spots and undeserving enthusiasms. He can’t mention Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole without making a retching noise, and it seems anything conductor Charles Mackerras records is perfection personified. And he will tell you, for every performance, whether the tam-tam has been featured properly. At times his uninflected enthusiasms remind me of the old radio host DeKoven. (How many are old enough to remember him?)

Classical music may be a niche subject for most Americans, but for those of us who have been listening to our Beethoven and Bartok for 60 years, Hurwitz is a joy. I watch him daily on the iPad while eating my breakfast.

MAP MEN

The Map Men is a British video channel and is either an educational channel that is comic, or a pair of comedians talking about geography. And it is very funny. I mean laugh-out-loud funny.

In it Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones dress up in costumes, add animations, write songs, and generally act out their themes with one-liners, sight gags, puns, and the ear-worm theme song: “Map Men Map Men Map Map Map Men Men.”

They take on such subjects as how many countries are there in the world (it is not an easy answer); why is north at the top of the maps; why the Netherlands is 17 percent fake; what makes a city versus a town in England.

Many YouTube sites are sponsored, and their makers interrupt their bits to sell you Incogni or Skillshare, but Jay and Mark make their ads just as entertaining as their regular content, so you never are tempted to fast forward through them.

Their most recent video is from March this year and talks about the first geological map of England and the madman who created it and published it in 1799.

ROB WATTS

There are a host of language channels on YouTube. I tend to watch them all, but Robwords is probably my favorite. Rob Watts is described by his book publisher, Penguin, as creator of “the world’s most-followed channel for the dissemination on intriguing if vaguely pointless facts about the English language.”

Born English, he now lives in Germany and is a newsreader for Deutsche Welle, but he makes this YouTube channel about etymology, alphabets, language culture, and the odd bits of speech and print. Watts is personable, good humored without entering into stand-up territory, and well researched.

He also takes part in a second YT channel, Words Unravelled, with an American counterpart Jess Zafarris, but I can’t bear watching it, as they are both too awfully bubbly and giddy, and Jess has an annoying vocal fry.

I also frequently watch Taylor Jones, whose Language Jones site sometimes gets too polemical for my bland taste, and Geoff Lindsey, at drgeofflindsey, which is more academic and often quite technical. But I learn a lot.

J.J. McCULLOUGH

McCullough was originally a political columnist, a Canadian conservative, but way too outlandish for any stateside version of that. With his towering hair and his weaving and bouncy body language, his primary concern on his videos is popular culture, of which he is a voracious consumer and thoughtful analyst.

His videos are fast, energetically edited, with lots of quick cuts to referenced material. Occasionally, he talks about Canadian politics, which are opaque to his southern neighbors, but mostly it is American pop culture — not just movies and TV, but toys, comics, advertising, packaging, fashion, architecture and design. He has wide interests and has insightful things to say.

Some may find his vocal delivery annoying, as he pauses and speeds up in a kind of herky-jerky speech rhythm as his head bobs to and fro. But, he is just fun to watch.

BEKAH HARDING

A Brush with Bekah is a YouTube channel where (usually) purple-haired Bekah explores rare, historically forgotten, often toxic, sometimes radioactive pigments, and finds sources for them, and makes her own paints from them. She also discusses art history, and sometimes just has a political rant she needs to get off her chest.

One such is titled “I Hate Picasso and You Should Too.” But most run toward “Making paint from Bugs,” “The dark history of mummy brown,” and “Science is changing the color of dinosaurs.”

Sometimes she shows up as blond, sometimes a redhead, most often when not purple, her hair is black. And she wears punk or emo eye makeup. But she is clearly very smart, her research is thorough, and she has taught me a lot, not just about color, but more importantly, about pigment.

MYSTERY

Whoever is behind the Moviewise site wants to remain anonymous. I can’t find him anywhere. But he produces some of the best, most insightful videos about the technical side of movies that I’ve come across. His narrative accent sounds very like that of Ernie Kovacs, but he has been cagey about where his roots are. Perhaps his family was also Hungarian? I dunno. Perhaps they just share the same adenoids.

But if you want to see clips explaining the secrets of cinematic blocking, or expressive lighting or camera movement, he will have them to show, and take you through them almost frame by frame.

He says, “I defend that, regardless of artistic intent or personal interpretation or cultural influence, there are objective aspects in stories and visuals that make movies succeed or fail, and by examining shots and screenplays we can find out what they are.”

I wait, champing at the bit, for each new installment. This is not a site about the great humanistic side of film history, but about how those films were constructed.

Geoff Lindsey videos

WHAT ELSE

What any one person watches is a microscopic mote of dust in the forgotten corner of the room, compared with what is proffered. According to Wikipedia, even in 2019, videos were being uploaded to the platform at an inconceivable rate — 500 hours every minute, and estimates of the total number on the platform range from 15 billion to 40 billion.

And so much of that is unwatchable — I don’t mean you can’t find them if you look, but such bad quality you can’t bring yourself to do it. Bad sound, bad editing, bad camerawork. And add into that all the political huff and chuff, and all the misinformation, all the conspiracy theories, all the fanboy rot, and cat videos, you could be excused for giving up.

So, we rely on the newest deity, the Algorithm, to choose for us. And there are some worthy spots that leak through. These have been some for me.

Captain Steeeve

Dan McClellan deals with biblical matters in a scholarly way, and debunks quite a bit of blather. Retired commercial pilot Steve Scheibner talks about aviation on the Captain Steeeve site (somehow, although he is 15 years younger than me, he still sounds more like my father than anyone — including the dad jokes).

Rick Beato

Rick Beato is mainly about pop music, but has genuinely intelligent things to say about the notes and their structure, and not just, as most pop music critics do, the lyrics. Simon Whistler hosts a variety of videos on various channels. He’s more script-reader than writer, and some people are put off by what seems like a streak of careerism in him, but there is a lot to learn from the videos he hosts.

Tom Scott

And one of the oldest continuous contributors has to be Tom Scott, who has been posting informative videos on odd topics since 2004, and on YouTube since 2014. He has a ranging curiosity, and his videos look to find answers to questions of geography, history, science, language, technology.

He has created more than 900 videos and has 6.5 million subscribers with over 1.7 views. In 2024, he decided he was exhausted and stopped making videos, but now, he’s back again and at it once more. His genial way and genuine engagement always make him worth watching.

I’ve mentioned a few sites that I have enjoyed. They cover things I am interested in. But there are worthy sites for other interests, whether astronomy, railroads, antiques, literature, insects, pick-a-subject. But you have to plod through the weeds to find them.

So, perhaps we won’t rain down fire and brimstone upon YouTube, but we are still better off avoiding the dreck.

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Having second thoughts

July 25, 2026

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I heard Allen Ginsberg say one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. He had come to town to talk about a work he had collaborated on with Philip Glass, Hydrogen Jukebox. It was a powerful piece, which I first heard live, performed in Tucson.

I have always loved Ginsberg’s poetry, from the first, when I read Howl in that tiny, squarish paperback published by City Lights Books. It is one of the great poems of the 20th century. I eventually collected his later books, including Kaddish, Planet News, Reality Sandwiches, although it was clear that not all his writing was up to the level of Howl. He was a very spotty writer, and the older he got, the less interesting the spots.

He sat on the stage that evening, in Scottsdale, talking about his work and making a case for his then-motto: “First thought, best thought.” How the version an idea comes to you spontaneously will always be better than it will be if you fuss over it and refashion it. Revision always dilutes the inspiration, he said. “First thought, best thought.

As a writer myself, my first best thought was: “Bullshit.” The man has deluded himself with his own bunkum. Most writers will tell you, honestly, that the first draft is always improved by reshaping, clarifying, expansion or excision. Writing is rewriting.

That doesn’t mean that the initial idea is worthless, but it needs refining, and especially, it needs to have the really dumb parts taken out.

The proof of this comes from Ginsberg himself, to be seen in Harper Perennial’s 50th anniversary edition of Howl, the original draft facsimile. His best poem, considered such by almost anyone’s account, was heavily reworked and refined, honed to a sparkle.

First thought: “I saw the best mind angel-headed hipsters damned./ What consciousness in oblivion, Joan?” Written in August, 1955. A week later, in the original draft of Howl, it became: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving mystical naked,/ who dragged themselves through the angry streets at dawn looking for a negro fix,/who poverty and tatters and fantastic minds sat up all night in lofts contemplating jazz”

Doesn’t have quite the inevitable ring and resonance of the published version: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,/ dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,/ Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection/ to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”

That’s quite an upgrade, from “poverty and tatters” and “fantastic minds” to “starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” Prose to poetry.

Do I think Ginsberg was a hypocrite for his espoused faith of “first thought, best thought”? I think less hypocrite and more that he was drinking his own Kool-Aid. He and his fellow writers — the Beat writers — became fascinated with Buddhism and stories of Zen spontaneity, of Haiku masters whipping up an instant 17 syllables of enigmatic profundity. Most likely, these tales of Basho and Buson are legends and myths, conjured years later. I rather imagine them counting syllables on their fingertips and honing the verse in their minds before committing them to their mouths. Careful craftsmanship.

The Beat version of Buddhism, and the accouterments of Chinese and Japanese culture are a fantasy. In a way, it might be hinted, this was the Beat version of what Edward Said called “orientalism,” and the hypnotic attraction of exoticism.

I remember visiting the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., to visit an old college buddy, who had joined the group. As we wandered through the campus, we passed a classroom, where Ginsberg was teaching. The students were chanting, along with the poet, a monotonous phrase in Tibetan — “Om mani padme hung” — over and over, so the noise coming through the open door sounded more like the insect buzz of a summer evening.

This was part of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, which Ginsberg had co-founded. And I have no doubt that chanting the mantra may have helped some students focus their minds. I practice a form of meditation, myself, although I don’t call it that — mostly I call it sitting on the back patio looking at the trees and clouds and trying to think no thoughts at all. So, I am not making fun of them. I don’t doubt their sincerity. But I do worry that importing portions of an exotic culture, without having grown up immersed in it, may be charged with being a version of cultural tourism. Yellow robes do not a Buddhist make.

But Ginsberg has enriched our trove of poetry. In addition to Howl, there is Kaddish (especially moving in the audio version with the poet reciting his own words), and shorter poems such as Kral Majales. You learn to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I reread Howl periodically. It gives me great pleasure, the way certain poems do, for me, such as Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode,” Whitman’s Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, Arnold’s Dover Beach, Conrad Aiken’s Tetélestai, or Dylan Thomas’ Fern Hill. Poems that dig deep and remain buried in the psyche. They refresh my sense of language and of being alive.

It is also true, as with Ginsberg, that a good portion of Wordsworth is banal and prosaic, a boatload of Whitman is blather, most of Arnold’s poetry is forgettable, and, let’s face it, Aiken doesn’t make most anthologies of the best American verse. But each has been capable of magic, and I read these poems over and over, the way you listen to favorite tunes.

In his best work, Ginsberg fussed and reworked and licked the bear-whelp into something infinitely quotable and meaningful. If he had stuck to his first thought, no one would still be reading it.

Too much!

May 4, 2026

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There was a time, many years ago, when I was an active birder and kept a life list. On one trip to the beach in South Carolina, I added 27 new species to my list. I was pretty chuffed about it. I don’t remember how many my list totaled by the time my interest shifted to something else, but it was in the hundreds. The checklist published in BirdLife magazine’s Handbook of Birds of the World catalogs 11,524 species of bird in the world, so my list is hardly detectible in the murmuration of life lists by serious bird watchers.

I had done the same for wildflowers before that. Many of them, I even had learned the scientific name for, which drove my wife nuts to the point she teased me about calling them all, “Know-atia dudiflorum.” Naming and cataloguing have been among the main preoccupations of humankind at least since Adam.

Mine has been a lifetime of learning — trying to learn everything. A quixotic quest at best.

In third grade, I learned — or seemed to learn — the names of all the popular dinosaurs. In fourth grade, I did all the whales. There seemed to be an endless supply of things to learn about. And that is the problem.

There is too much of everything. No one can grasp it all. Not even all of a limited subgroup, or sub-subgroup. Pigeons of Southeast Asia or sharks of the South Atlantic. You can find books about most of such things.

By most standard rankings, I am a reasonably well-read man. But I have looked up at the night sky in the desert wilderness, 50 miles from the nearest paved road, and seen millions of stars and the Milky Way, and thought, “That’s how many books I have not read.”

It may once have been possible to read almost everything ever published. After getting his Masters degree from Cambridge University in 1635, poet John Milton took six years off, reputedly to read everything available in English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Old English and Dutch. As impressive as that is, he did not read Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Aramaic, Turkish, or any other written Asian tongue. That is a lot left out of his erudition.

Over the years, I have collected thousands of books, and know that, like the birds or beasts, there are so many more out there that I have not even known existed. The sum total of human publication I doubt anyone has ever fully tallied. It would not be possible, even for a single language.

It is that way with almost anything. Too much. Even a post-doctoral scientist, who may know more than any other person about the subject at hand, will not have been able to read everything in that field. There is too much. Even the experts are mere dabblers, given the immensity of the task.

Take movies. I have seen more than most people. I spent part of my career for my newspaper as a back-up and later, temporary film critic (until a new full-time critic could be hired after the previous one left). My experience is with film from all over the world, not just Hollywood. But it is estimated that American film studios have produced more than 25,000 movies since they were invented. In 1940 alone, 1,973 films are listed. And that is just the U.S. Overall, the count is nearer 500,000 films worldwide. In fact, more films are listed as lost than I have seen — by far. It is estimated that half the films made before 1950 have been lost. Early Hollywood never carefully archived what it produced.

What about painting? Pablo Picasso produced more than 13,000 paintings over his 78 year life, to say nothing of the estimated 100,000 prints, 34,000 illustrations, 1,200 sculptures and thousands of ceramics. Admittedly, he was preposterously prolific, but he was just one artist. Consider all the paintings in all the galleries, museums, and private collections around the world. How many has any one person seen? What minuscule percentage? How can anyone claim to be an expert based on knowing such a small sample?

I have been going to concerts since I was 16. I can’t count them. I have a huge collection of recordings — thousands of them — but I know that I cannot ever reach the end of classical music. Yes, there’s Mozart and Stravinsky, and all the familiar gang, but what about Joseph Martin Krauss (the “Swedish Mozart”), Mieczysław Karłowicz (who was killed in an avalanche), or Johann Georg Pisendel (friend of Vivaldi). To say nothing about all those Italian Baroque composers: Corelli, Tortelli, Tartini, Martini, Spumoni (well, maybe not that last one). Wikipedia lists 406 Italian Baroque composers. Not even Naxos has recorded music by more than a fraction of them.

There are even more German Baroque composers, most with three names, beyond Johann Sebastian Bach. There were Johann Philipp Krieger, Johann Jeremias du Grain, Johan Gottfried Walther, Johann Heinrich Buttstett, Johan Paul von Westhoff, Johann Jacob Löwe, Johann Gottlieb Janitsch… And that’s not even leaving the “Johann” list.

Bach alone counted among his ancestors and descendants more than 50 musicians and composers (one list counts 77), beginning with Veit Bach, born about 1555. In parts of central Germany at the time, the name “Bach” was a synonym for “musician.”

And all that is merely a subset of European composers. I am humbled.

Even if we look at popular music, it’s the same thing. Irving Berlin, alone, wrote an estimated 1,250 songs (even he had no accurate count). Yes, everyone knows God Bless America, and probably Blue Skies and Alexander’s Ragtime Band, but what about Alexander and his Clarinet, The Blue Devils of France, or Everything in America is Ragtime?

No one can count the number of songwriters who wrote for the publishers on Tin Pan Alley: Harold Arlen; Irving Berlin; George M. Cohan; George Gershwin; Dorothy Fields; Scott Joplin; Fats Waller. And uncounted more. The 19th century gave us Stephen Foster, Philip Bliss, Joseph Skelly, Eva Carter Buckner … There really is no need to list them all, even if I could. And these are just Americans. Songs were being written everywhere, and continue to be.

Shirley Gunter and the Queens

Try to tally up all the rock and pop bands, beginning in the 1950s and ’60s. For every Bill Haley and the Comets, there are a hundred Bill Black Combos and Shirley Gunter and the Queens (Oop Shoop). For every Beatles or Stones, there are a thousand Jive Fives and Dyke & The Blazers. A few pop up infrequently on Golden Oldie radio stations, but most are buried under the avalanche of whatever followed, only for those to be buried in their turn.

There are more than 7,000 languages in the world, not counting languages long extinct. I’m proud of being able to manage the simple vocabulary of a French newspaper. Milton could read 10 languages. Pikers, all of us. There is so much more.

How many types of apples are there? How many breeds of pig? There are 7,500 cultivars of apple in the world, 2,500 grown in the U.S. No one knows how many wild strains have not been catalogued. As for hogs, according to a study by Chinese universities, around 600 breeds of pig have been created by farmers around the world, mainly in Europe and Asia.

The same could be asked of sheep, goats, kine, cats, dogs, and, I’m sure, even for fleas.

A million insect species have been formally described, but scientists estimate the true total is closer to 5.5 million. There are approximately 17,500 to 20,000 known species of butterflies worldwide. They are found on every continent except Antarctica, with roughly 750 species found in the United States and Canada.

There are eight billion people in the world. How many of them do you know? That’s a million of them eight thousand times over. If they were a parade and it moved past you at one soul per second, it would take 250 years to reach the end, but by then, the first billions would have died of old age, and billions more born to join the queue — so you would never reach the end.

This is all not to disparage expertise. We need people willing to learn as much as possible about as many things as possible. Ignorance is never a helpful contribution. But it is meant to foster a healthy humility about what we do know and what we even can know. Each of us is limited; the world is too vast, varied, and ever changing for any of us to claim much. There are as many recipes for cassoulet as there are families who prepare the dish.

I always remember what my wife told me. She was a primary school teacher and one day a third grader complained about how much they were expected to memorize.

“My mama told me the human brain can only hold so much or it will explode,” he said. He was serious.

Fun with words

April 15, 2026

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The perpetual face-off between writers and editors can frustrate both sides. I remember well once at my newspaper when a copy editor questioned my use of the word “paradiddle.” It didn’t exist, he insisted. I had thought it a perfectly normal word; it is a kind of drum beat. He wanted me to change it. This was fairly unusual; copy editors are usually right, and have an almost preternatural sensitivity to words and usage. But I showed him my word in the dictionary and he was abashed. Paradiddle made it into print.

But this became a kind of grudge I held (in a mild way — the copy desk saved my bacon many a time, so it was more a slight nettle than a grudge). And so, for the next six months, I got my own back by including in every story I wrote, a word I made up. To quote Captain Renault in Casablanca, “It is a little game we play.”

These were not outrageous words. Some were onomatopoetic, like the Batman “Groink!” or “Shwak!” Others were neologisms derived from Latin or Greek, and therefore easy to parse. Others were verbs in noun clothing, or common words with new prefixes or suffixes. And for six months, not a single one of them was questioned by the copy desk. Perhaps they just thought if they didn’t poke at me, I would leave them alone.

Writers (and editors) live in a world of words. We have all been English majors, came to love language and have developed a word trove far in excess of that of the standard math major or the athlete. We have absorbed most words, including the shibboleth words of numbers or sports. Words B Us.

This starts at a very early age. In second grade, when we were given vocabulary lists to memorize, I loved soaking them in. And when asked to write sentences using the new words, I tasked myself with using them all up in as few sentences as possible. When I could combine all 10 of them in a single sentence, it was the jackpot. It was a game and fun to play.

Words are things and English majors like to move them around, rearrange them, misspell them, invent new malapropisms. The wordplay involves mondegreens, eggcorns, puns, spoonerisms and other fun ways to mangle the mother tongue. They are terms used for language mistakes, but what do you call them when you commit them on purpose?

I have been doing this for as long as I can remember, or, as I usually say, “marimba.” As my newspaper’s classical music critic, I frequently attended concerts by the “sympathy orchestra.” I used these terms so often, I had to be careful when speaking to more sober-minded audiences.

I make “chilled grease” sandwiches, and oyster stew becomes “moister stew.” Lasagne becomes “la zagnee,” or “lazza gonya.” (Yes, I know this can become quite annoying.)

In college, a friend had scribbled on the side of his refrigerator a shopping list:

I have since embroidered that original list with a few extra items, including sesame kagels, cabbage-liver paste, and dishlicking washwood.

I have since then always referred to my “Chopin Liszt” and I carry around a notebook in my back pocket for random notes, and my weekly Chopin Liszt, and often mess around with the items.

Among these are: munchworms; scream cheese; switch cheese; mouse wash; shower kraut; permission cheese. Sour cream becomes “hour scream;” dill pickles turns into “pill dickles;” ginger ale becomes “Injure jail;” and toilet paper (i.e., loo roll) becomes “Lou Rawls.” In a nod to Homer Simpson, avocado becomes “avamocado.”

Perhaps this keeps my list safe from prying eyes. Ground beef is “bound grief;” chicken legs is “lickin’ chegs;” and there are “corn flecks;” “tumble fish;” “ravilowly;” and “bisgetti sores.”

All this just to amuse myself. It isn’t really to entertain the public, just my own list in my own back pocket when I grocery shopping. Shake the phonemes around and make surprising combinations.

I imagine those with different talents play games in their own disciplines. There must be fun things to do with numbers — different ways of thinking about them. I have always insisted that one plus one equals three: There is the one thing, the other thing, and the two things together — three things.

And historians can play with their counterfactuals. I imagine lawyers can work some fairly dirty jokes into their depositions. What is the Dirac Sea but some physicists having fun with quantum mechanics.

The world would be a very dreary place with no play. Even for grown-ups. Especially for grown-ups.

Henry David Thoreau

April 4, 2026

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Documentary producer Ken Burns has just released a 3-hour film on 19th-century author Henry David Thoreau, one of my heroes when I was a younger man and more easily caught by enthusiasms.

With a bit of hesitation, I tuned in to watch it on PBS and was instantly disappointed. It was the Standard Authorized Version, with almost nothing new to say. It was the Thoreau you might get on a network morning chat show — all surface, all cliche. Its language is largely that of 21st century pop psychology, while Thoreau’s own words are saturated with 19th century Romanticism.

When Burns came out with his monumental series on the Civil War in 1990, it was groundbreaking and original. It was also a huge hit and deserved every accolade it received. He has directed and produced some epical series since then, but I’m afraid it has mostly been downhill from then. He has parodied himself and his once-innovative style, with its narrator, and its Hollywood celebrity voice-overs and vintage photographs lovingly caressed by the slowly moving camera.

Walden Pond

And so, this series on Thoreau doesn’t offer much new or insightful. It does attempt to make the 19th century writer seem more 21st century than can convincingly be done — more social justice warrior and less tedious cataloguer of birds and ferns. To be fair, Thoreau was, in terms of his day, quite progressive, an abolitionist and environmentalist, and some of his writing has had tremendous social and political impact on the century that followed him. But the series gets the balance wrong, more in favor of things we value, and less so for the more Transcendentalist trends of his era.

And it glosses over the fact, that in addition to being a great writer and social activist, he was also a world-class loon. He didn’t play well with other children, as they say. He liked his loneness, didn’t comfortably interact with others, and while he was a proto-environmentalist and a fervent abolitionist, he also maintained many prejudices of his age, including a romanticized view of Noble Savage Native Americans. His political views could line him up pretty well with current anti-tax Tea Party Republicans. Some have outright called him an anarchist. Recently, others have placed him on the Asperger spectrum. Others have questioned his sexuality, or lack of. At any rate, Henry Thoreau was not what is typically considered normal. If not a loon, at least a very odd duck.

Emerson wrote of him, “He was bred to no profession. He never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. When asked at dinner what dish he preferred, he answered, ‘the nearest.’”

Walden, of course, chronicles his time spent in a cabin he built on the glacial lake of that name, where he lived for two years in an attempt to leave civilization behind and grow his own beans. Thoreau became the patron saint of environmentalism in the 1960s, and that despite the fact that in 1844, he personally destroyed a whole forest by, like Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon, “doubtless being careless with matches.”

Yes, he marched to the beat of a different drummer, but had little sense of rhythm.

I have read most of what Thoreau wrote, including his 14-volume journals. I feel safe in saying there were four basic periods in his writing life. Early on, he was a student, and like many such, mimicked his models to the point of too often simply quoting them endlessly. He had a habit of gathering shorter piece he had composed and editing them together into longer, rather discursive pieces.

Then came his journeyman period, where he had largely found his voice, but still had some problem making the whole cohere. This was the period of the book he wrote while at Walden Pond, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which told the story of the boat trip he made with his brother, John, 10 years before. They sailed a dory down the Concord River and up the Merrimack, and attempted to climb Mount Katahdin in Maine, where he had a transcendental vision. After John died, Henry wrote the book as a memorial to his brother.

Reproduction of the interior of Thoreau’s cabin

It is a wandering volume, mostly about the boat trip they took, but also about pretty much everything else the young writer could pack into it, still with lots of allusive quotes. Perhaps he was imitating Montaigne, whose work is likewise punctuated.

He had it published at his own expense, and when it failed to sell, he wound up with all the remaindered books delivered to his home. “I now have a library of nearly nine-hundred volumes,” he said, “over seven-hundred of which I wrote myself.”

The high point came with Walden or A Life in the Woods, which he began in his lakeside cabin and finished later on. It is one of the best written books I have ever read, if taken sentence by sentence. It is delicious to peruse. I fell in love with Thoreau’s prose style, with its biblical heft and Shakespearean metaphor.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.” How can you write better than that? You can’t.

Illustration of Heritage Club edition of “Walden” by Thomas Nason

His later books were cobbled together from magazine articles he had published. They are still a delight to read. The Maine Woods and Cape Cod — neither as sustained as Walden, but still solid writing.

But as Thoreau got older, he began to lose the metaphorical fire that had made Walden so memorable. He became more concerned with collecting data, precise taxonomy and recording detailed observations.

You can see these stylistic periods in the journals, which begin with lots of quotations, rise to metaphorical heights as the years progress, and then devolve into quotidian daily notations perhaps of scientific usefulness, but no longer designed for the pleasure of reading.

He published a final travel book that demonstrates the kind of exhaustion Thoreau was facing. It was published in 1866, after his death and called A Yankee in Canada. It begins, “I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada, not having seen much; what I got by going to Canada was a cold.”

I have read it all, from A Week to Walden to Maine Woods to The Dispersion of Seeds, which is one of the first meaningful explications of plant succession. But not the poems. Gott im Himmel, not the poems. Thoreau wrote the most poetic of prose, but the most prosaic of poetry.

This he shares with his mentor. Thoreau lived for a while with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a celebrity and public intellectual who wrote reams. Emerson was more widely and systematically read and educated than Thoreau and he explained a good deal of German philosophy to the American public. Emerson was a better philosopher than Thoreau, but Thoreau was the better writer.

Both shared an aphoristic style, where individual sentences are hugely quotable. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines,” Emerson wrote in Self Reliance.” And, “We are always getting ready to live, but never living.”

(Compare with Thoreau in Walden, where he wanted “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”)

Thoreau’s Cove, at Walden Pond

The difference between them is that Emerson strings these aphorisms one after the other like shunting boxcars bumping into each other. There is often little sense of continuity. You admire each sentence but they pile up rather than add up. Thoreau has the aphorisms, but also the talent, at his best, to make them flow together melodically.

I first went to Concord and Walden Pond more than 50 years ago. I can not accurately recall the number of times I have made it back; they all blur together. I’ve been there in spring and in fall; I have had the place all to myself, and I have had visits I had to share with busloads of tourists; there were moments when I felt I was communing with the eternity that Thoreau found there, and moments that were bound by the clock — I had elsewhere to get to before dark.

But the climax of a visit is circumambulating the pond, i.e., walking the perimeter of the water, a distance of roughly a mile and a half. At the one end is the swimming-hole beach used by the residents of Concord, Mass., and at the far end are the railroad tracks of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s Fitchburg Line commuter train.

Reproduction of Thoreau’s cabin

On the way, you pass the site of Thoreau’s cabin, marked by stones where the tiny building used to be (a modern replica can be see on the other side of the highway that passes the pond, at the parking lot; yes, there is now a parking lot.)

The pond is just another kettle lake in a landscape made by their number into Swiss cheese on the map of New England. But it has a resonance built into it because of its adoption by Thoreau, a resonance that is now felt by countless acolytes for whom Walden is, if not a holy book, then at least a baedeker for self-discovery.

I may have shorted Thoreau as a political thinker. His essay on Civil Disobedience has been especially influential on reformers, from Mohandas Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. And his scientific essays, written later in his career, have sometimes been well ahead of their time.

But shifting the emphasis from the nature writings to the political and moral writings, as the TV series seems to do, equally distorts the life he is profiling.

He became a prophet in the hippie 1960s, but that era was too louche to fully capture him. The informality of Whole Earth Catalog would have been foreign to the Harvard educated Thoreau, who read ancient Greek and quoted Aeschylus, and believed in “higher” thoughts and endeavors. He believed in a kind of intellectual hierarchy that our postmodern world mistrusts.

“He was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind; his enjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be convincing,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “So many negative superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig.”

We get very little flavor of the man, outside the comfortable mythos, from the TV series. Perhaps that is all the use we can get from him in an era of text messaging and Instagram when reading seems as antiquated as blacksmithing.

Fall leaves reflected in Walden Pond

We should, no doubt, honor the work that has immediate practical value in the world, but what ultimately gives Henry Thoreau his immortality is the writing, the words. At his best, he was one of America’s greatest writers. I wish the TV series had more of that.

The word and the world

March 24, 2026

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Dimitri Drobatschewsky was the most erudite man I ever knew. He spoke, wrote and read in German, French, and English. Born in Berlin and raised mostly in Luxembourg, his French and German were native, down to idiom, argot and accent. He was also conversant in Spanish, Italian and Polish (at least, he said, he knew several dirty jokes in Polish).

He was born in 1923, fled the Nazis with his family, joined the French Foreign Legion, deserted to fight with the Free French forces in Italy in World War II. Later, he became the classical music critic with The Arizona Republic, where he and I became friends.

(Once, when confronted by a musician who had gotten a bad review, he was challenged on his credentials. “What do you think is the most important qualification for a classical music critic?” the musician demanded. “Well,” Dimitri said. “He must have a long and unpronounceable name.”)

Because he was still a boy when moving to Luxembourg, he was able to learn French as a native. “I had to,” he told me. “French girls wouldn’t date you if you didn’t speak perfect French.” And that’s why, after the war, when he emigrated to the U.S., he kept his accent. “American girls loved a foreign accent.”

Dimitri felt that French was the most beautiful language, by the sounds it makes in your mouth. But for Dimitri, the best poetry was in German, and further, the greatest poet was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. For this, I had to take his word.

Because I don’t read German, and when I approach Goethe in translation, he sounds earthbound, even banal.

I try to hear the German in my mind to catch its melody, but I am walled out by my English. All I can gain from the reading is a commonplace.

“Little rose, little rose, little red rose

Little rose of the heath.”

It sounds better when set to Schubert’s music, but still, in English, the words are a touch sappy, and the sentiment pedestrian.

“You have to read him in German,” Dimitri said. “The sound of words, the language is unbelievably beautiful.”

“Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,

Röslein auf der Heiden.”

So, I’m afraid Goethe is closed to me. I’ve read Faust several times in several translations, and it never seems to quite get airborne, yet everyone who knows the original feels it is one of the greatest works of literature ever, and that Goethe is the equal of Shakespeare.

I have the same problem with Quintus Horatius Flaccus, or Horace, in English. In English, his poetry is flat as yesterday’s ginger ale. “You have to read him in Latin,” says my friend Alexander, whose degree is in Classical languages. “In Latin, he is truly exceptional — lapidary perfection.”

Again, I have to take his word for it. Shakespeare may have had “small Latin and less Greek,” but my Latin is even smaller than the Bard’s. I studied it in eighth grade, and mostly what I recall is “agricola.”

I freely confess it is my loss. But there it is; I am stuck with it.

There are those who hold that all literature is untranslatable, that you have to read it in the original language, and while I concede that you can never get all of a poem in a translation, nevertheless, I feel there is a class of work that functions perfectly well shapeshifted.

I can read my Homer not only in English, but in multiple translations, from Chapman to Pope to Fitzgerald to Fagles and I am sucked in by the poetry every time. It may very well be better in Greek, but it’s the best thing I’ve ever read even in English. I reread the Iliad once a year, and try to find a new translation each time. (I read the Odyssey, too, and I especially love the translation by T.E. Lawrence — Lawrence of Arabia. Who knew?)

The same thing happens with Dostoevsky. I’m sure it’s better in Russian, but even a good translation moves swiftly and powerfully and I am rapt by the story and moved by the humanity. There is a swift current underneath the surface of language.

It can make a difference which translation you read. I am told by those who know, that the Scott Moncrieff translation of The Remembrance of Things Past is closest to the quality of Proust’s French, yet I find his English stuffy and outdated. The newer translations — by a range of translators for Viking (Swann’s Way is translated by Lydia Davis) — is easier to digest and flows with the quickness that ensures pleasure in the reading. But am I getting the pith of Proust? My French is better than my German, but it is still small beer.

Constance Garnett gave us English versions of what must be every Russian novel ever written. She was a factory. And her versions are still the most widely read. But the more recent by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are much easier going. The duo now seem to be challenging Garnett also for the shear number of volumes converted.

Tolstoy’s War and Peace, in the English of Louise and Aylmer Maude, is the most profound and moving piece of literature I have ever read, despite the profusion of names. How much better would it read if I could understand it in Russian (and French, let’s not forget)? Its power transcends its tongue.

This all raises the question, however, of why Homer or Tolstoy can be read in translation and Horace cannot. And the reason, I believe, is that greatness in writing comes on two essential levels: content and style. That is, how deeply it connects with our human-ness, on one hand, and on the other, how deeply it connects with its medium. This is not an either-or situation; there should always be awareness of both sides. But in practice, one side or the other tends to predominate. The more it is the universal connection with life and experience that we read, the easier the literature can travel. The more it is the words themselves, the more insular the audience.

It would be difficult to illustrate this dichotomy if we try to look at examples of foreign literature translated to English; we would need to be conversant with the original language to see how it morphs in the conversion. But consider attempting to translate several English authors into some other language.

Shakespeare tends to travel well. His plays are valued in many lands and many languages. There are famous examples of Macbeth in Swahili, of Hamlet in Russian, and dozens of operatic versions in Italian, French and German. They all pack a wallop. And Shakespeare is loved in all those languages by their native speakers.

On the other hand, how in hell can you translate John Milton into French? You can tell the story of Paradise Lost, sure, but how can you convey the special organ-tone quality of his language.

“Round he throws his baleful eyes.”

Translate it into French and it comes out as the equivalent of: “He looks around malevolently.” Not the same thing, all the poetry is gone out of it. Deflated; a flat tire.

Or: “When I consider how my light is spent.”

It is only in English that the word “spent” has the two meanings: a spent taper; or money (or life) spent. The word in the opening of his sonnet “On his Blindness” has a nimbus of ambiguity about it. The primary meaning is that he is now blind, but he spreads the halo out from the word “spent” by following it up with several other financial words: “the one Talent which is death to hide” where a talent is also a biblical monetary denomination, and brings to mind the New Testament story of the servants and the talents, and the poor servant who is “cast into the outer darkness, where there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth.” And then there is, “present my true account,” and its hint of double entry bookkeeping. It is this expansiveness in language that is the key to Milton’s greatness. He is large; he contains multitudes. But they are bound in English, anodized, as it were, not separable. How do you work that magic in French? Or German? Or Japanese?

These things are untranslatable, and hence, Milton can never have the global currency of Shakespeare.

Or consider translating Chaucer from his own time to ours. The poetry — The sound of the words, phrases, sentences and stanzas — cannot hypnotize us as the original does. Yes, we get the sense, but we miss the art.

“And smale fowles maken melodye, that slepen all the night with open ye.”

Or imagine James Joyce in German. The melody is gone. “Stattlich rundlich Buck Mulligan…”

If I turn to a poet I love very deeply, and whose language I can parse, it survives translation very well. Pablo Neruda’s Spanish is so transparent, that the ideas embodied in it are clearly seen in any lingo. It is that Neruda’s primary concern in his poetry is not language, but experience. They are real pears and plums in his poetry, real life and death, real love, real sex, real toes and real stones. The poetry is about the things of this world, and not the way we express them.

The poetry is highly wrought, and in Spanish, there is a linguistic layer Neruda also cares about, but the power of the poems come from Neruda’s connection with his own life, his own experience, and that it is possible to share in any language.

“Quiero conocer este mundo,” “I want to know this world,” he says in his Bestiario/“Bestiary.”

“The spider is an engineer,/ a divine watchmaker./ For one fly more or less/ the foolish can detest them:/ I wish to speak with spiders./ I want them to weave me a star.”

Language is a mask. Behind it there is a world. You can concentrate on the language, or on the world. It is easy to be lulled into forgetting the difference, to think that words describe the world, and that the best language is the most accurate lens on the things of this world — este mundo — but they are not the same, but rather, parallel universes, and what works in words does not necessarily explain how the world functions. In reality, there are no nouns, no participles. There is only “is.” Can you squeeze that “is” through words? We try. And we try again.

Book’em, Danno

February 26, 2026

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I was a man with a price on his head.

Granted, it was only a nickel a day, but it was increasing. By the time the Library Police knocked on my door, that price was in the high single dollar range. Who knew the library had police? They came in pairs, like Mormon missionaries, and were nearly as polite; they wanted the money and they wanted their book back. I had forgotten I had even borrowed it from the Virginia Beach Public Library and now, I didn’t know where it was, in the welter of books in the house; I paid them the price of the book to be done with it. This was the most dire episode in my long relationship with libraries.

It was also a long time ago (you should have been tipped off by the fine of a nickel-a-day — library fines have grown with inflation), and it was at a time when I was suffering from student poverty, and so libraries were a godsend when I needed or wanted a certain book — and for those of us with the book affliction, the difference between want and need is very thinly sliced.

There is a word for this affliction. At first, I just thought of myself as a bibliophile, but the proprietor of a used bookstore in Norfolk, Va., recognizing the symptoms explained to me that what I was, in actuality, was a bibliopath. I kind of liked the name and have perpetuated the usage ever since. You know you are a bibliopath if you have ever feared for the life of your cat when the pile of books on the floor next to your bed reaches critical mass and you suffer what in our household we call a “bookslide.” Buried under there, like survivors of a third-world earthquake, is the unhappy cat you have to exhume.

Some of my earliest memories were of descending to the basement of my elementary school in New Jersey, where the town’s public library was hidden, and spending countless hours of joy poring over the shelves and finding the books that would explain the world to me.

In high school, I persuaded my Latin teacher to give me an entire pad of signed library passes so I could avoid the dreaded study hall — a place where tired students could place their weary heads in the crease of an open book and fall into a confused slumber — and go to the school library instead. Study hall proctors eyed me with suspicion every day, as if I were somehow avoiding the cruel and unusual punishment that my adolescent status deserved. They clearly thought I was getting away with something. Such was the pedagogical theory of 60 years ago.

In college, there was little more delicious than burying yourself deep in the stacks, seated at a tiny, poorly lit carrel with a tower of scholarly tomes and doing research late into the night. These lucubrations were almost as delightful as the traditional student discovery of sex and beer.

Even after graduation, I would go back to the university library and dive deep into its inventory — the stacks, called The Towers, were open only to students, but no one checked my ID — and I discovered many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore and managed to check out several rare books, including an 18th century printing of the sagas of Ossian — that famous fraud by James Macpherson. I was sorely tempted to pay the library fines and keep the book, but my conscience won out and I read the thing and returned it. (I have since bought a 19th century edition of the poems and it sits in my own stacks here in my tiny office — an office modeled on the site plan and measurements of the library carrel).

When I finally came to work for the newspaper, no assignment made me happier than one requiring a trip to the library, where instead of “reporting,” I engaged in “researching.” I was an indifferent reporter, but I was a great researcher.

And now that I am retired, I live in my library — my personal library — where the walls are made from bookshelves and each book is a door, and while I spend many a happy hour in Google-land or riding the Wikipedia bus, it is still the feel of paper, the sound of turning pages, the smell of the residue of dust from the spine of a book that makes my pulse quicken.

Alas, libraries are under attack, mostly by irate villagers with pitchforks and torches afraid their children will be exposed to unregulated thinking, but also because the very act of reading is dying out, like endangered species or network TV.

The newspaper where I worked had a library where I went to fact check what I was writing, but by the time I retired, it had been closed and the dear librarians who had helped me for 25 years had been offered buy-outs.

I had my own small library, several hundred reference books, at my desk, including a bookshelf jammed into the passageway behind my chair that had needed to be cleared by the fire marshal. But even that eventually became mostly decorative, since I could more quickly and efficiently find out birth- and death-dates of whoever I was writing about by Googling them on my computer.

I mourn the loss of libraries, and mostly the old-fashioned ones, with dark shelves piled high into corners of institutional basements, with their sequestered carrels lit by desk lamps, tucked into hallways.

The Library of Alexandria may have burned down, the Carnegie library buildings may have been rented out to non-profit foundations, the newspaper library has been thinned by a kind of bureaucratic deliquescence, and the public library has become a battery of computer screens, but I am here, behind the moat of my own books, vowing never to surrender.

“How could such sweet and wholesome hours/ Be reckon’d but with stacks and Tow’rs!”

Ballad of Reading

February 4, 2026

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I have been a reader for about three quarters of a century. It began so long ago, I don’t remember exactly when I started — probably in kindergarten when I discovered words. But once I began, I couldn’t get enough.

I read anything I could get my mitts on, from the backs of cereal boxes to the funny pages in the newspaper to road signs when the family was out driving. I’m sure I drove my parents nuts by pointing out stop signs and mileage markers.

This is not to claim any sort of prodigy. I believe most kids latch on to text as soon as they learned to decipher it.

But lately, I’ve been thinking about how my reading habits have changed over the years, and how those changes parallel life experience, and the needs I sought to satisfy as I grew up. Shakespeare wrote about the seven ages of life, and I think about the stages of reading.

My early reading is chronicled by years. In third grade, I was fascinated with dinosaurs and read all the books I could find in my elementary school library (which was also the town library). There was Roy Chapman Andrews and his All About Dinosaurs, part of a series of “All About” books written for kids.

By the fourth grade, I had moved on to whales, and spent the school year absorbing everything I could about cetaceans. And so it progressed through astronomy, airplanes, and, by the seventh grade, I was into World War II. By then I had left behind the books written for young readers and took on the history books and memoirs. Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis; Day of Infamy by Walter Lord; Crusade in Europe by Dwight Eisenhower.

Other boys my age were reading Hardy Boys books and maybe Sherlock Holmes, but I was single-minded in reading non-fiction. I wanted to learn everything. I was a compendious fact basket. Dump it all in.

We were given a 1930s copy of the Compton’s Illustrated Encyclopedia and I read through it constantly. It might have been out of date, but it had lovely drawings of autogiros and streamlined trains and learned about everything from Angkor Wat to frog-egg fertilization and The Great War.

My parents, who had just high school educations and had lived through the Great Depression, were eager to educate their children to guarantee them good jobs in life. There was never any doubt they would send their three sons to college. And so, they encouraged this reading.

They thought they would help by buying books for me, including a copy of some young adult fiction. I sneered at it. Fiction? “I don’t want to read anything that isn’t true,” I said.

This first phase was the fact-gathering stage. I wanted to learn as much as possible and reading was the funnel that poured it all into my hungry brain. You have to fill the pepper grinder before you can grind pepper.

And so, it poured in and stuck: 44 B.C.; A.D. 1066; 1215; 1588; 1776; 1914 — and Aug. 6, 1945, a date that hangs over anyone my age like a threatening sky.

I stayed away from fiction until, I was, perhaps, 12 or 13 years old, when I discovered science fiction. I gobbled it up like candy. All the mid-level sci-fi writers that were popular in the late ’50s and early ’60s: Poul Anderson: Lester del Rey; Robert Heinlein; Frederick Pohl; and, of course, Ray Bradbury. I must have burned out on it, because I cannot read any fantasy or sci-fi anymore. Lord of the Rings? God help me. No, never.

But there were the Fu Manchu books of Sax Rohmer, with their Yellow Peril and archly Victorian prose. All pure pulp, but they opened the world of fiction to me and transitioned me into the second phase of readership, which is perhaps the most embarrassing phase.

By high school, I wanted to prove I was a grown-up, and what is more, an intellectual grown up. I subscribed to Evergreen Review and Paul Krassner’s Realist. I was hip, in my tight jeans, pointy shoes and hair slicked with Wildroot Cream Oil.

And I began reading important fiction of the time: Saul Bellow; John Updike; Norman Mailer; Thomas Pynchon. Of course, I didn’t understand any of them. I was a pimply-faced high-school kid. What did I know? But I looked oh, so sophisticated carrying around Herzog under my arm. It was only when I read it again a few years ago that I fully realized how funny the book is. I didn’t know it was a comedy when I first read it. There is nothing more earnest than a teenager.

I did manage to pick up and understand On the Road and other Kerouac books, and J.D. Salinger spoke directly to my adolescent soul. On the Road held up on re-reading years later; not Catcher in the Rye, which is now close to unreadable. I couldn’t even finish a re-read.

The problem with adolescence is you have almost no life experience. It’s all just literature to you. You get caught up in “symbolism,” and what a book “means.” As if it were written in code to be deciphered. A 16-year-old is in no position to know what was going on in those books. It wasn’t much different from when we were assigned The Scarlet Letter or The Great Gatsby in eighth grade. I could understand the words, but not understand what was said between the lines.

A teenager thinks the world is simple. It is the tragedy of youth.

The following stage was college reading. There was, of course, a lot of it. But I loved it, especially the Classics courses I took, reading Greek and Roman authors, the English Romantic poets, and Chaucer. I took to Chaucer immediately. I still read him for the pleasure of his language. There was a course on Milton and another on William Blake. I ate the stuff up. I still do.

And I was then old enough that I actually understood much of what I was reading. I was beginning to have a life and feel the complexity of the world.

College only lasted four years and after that came marriage and divorce and unemployment and — just as bad — employment. I still read, but mostly I just tried to keep it all together, and not always successfully. (Unemployment gave me a lot of reading time and for months, I managed a book a day.)

The fourth great phase of reading came after divorce and other traumatic events, when I had what might now be called a break down. It didn’t stop me reading, and actually it led to a fever of it. I read all of Henry Miller (or as much as was available, not counting his privately printed short works); all of Melville, or pretty near; piles of D.H. Lawrence; and basket-loads of Twain, Hemingway and Faulkner — and Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which seemed to sum up my situation — and that marked a change in my relationship to books.

This was a turning point that not everyone seems to experience. Until this point, I measured my life against what I read. Was I like Nick Carraway or Sal Paradise? I wanted to be “important” like them and thought literature was there to show me the way.

After that point, instead of measuring my life against the books, I measured them against my life. Did they seem true to what I had experienced? When I was young, the books were real and my life a simulacrum; as I grew, it became clear my life was the real thing and the literature was only a reflection. Not “did I measure up,” but “did the books measure up?”

Books, as a percentage of time spent, varies quite a bit over the course of a life. I find the more I am engaged with doing something, like work or socializing, the less time I spend reading. And the fifth phase began when I started teaching in Virginia. It wasn’t that I stopped reading, but that I did less of it, and that the books I did read tended more toward histories, biographies, memoirs and essays.

I tore through Shelby Foote’s three-volume history of the Civil War; a one-volume selection from Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; tons of H.L. Mencken, including all his Prejudices; Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago; and as antidote, all the David Sedaris I could find.

This phase continued through 25 years working for The Arizona Republic, in Phoenix, where I was, among other things, the art critic. I read a lot for work — including background on things I was writing about.

The relationship with books had changed, but so had my relationship with words altogether. When I was young, I was eager for knowledge and read by the boatload in search of ways to fill my insides. But somewhere along the line the well was full and the words spent less time piling in and more gushing out: I became a professional writer and all that back-pressure of words, information and experience burst out. I wrote like a hose spraying water. I couldn’t fill the buckets fast enough.

Even on vacations, driving around this country or others, I spent part of every day writing down notes that later turned into stories for the paper.

So, there were those two major shifts in life: first when I began measuring the books against my life; and second when instead of just adding more words to the pile, all the millions of words dammed up behind my cranium began pouring out.

Through all of these phases, but increasingly over the years, I found myself re-reading as much as reading. My favorite books I tackled again and again. I cannot number the times I have read Moby Dick or Paradise Lost or James Joyce’s Ulysses — all dived into time after time for pure pleasure. There are others: Thoreau’s Walden; Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises; Gatsby, of course, now that I know what’s going on in it.

I try to re-read the Iliad once a year, usually with a different translation each time. I sometimes change pace and do the Odyssey. I tried Dante, and can gobble up Inferno any time, but admit I find Purgatorio and Paradiso quite a slog. I’ll stick with Hell, thank you.

The books I’ve mentioned so far indicate a fairly parochial taste for Western culture, and I have to admit to that. But I’ve soaked up a fair amount of early and non-Western writings to try to keep some balance. I’ve read and re-read the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, Lao-Tze, Beowulf, and Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, among others. I’ve read large swaths of the Vedas and Upanishads, and even a bit of various versions of the Book of the Dead. There is Sufi poetry and the Popol Vuh. I have tried to soften the boundaries of my cultural walls.

There is a sixth phase, where I am now — retired. Although, as I’ve said many times, a writer never really retires. He just stops getting paid for it. I now write this blog, for which I’ve written more than 800 entries with another hundred more for other online venues, all of which total a million and a half words, all since 2012 when I left the madding crowd behind.

I have slowed down some, but I still read. Now, I read a good deal of poetry. I find it satisfies my love not just of meaning but of the words themselves, the taste and mouth-feel of them. It is a connection with the world, and with the netting of language that holds that world up before my mind.

It is said in some cultures, after a life of striving and ambition, that there comes a time of quiet and reflection, a time to spend on weighing the life and figuring out where it falls in the larger picture of time and the universe.

I certainly feel that. But it hasn’t reduced my need to recharge that well from which I draw my words. My Amazon account proves that. I keep getting new books and find that I simply don’t have any more space on my bookshelves, and so, they pile up on top of other books and in dangerous stacks on the floor.

Every once in a while, there is a book-avalanche and under the chaos I rediscover some book I had forgot and sit down and open it up again. I’ll deal with the mess later.

Naming names

November 29, 2025

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We’ve all heard of Alexander the Great, William the Conqueror, or Suleiman the Magnificent. Who wouldn’t want to be known to history by such flattering names? But among the many kings, princes, barons and otherwise leaders, there are a few names a bit less splendiferous.

Alexander the Great; William the Conqueror; Suleiman the Magnificent

Every literate English speaker has probably heard of Ethelred the Unready, but what about Ivar the Boneless? We think of the third Julian Roman emperor as Caligula, although his actual name was Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. “Caligula” was a less-than-laudatory nickname which actually means “little boots,” because when he was a boy, he tried wearing a real soldiers footware and the troopers made fun of him by calling him Little Boots, or “Bootsie.”

But the list of unflattering cognomens, sobriquets and nicknames is really quite long. Not everyone was the Sun King. There was also Sebastian the Asleep of Portugal, who reigned from 1554 to 1578. And Barefoot Magnus III of Norway (1073-1103). Or Johann Georg the Beer Jug, Elector of Saxony from 1611 to 1656. As you might have surmised, he loved to bend his elbow.

Alfonso the Leper; Ivaylo the Cabbage; Piero the Gouty

None of these men seem to have had press agents spinning their boss’ reputations. Richard I may have been Lion-Hearted, but the Third was Richard Crookback. Ivaylo the Cabbage ruled Bulgaria in the 13th century. The grandson of Barefoot Magnus ruled Norway from 1130 to 1135 as Magnus the Blind. Vasili Kosoi ruled Moscow in the 15th century as Vasili the Cross-eyed. And, of course, Charles the Bald, or Charles II of France, who apparently had a full head of hair.

Physical debility seems to have been popular. William the One-Eyed of Meissen; Peter the Stutterer of Portugal; Sverker the Clubfoot of Sweden; Piero the Gouty of Florence; Alfonso the Leper of Portugal. Eric XI of Sweden (1216-1250) was called Eric the Lisp and Lame.

The most famous was probably Timur the Lame, who conquered much of the world and best known as Tamerlane. And don’t forget Uros the Weak of Serbia. Or Wilfred the Hairy of Catalonia.

Wilfred the Hairy; Ethelred the Unready; Halfdan the Bad Entertainer

The 1100s featured Bolesłav the Curly in Poland, Conan the Fat in Brittany, and Ragnvald Roundhead in Sweden.

John the Posthumus was born in France in 1316 after his father’s death and so was born a king already. He lived only a few days, and so was king from birth to death.

In AD741 Constantine was born in Byzantium and when he was baptized, the infant defecated in the baptismal font and so became ever after Emperor Constantine the Dung Named.

Sancho the Populator was king of Portugal in the 13th century (that nation seems to get a lot of these names). He had 20 children, both legitimate and otherwise. But he is beat out by John the Babymaker of the Holy Roman Empire in the 16th century, who had 63 illegitimate kids. Something for Elon Musk to aim for, I guess.

On the other hand, there was Henry the Impotent of Castile in the 15th C. and nasty old King John of England was called John Soft-Sword.

Louis Do-Nothing; Louis the Unavoidable; James the Shit

England has had its share of names, some glorious, like Elizabeth I as Gloriana, but otherwise, there was George IV, known as the Prince of Whales because of his obesity, and George III, known as derisively as Farmer George for his less-than-regal interest in agriculture. And James II was known in Ireland as Seamus as Chaca or “James the Shit” for his treatment of that country.

I love encountering these historical names. Constantius the Pale was Roman emperor. Stupid Willy was Wilhelm I of Germany. Louis Do-Nothing was Louis V of France. Germany had Wenceslaus the Drunkard. And Portugal (again) had Manuel I, the Grocer-King.

Coloman the Bookish ruled Hungary in the 12th century and Ivan I of Russia was Ivan Moneybags. And King Ludwig of Bavaria was Mad King Ludwig. And while Vlad Tepec is remembered to history as “Vlad the Impaler” and the model for Dracula, Besarab IV gained the throne of Wallachia with Vlad’s help and was then known as Besarab Tepalus, or “The Little Impaler.”

Then, there’s Alfonso the Slobberer, King of Galicia from 1188-1230, who foamed at the mouth when angered. And Eystein Halfdansson, an 8th century Norwegian king known as Eystein the Fart. Eystein’s son was known as Halfdan the Bad Entertainer — couldn’t throw a decent party. Another Norwegian king, from the 13th century was Haakon the Crazy. King Harald I of Norway from 1454 to 1474 had several names. He was Harald Fairhair, but that may have been meant ironically, since he was also Harald Tanglehair, Harald Shockhead and Harald the Lousy.

Harald Tanglehair, aka Harald the Lousy

Finally, Eric II of Denmark was Eric the Memorable but doesn’t seem to have done anything of note in his short four-year reign, at least not that anyone can remember.

These are just a few epithets and sobriquets. Wikipedia lists more than 200 historical figures once named as “The Great,” From Abbas the Great of Iran (1587-1629) to Zayn al-Abadin the Great, Sultan of Kashmir (1418-1470). Alexander the Great wasn’t called that until the Roman playwright Plautus named him that in a play, Mostellaria, in the Third Century BCE. He was also known, in Persia as Iskander the Accursed.

A list of monarchs by nickname in Wikipedia contains a thousand entries, some quite familiar, like Ivan the Terrible, some more obscure, such as Piero the Gouty of Florence, Italy.

Constantine Dung-Named; Childeric the Idiot; Ferdinand the Bomb

Some have more than one alternate identity. Napoleon Bonaparte had at least 21, including L’Aiglon (The Eagle), Le Petit Caporal (The Little Corporal), The Corsican, The Gunner of Toulon, Little Boney, and more. Most of them authored by his enemies, who seemed hesitant to pronounce his actual name. And so: The Nightmare of Europe, the Corsican Ogre, The Devil’s Favorite, The Fiend of Europe (or just, The Fiend). The British seemed to hate and fear Nappy the most and never seemed to run out of insulting names for the man.

Superstition about saying certain names out loud have given us many of these. Avoiding the name of the Devil has given us a bunch of folktale cognomens: Old Scratch, Old Nick, The Evil One Split-Foot, Father of Lies, Green-horned Monster, Jimmy Square-Foot, Old Adam, Tail-N-Horns, the Wicked One, Rule of Demons.

Which brings us to Donald John Trump. No one recently has accrued so many alternate cognomens, epithets or sobriquets. One single website lists 409 of them. Nixon might have been Tricky Dick and Clinton was Slick Willy, but no one before has had them delivered by the truckload. I stopped looking after about 800 of them. (I’m not going to list them all — I haven’t the heart). Everyone has their favorites.

They fall into several vast categories: His lying; his heft; his thin skin; his greed and self-dealing; his tweeting; his name-calling; his business failures; his sexual predation; his fascism; his failing mental powers; his word salad — the list goes on. And let’s not forget his orange hue or his hair, or his too-long ties, his golf cheating, or his bragging or the garish bad taste of a tinpot dictator. He makes it easy.

In his first term I began calling him — Moose-a-Loony. It’s almost a party game to make up new to call him. It’s fun; try it. Orange Foolius. (Although younger readers might not know where that one comes from.) Large-mouth Ass. Keep it going. Your turn.

Among my favorites: Trumplethinskin: Trumpster Fire; Mango Mussolini; Cheat-O; Tangerine Palpatine; Mar-a-Lardo; Captain Bonespur; Hair Furor; Prima Donald; Assaulter-in-Chief; Boss Tweet; Deadbeat Donald; the Lyin’ King; The Man of Steal; Forrest Trump; Donny Dementia. Use these and no one needs to be told who you are referring to. The Creature from the Orange Lagoon.

Everyone who wants is free to invent more of them. Late night talk show hosts seem to come up with new ones each night for a good laugh.

Stephen Colbert called him the Orange Manatee; John Oliver said he was Rome Burning in Man Form; Seth Meyers dubbed him Creep Throat; Jon Stewart said he was a Decomposing Jack-O-Lantern. Samantha Bee called him a Screaming Carrot Demon, and also America’s Burst Appendix. Trevor Noah said he was a Pile of Old Garbage Covered in Vodka Sauce (although I would have thought “ketchup” more apt).

The characterization that seems to have gotten under the Tangerine-Tinted Trashcan Fire (S. Bee) more than any other was delivered almost 40 years ago in 1988 when Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter called him a “short-fingered vulgarian.”

Carter said that he made the comment “just to drive him a little bit crazy.” And according to Carter, it still does.

“To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of him — generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers,” Carter said. “I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby.”

But whether his fingers are abnormally short or not, there is no question he is a vulgarian. Every time DJT opens his pie-hole he demonstrates how little class he possesses. “Quiet, Piggy!”

And so, we keep renaming the Yam-colored Yammerer, as if we don’t want to have to say his name.

A linguist named Jenny Lederer said, “people feel like not repeating his name is [a way of] not speaking to the brand and the value system that goes along with his political ideology.”

Even a mention of his name is a problem, with a kind of folk-magic power, causing many of us to avoid it. Tweets will spell the name “Tr*mp,” like it’s a four-letter profanity, although that doesn’t really hide the name, but it does make the Tweet unsearchable by the keyword, “Trump,” and so limits its spread. And the asterisk implies that his name is vulgar, like the the dirty words censored in old books.

One is left to wonder what posterity (if there is posterity) will finally settle on as the epithet for “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.”

We have Old Hickory, Honest Abe, Silent Cal, the Gipper, Bubba and Dubya — but how will we ever choose from the superfluity of imprecations swirling around Trump as he circles the drain?

—Richard Nilsen

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