Thank Evans for good wine

There was an entirely forgotten leftist called Allen Ginsberg, a so-called beat poet (surely an oxymoron) who once produced a work entitled ‘Howl’. That was appropriate. It reads like a wolf on hallucinogens. The author whined that he had seen the best minds of his generation destroyed. ‘Best minds’: how would he have known? This was hardly Dunbar lamenting the makars of his era. Such of their verse that survives may now be an unyielding read. But in their day they were names to conjure with. Nor did they put their minds up their noses, or inject their hopes into ravaged veins.

I was thinking about poetry, decadence and self-destruction because I have decided that after a gap — horrifying thought — of 50 years, it is time to make a new assault on the French 19th century, before my grenouille rusts away completely. I revisited the Pleiades over the summer.