Anno Mirabilis

"That year, the amapas bloomed twice."

It could be the opening line of a Hemingway novella. Better yet, of a Garcia Marquez novel ("One Hundred Years of Pulchritude," 697 pages). It drips of portent, of matters metaphysical or theological - an anno mirabilis, eternal recurrence, a great awakening, a second chance, the Second Coming, a renaissance, another Great Revival (god forbid) - something grander and laden with meaning beyond merely a summer of good rains. This winter, the amapas really did bloom twice.

What to make of that? Probably just the good luck of the summer rains. But still, the line seems too good to leave at that, to simply throw away or consign to the dustbin of mundane cause and effect. It's too good to waste, too allusive not to want to see what could happen with it in successive pages of, say, Hemingway or Faulkner or V. Woolf.

Would it be a light be a light tale or a dark one; remain brightly optimistic, perhaps turn sinister? Surely it deserves to be followed by more than a gardening memoir or a "Guide to the Trees and Shrubs of Sonora." It begs a metaphysical turn, a tale (dark, one hopes) involving Chaos, the Fates, the titans, the valkyries, the shekhinah, the cyclops and harpies and lokis, immanences that bedevil our lives and jar us in our daily transit.

For my part I don't know what to do with it, not being inclined to writing novels, or novellas for all of that. I can see nothing else for it but to offer it gratis to any takers, and let it have its head. 

No Kings Today

House Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News last week that Democrats are refusing to end a government shutdown because “they can’t face their rabid base.”  (The Independent, October 14, 2025)

Today brings the second No Kings national protest to our weary little cow town on the Colorado prairie. Miguel and Madame de Montaigne are planning to leave the precincts of the chateau and totter into the city to participate in a day of Marxist hijinks and merry japes. We have assembled an assortment of petits fours and dried bouquets of meadow flowers to distrubute among the encircling squadron of ICE agents, FBI infiltrators and any other benign protectors of the approved public order our consuls and praetors in a distant city may deem it sound policy to deploy. I find it advisable to wear logo-ed clothing (Patagonia vest and outdoor pants, SmartWool hiking socks, Merrell hiking shoes, anything from Gwyneth Paltrow or the fascist fashionista Hugo Boss, etc.) hoping to "blend in," as the saying goes, by not seeming overtly anti-capitalist.

"I got all this stuff on Amazon."

According to Sean Duffy, our non-public, coal-fueled, over-the-road transportation secretary, we are a mercenary antifa, clearly being paid, everything transparently transactional in the New America. So I am looking forward to the additional income such outings provide, the gutters on the north coping of the chateau being currently in a parlous condition. Word among the local protest organizers is that George Soros may favor our group with a visit to personally disburse large personal checks, but I find that a bit fanciful, much like Santa Claus actually turning up at your chimney on the night. After all, George is only one fellow, his minions are legion.

My speculation is that the funding for these events will come from a dark consortium of all the baddies who range freely in Republican fever dreams - people like the Clintons (who even have a foundation to fund such frolics), Hunter Biden and his Laptop (it has a life of its own), the Marx Brothers, Antonio Gramsci (we don't know who he is but we know Mussolini didn't like him), Bill McKibben, the climate doomsayer, Taylor Swift, George and Amal Clooney, James Comey if he's not in jail by now. (And lest we forget, "Hanoi Jane" Fonda.)

Marxists

We are the Terror, the Red Scare, a Marxian elite, in the decrepitude and poverty of our imagination incapable of seeing the better world offered us, the Shining Magmire on the Hill, no liquor on Sundays. Only a mad person, a terrorist, an inveterate thinker, a sceptic, a mocker of authority - a "rabid base" no less - could refuse a forcible invitation to return to the land of John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, William F. Buckley, John Birch, Joseph McCarthy, Strom Thurmond, Lester Maddox, George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, Curtis LeMay, Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall grifters, of Smoot-Hawley Tariffs and Jim Crow, of Dr. Strangelove and Catch-22 and the Watts Riots. Only the wilfully blind could fail to find the promise of a rosy new order in W.D. Griffith's Klan epic, Birth of a Nation. What could be better than a return to America's Golden Age - 1950? 1850? 

Without the polio and tuberculosis.

Oh, shit.

On Making of Lists

Of the making of lists there is a grand tradition in (what we may still call) Western literature. I am not thinking of the lists found in Herculaneum or Pompeii, lists of papyri manuscripts stashed in private libraries, or those lists of groceries, household utensils or shipping manifests - casks and barrels, jugs and amphorae, salt and ale, rope and sail, thole and pin; not the catalogs in cuneiform of granary or warehouse, harem or household, tax office or counting house; not what we think of as laundry or (worse) "to-do" lists. Nor even of such awful and august lists as the list of our ten principle sins in the Bible, arguably the first novel of the Western canon.

I am speaking of the rich, rambling, allusive list as an integral form of imaginative literature in a tradition stretching from Cervantes' Sancho through Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel) to Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy), Jonathan Swift to Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy). Here for starters is one of Sancho Panza's typical rambling soliloquies in Don Quixote, stringing together (to Quixote's disgust) a medley of freely associated proverbs to make an obscure point:

“I can sign my name,” responded Sancho, “because when I was a steward in my town, I learned to make some letters like they use to mark on bales, and they said that it was my name. Besides, I can pretend that my right hand is maimed and I can have someone else sign for me. There’s a remedy for everything except death, and holding the power and the staff, I’ll do whatever I want. And what’s more, he who has a bailiff for a father . . . or They’ll come for wool and go back shorn, and the lucky man has nothing to worry about. And the foolish remarks of the rich man pass for wisdom in the world. And being a governor and liberal at the same time, as I plan to be, they’ll think I’m flawless. Make yourself into honey and the flies will eat you up. As my grandmother used to say, you’re worth as much as you have. And you can’t take vengeance on the landed gentry . . . . My only wealth is proverbs and more proverbs. And right now four of them come to mind that fit the situation exactly, like peaches in a basket . . . . What better ones are there than never put your thumbs between your wisdom teeth, and to ‘leave my home’ and ‘what do you want with my wife?’ there’s nothing to answer, and if the pitcher hits the stone or the stone hits the pitcher, it’s bad for the pitcher? All of them fit perfectly. . . . So, why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye with never a thought for the plank in your own, lest it be said of him: the dead woman was frightened to see another with a slit throat. And your grace already knows the one about the fool knows more in his own house than the wise man in someone else’s.”

Or consider Rabelais's registry of curses the Parisians hurled at Pantagruel when the giant unzipped in urbe and let go a flood of piss as payment for the rude welcome they gave him:

"God's plagues upon him! (There can't be a god.)

Mother of God, Francine!

By Christ's holy head!

Passion of God confound him!

God almighty!

By the belly of Saint Quenet!

O, the heavy hand of God!

By Saint Fiacre of Brie!

Saint Trinian help us!

By Christ's last supper!

By God's bright day!

The devil take me!

Pon'st a gentleman's honor!

Holy Saint Andrew!

By Saint Godegrin, stoned to death with his own apples!

By the saints Foutin and Vitus!

O Saint Mamica, you virgin martyr!

By all pigs in pokes! We've been drenched for a laugh!"

Robert Burton's Melancholia (1621) is a cornucopia of lists, not least in his enumerations of the various crannies in the brain where the animal spirits are stored - animal spirits being, as you will recall, the medium for such subtle events as our "thoughts, passions and imaginings, all sentiments light or heavy, joyous, melancholic, whether reasonable or mad, a highly refined and rarefied liquor whose subtle influence occasions the motions of the humors in all the assorted ventricles, chasms, receptacles, creeks, channels, conduits, rivulets, ravines, puddles and reservoirs, byways, courses serene or rapid of the brain, transmitting commands and volitions to the limbs and likewise transforming the perturbations and oscillations of the nerves into images, impulses, sensations, smells, sounds, appetites, wishes, perceptions, doubts, deliriums, visions and what have you."

The urge to list things as a literary mode seems to me a lost art, a glaring lacuna, a gaping loss, a deficiency of invention, a paucity of imagination, a timidity of thought, a malaise of vocabulary, a want of brio in the literature of (at least) the last two-and-a-quarter centuries. I may easily be proven wrong by the occasional counterexample, a literary lister who proves my rule by exception. My general point stands.

Listing in the course of a fine telling can strain the vocabulary to eloquence, exhaust or adumbrate the possibilities in the subject at hand, open the ventricles of the heart and the hibernated recesses of the brain, open the kidneys, stimulate the bowels, make the legs twitch and the eyes roll, cleanse the palate, clear the mental sinuses, open new vistas and reillumine familiar views. All in a few extra words. Which will perhaps not escape a commercial literary editor, a task which any reasonably intelligent person is well advised to take up on her own.

The Spelling Bee

 

The Games section of the daily New York Times includes the Spelling Bee, a challenge to spell as many words as one can using only seven letters, one letter required to be used in every word. Along the way the player attains certain sophomoric goads to success - Beginner, Solid, Awesome, Genius and Queen Bee, the last for finding all of the approved words in the puzzle. I say approved words advisedly since some words, at least, are proscribed on proper grounds - such as racial slurs, obscenities, vulgarities and so on. 

One might expect the rules to lead to fairly straightforward results: no personal or place names, nor words derived from names are used unless they otherwise have an ordinary referent ("Albanian" or "Germanic" for example aren't allowed, but "neapolitan" or napolean" are fine because they refer to things, in this case desserts). This is a tacit rule. One might also expect that the range of permissible words might (tacitly) be limited to English, at least in its American version, but this isn't the case.

In fact there seems to be a bias against perfectly good English words that either the wordbot doesn't know, or that the editors don't; or those that they decide are too obscure or arcane for the average English speaker (both arcane and arcana are permitted). So words like trinitarian, antinomian, antinomy (see Kant's Critique of Pure Reason), marmoreal or porphyry are not, for the puzzle setters, words at all. Antinomy can't pass muster but antimony does. On the other hand lots of words creep into the language from all directions. Lanai (a Hawaiian verandah) is ok (and so is verandah, an Anglo-Indian word like bungalow); but liana (a tropical vine) isn't; raita (a yogurt dressing in Indian cuisine) is good, but riata (a woven rope used by Argentine gauchos) is verboten, as is verboten verboten.

What's more, English also contains a fund of French words in common usage, but which ones count is also arbitrary - entente and detente, bonbon and restaurant are fine, but pensee isn't, nor auberge, aubergine, courgette. Italian musical terms are permitted - lento (but not lenten, as in the season between Good Friday and Easter), tutti, allegretto, molto, etc. Nor is most British English except where it opens the prospect of alternate spellings (catalog/catalogue, dialog/dialogue, ton/tonne). Twit is fine but not twat; and why not wank/wanker or bollocks?

You learn the rules by trying things out - the black box approach. All of this experimentation, however, cannot prepare anyone for the completely whimsical admission of obscure foreign words. You may get by with sirocco (a seasonal wind blowing northward from the Sahara across Spain), but not with lebeche nor cierzo (also seasonal Spanish winds); no mistral (a French wind); but haboob, a trans-Saharan wind is just fine. So is haka (a Maori ritual celebration); lantana (a tropical verbena); llano (a Spanish prairie) but not llanta (a Spanish tire). And there is a catalog of permissible Latinate words (though not "Latinate" itself): I give you but one exhibit A - torus, and its plural forms, tori and torii (a surface of revolution generated by a revolving circle in three-dimensional space one full revolution about an axis that is coplanar with the circle - think 'donut'). 

It's enough to make a person cynical. What was wrong with porphyry, then? And there are those words, presumably English ones, which no one would ever use - openable comes to mind, or nonillion (nine millions), catalytically, deckle (a peculiarly Canadian version of decal). It is just this organic mushiness of a language that keeps it alive and evolving but drives a puzzler to desperate measures: finally at the end of a daily puzzle with maybe three words remaining to find, one's baser instincts come into play and a kind of corrupt invention takes over. One begins to concoct a kind of mad syllabic stew, a jaundiced eye for easy composites: turdhammer (Harbor Freight, only $14.99); slackwad (available on Amazon in plumbing supplies); brassball, globel, globulment . . . but here I go. It is the debasement of the imagination, the beginnings of a new strain of dementia.

Rioja Vieja

 Were I out looking for it I should never have encountered it. The bottle was a decade old, arrayed on a single shelf among some younger, nondescript wines, a few years' worth of dust around its shoulder and clearly not going anywhere soon. I might have overlooked it for the garish display of junk food packets just below the wine shelf.

I was returning from a birding excursion with my friend Rafa, the birder par excellence of Sonora, and we had stopped for something else at a little roadside tienda outside of town. But the bottle caught my notice and I asked to see it. Over its lengthy tenure among the Dorito packets the price had not increased - I took it for 200p (MXN), or about $10 (USD), a Rioja crianza 2015. It was a calculated risk, though not much of one in the scheme of things. Ten bucks is worth the flutter when you might well hit a home run.

I cradled it, carried it outside and held the bottle up to the sun. Through the glass darkly shone a deep, perfectly clear garnet, free of sediment, none of the raisin-browned tinges of a corked bottle. If this is still a good bottle, I thought, then it deserves to be approached with discretion. So I let it rest on its side for a few days; the cork was certain to be dry after years of standing upright through hot Mexican summers. 

Impatient, curious, I opened it a few days later, gingerly corkscrewing into a spongy mass of soft cork. The farther I turned it, the dustier became the bottle neck, until the cork was a pile of wood dust and had bottomed itself into the wine. I had a fine sieve and pitcher at hand, strained the cork out of the wine, poured a bit into a glass, and looked again at the wine through light. The same garnet tones, no inky purple tinge of a too-young bottle, no sign of floating cork - fine so far. A swirl, a genteel sniff, not much bouquet to it at all. A good sign though, since it also didn't give off the musty signs of a turned bottle. 

My first sip was underwhelming, as though secrets were being kept. Very well, I would wait. A half hour passed, another sip and the wine had stirred a bit. What had once been edges had softened, the tannins had settled away; what remained was a nuanced and subtle mouthful of dried mint and anise, a ghost of black pepper - no offputting noise of jammy, fruity over-familiarity. Well, I thought, this may do.

It wasn't really all that old but its indenturement in a hot little snack food joint along a hot dusty highway had aged it beyond its decade. It had all the earmarks of an older wine. Old wines, as compared with recently vinted ones, seem attenuated and understated. They require attention, judgment, discernment - in a word, they deserve as much time and consideration as will recompense a long and perhaps wearisome embottlement.

We live in a time and a culture in which a cellar is now merely a basement. Cellars are for wines. Basements are merely for our existential detritus, the stuff we bought from Amazon and wished we hadn't, rubble for our next garage sale. Our belongings more often than not reside in cardboard cartons in storage units, awaiting our next removal to newer digs. How many people in one's acquaintance still live within a day's travel of wherever they were sired and born? Who can remain settled enough to keep a decent cellar? Consequently wine is made for a market of transients and vagabonds, people impatient of stasis and extended attention. So wine has become, like golf, a democratic amusement and not much more.

The Rioja was soon gone, but in the course of sipping it I remembered a cellar I once had, of wooden crates along the cement floor, of other wines old already when I drank them - austere, brown-tinged clarets; sturdy Italians; fat, complacent late-harvested Alsatians, the kind of wine that winks and says naughty things like, "I would taste no better with a bit of fois gras, but the fois gras would certainly taste better." 

It is a geezer's lament. But I very much like old things, things that keep.