Category Archives: america

Christmas Around the World

Every year during my childhood, our post box was graced with an 80 page volume of one of the World Book’s Christmas Around the World series, a gift, I think, from my globetrotting grandparents. Although somewhat dated and with some breathlessly misleading information (the Spain entry insists that Spaniards eat loads of turkey for Navidad, but that it’s stuffed with garlic and glazed with olive oil, and the Washington volume seems to describe a city that hasn’t existed for a good century or so, and possibly never did), they’re still wonderful glimpses into the habits of other countries at Yuletide. At the very least they inspire curiosity, which I’d like to think has something to do with why I can vouch for how Christmas is passed in the locales of at least five of the books on the below list. I hunted in vain for a decent list online, and failing to find one, decided to post the below, which I’ve verified with family members who still have the books. I have a few of them in my possession myself (pictured).  It seems the series went on for another decade, till at least 2003, when probably — like so many other good things in the past — someone decided that the internet did a better job with “information.” But those who had these colorful volumes know the truth. A reader who knows the series very well writes in to note that the books “also arrived with an advent calendar, small ornament, and recipe cards. A family could celebrate Christmas around the world!”

  • 1993 — Germany
  • 1992 — Russia
  • 1991 — Brazil
  • 1990 — The Philippines
  • 1989 — Poland 
  • 1988 — Washington, D.C.
  • 1987 — The Holy Land
  • 1986 — Denmark
  • 1985 — Ireland 
  • 1984 — New England
  • 1983 — Spain
  • 1982 — Austria
  • 1981 — The Netherlands
  • 1980 — France
  • 1979 — Italy
  • 1977 — Scandinavia 
  • 1978 — Britain
  • 1976 — Mexico 

Given the paucity of information out there about the series in general, for the completist I’ll add the below list. I don’t actually own any of these (although I wish I had the Belgium one, at least), but these are the fruits of the some internet labor, mainly thanks to ThriftBooks.com. There appear to be a couple of duplicates, or possibly some of the copyright dates are wrong.

  • 2003 — Puerto Rico 
  • 2002 — Belgium
  • 2001 — Scotland
  • 2000 — Greece
  • 1999 — Finland
  • 1999 — Australia
  • 1998 — The Phillipines
  • 1997 — Ukraine
  • 1997 — Colonial and Early America 
  • 1996 — American Southwest
  • 1995 — ?
  • 1994 — Switzerland 
  • 1994 — Canada

On Neutrality and Great Powers

From Henry Adams’ Education of Henry Adams:

Minister Adams felt the same compulsion. He bluntly told Russell that while he was “willing to acquit” Gladstone of “any deliberate intention to bring on the worst effects,” he was bound to say that Gladstone was doing it quite as certainly as if he had one; and to this charge, which struck more sharply at Russell’s secret policy than at Gladstone’s public defence of it, Russell replied as well as he could:–

… His lordship intimated as guardedly as possible that Lord Palmerston and other members of the Government regretted the speech, and Mr. Gladstone himself was not disinclined to correct, as far as he could, the misinterpretation which had been made of it. It was still their intention to adhere to the rule of perfect neutrality in the struggle, and to let it come to its natural end without the smallest interference, direct or otherwise. But he could not say what circumstances might happen from month to month in the future. I observed that the policy he mentioned was satisfactory to us, and asked if I was to understand him as saying that no change of it was now proposed. To which he gave his assent….

Minister Adams never knew more. He retained his belief that Russell could be trusted, but that Palmerston could not. This was the diplomatic tradition, especially held by the Russian diplomats.


Let’s imagine Yellen had a personal financial interest in Russia holding on to Ukraine and had made public comments to that effect, and update the passage for these Top Gun times.


Ambassador Oksana Markarova felt the same compulsion. She bluntly told Blinken that while she was “willing to acquit” Yellen of “any deliberate intention to bring on the worst effects,” she was bound to say that Yellen was doing it quite as certainly as if she had one; and to this charge, which struck more sharply at Blinken’s secret policy than at Yellen’s public defense of it, Blinken replied as well as he could:–

… The Secretary intimated as guardedly as possible that President Biden and other members of the Government regretted the speech, and Ms. Yellen himself was not disinclined to correct, as far as she could, the misinterpretation which had been made of it. It was still their intention to adhere to the rule of perfect neutrality in the struggle, and to let it come to its natural end without the smallest interference, direct or otherwise. But he could not say what circumstances might happen from month to month in the future. I observed that the policy he mentioned was satisfactory to us, and asked if I was to understand him as saying that no change of it was now proposed. To which he gave his assent….

Ambassador Markarova never knew more. She retained her belief that Blinken could be trusted, but that Biden could not. This was the diplomatic tradition, especially held by the EU diplomats.

An excerpt from Octavio Paz’s “Mexico and the United States”

‘Today, the United States faces very powerful enemies, but the mortal danger comes from within: not from Moscow but from that mixture of arrogance and opportunism, blindness and short-term Machiavellianism, volubility and stubbornness which has characterized its foreign policies during recent years and which remind us in an odd way of the Athenian state in its quarrel with Sparta. To conquer its enemies, the United States must first conquer itself — return to its origins. Not to repeat them but to rectify them: the “others” — the minorities inside as well as the marginal countries and nations outside — do exist. Not only do we “others” make up the majority of the human race, but also each marginal society, poor though it may be, represents a unique and precious version of mankind. If the United States is to recover fortitude and lucidity, it must recover itself, and to recover itself it must recover the “others” — the outcasts of the Western World.’

Octavio Paz, ‘Mexico and the United States,’ first published in the New Yorker of 17 September 1979.

Leer en el idioma original:

«Hoy los Estados Unidos se enfrentan a enemigos muy poderosos pero el peligro mortal no está fuera sino dentro: no es Moscú sino esa mezcla de arrogancia y oportunismo, ceguera y maquiavelismo a corto plazo, volubilidad y terquedad, que ha caracterizado a su política exterior en los últimos años y que recuerda extrañamente a la del Estado ateniense en su disputa con Esparta. Para vencer a sus enemigos, los Estados Unidos tienen primero que vencerse a sí mismos: regresar a sus orígenes. Pero no para repetirlos sino para rectificarlos: el otro y los otros —las minorías del interior tanto como los pueblos y naciones marginales del exterior— existen. No sólo somos la mayoría de la especia sino que cada sociedad marginal, por más pobre que sea, representa una versión única y preciosa de la humanidad. Si los Estados Unidos han de recobrar la entereza y la lucidez, tienen que recobrarse a sí mismos y para recobrarse a sí mismos tienen que recobrar a los otros: a los excluidos del Occidente.»

Happy (belated) birthday, Hunter Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson, who was from Louisville, would have turned 79 this week. With the Republican National Convention in full swing and on the cusp of a truly ludicrous election, we need him now more than ever. The Paris Review’s lengthy interview from 2000 is worth re-reading, and quotes the following from 1988’s Generation of Swine:

. . . I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than from anything else in the English Language—and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.

This week, the New Yorker ran a satirical bit that started as such:

The 2016 Republican National Convention became embroiled in another controversy on Tuesday, as Biblical experts accused Republicans of plagiarizing the entire Convention scenario from the Book of Revelation.

So HST’s ghost still walks with us.  I wish he had stuck around for another decade or so. There will be much unfinished business to come, it seems, in the matter of the “autopsy of the American dream,” a job at which he excelled.

You All Want a Pepsi-Coke?

I’ve always enjoyed dialects, and I’ve had the good fortune to live in a few places with strong dialect areas, from Torlak to Veneto to Cantonese. But what about American dialects? Are we too young of a nation to really have them, as our transatlantic cousins might assert? I don’t think so.

I had fun with this dialect quiz today. Here’s my result, which put me squarely as a southerner, even if I don’t have an accent.

Screen Shot 2014-06-07 at 12.59.43 PM

A Paducahan first told me that “you all” marks someone as a Kentuckian — here’s some statistical proof —  and the quiz reflects that. Each question seems to have a couple of very rare words or phrases that will mark you as being from a certain area. (This goes beyond the usual coke/pop/soda or sub/hoagie/grinder marker. Some of the words for tractor trailer or, as I said as a kid, 18-wheeler, truly baffled me.) For example, I always heard my North Carolinian grandmother call a rainstorm while the sun was shining “the devil beating his wife behind the door” — maybe not native to Kentucky, but a Southernism at any rate.

I got to the quiz via this write-up in the Washington Post about Joshua Katz’s map of where people say soda, coke and pop. I’m not exactly sure why the Post is running the feature now, when it seems like Katz’s maps came out a year ago, but they’re a lot of fun anyway.

Here’s a competing map and post. I think “dope” for a sweet carbonated beverage has likely died out, but I seem to remember hearing adults talk about it when I was a kid — “and over in Virginia, they call it dope.” One usage that gets omitted that I often heard in Eastern Kentucky is the combined “Pepsi-coke” — Pepsi being the brand name, “coke” being the marker for what kind of beverage it is. Then there is also the term “cocola”, which I could never get a read on — was the first syllable short for “Coke”? In the comments, the discussion about how to offer a stranger a non-alcoholic drink in abstemious Virginia is pretty fascinating.  Doubtlessly how we talk says a lot about who settled the area that we call home and what their — and our — values are. (Incidentally, why do so many southerners — including Louisvillians — get so revolted at the word ‘pop’? Quaint, yes, but nothing to get, uh, fizzed up about.)

Take the quiz yourself! There’s a longer form one here that looks like Dr Vaux’s original one that the NYT one was based on, but the maps have been disabled, so less fun. There are more questions, and more sample answers (including the aforementioned “cocola”), however, if you want to get an idea of what people all over the world who speak English call things like bank machines, water bugs, and sub sandwiches.

Sorry, Charlie: Deep Parables of Consumer Capitalism

charlie tunaThere’s no age quite as awkward as the semi-pubescent 11-14 age range which corresponds to what we now know as the middle school years. My own awkwardness at that age can probably best be encapsulated by a rundown of my lunchtime eating habits: every day, a can of StarKist albacore tuna, some saltines, and a can of V-8. (The excess of sodium was probably what caused terrible cankers, I managed to figure out later.) My schoolmates called me “Charlie Tuna,” and I carried in my first grown-up leather wallet a picture not of family, cat or some braces-ridden, underdeveloped girl I had a crush on but rather a magazine cutout of the hipster fish. I dropped the diet after awhile — good taste, indeed, prevailed — but the habit persisted: in post-college years of impecuniousness, I loved a tuna melt under the broiler at home, or a tuna on rye with lettuce and tomato from one of Baltimore’s many fine delis. And in Italy, my British friends, also used to subpar canned fish, and I were awed at what we called “supertuna” — excellent Italian tuna, canned in olive oil — perfect for adding some protein to a fresh salad or plate of pasta pomodoro.

So it was with a mixture of delight and fear when I came across the following passage in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, which I just finished this week, deconstructing the meaning of the cartoon fish and his desire to sacrifice himself. Doc Sportello, the book’s stoned out-private investigator, is hearing an earful from his conspiratorial, and no-less-stoned-out, lawyer, Sauncho Smilax (p. 119 of the Penguin paperback):

“It’s all supposed to be so innocent, upwardly mobile snob, designer shades, beret, desperate to show he’s got good taste, except he’s also dyslexic so he gets ‘good taste’ mixed up with ‘taste good,’ but it’s worse than that! Far, far worse! Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish! Yes! he, he wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won’t be happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking us on the shelves of Supermarket Amerika, and subconsciously the horrible thing is, is we want them to do it. . . .”

“Saunch, wow, that’s . . .”

“It’s been on my mind. And another thing. Why is there Chicken of the Sea but no Tuna of the Farm?”

“Um . . . ” Doc actually beginning to think about this.

“And don’t forget,” Sauncho went on to remind him darkly, “that Charles Manson and the Vietcong are also named Charlie.”

Dark reminders, indeed, and one of the book’s few mentions of the Vietcong, which, has caused some Pynchonites, who’ve very accurately tracked the chronology of the novel to the spring of 1970, to raise an eyebrow or two. The Cambodian Campaign would have been getting underway about a month after the book’s start date of March 24, 1970.

Back to the topic at hand, the idea of the animal who wants to be consumed is a familiar trope in advertising: at least 15 years ago, friends and I chuckled at the image outside Señor Chicken’s in Northern Virginia — a cartoon bird serving up a plate of, guess what, Peruvian-style chicken. Billboards near the old Fischer’s pork-processing plant in my hometown used to feature pigs serving up bacon from “the bacon makin’ people,” and ads of cows serving burgers seem ambiguously ubiquitous somehow — now cleverly riffed on by Chick-Fil-A. And what about the Kool-Aid man, who invites us to drink him with his basso profondo “oh yeah!”?

What Saunch’s rant adds to the adman’s trope is the notion of “suicidal branch loyalty” and intense paranoia. We must like, even desire, late capital’s endless conquest and consumption; everyone is to be chopped up and stacked up for ease of consumption: “not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist!” I vividly recall in the mid-nineties hearing about college students from MacLean voluntarily getting A&W and other brand logo tattoos. (At least this company is offering their bod-mod-willing employees a raise for it.) And as always for Pynchon, there’s a nefarious They, and the flesh that They intend to extract from their unlucky creditors will be far more than a pound. Everyone will be caught, thrown aboard, dredged out of safety and fed into an all-consuming mouth — to what ends, we humble prey are not to know.

But far from being the fantasy of a man whose greatest work contains a series of Proverbs for Paranoids, tuna harvesting in 2014 is deeply controversial and linked to all sorts of unsavory effects of late capitalism: floating canneries in Southeast Asia operate under heated controversy and allegations of slave labor, the Mediterranean’s tuna stocks are rapidly depleting, and Mitsubishi is apparently hoarding a vast amount of the world’s dwindling stock — a fact explained to me in hushed tones and over tuna sandwiches by a lawyer in an office in the City of London a few years ago. Not only is StarKist not American-owned anymore, its Korean parent company seems to be up to funny business.

Pynchon’s metaphor — Charlie as spokes-fish for an all-consuming, self-destructive life cycle — looks right, and so the tuna of my early adolescence is to be stuffed into an ever-fattening file labeled “is nothing sacred?”. Perhaps, as he put it, using another excellent culinary metaphor, “paranoia’s the garlic in life’s kitchen, right, you can never have too much.”

As an antidote to the depressing reality of Charlie Tuna as the ultimate symbol of industrialized, exploitative, tastes-bad and in-bad-taste food I give you Anthony Bourdain and his Catalonian guide rhapsodizing over some excellent, locally-canned, and non-exploitative seafood in the home of Cervantes — who, incidentally, knew that there was such a thing as too much garlic.

Review of Peter Hessler’s River Town

Fuling, where Peter Hessler served
Fuling, where Peter Hessler served

Peter Hessler was a Peace Corps volunteer in Sichuan in 1996-1998 and his book chronicling his life there, River Town, is an excellent Peace Corps memoir. Even though I can’t think of a place more different from Macedonia, where I served, than China, he still has many of the same or similar experiences living in a remote, rural and developing place. River Town is also highly readable; one can knock it out in a day or two, despite coming in at almost 400 pages. Hessler is a dedicated teacher, even if he is still finding the voice that is so clear in later books like Country Driving: his tendency to mimic repeated Chinese adjectives can annoy, as does his repetition of turns of phrase that he himself admits are awkward and clichéd.  Despite his differences from most of the volunteers I served with — I didn’t know volunteers who went to church, for starters —  the experience is broad enough to resonate with Peace Corps volunteers removed by a decade and thousands of kilometers.

For these reasons, River Town succeeds more as a Peace Corps memoir than as a straight-up China travelogue. Hessler mentions how the one group he connects with the least are the new moneyed young males, arrogant, self-assured, and decked out in garish styles. Macedonia had a similar class — pretty boys with shaved armpits, garish faux-designer sweaters and fast cars, who would eagerly give you a lecture on how much money you could make doing whatever your Peace Corps job was back in America. Like Hessler, none of our group were really friends with this chunk of society. I’m sure large chunks of the rest of the developing world have their analogues as well, even if the stakes may be far higher in ever-growing China.

The book is not without its flaws. Despite being the ultimate Peace Corps book, meticulously chronicling the whole two years of hardships similar to volunteers all over, what I ultimately didn’t like about it was that Hessler’s problems all seemed easily resolved, leaving perhaps some vague sense of discomfort but nothing more.  Largely, his experience is one of positive, self-enriching activities. He rises early to write every day. He diligently masters Chinese without major frustration and speaks exclusively in it. He goes to church and give the church money. He meets crazy desperate women and whores, and nobly turns them down. He participates in macho Chinese drinking, but realizes it is wrong and boring. He cheerfully gets his students through Shakespeare and other English classics, even getting them to perform plays. He is a dedicated runner whose only issue seems to be grappling with American competitiveness.

Too much of this can make the author come across as sanctimonious at times. He tangles with all manner of foreigner-in-a-developing-country issues, but he almost always rationally and calmly makes the right choice, and even when he doesn’t, the consequences are banal: he almost gets into a fight with an ignorant villager, but just walks away after humiliating the guy. I was cheered to see that even the best volunteers almost got into fights with annoying villagers after a year and some of taunts and unwanted attention, but it might’ve been interesting to read about the Peace Corps volunteer who didn’t always make the right choice or who made bad friends.

Although I wasn’t expecting Hessler, who is largely realistic about the goals of his service, to adopt a pro-democracy viewpoint of either the humanitarian interventionist or neoconservative stripe, his judgment did seem off-kilter at least once, less for political reasons than the personal. But the personal is telling: at one point he meets a pro-democracy student whose English name is “Rebecca” and he dismisses him as a loser with a girl’s name, and after giving him an old Newsweek writes the kid off.  After a brief discussion about how this dumpy loser didn’t fit his image of the Tiananmen protesters as “noble characters,” he disappears from the book. Instead, he prefers the nobility of the party:

He was the only student who has anything like a dissident, and I remembered how I had imagined those figures before coming to Fuling. I had always assumed that they were noble characters — charismatic, intelligent, farsighted, brave. Perhaps that was the way it had been in 1989, and perhaps it was still like that in the bigger cities; but here in Fuling things were very different. My best students — Soddy, Linda, Armstrong, Aumur; the ones who were charismatic, intelligent, farsighted, and brave — those were the ones who had been recruited long ago as Party Members. If you had any talent you played by the rules; being a Party Member was good for your career, and in any case all of the students seemed to think that it was good to be patriotic in the narrow way that they were told to be. The image I had once had of the Chinese dissident had no reality in Fuling.

All I had was Rebecca — he was the only one, and he was a loser. He was a bad student, and he was socially awkward. He had no friends. He had a girl’s name. Some of these characteristics had conspired to set him apart, and in his bitterness his ideas had undoubtedly swung even further from the Party line. If there were big changes in China’s future, it was hard to imagine them coming from people like Rebecca, or, for that matter, from any of my other students.

I found the above passage recently reproduced on a blog with a strong nationalistic Chinese bent. (That’s nationalist in the present sense, not the 1949 Taiwan/Guomindang sense.) There are several problems with this, not the least of which is that the authors of such blogs using Hessler’s love of a winner to prop up their own idea that the true and good of China belong to the Communist party and that the marginalized and pathetic are ones who resist it. Of course Hessler spends an equal amount of time talking about how sick he is of the party’s ham-fisted attempts at controlling his school and the teachers’ interactions with students, but that is easily overlooked by the selective blogger.

Hessler does make a good point that being a Peace Corps volunteer makes a foreigner automatically marginal and thus attracts the local fringe element. This is definitely true: certainly Peace Corps volunteers attract both good and bad fringe elements. Sometimes the bad ones were the among worst – several of my colleagues and I had experiences with both categories. But most of the volunteers I knew, who were in-country for complex reasons of their own that might’ve included feeling marginal in their own country, always tried to lend a sympathetic ear to the good fringes. In my own town, my good friends Traki and his pal Ace, sons of a laid-off factory worker and a policeman-cum-hog-farmer respectively, were losers with bad grades who had taught themselves English from action movies. They wanted nothing from me but friendship and gave me just that and more in return.

Hessler’s ardent Chinese Communist Party students remind me of my Macedonian students who had what were called vrski — connections, most of which were with that country’s ex-socialist ruling class as well. They were civilized and the most “European” of my students, speaking usually excellent English well before I arrived, and I liked them — but they didn’t need any help. Mostly their parents had arranged decent careers and jobs for them, and they had little interest in things like scholarships to English-speaking universities and journalism clubs.

The students who were interested were indeed the marginalized — the Roma, the orphaned, the refugees. These were the students that eventually did move, get scholarships for their many talents — languages, computer programming, graphic design — and end up living and earning money abroad. Whether living in the West was ultimately to their benefit is perhaps another question, but I never had any doubt that working on the margins of the world I would end up serving the marginalized.

On the Unremarkable Processes of Life

I had a relatively minor surgery last week and thus had more than the usual amount of time to sit around reading, especially about healthcare, medicine, and most of all its incredible rising cost.

From Craig Bowron’s most recent article in the Washington Post comes an excellent meditation on dying in the 21st century, on par with Atul Gawande’s work in the New Yorker.

For most of us living with sidewalks and street lamps, death has become a rarely witnessed, foreign event. The most up-close death my urban-raised children have experienced is the occasional walleye being reeled toward doom on a family fishing trip or a neighborhood squirrel sentenced to death-by-Firestone. The chicken most people eat comes in plastic wrap, not at the end of a swinging cleaver. The farmers I take care of aren’t in any more of a hurry to die than my city-dwelling patients, but when death comes, they are familiar with it. They’ve seen it, smelled it, had it under their fingernails. A dying cow is not the same as a person nearing death, but living off the land strengthens one’s understanding that all living things eventually die.

Somehow the quote ties together a number of disparate threads on life and death in the media recently, from Teju Cole’s comment that drone strikes have given us an empathy gap to the death of a young woman in a lion cage this week and the salt-of-the-earth farmers in John William’s brilliant Stoner (who should get credit for the title).

Bowron has another excellent piece from 2009 online here.

il Kentucky

We’re often curious as to how others see us. To that end, today’s offering is composed of translations from an Italian guidebook to the USA on my home state and city. Factually, it’s largely accurate, with a couple of exceptions (the Louisville Falls Fountain was scrapped 13 years ago), but the amusement for Louisvillians and Kentuckians should come from the nuance. Largely, the Italians give the Commonwealth high marks for natural beauty and traditional culture. Coming from Italy, that’s a high compliment.

**UPDATE**

Upon closer inspection, the book is actually the Italian translation of a UK-published volume, DK Publishing’s USA Eyewitness Travel Guide. Well, although not Italian, it is still foreign, so the basic premise remains, but it’s less fun.

Civil War Cannons

Kentucky

With its passages through the Appalachians and hilly pastures where horses run through acres of bluegrass, Kentucky is one of the most picturesque states in the country. The land in the west is mountainous, and was at one time inhabited by Indians who forcefully resisted settlements of the white colonists. Today Kentucky is known all over the world for its horses and in the area around Lexington you can find many thoroughbred farms. One of racing’s most prestigious events, the Kentucky Derby, takes place in Louisville. The state is also famous for its traditional style of country music. Highway 23 along the eastern border of the state is nicknamed Country Music Highway.

Louisville Sluggers

 

Louisville

Founded near the falls of the Ohio River in 1788, in Louisville (pronounced “Luuavol”) you’ll find one of the most famous horse races in the world, the Kentucky Derby. The Derby is to Louisville what Mardi Gras is to New Orleans or what the Masters is forAugusta: the event around which the whole calendar turns. Since the first Derby in 1975, countless three-year-old horses have run down the track at Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May. Kentucky’s high society turns out in spring dress for the event, with hats and striped cotton suits. The unofficial drink of the day is the mint julep, a mix of bourbon ice, sugar and fresh mint typical of the south. The song “My Old Kentucky Home” is sung as the horses are led to the track for a race that lasts less than two minutes. The winner brings home the coveted trophy, adorned with a silver horseshoe in the form of a “U” — “so that the good luck can’t escape.”

La mia vecchia casa del Kentucky

The nearby Kentucky Derby Museum shows off the history of horse racing and offers a tour of the racetrack Churchill Downs. A couple of blocks from the old downtown by the riverfront, the Louisville Slugger Museum produces the noted baseball bat in a factory marked by a 36-meter-high bat.

The J.B. Speed Art Museum on South 3rd Street offers a grand collection of paintings and Renaissance sculpture. At Riverfront Plaza on the banks of the Ohio River, between Main and Fourth Streets, there are many paddlewheel boats that offer a tour of the area, and a fountain that sprays water 115 meters in the air. The old warehouses that surround the old downtown have been changed into cafes, galleries and stores.

Three kilometers to the northeast of downtown is Cave Hill Cemetery, one of the biggest cemeteries in the United States. Many Louisvillians come just to feed the ducks or to wander on the well-kept lawns. Fifty kilometers southwest of Louisville you can see the federal gold deposit at Fort Knox.

Country Music and Bluegrass

Poa pratensis, field fodder

Like the Mississippi Delta is for the blues, the strip of eastern Kentucky(along with West Virginia) has one of the biggest concentrations of country music artists in America. English, Irish and Scottish immigrants brought with them their ballads, rhythms and Elizabethan instruments, which they used to create a typically American style now called “country,” characterized by rapidly-played violins, an occasional yodel and lyrics about the hard life in the southeastern United States. Highway 23, which goes from Ashland to Pikeville along the eastern border of the state, is nicknamed the “Country Music Highway” to commemorate the number of musicians born along it. The road passes though the birthplaces of Billy Ray Cyrus, Loretta Lynn, Patty Loveless and Dwight Yoakam. The great fields of Kentucky bluegrass inspired a particular kind of country music that bears the same name, which comes from a kind of music played at the end of the ’40s by Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys. The name bluegrass stuck and this style of acoustic folk music is quite popular in the region. The traditional bluegrass instruments are the guitar, mandolin, five-string banjo, bass and Dobro.

If you outlaw whiskey, then only outlaws...

Use and Consumption of Alcohol

Compared to the rest of the country, inhabitants of the south are predominantly teetotalers. Many are Baptists, a religion that disapproves of the consumption of alcohol. In some rural regions, one can find counties, mainly in the mountains, where alcohol cannot be sold or served to the public legally. But the exceptions to this tradition are legendary: producers of “moonshine”, a homemade whisky made from corn, earned their fame as outlaws in the days of Prohibition by hiding from federal agents in the depths of the woods and using their stills only at night – thus the name “moonshine.” Drinking a mint julep on Derby Day in Louisville is local tradition so beloved that local girls begin collecting the traditional silver cups starting at age 12.