Noctambulate

. . . my email self is my best self . . .

The military logic of Stewart’s 1949 FIRE. Watching his beloved forest burn, the conservation minded “Fire Boss” Bart is unstrung. “It was like fighting a war, a General figured it would cost so many dog tags . . . That was part of Bart’s trouble, he didn’t want to admit that any trees had to burn.”

George Stewart’s 1949 FIRE plunges one back into mid-century gender norms. The plucky college girl in the fire tower waits, as thick smoke rises, for the young weatherman to rescue her; the untried forest supervisor has to show grit before he is called “Slim,” his preferred manly nickname.

Back from an eight day driving and hiking jaunt due south to the borderlands, all of it under clear skies and a spectacular super moon. Trip reading was George R. Stewart’s 1949 FIRE in which wilderness conservation vies with the economic logic of extraction.

“He hated the younger man because his days of strength lay ahead, and because he thought of trees as lumber, and figured fire-fighting on sheets of paper.” As the Spitcat fire continues to devour the forest in George Stewart’s FIRE, an emotional generational divide emerges.

The raging fire reorders the Great Chain of Being with human-defined systems at the bottom in George Stewart’s FIRE: “Against that heat driven on by the wind, all the power of Forest, Zone, and Region would have been for the moment no more than a few ants, furtively scurrying.”

“And now with a kind of slow majesty — when the end of the world comes, there is no need to hurry — the crown-fire moved down the ridge, leaping from tree top to tree top” — a cold weather front kicks-up the blaze in George Stewart’s FIRE

West Texas Ramble (11/6/2025). Hiking under the supermoon in the Davis Mountains; late evening at the Indian Lodge; browsing Donald Judd at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa

“Like a man, a fire exists in time . . . where once it scarcely crept, now suddenly it walks and runs.” The wildfire as life form in George Stewart’s novel FIRE (1948). “The fire is a thing in itself. It begins, and is, and ends; it is born, and lives, and dies.”

Wake-up view. Marathon TX

“He cultivated God the same way some highly respectable people cultivate a vice — secretly, that is, and with solemn care.” Balzac, HONORINE

“His motto seemed to be: ‘I suffer and I stay silent.’” Reading in typescript a new translation of HONORINE, one of Balzac’s long stories, in which a reclusive and otherwise stoic aristocrat lives a secret life of charity, entrapped in a fervor of selfless benevolence.

Usually, when your beliefs fail to evolve as you age, it’s a bad thing

However I’m feeling good about my crotchety, knee-jerk attachment to radical 20c concepts like anti-racism, don’t do crimes, avoid financial bubbles, feed all the kids, fight Nazis, etc etc

It’s a weird time to be obsolete!

Thanks Matt. It has been amazing from that first Guinness onward.

It had always been good knowing you’re out there. And any lover of Balzac is a friend of mine . . .

Thanks so much Ken! I feel like we’ve very much been partners all these years: conspirators for the good.

Thanks so much Scott. It has been a great deal of fun!

Rising in the ranks of his profession, T. C. Worsley finds himself increasingly unsuited to administrative duties: “My sympathies were against all authority [and] I was always on the side of the lawbreaker. How then could I weild authority with any conviction?” FLANNELED FOOL

Currently showing is George Marshall’s THE GAZEBO (1960) with Glenn Ford, Debbie Reynolds, and Carl Reiner

On my own this weekend, with H in Portland on business. Dropped into an old haunt, The Normandy Kitchen, for brunch after quite a few years away. Glad to say they’ve maintained their strict policy of *always* having Turner Classic movies (muted) on the television over the bar.

The “cold, barbarous barn” that is the school’s common area in Worsley’s FLANNELED FOOL. Staffed by the school’s athletes, “the only law was the jungle law of force; and the special sufferers were the individualists and non-conformers.”

In keeping with the times, the leader of the conservative faction within the school faculty is given the nickname “The Hun.” An arch-disciplinarian, with a deep sadistic streak, “the line of boys waiting outside his study to be whipped each morning was notoriously long.”

Weekend reading is T.C. Worsley’s memoir FLANNELED FOOL. Fascism rises in 1930s Europe, reverberating as a fierce culture war within the walls of a beef-witted English public school. The exasperated Master begs for peace: “We were fighting like weasels in a bag. It wouldn’t do.”

“But my loyalties were with my own little group of rebels rather than with the authorities of which I was, after all, one.” The schoolmaster T.C. Worsley, in his memoir FLANNELED FOOL, as the political crisis of the 1930s erupts.

Encountering the dangerously dashing Esmond Romilly: “I couldn’t help admiring the spirit of I-care-for-nobody which gave him such a single-minded will . . . He was a lone wolf with a wolf’s bite for any hand that fed him and a wolf’s snarl for anyone who reasoned with him.” Worsley, FLANNELED FOOL

Looks very interesting and could probably use a new edition. I haven’t seen a copy in person.

But PRH and in print, so very likely under copyright. And there are so many pirated books out there, it could be an anomaly.

Our House Was a Very, Very, Very Fine House Trump views the physical history of the White House much as he views the nation’s laws: something to be swept aside at will.

"According to the pledge agreement sent to donors, they’ll be contributing to the construction of 'The Donald J. Trump Ballroom at the White House.'"

www.thebulwark.com/p/our-house-...

Embracing stasis in Dino Buzzati’s THE STRONGHOLD: “The freedom to waste time in this way, without taking refuge in sleep, without fearing the lateness of the hour, letting the sun rise, a foretaste of eternity unfolding before you, without any compulsion to agonize.”

“But at a certain point,” Buzzati continues, “almost instinctively, you turn around and see that a gate has been bolted behind you, closing off the way back. . . . You grasp the passage of time and the inevitable end of the journey.”

“He had advanced through the carefree period of early youth . . . years pass slowly with such a light step that no one notices their conclusion. . . You savor the foretaste of the marvelous things that lie in wait.” The ever-receding promised future in Buzzati’s THE STRONGHOLD