For Respondents Nagle and Lane:
I am somewhat crestfallen over your desire to deny me the opportunity to express a truthful observation in a quasi-personal response to my original story.
As a former teacher of writing at Los Angeles City College, I always stressed that young writers should be innovative and honest in their reporting of events in their lives. Avoid cliches in both words and ideas.
People with pedantic, stentorian notions of appropriateness and correctness should avoid trying to make the universe fit into their restricted space.
I encourage anyone to include both Apollonian and Dionysian principles in all aspects of their lives, including their writing on serious topics, though in varying degrees.
Adana, Turkey, has remained the peak experience of my life since I spent a temporary tour of military duty there in summer 1964. I found the Turks that I lived among to be the least racist people ever. That observation naturally carried over to the women ---Moslems all, I should remind you---that I encountered there.
I don't apologize for making the reference to the women in Baton Rouge as being the "sexiest bunch" I've met since Turkey. Now, if I had made an analogy of Baton Rouge with Gibbons' observation about the German women associated with the Roman Empire in its heyday, then there would be some cause for complaint.
By the way, both Apollo and Dionysus were African gods adopted by the Greeks and Romans. (Check Frank Snowden's work as well as the older work of Herodotus, in Book II, of his History.) I like the idea of co-opting Nietzsche and modern Euro-Americans in falling back on African ("felix Africa") aesthetics.
Why anyone would freak out over what was actually a phatic interlude in a fairly heavy discussion, I don't know. It brings to mind Engels' (of Marx and Engels) complaint about the "rosin Scheizers" of 19th Century German academia. (It would really be "inappropriate" for me to translate this term. So look it up for yourself --including Engels' original statement --in a work that escapes my memory right now.)

Meanwhile, I would like to apologize to the real scholars of the Maroon-Seminole variety. In my response of November 17, I tried to amend Chuck Siler's statement that St. Malo was the only documented maroon leader in U. S. history. I mentioned some of the black Seminole leaders ---Alligator, Cheechoter,and Bledsoe. That really should have been Alligator, Abraham (or Ibrahim), Chechoter, and Cudjoe. (Most of this stuff I do from a memory bank that's been ovetaxed for the last 30 or 40 years. But I highly recommend William Mannings's "The Five Civilized Tribes," and A. A. Whitman's (the black Whitman's) epic poem "Twasintha's Seminoles: Or The Rape of Florida" for a loving account of the marriage of black African and Creek Indian to form the Seminole tribe.
A friendly last reminder to both critics Nagle and Lane: "As you travel along life's highway/ let this ever be your goal:/ Keep your eye upon the donut/ And not upon the hole."