Martial Interest

Just why did a gentle lamb like Hopper begin reading about the Civil War, followed by World War II, to the tune of two dozen books and two hundred hours of reading?

There’s a simple answer to this.

A few years ago I was strolling through an unfamiliar library, browsing along until my eyes fell upon a seemingly random title – and stopped dead in my tracks:

An American Iliad: The Story of the Civil War

Never read it (yet), but that juxtapositioning of Homer’s Iliad with the American Civil War made some little metal ratchet in my cerebellum go click and I haven’t forgotten it since.

(One day I’m going to compile a list of a hundred words that I find, for lack of a better term, “neat.”  Then I’ll plug them into a simple BASIC program that will spit two out at a time.  What odd, unusual, and eclectic ideas will those word pairs spawn in my mind?  Adrenaline is literally shooting through my veins as I type this …)