Agent Palmer

He’s written fiction, non-fiction, and essays about music, death, history and pop culture, but now Chuck Klosterman has turned his attention to villains with I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined), a book published on July 9th, 2013 and reprinted in paperback on July 1st, 2014.

Before we get into the book, let’s first look at the definition of the word villain, a noun. According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, Villain is “a character in a story, movie, etc., who does bad things,” “a person who does bad things,” and “someone or something that is blamed for a particular problem or difficulty.”

Joseph Ferdinand Cheval was a French postman who spent 33 years building Le Palais idéal (the “Ideal Palace”) in Hauterives, France.

The building began in earnest in April 1879, at first with stones from his pocket. It gradually moved to stones in a basket and eventually included a wheelbarrow to move larger stones. It took him 33 years to build the palace, 20 of which were spent on the outer walls alone. From one stone to another along his postal route, he collected them while thinking to himself, “Since Nature is willing to do the sculpture, I will do the masonry and the architecture.”

I have lamented in the past about how Twitter is not Facebook, and I still believe that. I use Facebook for, well, Facebook’s sake, although not much. It’s mainly for the Agent Palmer Facebook page, to keep those fans who “like” that page informed, but rarely beyond that. Twitter, on the other hand, I enjoy as my own personal digital newspaper of sorts, as well as a community of never-ending and ongoing conversations.

But it can be overwhelming with the more than 232 million users, and the large percentage of those that are bots. It can sometimes feel as though you are talking to the wall.