More Bweefing? More Bweefing.

I do this every now and then: ask a few rhetorical questions that have been bugging me, and see if anyone out there has an answer. Since no one reads my blog, I never get answers. But asking the questions is fun anyway.

1. Marxism is a 19th century idea, which the 20th century pretty much proved to be so much simple-minded snake oil. And yet now, in the 21st century, we're being told that those who still cling to this 19th century idea should be called "progressives." Why? What's so "progressive" about an outdated bunch of apocalyptic nonsense cooked up by some woolgathering German picking his nose in the British Museum while Queen Victoria was still on her throne?

2. Why is it that the same people who can't wait to get us out of Iraq can't wait to get us into Darfur?

3. Why did the media tar-and-feather Dan Quayle for misspelling "potato," then turn around and give Barack Obama a complete pass for saying there are 57 states and that they speak Arabic in Afghanistan? (My old friend Charlie Berigan thinks "media bias" is nothing but a Republican bogeyman. I'll let him explain this one.)

4. While we're on the subject, why did the media, which exploded into a chorus of hallelujahs and hosannahs over the idea that we could have a female or black presidential candidate, not utter so much as a peep when, for the first time, we got a Secretary of State who was both black and female? (Hint: both she and the president who appointed her were Republicans.)

5. In golf, the player with the lowest score wins. In the Foreign Service wing of the U.S. Department of State, the lower your grade number, the higher your rank. Anyone out there still doubt that the diplomatic corps is essentially a country club?

6. I don't listen to talk radio, but I do wonder: why are the same people whose favorite buzzwords are "diversity" and "tolerance" trying to get Congress to silence conservative talk radio? (Hint: left-wing talk radio can't find an audience bigger than a quilting bee.)

7. Why does Alec Baldwin still live in the United States? In 2000, he told one and all that if Bush were elected he would leave the country. Thousands offered to help him pack. But he didn't go. Now Susan Sarandon is saying that if Obama isn't elected in November, she'll pack up and leave. I've also offered to help her pack. If John McCain happens to be president next January, I'll be asking this question again. (Hey, Susan! I subscribe to a magazine called International Living. They're pitching some great real-estate bargains in Panama!)

8. Why does anybody still pay any attention to Al Franken? If Rush Limbaugh is "a big fat idiot," Al Franken is a disgustingly ugly, simple-minded, trash-mouthed abortion who for some reason gets called a "comedian" although he has never been funny one day in his entire worthless life. Now he's running for Congress. They say people vote for the best-looking candidate. On that basis, a boiled lobster could run against Al Franken and win.

9. Just as I wonder why Marxists get away with calling themselves "progressives," I also wonder why the new crop of atheists gets away with calling itself "bright." What's so "bright" about lacking the imagination to conceive of anything greater or smarter than yourself?

10. And finally, like most conservatives I'm not really all that crazy about John McCain. My position on McCain is, I'll probably vote for him, but I won't put his bumper sticker on my car. Still, I wonder why the media keep telling us about his supposed bad temper, while throughout the entire primary season we didn't hear one word from the media about Hillary Clinton's legendary temper -- McCain got press coverage for snapping at a reporter, while Hillary, who according to those in the know throws furniture when she doesn't get her way, got the same kind of pass Obama got saying he'd visited 57 states.

Annus Mirabilis, My Big Fat Annus

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."--The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1965.

Hey, is my generation aging well, or what? As we trailing-edge baby-boomers move into our fifties, skydiving schools are filling up, Harley-Davidsons are selling like the double-pecan special at the Waffle House and botox has become the new viagra.

Boy, I tell you, Dylan Thomas would be proud of us. Nobody "raged, raged against the dying of the light" like our crowd.

I'm as guilty as anyone else. I'm 52 and I just had the braces taken off my teeth. When my father was 52, he decided to head off what he regarded as the inevitable and he had all of his upper teeth pulled out, opting for store-bought. Not me. And if the Crest whitening strips don't work, I'm going to have 'em whitened by a pro. And by the way, if my ship comes in before it sinks, I'm heading for a cosmetic surgeon to get rid of my father's turkey wattle before it gets much worse. (His got so bad that eventually his grandchildren liked to climb in his lap and bat at it like cats playing with a ball of yarn.)

OK. I've made my point, which has been made countless times by others. We baby boomers are (a) vain, and (b) afraid of getting old. (And there's growing evidence that we are also (c) cowardly. Well? Didn't Pete Townshend write in My Generation, "I hope I die before I get old?" '60s bravado. The old geezer is still out there somewhere, huffing and puffing and collecting whatever the Brits call social security.)

Which brings me to my real topic.

There I was, in Frankfurt, Germany, minding my own business. I was 31. Reagan was president, New York baseball was all about the Mets, and you couldn't be a pop star in America unless your act included dancing.

And then it appeared. That issue of Newsweek with the breathless cover story
all about the 20th anniversary of incredible 1968, that Annus Mirabilis, the Year That Changed Everything.

Fast forward. I'm back in Germany again, Bonn this time. Still minding my own business. Now Clinton is president, the Yankees have retaken the attention of New York media, and Marilyn Manson is channeling Alice Cooper for a generation of little shits too young to remember Alice Cooper.

And here it comes again,that issue of Newsweek. Now the breathless cover story is all about the 30th anniversary of incredible 1968, That Annus Mirabilis, The Year That Changed Everything.

The first time around it was kind of pleasantly nostalgic for me. I had nothing to do with the turbulence of the '60s myself; when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated I was only 12 years old. Speak to me of 1968 and what I remember is Tiny Tim.

But now, ten years later, it makes me a little uneasy, and I note it in my journal. Are we going to have to listen to this crap every decade, in the year that ends with an "8," until the last loose-sphinctered old crock who remembers throwing a beer can filled with piss at the Chicago police has gone to the great Woodstock in the sky?

It would seem so. Because if you look at the calendar, folks, we are now in a year ending with "8," and in the immortal words of The Dave Clark Five, "Here they come again."

I'm not sure if I'm quoting with 100 percent accuracy here because I don't have a copy of Dave Barry Turns 50 at my elbow. But that book, published by the way in last decade's "8" year (Barry was born in 1948) contained a sentence that went something like this: "Our convictions gave us the courage to go out and change some things about the world that needed changing. They also turned us into the most self-righteous bunch of assholes who ever lived."

Not to mention the most narcissistic. But calling baby boomers narcissistic has become a cliche on the level of saying that so-and-so got "thrown under the bus." No, the narcissism of my fellow Romper Room-watchers is not what I'm here to discuss.

It's our dishonesty.

Here is what Hemingway would have called "the true gen:" 1968 was no great shakes. The sixties in general were no great shakes. Think I'm an old party-pooper for saying that? Okay, Mr. or Ms. Smarty Pants, hear it from one of your own household gods of the Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out era. Bob Dylan says the sixties were no great shakes. He doesn't even like to talk about them. Dylan, who for so many of you unrepentant geriatic teenagers was the very embodiment of the sixties, has no illusions about them. When he says "Don't Look Back," he means it.

So why don't all of you, who worshipped him when he looked like Cate Blanchett, take his damn advice? Quit selling us this snake oil every ten years that the age of Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman and the Weathermen was some kind of good old days that we should all gee-whiz wish we could board the old Willoughby Express and zip back to?

Bull cookies. The hippies of the 1960s were merely the younger brothers and sisters of the Beats of the 1950s. They picked up on the messages that the Beats espoused and ran amok with them, Vietnam and Civil Rights having generated an atmosphere that encouraged amok-running among kids raised in comfortable suburban households. Their parents had survived the Depression and WWII and were determined that their kids should have it better than they did.

Picture a nursery full of spoiled brats clutching volumes of Herbert Marcuse. And by the way, that's been offered as one of the reasons the Chicago police ran amok at the 1968 Democratic convention and started cracking heads. Most of those beleagured cops were blue-collar types who resented the Yippies throwing rocks at them as much for being the pampered and spoiled children of wealthy suburban parents as for the rock-throwing. I can easily believe it. Kids always think they know everything, and in the sixties they thought it especially loudly.

So what did the wonderful Peace Now, Sex, Drugs & Rock n' Roll sixties, with their Che Guevara T-shirts and Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh buttons actually give us? Well, let's list a few of their legacies: Campus speech codes. Political correctness. Institutionalized reverse racism. A massive welfare state that creates more problems than it solves. Runaway teenage pregnancy. Fatherless homes. A "gender war" now in its fourth decade even though virtually every goal of the 1960s "women's movement" was achieved a long time ago. (But to admit that would put the women who run NOW out of a job, wouldn't it? -- No, the whining must continue, so they can.) More recently, the legacy of the sixties has come out to bite Sen. Barack Obama in the form of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that venom-spewing racist volcano whose hate-whitey bullshit is as quaint as the striped bell bottoms and polka-dot shirts of Carnaby Street, and has been a complete embarrassment to a candidate trying to pitch himself as a unifier.

And here's the real kicker: (You can believe me, I was there. I was young, but I was a precocious kid who noticed things and, just ask my good friend Holly Inder, remembers things.) The country club revolutionaries who now sip Metamucil with their marijuana rather than the Schlitz they slurped when The Fugs and Norman Mailer were doing their thing in front of the Pentagon, want you to believe that the '60s really were this wonderful socialist-utopia never-never land where peace, love and inclusiveness were the preoccupations 24/7 of everyone under 30.

You want to get a real, non-rose-tinted picture of what life in the sixties was like? I can actually recommend a novel that gives a pretty good description of it. Go and dig up Rabbit Redux by John Updike. Published in 1971, its action takes place in 1969, and it sugar-coats nothing. When I first read it, around 1990, I thought "Yeah, this is close to what life in the late sixties was really like."

For those of you young enough to be hoodwinked by all the reflexive nonsense about freedom, idealism and social justice that gets nostalgically regurgitated every time 1968 is under discussion, let me throw some snapshots at you from one who was there:

-- I mentioned Tiny Tim above. He was the hottest thing around in the spring of that year, and no act more unbearable ever trod the boards.

-- In revolutionary 1968, the year the great global communist utopia seemed within reach to anyone and everyone wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and stoned out of their skulls, the top 10 most popular shows on American television included Gomer Pyle, Mayberry RFD and The Beverly Hillbillies.

-- Thousands of hippie romantics, Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi echoing in their heads, headed for the hills to "get back to the land," living in communes and quarreling over whose turn it was milk the goat. Of course, being revolutionary romantics, they wanted to get away from anything and everything they considered "bourgeois," and that included basic hygiene. Pretty soon they were coming down with things like thrush and crab lice, things that can easily be avoided if you use soap and water and don't do stupid things like sharing a toothbrush. How romantic.

-- The Velvet Underground (and Tiny Tim) aside, here are a few of the big radio hits of 1968, a year the Boomer Nostalgia crowd remembers as one long idyll of Beatles, Stones and Jimi Hendrix:

1. Simon Says, by the 1910 Fruitgum Company.

2. 1,2,3 Red Light, also by the 1910 Fruitgum Company.

3. Yummy, Yummy, Yummy by the Ohio Express.

4. I Gotta get A Message To You by the Bee Gees (I wince just thinking about it.)

5. Nobody But Me by the Human Beinz.

6. The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde by Georgie Fame.

7. Playboy by Gene and Debbie.

8. La La Means I Love You by the Delfonics.

9. Tapioca Tundra by the Monkees.

10. And Suddenly, by The Cherry People.

11. Honey by Bobby Goldsboro.

12. Bang-shang-a-lang by The Archies.

13. Chewy, Chewy by The Ohio Express. (Yummy, Yummy Yummy and Chewy, Chewy...Do you see a pattern here?)

14. Dreams of The Everyday Housewife by Glen Campbell. (If you really want to gag, try Wayne Newton's version.)

15. Fire, by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. (His damn shouting set a new standard for annoying.)

16. Here Comes The Judge, by Shorty Long (See below.)

17. In-a-Gadda-da-Vida by The Iron Butterfly (Yes, I know it's considered a cult classic, but Doug Ingle's voice always affected me like fingernails on a chalkboard, and say what you will about that long drum solo, Ron Bushy was a lousy drummer.)

18. U.S. Male, by Elvis Presley. (Some Elvis bitter-enders claim everything he recorded was great. This stinker was three lemons, period.)

19. Little Green Apples, by Roger Miller.

20. Goody Goody Gumdrops, by the 1910 Fruitgum Company. (Anyone see a pattern here?)

Anybody who wants these back can have them.

-- Speaking of goodies, here's one! In 1968, cigarettes were still being advertised on television. There's something I miss like my last attack of diverticulitis.

-- 1968 was the year of the Nehru jacket. For those of you too young to remember what that was, imagine the sartorial equivalent of the hula hoop.

-- Jackie Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis (imagine them having sex. Eek.)

-- The Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and arrested its president, Alexander Dubcek. (See August, 1968 by W.H. Auden, a truly great expression of outrage over this international outrage.)

-- Director Roger Vadim released Barbarella, starring his then-girlfriend Jane Fonda as some sort of outer-space nymphomaniac. A more eloquent tribute to bad taste was never committed to celluloid.

-- Everybody was going around saying things like "Sock it to me," and "Here come da judge." Let me tell you that got old fast.

-- Everywhere you looked on the road, you saw station wagons.

-- All male teachers dressed exactly alike: short-sleeved white shirt, skinny necktie, black horn-rimmed glasses, crew cut. I swear to God. I was in the 7th grade that year. I remember. All my male teachers looked like members of some doo-wop group for nerds.

-- Telephones were all rotary dial and came in two colors: Black and "Princess."

-- The hottest book of the year was Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann, and the airwaves were filled with Dionne Warwick singing the theme song from the stupid movie they made out of the stupid book.

-- The annoying Lyndon Baines Johnson exited the White House and the annoying Richard Nixon followed him into it.

I can't think of much that was very good about 1968. Well, maybe a few things. (1) Women were wearing skirts halfway up their asses. (2) Gasoline was 34 cents a gallon. (3) Don Martin was still drawing cartoons for MAD Magazine. (4) It was the year the Rolling Stones released Jumpin' Jack Flash and also what I consider their greatest album, Beggar's Banquet, and it was also the year the Beatles released the so-called "White" album.

And finally,(5) A year that began with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the illegal seizure by North Korea of the Navy spy ship Pueblo and its crew, ended with Apollo 8 orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve, and astronaut Frank Borman read the opening chapter of Genesis as a holiday greeting to everyone back on earth. (imagine what the ACLU would say about that now.) And then, to follow that up, the Pueblo's crew was released to freedom.

Other than that, take my word for it (and Dylan's). Don't Look Back.

Three Days With Hemingway

My friend Chris McDonald and I drove to Kansas City the week of June 9-13 for the 13th International Hemingway Conference, held at the Marriott Country Club Plaza Hotel in that city. Chris presented a paper at the conference, which had been culled from his master's thesis concerning the influence upon Hemingway's style of the painters Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Cezanne and Antonio Gattorno. Since I had given Chris a little help with his thesis last year, I went along as his editor and consultant. Although I've been posting at www.ernest.hemingway.com for several years and have something of a reputation on the Internet as a Hemingway maven, mostly I went along for the ride. It was a good ride. Read all about it in the journal I kept during our three days in Kansas City:

June 9 Monday Kansas City

Left Washington, D.C. Saturday morning at 11 a.m. Pushing 80 mph down I-95 in the PT Cruiser, reached Greenville, North Carolina by 5:30 p.m. Stayed over at Chris McDonald’s place in Winterville Saturday night. We went to a Mexican restaurant where I met his wife Christy, a nurse who met us at the restaurant still wearing her scrubs from work.

Chris and I left Greenville Sunday morning about 7:00. Our route out of North Carolina took us right past the real “Mount Pilot” if you’re a fan of The Andy Griffith Show, as I am. Just outside Mt. Airy, the home town of Andy Griffith which was supposedly the model for Mayberry, there is a granite peak called “Pilot Mountain,” although there isn’t any town there. Chris dissuaded me from wanting to see Mt. Airy. “Dude, I promise you, there’s nothing there,” he insisted.

We were in Evansville, Indiana by 6:00 p.m. CDT, where we stopped for the night at the Holiday Inn Fairfield. Got cleaned up, had a couple of drinks and then went out for pizza. I called Valerie but got voicemail. Left a message and went to bed around 10 p.m. Hit the road this morning at 6:30 CDT. Made St. Louis by 10:00 and Kansas City by 2:00. Checked into the Marriott Country Club, where the 13th Annual Hemingway International Conference is being held this week.

A bit of minor excitement at check-in. Our room wasn’t ready, so we had to go get coffee at Starbucks and wait around the lobby. James Taylor is playing a concert date tonight in KC, and we were checking in at the very moment he and his band were checking out. We didn’t see him, but we did see his band. The desk clerk told me that James Taylor has stayed there twice and he has yet to see him. They must sneak him in through the service entrance. (He added that the band Styx has stayed there a couple of times as well, and the members of Styx are very nice guys. “A lot of fun,” he said.)

Another little event at check-in that pleased me: A group of young Hemingway scholars who had come for the conference checked in shortly after we did. Chris introduced himself to them, then introduced me. “Oh,” one of them said, shaking my hand. “You’re cited in my paper.” There was also some old buzzard wandering around the lobby in a seersucker jacket, ball cap and white beard who looked just like Hemingway. I remarked to the valet parking attendant, “He must be part of the entertainment. Well, why not? If there are Elvis impersonators, why not Hemingway impersonators?”

Chris and I worked on his Hemingway presentation for about an hour before we went to dinner. It’s culled from his master’s thesis and we decided to give it the title: Less Is More: Undiscovered Country in the Fiction Of Ernest Hemingway. What it actually deals with is the influence upon Hemingway’s famous “iceberg procedure” of three painters: Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Cezanne and the Cuban Antonio Gattorno. He’s scheduled to read his paper on Wednesday afternoon.

My childhood pal Charlie Berigan, who passed through Kansas City with a road show about 15 years ago, had strongly recommended KC's Savoy Grill, so we’re going there for dinner tonight. It was once one of KC’s toniest restaurants. Seems Harry Houdini dined there once, and after they played a prank on him, locking him in a phone booth, he never went back. I also understand that one scene from the movie Mr. & Mrs. Bridge was filmed there. But the valet parking attendant told me that the Savoy Grill is “not what it was 50 years ago.” Well, since I don’t know what it was 50 years ago, what the hell do I care?

June 10 Tuesday

Met Valerie Hemingway this morning. She’s here for the conference. Very charming lady with a slight British accent, interesting as I think she’s actually Irish. Although I already have a copy of her book Running With The Bulls, I bought a second copy so I could ask her to sign it, which she graciously did. Also met Audre Hanneman, a perfectly wonderful old lady who is apparently the dean of all Hemingway bibliographers. The academics assembled at this morning’s breakfast here in the hotel gave her a standing ovation when she spoke.

Dinner at the Savoy Grill last night. As my mother once said of San Diego’s University Club, it was “like dining at Hubbard Mortuary.” The dark, 100-year-old dining room was nearly deserted. The meal, with drinks, ran $150. I had veal marsala and of course, managed to get gravy on the sleeve of my new sportjacket. Was running downstairs this morning to catch the hotel’s dry cleaning service before the truck left. Although the meal wasn’t much, and the Savoy Grill itself a rather tired dining experience, the manager of the place made up for it by being extremely hospitable to Chris and me. He gave us a tour. Among other things he showed us the table where Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward did indeed sit when they were filming the “tornado” scene of Mr. & Mrs. Bridge. We also saw the table at which Harry Houdini sat the night some practical jokers reportedly locked him in a phone booth at the Savoy and he couldn’t get out.

Back at the hotel, we went out to the bench in front of the lobby near the street, the designated smoking area, to have a cigar. There had been rain upon our arrival that afternoon, but by 9 p.m. it had become a lovely, mild spring evening. A tour bus pulled up, bringing back to the hotel a group of conference attendees who had just taken a tour of the Kansas City Star building, an event Chris and had I skipped in order to dine at the Savoy. I was told there had been free food and liquor provided as part of the Star tour. There must have been plenty of the latter, because as I sat there smoking, a young woman got off the bus being supported by two people, one on each side. Her body was so out of control that for a moment I thought she might have cerebral palsy. But no, she was just drunk. So drunk in fact that they had to use a wheelchair to get her into the hotel. I wouldn’t have wanted to be inside her skull this morning.

June 11 Wednesday

Speaking of drinking, after the thrill of meeting Valerie Hemingway yesterday morning after breakfast, the rest of the day devolved into one of the booziest I ever spent. But I was still walking under my own power when it was over, so I suppose I would have passed one of Hemingway’s key tests of “manliness,” that being the ability to hold your liquor.

It started out innocently enough. After Chris and I had attempted a “dry run” (no pun intended) of the paper he will be presenting this afternoon, I concluded that it would be best to run off copies for the audience. Chris resisted the idea, but I overcame his resistance by offering to pay for the copying. The hotel shuttle took us to the FedEx Kinko’s downtown. It was a beautiful day and I am really impressed with Kansas City; it’s a much more attractive city than I might have expected; I even told Chris that it reminds me slightly of San Diego. Chris, who has lived in San Diego himself, agreed.

The girl at the FedEx counter told us that the copying job would take about 30 minutes. Next door was a restaurant/bar called Tomfoolery. While waiting for our copies, we slipped in there, sat at the bar and ordered tall, frosty mugs of Fat Tire. We both flirted with the bartender, "Mary" from North Platte, Nebraska, one of those slim, tough, slightly homely gals who nevertheless manage to be sexy by sheer force of personality. When I asked what people do in North Platte on a Saturday night and she replied, “Get drunk and fuck,” Chris and I were both immediately smitten. Chris ordered a salad and I ordered some chicken tenders. To wash the taste of the beer out of my mouth, I asked Mary for a Jack Daniel’s straight up, then had another. Chris had a Bloody Mary. Then we paid our bill, retrieved our copies and went back to the hotel, where we wound up spending the shank of the afternoon sitting in the hotel bar working on the PowerPoint portion of Chris’ little dog-and-pony show about the influence of certain painters on Hemingway’s style. We were in the bar because there is WiFi there, whereas if you access the Internet in your room they charge $9.95 a day for it. Chris drank White Russians as we tinkered with his program; I followed suit with Dewar’s on the rocks. There was a little excitement around 3 p.m. when the hotel experienced a partial power outage. The elevators and the air conditioning went out. For some reason the fire department showed up.

Late in the afternoon, as we were still sitting in the hotel bar arranging visuals on Chris’ laptop, he suddenly decided he wanted to try a Papa Doble, the legendary daiquiri whose recipe was supposedly invented by Hemingway. Chris got on the Internet and looked up the recipe, wrote it down and asked the bartender to make one for each of us. The Papa Doble mixes up as a pinkish concoction which is actually quite tasty, if a bit sweet. When the bartender put the drinks in front of us, I went into my best Hemingway-imitation voice and growled, “Made a run of 16 in here one night!” Chris doubled over laughing. We each had two.

In case anyone's interested, here is the recipe for a Papa Doble:

2 jiggers white rum
the juice of two limes
the juice of half a grapefruit
6 drops grenadine or maraschino cherry brandy

Fill blender one-quarter full with crushed ice. Add the rum, lime juice, grapefruit juice and grenadine. Blend until cloudy and frothy.

Chris decided he wanted to have dinner at a jazz club not far from the Savoy called the Majestic Steakhouse. We took a cab there. They had no jazz last night, and the food was only so-so, (as well as pricey) but Chris had another Bloody Mary before dinner and I had more Scotch, then chased down my somewhat dry roast pork loin with an ice-cold Pinot Grigio.

The Majestic is within walking distance of the Savoy, and Chris suggested we walk back over there after we finished dinner. We sat at the bar, drank port and chatted up the bartender. Kansas City apparently has an ordinance which allows cigar-smoking in certain venues after 11 p.m. In any case the bartender told us that, it being after 11 now, we could light up if we wanted. So there I was, following an afternoon of beer, Jack, Scotch, daiquiris, more Scotch and then Pinot Grigio, sitting in the Savoy Grill at 11:15 p.m. smoking a cigar and drinking port.

We got a cab back to the hotel. Chris claimed to be not at all drunk, but I don’t know…this morning when I got up at 7:00 with a slight headache and prepared to go downstairs for coffee, I found his pants on the table, his jacket on the desk and his wristwatch on the floor. I let him sleep and went down to the lobby to read the newspapers and drink Starbuck’s, which is not my favorite coffee but it’s what they sell in the lobby. Took Aleve for the headache.

POSTSCRIPT, 3 PM – Had a “fashion emergency” this morning. Had decided to dress “up” for Chris’ presentation as an expression of solidarity, and had brought along my new, light summer suit for that purpose. But while getting dressed I discovered to my horror that I had brought along only white socks. Can’t wear white socks with a suit; I’d look like Jethro Bodine on The Beverly Hillbillies. Went down to the front desk to ask where the nearest place was at which I could buy a pair of dress socks. Fortunately they keep an emergency supply of them behind the front desk.

Chris did his presentation at 1 p.m. There were maybe 20 people in the amphitheater. Valerie Hemingway was there. Everything went fine except Chris inadvertently left out one of the slides he wanted to use. Other than that I thought his presentation went quite well. Unfortunately the shadow over Chris at the moment is that his father back in North Carolina is in the hospital and not doing well; we have canceled plans to stop off in Cincinnati on the way back and see the Reds play ball, as Chris, understandably, wants to get home.

And by the way I had another fashion emergency after the presentation. I stuck a felt-tip pen in my shirt pocket and forgot to put the cap back on it. It promptly leaked ink all over my brand-new dress shirt.

June 12 Thursday Louisville, KY

Last night we went out to Kaufman Park in Kansas City to see the Royals play the visiting Texas Rangers. KC proved brilliantly why they’re in last place in the AL Central: going into the seventh inning with a 5-1 lead, the Royals’ bullpen went into action and promptly gave up seven runs, including a grand slam. Texas scored three more runs and won the game 11-5.

Kansas City sports pundits’ general disgust with the Royals was all over KC talk radio this morning as we drove out of town after three very interesting days. John Hemingway was supposed to drop in at the conference today. J’aime Sanders, the little PhD-to-be from the University of South Florida who presented along with Chris yesterday, told me that John Hemingway is a lot of fun. (J’aime’s paper, by the way, was entitled The Study of Death and the Creation of Art: Hemingway’s Philosophy Of Writing In Death In The Afternoon. Fair enough, but I’m not sure what Hemingway would have thought of a paper about his work that used the term “existentialist.”)

But Chris is still worried about his dad, so we left a day early. We had an earnest (again, no pun intended) discussion in our hotel room last night before lights-out. I gave Chris some tips on writing. Mostly I just think he needs to attain focus and establish a routine. Advised him to start keeping a journal, as I’ve been doing for more than 35 years. As Hemingway himself would probably have told you had you asked, 90 percent of what makes a successful or even a good writer is not being a genius, nor is it having a great story to tell or a great idea to put forth. Mostly it’s just sticking your butt in a chair and writing, every day. Unfortunately that’s also the hardest part.