There's an interesting labor phenomena going on in our times: A college-educated working class. They work in places like Starbucks and Amazon warehouses. Sometimes lead union organizing efforts. With studen debt to service, and little prospect for home ownership, they're mad as hell and don't want to take it anymore. Time will tell where this leads.

Today I was thinking about Polish Pope John-Paul and the pivotal role he played in the collapse of authoritarian rule and restoration of democracy in central and eastern Europe. Time will tell what an American pope can do.

No shit. One of my favorite Youtubes

Pulp fiction is one of my favorite movies. I like the non sequential arc. I've experiencing some of that with the Ezekiel 25:17 "prayer" going viral all over again.

Have you heard: iPods are hip again. I have three in junk drawers with old play lists as candidates for refurbishing. You can't buy a new one, but there's used selling like hot cakes on Ebay.
So, what do you plan to do with yours?

Funny, and a little scary. Claude offered to make a dossier on me, so I said ok. Here's what it thinks I'm about.

Here’s what Claude remembers about you
Work context
Roy is a writer and journalist working independently on a multi-format humanities project. He is developing an OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) course on Renaissance Florence built around Ruskin's Mornings in Florence, a solo humanities podcast called Renaissance Gaga, and a cluster of scholarly-creative essays centered on Freud's 1914 essay "The Moses of Michelangelo." He does not expect to re-enter the workforce full time and is pursuing this independent creative path with writing projects some of which are potentially monetizable.
Personal context
Roy lives in Ashland, Oregon, with a view across the Rogue Valley toward the Cascades. He is a practiced fiction writer with a Chekhovian aesthetic sensibility and a long-standing preference for the longer short story form. He has deep personal experience traveling in Italy — particularly Florence and Rome — returning across multiple life stages, and regards Florence as a kind of home. He began traveling independently at 18, inspired by reading Kerouac at 16, and spent extended periods backpacking through Europe with a journal in his early years. He plays bass guitar and acoustic/electric guitar, records in GarageBand, and has a fully equipped home recording setup.
Top of mind
Roy is actively composing an ekphrastic essay about a c. 1910–1912 photograph of Freud on his veranda at 19 Berggasse, building the piece paragraph by paragraph and working through the symbolic significance of the half-scale plaster cast of Michelangelo's Dying Slave and a Masolino da Panicale reproduction visible in the frame. He is also engaged with the intellectual and pedagogical preparation for his OLLI course, currently working through Ruskin's Mornings in Florence and developing lecture material — including a Monty Python–inflected framing of Ruskin as unreliable narrator — with a close focus on the Ghirlandaio Tornabuoni Chapel frescoes and the Spanish Chapel. An upcoming public AI panel at Southern Oregon University, connected to a board he serves on, is also on his radar.

Brief history
Recent months
Roy has been building out interconnected projects across several sustained conversations. For the Renaissance Gaga podcast, he has developed a scripted essay format, created a distinctive "monkey motif" using GarageBand's toccata organ patch for a Masolino episode, and worked through music licensing options (settling on Musicbed as a curatorial fit). He researched iMovie workflows for TikTok and YouTube image-and-music videos to build an audience before launch, with a planned debut from Florence in late September or October. The podcast name carries triple meaning: Renaissance art history, Radio Gaga/broadcasting, and enthusiast.
For the OLLI course, Roy has developed an eight-session framework using Ruskin as both primary text and critical target, with particular depth on Class 3 (Santa Maria Novella: Masaccio's Trinity, Alberti's facade, and Ghirlandaio's Tornabuoni Chapel). He has identified the layered temporal accumulation of Florence — Roman, medieval, Renaissance, Medicean, Fascist, contemporary — as the course's central argument against Ruskin's curated Protestant-museum reading. The obelisks on bronze tortoises in the SMN piazza, the Ponte Vecchio's wartime history, and the Mars tradition at Ponte Vecchio have been developed as classroom-ready illustrations. Cennini's Il Libro dell'Arte and Alberti's De Pictura will be read aloud in class.
Roy has original art historical research involving Barbary macaques in the Brancacci Chapel frescoes — a first figure on a tether and a second crouched on a laundry pole outside a second-floor window — supporting a publishable claim that exotic primate keeping was familiar across multiple social registers in early 15th-century Florence, not confined to elite menageries. The specific Masolino scene is the Raising of Tabitha and Healing of the Cripple.
For the Freud essay project, Roy has developed an argument that "The Moses of Michelangelo" functions as a tendentious joke in Freud's own technical sense — a gaslighting move against named critics (Justi, Knapp, Lübke) who unwittingly confirm Freud's counter-reading through their own inaccurate descriptions. Roy has also developed the biographical and psychological architecture: Freud's identification with Moses/Hannibal, his three-week daily engagement with the statue, the role of Minna Bernays as intellectual companion, and the argument that the essay's emotional core is longing to forgive Jung rather than achieved wisdom. A return trip to Rome and Florence — planned for around April–May as a generative research act before writing — is a key milestone, with standing before the Moses in San Pietro in Vincoli as a deliberate compositional preparation. Roy has also identified the photograph of Freud at home beneath a framed Masolino reproduction and beside a plaster cast of the Dying Slave (better understood, he argues, as a "Dreaming Youth" in a threshold state) as a structural hub connecting the Freud, Masolino, and Michelangelo threads.
Roy has been developing a rich theoretical framework connecting T.S. Eliot's "presence of the past" (Tradition and the Individual Talent), McLuhan's acoustic/visual space distinction, Renaissance painters' simultaneous depiction of multiple temporal registers within unified perspectival fields, and Freud's dream theory. Ruskin is read against this framework as a failure of Eliotic double vision — capable only of elegiac temporal structure. The OLLI course and podcast will argue this temporal consciousness is a universal human capacity found across non-European traditions, reframing the Renaissance as a concentrated local instance rather than the origin of Western civilization.
Additional intellectual threads in active development: a Proust-Ruskin essay contrasting Ruskin as Dominican (systematic, didactic) and Proust as Franciscan (enacting rather than explaining), with the Elstir studio passages and the opera house scene as key Proustian sites; connections between Freud's id (das Es), Kerouac's "IT," Proust's la petite phrase, and the dominant seventh chord's suspended resolution; and a Freudian/formal analysis of Coltrane's Giant Steps and A Love Supreme.
Roy is researching the Catasto — the 1427 Florentine tax declaration system — in connection with the Tribute Money fresco and Florentine fiscal history. Key scholarly resources include Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber's Tuscans and Their Families, D.V. Kent and F.W. Kent's Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence, and Eckstein's The District of the Green Dragon. The original portate are held at the Archivio di Stato in Florence.
For Italy travel, Roy departs from Medford (MFR) but regularly drives to SFO or PDX for better transatlantic connections. He strongly prefers FCO for departure due to reliability; FLR and MXP are acceptable arrival airports. He is open to open-jaw ticketing. His workflow is to use Going.com or Google Flights for fare alerts, then bring candidates to Claude for routing analysis. He prefers Swiss Air via Zurich as a transfer experience. Roy is planning a future multi-week trip including Florence, Rome, and Padua (intending to overnight for the Scrovegni Chapel, having regretted passing through without stopping on previous trips to Venice).
Earlier context
Roy developed his Freud/Moses project through an extended collaborative session treating Freud as a patient — using that conceit to excavate biographical, psychological, and cultural layers including the Julius II timber-throwing incident, the recursive structure of mercy from Julius to Michelangelo to the statue, and Freud's published anonymity as a marker of the essay's joke structure. He explored Peter Swales' 1982 piece "Freud, Minna Bernays, and the Conquest of Rome" as important pre-trip reading to establish where his argument is original.
Roy wrote and refined an Atlas Obscura submission about accidentally entering the Galleria Borghese alone and spending sixty seconds in Room 8 (the Silenus Room) with major Caravaggios including David with the Head of Goliath — developing the piece around Benjaminian aura, the solo traveler's dissociative heightened perception, and Caravaggio's biography as parallel fugitive narrative. He plans a longer podcast episode on the same material.
Roy has a deep relationship with the late Carol Bly (formerly married to Robert Bly, a member of a small online writers' circle Roy belonged to), whose craft advice shaped his development: never share work-in-progress with family; ground fiction in developmental stage psychology (Erikson, Kohlberg, Kegan); the "one more invention" principle. Roy's own aesthetic sensibility runs darker than Carol's redemptive register, closer to Chekhov.
Long-term background
Roy has decades of independent travel experience in Italy, beginning at 18 after Kerouac's On the Road inspired him to travel through Europe with a backpack and journal. He has a graduate-level humanities background with deep fluency in art history (Florentine Renaissance, Flemish, Impressionist), Victorian intellectual culture, literary modernism (Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Proust, James), psychoanalytic theory, and intellectual history. He thinks in cross-disciplinary connections, prefers exploratory intellectual dialogue over structured exposition, and consistently contributes original analytical observations rather than receiving received opinion. He identifies as both Freudian and Jungian in theoretical orientation. He has personal photographs of Florentine terracotta roof tiles taken from the top of Giotto's campanile, and has had a formative "reverse Stendhal" experience at the Piazzale Michelangelo — outward and collective rather than inward — which now functions as a permanent perceptual lens rather than a repeatable event.

Ever hear of Pascal's Wager?

Pascal was a mathematician. It's a kind of a joke. According to Pascal, everyone has something of value on the table on on the big question: Does God Exist.

If you bet yes, your winnings are infinite as you will be rewarded with eternal salvation. Your potential loss is the inconveniences of the religious life.

If you bet no, your winnings are a finite gain, lifetime free of guilt, shame, and restrictions on simple pleasures. Potential loss: infinite, eternal damnation.

Long before Pascal, dante sort of raises the question in Canto XIX of Paradiso, He asks the Eagle of Justice what justice is there for a good peasant living along the remote shores of the Indus river being punished when he had no way of knowing that such a game was being played elsewhere.

The Eagle dodges the question.

When I was a boy, I asked my mom something like that question on behalf of those living outside of Christiandom.

My mom said, "They will be given their chance."

I let it go at that. What else can one do?

So what go me thinking about this? Ok, I'm reading a very good book on critical art theory called "Vermeer's Wager." The wager revolves about meaning and truth observable in certain Vermeer painting. You can either approach the painting as conveying truths about the human and spiritual experience, or you can take the position that the objects in the painting are merely the normal representation of Flemish 15th Century domestic life. The mousetrap in the corner is just that, a mousetrap. Has nothing to do with a metaphor invented by St. Augustine.

I'm betting on St. Augustine and Vermeer. What do I have to loose?
.

My rating talk show hosts:
1. Letterman, I miss him. Goofy, but knew how to step back and listen to his guest.
2. Crraig Fregusen, miss him too. Always goofy, but was a secret empath, you saw that in his interview with Desmond Tutu. They laughed together.
3. Arsenio Hall. Long gone, but way underrated. He too was a good listener and interviewer. Had more black guests and artists than anyone else and took a lot of flack for it.
4. Cobert, the best one now, but not for long. He's getting canned to curry favor with the right who hate his stream of Trump jokes. I never stay up past the monologue. His interviews are shallow, always jumping in in the middle of his guests' storytelling. Not actively listening. Great writers, and gags for the opening monologues. More blatantly performative than letterman, who had the gift of the understaetment. Colbert does physical humor, likes to mug and make faces and play with his glasses for the effect. Letterman never needed that. Conan was another who was too perfomative, too physical in the opening stand-up.
Jay Leno. Silly Jay. I still hold it against him that network executives at CBS chose him over Letterman, and that later he came back to help push Conan under the bus.
Carson, not ranking him last. No at all. He defined the genre, and that makes him "the great one", but if he were on today, it would be clear that genre has left him behind.

An Ekphrastic, by me:

The distance between Jerusalem and Jaffa is 42 miles.

According to Masollino, that long walk

did not deter St. Peter, from warping time

.

and space:

.

Resurrecting dead Tabitha,

in Jaffa, and also

Healing the cripple

at Jerusalem’s temple gate,

Simultaneous in that Florentine piazza,

where, in the far background,

just this side of the vanishing point,

someone’s ape crawls to the end of his tether

on an upper room's window ledge.

.

A minute detail so faint not likely noticed

by the Carmelite monks and nuns

in the Brancacci Chapel's

Quattrocento half light.

.

The question remains for psychoanalysis:

Of all pictures, why did Freud put down his cigar,

pick up a hammer, then drive that nail

to hang these miracles on his his parlor wall

at 19 Berggassee, the year of the Gentiles' Lord, 1910.

Random note exhumed from under other random notes on my desk:
"When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine
That's amore
Bells will ring ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling
And you will sing "Vita bella"