My father was friends with Leah Chase and used to enjoy going to her special Holy Thursday gumbo Z’Herbs lunch. I regret that I never was around to join him for this event. In fact, I’m not sure I have ever even had gumbo Z’Herbs. I had an idea of starting a small Gumbo Z’Herbs garden which the hope everything would (somehow) be ready for Holy Thursday and I could try to cook up a batch of green gumbo.

I found a good pack of seeds on Amazon with 20 different herbs that matched well to Leah Chase’s recipe. The only thing missing was carrots for their greens. I have since learned that there is lots of improvising in these sorts of dishes and the measurements and even the ingredients aren’t necessarily strictly followed.

My original plan, perhaps born out of laziness, was to mix all the seeds together and spread them in my planter. The more I though about it, the planter seemed a bit small for all of this, so I reclaimed a few pieces of the yard that werent in use, including a patch when my large rosemary bush died in the recent freeze. I actually planted the seeds in separate groups. We will see how this all turns out. Will post a picture of the final gumbo if all goes well.

“What do you call it when people invest $2 trillion into an industry that is becoming worthless? That, my friend, is a bubble.”

As Solar, Wind Costs Plummet, Coal, Gas Vastly Over-Priced in Bubble That Could Burst Worse Than 2008

I have to admit I admire his thinking. Mug shot says it all. From Lubbock.

Texas man drove BMW dealership loaner car to rob bank, tried to use stolen money to buy BMW

I had always been a big reader but somehow it was not wasn’t until my second year of college that I found Kerouac’s “On the Road”. Earlier I had run across Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Great Shark Hunt”, already an anthology. It was years later before I even learned of the overlap these two mid-20th century American books had. But this was all before the internet where such connections were harder to make.

I wanted to read the rest of the Kerouac catalog but only made it roughly halfway through. I may yet finish. I confess to having an ebook of “Mexico City Blues” on the pad I currently am typing on (all thumbs, much slower than Kerouac) but haven’t gotten too far with it. All that said, I have since read two or three biographies of Kerouac and have the hardback Viking 50th Anniversary edition of “On the Road” with critical commentary on my bookshelf, a prize possession.

Unlike most books, especially books that are people’s favorites, this one seems to defy discussion. I have found close friends also liked this book, but we never discussed it the way we would discuss writing or music. It was somehow self contained. It was the fully formed view of where post-WW II America was and where it was headed, long before anyone else seemed to realize it.

I undertook a bit of a project recently to re-read some of the favorite books of my youth. I was prepared to be a bit embarrassed by my youthful enthusiasms. Kerouac was the hardest to approach. I liked that book so much when I was younger it would be hard to find out that it was perhaps thinner and lighter than I thought. But I bought the ebook and dug in and it was as good as I remembered, perhaps better (so was, I might add, Persig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, another favorite of mine at that time).

I suppose Kerouac was always controversial and never easily integrated into the rest of 20th century writing. I don’t imagine he is on many college English class syllabus, or taken that seriously in English departments. Anyway a re-evaluation of Kerouac seems to be underway. Maybe it is always underway. From the Los Angeles Review of Books.

“On the Road,” Again

A good March Madness read from The Better Letter.

The Better Letter: How Lucky Are You?

Everyone I talk to from out of state asks the same question: what the heck is going on in Texas? I don’t have a good answer, besides incompetence and mismanagement. I will let the Guardian in the UK explain. I don’t see my family continuing to live in Texas.

Texans scramble to get vaccinated after Republican governor says no more masks