Lloyd Bowers was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1952, graduated from Furman University in 1976, and has lived in Charleston, South Carolina since 2002.
The Results of Polar Bear Research is Lloyd's first novel and was published in 2007. Lloyd's next book, Keep These in the Family, is a collection of twelve stories and was published in 2010.
"I grew up in the South," says Lloyd. "The Southern Appalachians is a sort of fixed foot in my life, and the summer-time is a great time to gravitate unpredictably in social settings."
"Freedom is a Public Utility, published 2014, developed from the discovery of a stash of old family letters, dated 1812 to 1857, mailed to my great-great-grandfather John Siegling, who emigrated from Erfurt, Germany, and settled in Charleston in 1820. That he was en route, or 'unterwegs,' for five years impressed me.
"Divide the Country! was published February, 2020. It reflects my concern about the disunity, and even partisan hatred, that plagues the U.S."
To recap, the Reformation in Germany challenged important presumptions that members of the Western Church had heretofore accepted as sacrosanct. It overturned the authority of the Pope and Church Councils, and established the Bible as the primary interpreter of the Lord's intentions and character.
I have studied the history of Germany in the period leading up the Reformation, and wondered why the Reformation took so long to get rolling? Informed people knew that corruption, nepotism, and greed fed the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church—more or less like the biblical history of the Israelites, or any other great human institution, for that matter: Its leaders progress from exploiting the perks of the office to actually perverting the intentions of that office—just gradually so that no one will notice.
My interest in Martin Luther started after I graduated from college and started working for my dad's company. At that time, the Public Broadcasting Service ran a program called PBS Saturday Night at the Movies, introduced with the music of Modest Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition. I got my first viewing of Fritz Lang, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and many others in that glorious hierarchy from watching PBS Saturday Night.
In the Summer of 2005, a few days before I had to leave Erfurt, Germany, I stopped at a bookstore to find something to read for the trip home. I saw a book that looked interesting—titled Stadt-Bau- Geschichte by Dr. Thomas Nitz. I picked it up and put it in my rucksack to read on the long flight home. In English, the title means "City, Architecture, History". The undertitle reads "Development of a city, as seen by its architecture."
I don't remember any longer when I came across The Lüscher Color Test. I remember that the film-critic Donald Spoto mentioned Color Test in his book The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, about the film-director from England. For his movies, Hitchcock always chose the colors of clothes that he wanted his actresses to wear, and Spoto picked up on the psychological premises that guided Hitchcock's decisions.
Leadership basically means that you take responsibility for the actions and the results of something. At the end of the day, you stand under the gun for all that happens. You get either heaps of praise or all the blame. Sometimes, you only have to take responsibility for your own actions. At other times, other people make you responsible for their actions—or you and everyone around you bails out of responsibility and lets a third party take the blame and assume leadership.
Presidential elections have begun to bore me. I did vote. I wouldn't have missed it for anything, but I am also mature enough to know that the 2024 Election stands out as hardly more than a blip in the course of history—just another year in America's Political League Championship—hardly different from America's football or basketball championships. All of the players have been repeatedly vetted to do their jobs. They celebrate their victory until the next contest.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) shares the fate of most famous literary figures—that few people actually read them. In the case of Shaw, they may remember "The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain" and "I could have danced all night," from the musical My Fair Lady, based on Shaw's play Pygmalion, and they may also remember the opera The Chocolate Soldier by Oscar Straus, based on Shaw's play Arms and the Man; but active knowledge of his work resides in no more than three percent of people in any country, Britain or the U.S.
This article appeared in the German-language newspaper, Die Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), based in Zürich, Switzerland, on the 18th of November. Its self-apparent title, refers to President-elect Donald Trump and his advisor Curtis Yarvin—named in the article as Trump's "dunkler Einflüsterer", or "dark whisperer", suggesting a mysterious confidential-advisor whom no one else knows.
This article, "Feuer frei auf das System!" (Take aim at the system!), appeared December 1st in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper. It uses an image, called a "still" in the business, from the 1968 movie Once Upon a Time in the West, starring Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson, and directed by Sergio Leone, already famous for his other "Spaghetti Westerns", (Leone was an Italian who shot movies in the desert of Southern Spain.) such as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and For a Few Dollars More—also shot in Spain with Clint Eastwood and Lee van Cleef.
This article "Eine Zukunft hat der Liberalismus nur in der Allianz mit den Grünen" (Liberalism can only achieve its goals in an alliance with the Green Party) appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper in November. The text of the article consists of an interview with an American historian named Alan Kahan who lives and works mostly in France. His book Freedom from Fear appeared in 2023, with the undertitle: an Incomplete History of Liberalism.
I caught a quote on Facebook from a striving author J. Adam Snyder. Reacting presumably to the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 Presidential Election, Snyder said, "Politics is a game played by the rich with the lives of the poor." His words carry a false gravitas and do not stand out in the fields of left-wing rhubarbs as anything significant, just overblown browbeating.
