It’s between a US Senator who served many terms and was involved in some major legislation (that bears his name) or a Nobel-winning Economist. So, no one that 99% of the planet has ever heard of. I will not comment on whether these individuals fell in the “famous” or “infamous” category.
the cormorant,
glistening & dripping,
must air dry
before it’s a bird again;
humans cramp in the pool.
cymbals crash &
horns blow, a dragon weaves up-street:
winter festivities!
No. I try to see wherever I’m at as being as good as any other place I’ve been. And, of course, it is — only my perceptions change and can drive value judgements. The places and the peoples are just different. If one starts ranking and rating places, one can kill the ability to see what is beautiful and spectacular about a particular place. If a place didn’t have redeeming features, people wouldn’t live there. And, by the way, if people don’t live there, that’s probably my favorite place on earth.
of all things for which
“just a little is enough:”
1.) human beings
There are cities that grow upon cities, piling them up and spreading them out; amoeba-like false feet reaching down the cold run corridors of transit Markets grow up through the cracks - some vast and hardy tumors of commerce while others are little card table kiosks kicked into corners The view becomes uniform & undifferentiated - like an ocean, sprawling to infinity in all directions; more complex than the sea but equal in its dispiriting sameness In some room or another, in that vast repository of rooms, everything that can happen is happening -- loving, killing, praying, torturing, healing, and so on Rooms are the city's cells; the buildings - its organs; the neighborhoods - its systems; and we are but molecules in the city's scheme.
blood runs to the gutters, flowing and whirling, a sluicing pink juice that circles and sloshes down the drain most did not feel the missing blood, but it came from each and every one of them - the locals, the exiled, the travelers, and the ne'er-do-wells - all bled into the city, and something grew from that protein slurry most contributed only drips & drops, but some hemorrhaged, giving their liquid selves for something they couldn't anticipate
5.) Jean-Jacques Rousseau: This French philosopher is probably best known for his ideas about social contract in governance. At least that’s what I knew him for when I was a student of the social sciences.
Unlike the Marquis de Sade, whose philosophy and sexual proclivities were intimately intertwined, one wouldn’t necessarily guess that Rousseau was a masochist into getting spanked by dominant women from his political theories. Although, all interest in governance is about who holds the whip and what the whipee gets in exchange for being subjected to it — figuratively speaking, of course.
4.) Peggy Guggenheim: This heiress to an 
artistic empire had a legendary libido — and not just in her youth. What interests people is not so much that she was sexually promiscuous, but that age didn’t seem to curb her desire for sexual conquest.
Even though her memoir is filled with discussion of her sexual dalliances, she is still more well known for discovering important 20th century artists and saving art from thieving Nazis.
3.) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: One of the all-time greatest musical minds, his genius for composition may have helped to keep him from being known for his scatological obsession.
This may seem far-fetched (not to mention grosser than the other proclivities discussed herein) but there’s even a Wikipedia page about it — so it must be true.
I knew from discussion of the movie “Amadeus” (which I, sadly, haven’t seen) that there was something unexpectedly scandalous about Mozart, but I never would have guess this was it.
2.) King Edward VII: It may be well-established that King Edward had some wild times, but the fact that he had custom sex furniture made tells you just how all-consuming his passions were.
1.) H.G. Wells: The author of “War of the Worlds,” “The Island of Doctor Moreau,” and “The Time Machine,” Wells was all for free love, long before there was a free love movement. He is said to have had sex atop bad reviews. While I knew him as an early sci-fi author who famously predicted the atomic bomb (Physicist, Leo Szilard, cited Wells’ “The World Set Free” as an inspiration), he was — unknown to me — legendarily promiscuous.
Taken in Himachal Pradesh in June of 2015
