My World and Welcome to It

    


UPDATE: This post was last updated 4:15 pm, Feb 21, 2025.

This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in the Algonquin Hotel in the 1930s, and I made my own pilgrimage there once in my youth to have drink in the bar and imagine my favorites — Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and Thurber — at play in black tie. The place felt empty and sad, darker in the afternoon of a day on which I had already made the obligatory elevator ride to the top of the World Trade Center. All things come to an end one way or another. Except maybe for the stuff that can be secreted in a box and hidden deep in something big that may be excavated from the rubble to come.

The Algonquin Roundtable as captured by Hirschfeld and as rewritten by the New York Times

Here’s how this branch of Undernet Black works. The center portal will always be the current issue of the reborn publication called The Instapunk Times. I will try to update daily, but you all know how that goes. The rest will take you to places in parts of life that are not based on the steamy world of politics. Every issue will be archived and accessible in case you’ve missed anything you want to catch up on 

Some of the other boxes will be regular though not constant features, but won’t be updated every day. Usually, since you’re being taken at times to the icky nasty OverNet, you will also have the opportunity to see where the starting point I give you leads. 

Like everything else it’s all a work in progress. Hope you like what you find here.

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