Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Questers and Other Oddballs

  • Be neither Bohemian nor Bourgeois

    A Substack short with a scene from "Barfly." Is that Bukowski at the bar?

  • The Calvin Blocker Story

    My wife and I owned a house in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, on Euclid Heights Boulevard, from 1986-1991. That location put me within walking distance of the old Arabica coffee house on Coventry Road. The Coventry district was quite a Bohemian scene in those days and there I met numerous interesting characters of the sort one…

  • More on ‘Baron’ Corvo

    A. J. A. Symon's Quest for Corvo (1934) has me in its grip. It is an intriguing exercise  in literary pathography whose subject is an English eccentric of the first magnitude. I'm on p. 222. Today I came across a high-class literary site, The Yellow Nineties, whereat I read this entry about our man. Thanks…

  • Richard Peck, Seeker of Lost Gold

    Substack latest.

  • A Quest for Transcendence Gone Wrong

    Substack latest.

  • The Eremitic Option

    Top o' the Stack.

  • Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists

    Top of the Substack stack. …………………………….. Tony Flood comments (12/23): This was enjoyable on so many levels. There's irony in labeling these gents "idealists" (I know the sense in which you meant it) since Marxists considered theists like Merton metaphysical "idealists," but and how could any mathematician, even a Marxist one, be anything but an…

  • Were They Always On?

    Did Socrates or his Danish disciple ever just play the regular guy while out and about in the public square? Did they ever hide their true selves in a concession to their own all-too-human humanity and in recognition of a need to stay loosely tethered to the mundane for the sake of sanity? Or were…

  • Jack Kerouac on Robert Lax

    During his years of unsuccess, when he was actually at his purest and best, an "unpublished freak," as he describes himself in a late summer 1954 letter to Robert Giroux, living for his art alone, Kerouac contemplated entering a monastery: "I've become extremely religious and may go to a monastery before even before you do."…

  • Transcendence

    The Transcendence we aim at is so faint and uncertain, so easy to suspect of being a mirage, while the earthly lures are so loudly attractive, so seemingly real. This is reality, the sense world shouts at us. All else is illusion!

  • For the Kerouac File

    Black Like Kerouac I was awfully naïve once, but never so naïve as Kerouac/Paradise, who understands so little about the lives of black Americans that he wishes he “were a Negro [because] the best the white world could offer was not enough ecstasy, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.” It is…

  • The Joe Gould Story

    Jack Kerouac, ON THE ROAD: […]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding…

  • Walter Morris: Bourgeois Bohemian

    Walter Morris may count as an early bourgeois bohemian, a 'BoBo' to adopt and adapt a coinage of David Brooks.  Morris is an exceedingly obscure diarist, known only to a few, but a kindred spirit. An e-mail from a distant relative of his caused me to dip again into the stimulating waters of his journal. I have…

  • Puts Me in Mind of Chris McCandless

    Here's another for the category, Questers and Other Oddballs.

  • Rebel with a Cause

    "The eighty-year-old mystery of the murder of Sheldon Robert Harte, Leon Trotsky’s most controversial bodyguard." Jean van Heijenoort was another of the Old Man's bodyguards.  I met van Heijenoort in the mid-70s when he came to Boston College on the invitation of my quondam girlfriend, Charaine H., a student at Brandeis University where van Heijenoort…