coochee redux

i've been thinking that the sautee nacoochee project has been a high point in my career --- let's put a cherry on it!

https://www.authoroftheyear.org/2026finalists

eternal thanks to the sautee nacoochee association and uga press for making it all possible

"a republic, if you can keep it"

over the last ten or so years, it has been awful to watch the degradation of our republic, by the republicans, no less --- they, and a supreme court in which they have cheated their way to a majority, have let a clearly amoral asshole run rampant around the world --- our federal government and its civil service are in the middle of an existential crisis, alliances older than i am lie in ruins, europe despises him, while russia and china applaud the wreckage --- the whole idea that this is making america great again is just bitterly laughable --- 

[the old man is from the beer garden scene in "cabaret"]

reading my way through this godawful year

 i've read only a couple of dozen books this year, when forty is more typical --- trumpistan 2.0 has taken its toll on my reading, along with a great many other things --- 

Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History (2025)

Itohan I. Osayimwese, Africa’s Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage (2025)

**Colin Woodard, Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America (2025)

***Roger Luckhurst, Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead (2025)

*David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (2000)

*Robert Reich, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America (2025)

*Toby Wilkinson, The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra (2024)

Karen Armstrong, The Bible: A Biography (2007)

Eric H Cline, After 1177 BC: The Survival of Civilizations (2024)

***Peter Manseau, The Jefferson Bible: A Biography (2020)

*Rick Steves, On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer (2025)

**Laura Spinney, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (2025)

*Edmund White, My Lives: An Autobiography (2006)

Mark Masterson, Between Byzantine Men: Desire, Homosociality, and Brotherhood in the Medieval Empire (2022)

Gerald Easter and Mara Vorhees, The Last Stand of the Raven Clan: A Story of Imperial Ambition, Native Resistence . . .  (2024)

***Michael Grant, The Roman Forum (1970)

*Roland Mayer, The Ruins of Rome: A Cultural History (2025)

*Peter Fertado, ed., Great Cities Through Traveler’s Eyes (2019)

Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve (2001)

**Eleanor Marraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (2024)

 *Randall Woods, John Quincy Adams: A Man for the Whole People (2024)

John Ruggiero, Hitler’s Enabler: Neville Chamberlain and the Origins of the Second World War (2015)

John Muir; William Fredrick Bade, ed., A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916)

Anthony Sattin, Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World (2022)

dead inside 2025

 this has been a rough year, what with trumpistan and all --- my coochee book got published but the rest of the year sukd --- tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of my advent here on the 13th floor --- “danny delivers” was tfhe name of the mover who moved my furniture and all that day — I never met him, just talked on the phone, but he was great — real brusque, but you just had to trust him and like him for his apparent honesty — he was later murdered for a few dollars in his office down in southeast atlanta — i hate people sometimes, but i still like living on the 13th floor

sautee nacoochee

final cover design --- wheeeee!!!
 

proofing coochee

page proofs for coochee are in!  wheeeee!

19 august update: review complete and comments returned!!! 

2024 reading

as i watch the continued degradation of our republic by a rogue supreme court, i've done a little reading, some of it oddly reassuring --- "apprentice in wonderland" was particularly apropos --- 

**John Ghazvinian, America and Iran: A History 1720 to the Present (2021)

 Michael Pye, Europe’s Babylon: The Rise and Fall of Antwerp’s Golden Age (2021)

**Fernando Cervantes, Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and C0nquest (2021)

John Parker, ed. Great Kingdoms of Africa (2023)

**Marcus Tullius Cicero, How to Grow Old: Ancient Wisdom for the Second Half of Life (2016)

 *Richard Pankhurst, The Ethiopians, A History (1998)

Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (2005)

*Michael Grant, The Roman Forum (1970)

*Justin Marozzi, Baghdad, City of Peace, City of Blood: A History in Thirteen Centuries (2014)

Willemijn van Dijk, Via Roma: The History of Rome in Fifty Streets (2015)

 Daniel Lewis, Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of the Future (2024)

*Max Rodenbeck. Cairo, the City Victorious (1998)

*Stephen Warren, The Worlds The Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America (2014)

Judith Herren, Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe (2020)

*H. W. Brands, Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and The Brawling Birth of American Politics (2023)

Mary Beard, Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World (2023)

**Dennis C. Rasmussen, Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders (2021)

**Roger Crowley, Spice: The 16^th Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World (2024)

Ramin Setoodeh, Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass (2024)

*Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (2005)

***Dennis Romano, Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City (2024)

Derek Wilson, Charlemagne (2006) [poorly written]

Michelle P Brown, Bede and the Theory of Everything (2023)

***Irene Vallejo, Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World (2022)

Hamish Coghill, Lost Edinburgh (2008)

*Michael Fry, Wild Scots: Four  Hundred Years of Highland History (2005)

**Michael Fry, Edinburgh: A History of the City (2009)

Ian Mortimer, Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter (2024)

Paul Stephenson, New Rome: The Empire in the East (2021)

Ernle Bradford, The Great Betrayal: The Great Siege of Constantinople (2014)--reread

Robin Waterfield, Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy (2023)

James R. Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment (2005)

*Karen Armstrong, The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts (2019)

Rowland J. Mainstone, Hagia Sophia: Architecture, Structure and Liturgy of Justinian’s Great Church (1988)

*Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle (1839)

*Jürgen Osterhammel,  Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter With Asia (2018)

Victorino Matus, Vodka: How a Colorless, Odorless, Flavorless Spirit Conquered America (2014)

***Hershel Shanks, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount: From Solomon to the Golden Dome (2007)

**Olivia Williams, Gin Glorious Gin: How Mother’s Ruin Became the Spirit of London (2014)

coochee

the copyedit phase of the project is done! two hard weeks on my part, significantly improved by the end --- the stupid thing has had a couple of serious edits before this --- all have made it better --- i won't see it again until the proofs or whatever --- publication late this year or early 2025 

i'm still a little impressed with the universe that it threw me this bone to enjoy in my dotage, even if i gave the copyright away and won't make anything off it --- i fkn loved doing it --- to be published by an academic press was something that crossed my mind a time or two, but i don't have a phd and what not, and so, like the rest of my life, serendipty brought me to it

 

wordses

great opening lines:

 ·         In the beginning, and what not.

 ·         . . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.

 ·         I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills.

 ·         On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.

rocking along

 

twelfth day of xmas

the crazy juggler has been gone for most of three weeks    now, but he's coming back monday, if he doesn't get     stranded in chile or wherever --- i thought kenneth was gonna die tonight when mary troy (one of his besties) was over here --- i'm sure the neighbors thought i was killing the dog, what with all the baying for joy and what not --- he might really die of joy when he sees the juggler again --- me, too

read, read, read

another year of indiscriminate reading, not quite as prolific as in some years past, mainly because of the time spent working on the woodruff chronicle ---

 

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years” War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistence, 1917-2017 (2020)

Liz Cheney, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning (2023)

***Peter Frankopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold Story (2023)

Jonathan Kennedy, Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues (2023)

**Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, and their race to save the world’s most-precious manuscripts (2016)

**Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge (2020)

*Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention (2020)

Adam Rutherford, How to Argue with a Racist: What Our Genes Do (and don’t) Say About Human Differences (2020)

**Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them (2022)

***Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War (2023)

**Hugh Howard, Architects of an American Landscape: Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the Reimagining of America’s Public and Private Spaces (2022)

**James Crawford, The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World (2022)

Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer, Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About our Past (2022)

*Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra, A Life (2010)

**Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972)

happy holidays

so, smiley left today for another stupid cruise, which they have styled a cruise to antarctica, which is on the big guy's bucket list, so they're taking a cruise to antarctica --- i'll see him again a couple of days after epiphany next --- in the meantime . . . . .

i have five pounds of delicious catholic fruitcake from the trappist monastery in kentucky and an endless supply of vodka from mac's down the street, and dog, and a shitload of books to read, so i will survive
 

passages redux and done

one of the only bits of monumental sculpture salvaged when st paul's cathedral in london burnt down in 1666 was this of john donne, which had been installed within a few months of his death in 1631

as of today, i have a living will, a dead will, and beneficiaries installed for this and that, but have not yet arranged for disposition of my "remains," as it were, nor for any death mask or monumental sculpture ---