Today, dear reader, we pour some out for Ernest Hemingway.  For a name that thunders with such literary gravitas, it’s paradoxical how much of him has been sliced, boiled, and reduced into a series of cliches fed to college freshmen in Intro to Lit.  Hemmingway, the masculine deity of the English sentence, I’m told, lived as though his life were a dare he accepted solely to spite death.  And how did it end?  Death, of course.  Death, in all its clinical indifference, finally called his bluff.  On July 2, 1961, Hemingway shoved two rounds of buckshot into himself in Ketchum, Idaho.  Cue the symphony of gasps, tributes, and reductive eulogies, all neatly packaged for obligatory reverence.  Yet the man, much like the sentences he crafted, wasn’t so easily punctuated.

To get into the meat of Hemingway’s life – this messy, blood-soaked symphony of adventure, genius, and catastrophe – you first have to understand the gravitational force he exerted not just on American literature, but on our entire mythology of what it means to live wildly and write well.  You can’t talk about courage in prose without tipping your hat to the guy who turned language into a knife.  Hemingway wrote as if words had weight – every sentence carved lean, shorn of excess, held up by something primal.  The Old Man and the Sea was a proving ground of grit.  A Farewell to Arms was love set against the erosion of humanity.  He forced readers into the ring with life’s hard knocks, and somehow, we loved him for it.  But there’s an odd hypocrisy in the Hemingway myth.  For all his talk of stoic restraint and quiet courage, his life was a chaos of loud, brazen excess.  This was a guy who chased bulls in Spain, downed daiquiris on the daily in Cuba, and hunted big game as if extinction lists didn’t exist.  Hemingway didn’t just live…he swaggered.  He tore through the trenches of World War I, bled out Hemoglobin’s worth of whiskey, and somehow still had the energy to swear loudly at the inadequacies of hotel service.  It was as if he lived on the belief that to stare death in the face was not enough – you had to step closer until you felt it’s breath.

And yet, the end loomed.  Because genius burns fast, and gods of excess always leave behind a smoldering wreckage.  By the late 1950s, Hemingway’s life turned into its own tragic third act.  Wracked by injuries from plane crashes, riddled with lingering effects of old wounds, and plagued by the ghosts of too many memories – his resilience began to crack.  Depression crept in, and paranoia turned the world into a series of looming shadows.  There’s a particularly cruel irony in knowing how a man who prided himself on the clarity of language underwent electroshock therapy – treatment that dulled not only his memories, but his creative fire.  He who gave the world such piercing prose began to lose his edge, stumbling toward a haze of confusion and pain.

And so when that July morning arrived, it didn’t exactly whisper.  Hemingway closed the book on his own narrative in the way he had always seemed destined to – not quietly, not cutely, but violently definitive.

The lesson I’ve taken from his work, mostly, is something like this: courage is not the absence of fear but the grit to stand firm within its shadow.

He was not a saint.  He was flawed, and sometimes brutal.  But that’s also the point.  Hemingway didn’t live or write to be worshiped.  He did it because he couldn’t do otherwise, and from that compulsiveness sprang something rare, magnetic, and alive.
I think Hemingway would laugh at all the efforts to tidy the loose ends of his story and life.  Because he, of all people, knew there was no clean narrative.  Just the raw beauty of life lived, fought for, and sometimes lost.

N.P.: “Sunroof Diesel Blues” – MY BABY

Today we celebrate the birthday of Eric Blair – better known to us as George Orwell – who was born on this day in 1903, into the sweltering chaos of Motihari, British-occupied India.  A literary titan emerged from that colonial crucible, and damn, did he deliver!  His works, 1984 and Animal Farm, hit like intellectual shithammers, tackling totalitarianism with a razor-sharp insight that cuts deeper than my switchblade through silk.  These books are fearless, incisive grenades of storytelling that explode power structures and leave you reeling.  Orwell’s prose, drenched in a gritty, enduring impact, resonates across generations like a rebel yell that may very well echo forever.

1984, penned by George Orwell and unleashed in 1949, was a stark cautionary tale, a dystopian scream against the perils of totalitarianism, surveillance, and the erosion of truth.  Orwell crafted a world where Big Brother’s omnipresent gaze and the Ministry of Truth’s reality-warping lies served as a warning: look what happens when power crushes individuality and language itself.  The novel’s bleak vision was meant to jolt readers into vigilance, a fuck-you to authoritarian creep.

Yet, some interpret it quite differently today.  The leftist Woke Supremacists seem to have flipped the proverbial script, treating Orwell’s nightmare as some sort of perverse political playbook rather than a dire caution.  Where he depicted the manipulation of language and history as oppressive tools – think “doublethink” (more on that in a minute) and rewritten records – they’ve embraced similar tactics, wielding cancel culture and narrative control to enforce ideological conformity.  The irony’s thick: Orwell’s warning about though police morphs into a justification for policing thought, with social media acting as the new telescreen.  It’s less about resisting power and more about redirecting it, turning a cautionary talk into a how-to guide for their own dark version of utopia.  Orwell might’ve rolled in his grave – or grabbed a pen to rewrite the ending.

Doublethink, a cornerstone of Orwell’s 1984, is the mind-bending art of holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, accepting both as true, and purging any flicker of cognitive dissonance.  Born from the novel’s oppressive regime, it’s the psychological grease that keeps totalitarianism humming – where “war is peace, “freedom is slavery,” and “ignorance is strength” aren’t just slogans but lived realities.  Orwell, with his 1903-born genius, designed it as a warning, a glimpse into how language and thought can be twisted to enslave rather than liberate.

It works by training the mind to suppress doubt, embracing the Party’s ever-shifting truths with zeal.  Take the daily rewriting of history in the Ministry of Truth – yesterday’s ally becomes today’s enemy, and records adjust seamlessly.  The individual doesn’t just accept it; they believe it, untroubled by the contradiction.  It’s a mental acrobatics act, requiring constant self-deception and a willful amnesia of the past.

In 2025, real-world doublethink echoes Orwell’s 1984 with eerie precision, manifesting in ways that blur the line between caution and complicity.  Take social media platforms where users decry censorship while flagging posts they deem offensive, embracing “free speech” only when it aligns with their views.  This cognitive juggling act lets them champion open dialogue while silencing dissent, a contradiction swallowed whole.  Politically, it’s rampant: public health offers such a case – during debates in recent years, I witnessed myriad such slaves who, in a single conversation, screamed about bodily autonomy and  “my body, my choice,” and in the same breath fascistically pushed untested vaccine mandates, holding both as unassailable truths.  Even consumerism shows it: people whine about climate change but immediately buy into fast fashion’s disposability, rationalizing personal impact as negligible.  “Ugliness is beauty” double-think is easily seen in the body positivity movement, to such an extent that even television commercials, which used to use beauty to sell their products, are now a nauseating parade of aggressively unattractive, overweight dullards touting victimhood.  These instances reveal a society that has become pathetically adept at doublethink – accepting opposing ideas, rewriting narratives, and silencing inner conflict, just as Orwell warned.

Disgusted as he’d be if he could see western society now, I still raise a glass and toast the birthday of a scribe whose legacy remains a badass benchmark for truth-tellers everywhere.  Doubleplusgood birthday, George…your ink still burns bright!

N.P.: “Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four)” – Eurythmics

Behold, dearest reader, another Monday is upon us.  But this isn’t “just another Monday.”  No.  June 23, 2025 is a day of ink-soaked rebellion and typewriter fury.  Around this time in 1971 (try as I might, I couldn’t pin down an exact date), Charles Bukowski’s raw, booze-soaked novel Post Office was published.  It’s a throbbing middle-finger to The Grind, chronicling his years as a postal worker with unfiltered grit – drinking, screwing, and surviving the soul-crushing monotony.  Bukowski’s voice is pure badass: no polish, just truth.  This book cemented his rep as the poet of the down-and-out, and its release was a liver-lick to the literary establishment.  If you’re looking for something that screams defiance, this isit.  The prose hits like a shot of Jack – rough, unapologetic, and leaving you reeling.  Bukowski showed writers like yrs. truly How Its Done, turning a dead-end job into a manifesto of survival.  Pick it up, crack it open, and let the pages drag you into the chaos of a man who refused to bow to the suits.  This book was a grenade tossed into the ivory tower.

June 23 is also National Typewriter Day, marking the 1868 patent of the typewriter by Christopher Latham Sholes.  This machine was the weapon of choice for literary rebels like Hemingway, Kerouac, and other wild scribes who hammered out their works with mechanical fury.  The typewriter’s clack is the sound of creation under pressure.  It’s a nod to the tools that let writers fight their own apocalypses on the page.  Back in the day, this beast of a device was the heartbeat of the craft, a clattering symphony of keys that turned thoughts into tangible rebellion.  Sholes’ invention birthed a revolution, giving voice to the outcasts and dreamers who pounded out epics on its iron frame.  Today, it’s a relic, sure, but its legacy lives up to every keystroke – a reminder that the fight for words is as old as the machine itself.

I have a truly old, totally analog typewriter…no electricity needed.  If the world goes up, or the electrical grid collapses, dissemination will certainly be affected, but I’ll still be here, banging on the keys.  Due to my father’s ludditic obstinance when it came to technology, I was forced to use a typewriter until I had already started college.  It was a real pain in the ass, especially since literally everyone I knew had been rocking word processors for years at that point.  But there is a certain satisfaction the comes from typewriting.  I think it’s the combination of several different elements: the various noises from the contraption itself…the aforementioned clanking of the keys, the end-of-the-line ding, the subsequent smacking of the carriage-return lever.  It also has something to do with the fact that you are dealing with a physical page, which pages stacking up next to the machine is far more gratifying to those of us who like tangible, visible results of our efforts than any screen could ever be.

N.P.: “Bauhaus Staircase” – Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark

Happy Monday, dear reader.  Today is June 16th.  A day like any other for most, but for a certain breed of literary masochist, this isn’t just another ripple in the mundane tide of the Gregorian calendar.  Nope.  For them, today is Bloomsday, that annual carnival of intellectual flexing, literary cosplay, and public displays of knowing exactly what “ineluctable modality of the visible” means (spoiler alert: most of them don’t).

If you’re unfamiliar, Bloomsday is the hallowed celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses.  This 700-something-page modernist behemoth, set entirely on June 16th, 1904, captures a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom, a humble Dublin ad salesman with a thing for kidneys and an uncanny knack for making his deeply weird interior monologue your deeply weird interior monologue.  Why June 16th?  Well, legend has it that Joyce picked the date in honor of his first outing with Nora Barnacle, the woman who’d eventually become his wife and soulmate in stubborn eccentricity.

Since 1954, when a pack of particularly ambitious Joyce fans retraced the steps of Bloom and his moody sidekick Stephen Dedalus through the cobblestone streets of Dublin, Bloomsday ha spiraled into a global phenomenon.  Dublin itself is ground zero, morphing into a labyrinth of tweed-clad academics, aspiring novelists, and tourists pretending to understand what “Molly’s soliloquy” really means.  The day’s menu features marathon readings, theatrical performances, and pub crawls where Guinness and existential dread flow in equal measure.  But Bloomsday isn’t confined to the Irish capital…it’s gone international.  New York has its own event.  Budapest, too.  Chances are, there’s someone in your city right now butchering a Joyce passage in public.

Here’s the thing about Ulysses, though: it’s an entire ecosystem of narrative rebellion.  At its most basic level, this is a novel about a guy, kind of a schlubby everyman, wandering Dublin for a day while mulling over infidelity, bodily functions, and the cosmic messiness of existence.  Describing Ulysses as “just a book” is like calling the Grand Canyon a “neat hole” or fireworks “nice little explosions.”  Joyce scrapped the blueprint for what novels could be, melted it in acid, and reconstructed it as a linguistic rollercoaster built for causing epileptic fits in English majors.

It’s a book where style isn’t just substance; it’s spectacle.  Stream-of-consciousness prose drenched in linguistic gymnastics?  Check.  Entire chapters mimicking everything from 19th-century romance novels to overwrought legal rhetoric?  Yep.  A narrative that stops being linear the minute Joyce decides he’s bored?  Oh yeah.  And through all of it, you’re left marveling at its audacity, its wit, and its refusal to make itself easy for you.

Which is exactly why Ulysses has earned its badass reputation.  It doesn’t care if you understand it.  Hell, it seems to actively hope you won’t.  It’s confrontational, unrelenting, and defiantly weird.  And yet, buried under its dense wordplay and chaotic structure is a keenly human portrait of love, loneliness, sex, guilt, and spiritual yearning.  It’s about what it means to be alive, absurd and messy as it is.

And maybe that’s what makes Bloomsday so resonant.  Beyond the cosplay, the debates over whether Leopold Bloom or Stephen Dedalus is the superior antihero (Bloom, obviously), and the whispered apologies to unread copies of Finnegans Wake, Bloomsday is a celebration of literature that refuses to be ignored.  It’s a collective act of tribute to the kind of art that challenges, confuses, and maybe even pisses you off, but changes you in the process.

Whether you’re in Dublin following Bloom’s hypothetical footsteps, or just cracking open Ulysses for the twentieth time only to quit two pages into “Oxen of the Sun,” Bloomsday isn’t about mastery.  It’s about grappling with brilliance on its own terms, about raising a pint to impossibly large ideas compressed into impossibly difficult prose.

And it that’s not worth celebrating, then neither is art itself.

N.P.: “Looking for a Fight” – The Cold Stares

Today we pour some out for Charles Dickens, who dropped dead on June 9, 1870.  His death was likely due to a stroke, though the exact cause remains a subject of historical speculation.  He had been in declining health, suffering from fatigue and possibly a prior minor stroke, before collapsing at his home in Gad’s Hill Place, England.

Uncle Chuck, an absolute beast behind the quill, left behind an unfinished masterpiece, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  His works, his sprawling epics and a certain dual-city saga, went beyond simple entertainment…they sliced through the fog of Victorian pretense with razor-sharp wit and characters so vivid they practically leap off the page, reshaping the literary landscape forever.  He wasn’t some polite putz scribbling tame tales…he was a bona fide literary rockstar who flipped the script on the status quo, dragging the gritty, unvarnished truths of poverty, class, and corruption into the spotlight.  With a narrative weave so compelling it could hypnotize, he roared for social reform.  Dying mid-novel only amps up the enigma, leaving a legacy that still echoes like a thunderclap through time.

In more temporally local news, my work continues apace.  I’m busy as hell, but getting it done.  On a sidenote, the degree to which my day-to-day existence is dictated and controlled by an 8lb girl puppy is the source of great shame and embarrassment.

N.P.: “Barbaras Rhabarberbar” – Bodo Wartke, Marti Fisher, Matthias Kräutli

Happy June, dear reader.  Yo rent is due.

I’m once again running behind on the production schedule for the two books I’m working on (one officially, the other not), so I’m going to keep things on the brief side today.

Today we pour some out for literary badass Edith Wharton.  The details and timeline of the final events of her life seem to vary greatly depending on which source one consults, but all accounts agree: on this day in 1937, Edith collapsed from a heart attack.  Some sources say this happened at her French country home, while others insist it happened at the home of Ogden Codman, a big-deal architect and designer.  She survived the heart attack, but she dropped dead two months later from a stroke, hitting her at Le Pavillon Colombe in Saint-Brice-sous-Foret, France, where she died at 5:30 p.m.  But that moment on June 1 marked the beginning of the end for a writer who wielded her words like a blade, carving out truths about wealth, class, and the human condition which still sting today.

Wharton didn’t dick around with pretty illusions. Books like The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth aren’t polite little tea-party reads—they’re a liver-kick, peeling back the suffocating traditions and quiet savagery of a world obsessed with appearances. She wrote with a fierce, clear-eyed intensity that makes you feel the rot beneath the polish, the ache behind the opulence. In 1921, she became the first woman to snag a Pulitzer for The Age of Innocence, which winning was a fuck-you to anyone who thought a woman couldn’t cut to the bone of the human condition.

Her death was the end of an era for a writer who made us see the cracks in the American Dream, the ones we’re still tripping over today. Wharton’s legacy demands we face the mess of our own making, unblinking. So here’s to the literary titan who never flinched, whose words still burn with a clarity that’ll wake you up faster than a shot of Jack. Let us pour some out today for Auntie Edith.

N.P.: “Black Betty” – The Dead Daisies

Today is hot as balls in Fecal Creek.  Day two of triple digits, dear reader, and its technically not even June!  All the prognostications, scientific and otherwise, indicate that this is going to be a violently and punitively hot summer.  As I may have mentioned before, I’m actually going to try to lean into the heat this year.  Sort of an “if you can’t beat it, join it” resignation, I suppose.  To that end, I may road trip to Death Valley this summer.  If I’m feeling really ballsy, I might even book a stay at the notorious Tarantula Ranch.  After a couple of days dealing with scorpions and vipers in 120F+ heat, coming back to The Creek will feel downright autumnal.  Such drastic measures may be ill advised though…even a couple of days in those sorts of conditions can permanently scramble a person’s mind, even if it doesn’t kill him.  Rumor has it that Charles Manson was a pretty reserved, well-adjusted dude before he decided to take up residence in Death Valley.  I dunno.  We’ll see.

There’s no getting around the fact that aside from personal misery and discomfort and swamp ass, this heat makes life around here difficult.  I’m pretty much stuck in the Safe House for the time being…the asphalt on the street outside is so hot that it causes tires to melt completely in a couple of blocks.  Regrettably, I didn’t stock up on booze before the heat wave hit, so I’m shit out of luck in the tequila and whiskey department.  The heat seems to block satellite signals, so there’s no reliable internet connection.  The garage door quit working, though that might be due to demonic possession rather than extreme heat…who knows.  No one’s talking.  Even my Mexican puppy, who was whelped in the brutal Tijuana heat, finds the present conditions untenable.  She’s on strike, refusing to even be cute until the situation improves.

But never mind all that…today is massive on the Dead Poets Society calendar.  On this wild, untamed day—May 31, 1819—a raw force of nature roared into being in West Hills, New York. Walt Whitman, the untethered soul who’d soon carve his name into the beating heart of poetry, came kicking and screaming into the world. This isn’t our usual birthday nod, dear reader…it’s a full-throated howl for the man who’d become the father of free verse, a literary outlaw who tore through the stuffy rules of his time with the reckless abandon of a storm. His work, sprawling and sweaty like Leaves of Grass, doesn’t play nice with polite society—it’s transcendental, sure, but it’s also got the grit of realism, the kind of voice that makes you feel the dirt caked under your nails and the thrum of your own pulse.

Whitman’s words aren’t here to coddle you. They’re a call to the wild, a dare to embrace the messy, beautiful chaos of the human spirit and the body electric. His poems still get hauled into classrooms, thank Christ, not because they’re tame or safe, but because they’ve got the kind of fire that makes you feel alive, line after line. It’s the sort of fearless, in-your-face brilliance that keeps poetry kicking through the ages.

To demonstrate Whitman’s current cultural significance, remember, dear reader, that it was Walt Whitman who ultimately brought down Walter White.  If it hadn’t been for Uncle Walt, Breaking Bad would likely be into its 10th amazing season by now.

So here’s to Whitman, the rugged bard who showed us how to sing our own song, unapologetically, with every ounce of our being. Let’s raise a glass (unfortunately the strongest thing on hand is lemonade) to the man who’s been shaking things up for over two centuries—may his spirit keep us restless, always.

N.P.: “The Heat” – The Bones of J.R. Jones

Today, dear reader, we wind the dial back to 1937, a year when the world was still clawing its way out of the Great Depression’s chokehold. On May 28, John Steinbeck—that raw, unflinching scribe of the human struggle—dropped a literary bombshell with Of Mice and Men, first published as a novella in The American Mercury magazine before it landed on bookshelves later that year.  The book was a deep dive into the shattered dreams of two drifters, George and Lennie, chasing the American Dream in a world that’s nothing but dust and broken promises.

Steinbeck was not one to mess around. His lean, razor-sharp prose slices through the page like my switchblade, laying bare the brutal loneliness and fragile hope of an era where survival was a daily gamble. You can feel the weight of the time in every line—the desperation, the fleeting glimmers of something better, always just out of reach. It’s storytelling that doesn’t hold your hand or whisper sweet nothings; it grabs you by the collar and forces you to stare into the abyss of a society on its knees. And even now, nearly a century later, its legacy burns through American literature, a haunting reminder of what happens when you dare to look away from the underbelly of the human condition.

N.P.: “Are They Real or Not – Special Version” – Boys Don’t Cry

Today’s a big one on the D.P.S. calendar, dear reader, because today—May 25, 2025—we’re tipping our hats to a man who tore through the fabric of American thought like a wildfire through dry brush. On this day in 1803, Ralph Waldo Emerson came screaming into the world in Boston, Massachusetts, and the literary landscape would never be the same.

Emerson, the sharp-eyed sage of Transcendentalism, carved out a manifesto for the soul.  I understand that your average college graduate can’t tell you what Transcendentalism is, so they likely don’t understand why they should read Emerson.  Which is part of their existentially angsty problem.  Pieces like Self-Reliance and Nature are raw, pulsating calls to break free from the herd and dive headlong into the wild, untamed marrow of existence. He’s telling you to trust your own damn instincts, to let the wind and the trees whisper truths the stiff-collared conformists of his day couldn’t hear over their own sanctimonious droning. Emerson’s words crackle with a fierce individualism, the kind that makes you want to ditch society’s rulebook and howl at the moon just to feel alive. At least that’s what it does for me.

What makes him a cornerstone of the Romantic movement is how he weaves the natural world into a tapestry of cosmic revelation—every leaf, every river is a sacred text if you’ve got the guts to read it. His ideas not only influenced his generation; they laid down the tracks for American literary identity, giving writers the courage to chase the sublime and spit in the face of convention. Emerson’s legacy is a middle finger to mediocrity, a challenge to live boldly, and 222 years after his birth, his fire still burns bright enough to light our way, but only for those of us with the guts to walk the path.

So here’s to Uncle Ralph, the man who taught us to walk our own path, to find divinity in the dirt beneath our feet. Crack open his essays, let his words sear your brain, and join the rebellion he started all those years ago. The world’s still too tame, populated mostly by vacuous Crok-wearing, screen-staring automatons—let’s make it wild again.

In other, more personal news, there’s still no sign of my ass, which stormed off in protest last Thursday night.  I’ll probably head to the Fecal Creek Flea Market later today to see if I can find it there.  If not, I’m not sure what I’m going to do…haven’t been able to sit down for days, which has made things like sleep virtually impossible.

N.P.: “Behold Bofadeez!” – Bourbon Bach