I had meant to post this a week or two ago, but the French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire turned 188 two weeks past. I was reading Baudelaire just before his birthday and I was struck by the fact that I think Baudelaire would have really enjoyed LPR. He was a big supporter of the arts, an artist himself, he loved the idea of arts bleeding into one another, and he loved, above all things, drinking. Not only was he an art critic but frequently artists became the focus of his writing (“The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist shrieks with terror before being overcome.” from “The Artist’s Confiteor”). Also present in his writing is the synthesis of art and revelry. He wrote, in a poem titled “Get Drunk:”

One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing; the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite.
Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk.
And if sometimes you…find that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished, ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird, or clock, ask everything that flies, everything that moans, everything that flows, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird and the clock will all reply: “It is Time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.”

I think Baudelaire would have like LPR.