I noticed recently that Robert Olen Butler has a page up on Fictionaut. If it’s the real Robert Olen Butler, then that would be pretty cool. I hadn’t really thought of him since a comparative lit class during my first semester of college. The professor I had was obsessed with “A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain” during the time we had to study it. I just re-read it, and I now understand why. At the time, I think I failed to read it for that week’s class. It’s an amazing story about a man near death, who is visited by the ghost of his former friend, Ho Chi Minh. They had known each other in Paris just after the end of World War I. They had seen snow for the first time together.