the blog quebecois

I just got around to reading it, and if you haven't, you should: Not Hillary Clinton's "memoirs," but P.J. O'Rourke's evisceration of same.

Buried in the footnotes of Richard Ellmann's magisterial biography of Oscar Wilde (oh, look it up on amazon.com yourself) is a charming anecdote.

Whatever you might make of Wilde's sleeping arrangements, he seemed like a profoundly nice man. That's rare enough among men with intellectual gifts that it sort of sticks out.

But to the anecdote: On his first (or was it second? Where's amazon.com when you need it?) trip to America, he was the guest of honor at a dinner party in Pittsburgh.

The hostess shyly confessed that she, too, wrote poetry (Wilde was much more famous in the era for his poetry than his plays or novels or aphorisms), but that she would perhaps wait until she passed on before publishing it.

Wilde shook his head: "My dear Madam, do not depend on that. There are no publishers in Heaven."

Tossed off in a footnote. I'd kill to have it chiselled on my headstone.

It was the night before Christmas. The house was very quiet. No creatures were stirring in the house. There weren't even any mice stirring. The stockings had been hung carefully by the chimney. The children hoped that Saint Nicholas would come and fill them.

Via About Last Night channelling Danger Blog! channelling James Thurber channelling Ernest Hemingway channelling Clement Clarke Moore Major Henry Livingston Jr.

Oh, hell. Just click here.

If you want to find a group of people who are full of their own imagined importance, it'd be tough to beat the American Library Association, in high dudgeon over the Patriot Act's provisions to allow the FBI or other agencies to subpeona library borrowing records. Nat Hentoff, the renowned Village Voice columnist and First Amendment absolutist writes on this here. (It's worth clicking on the link just to see the picture of one Marie Bryan, striking what she hopes is a heroic pose amidst the bookracks. She instead looks like she's spying on someone, which in my experience is not an unknown habit in the profession.)

The ALA (and booksellers, as in the Lewinsky case) seems to take the tack that it is some sacred knighthood guarding the public's right to access information, the fight against censorship, etc.

This is plainly not the case. I'll not quarrel with private bookstores choosing to stock the books that they do; but public libraries are notorious for slanting their purchases and sticking inconvenient arguments into some of the dustier corners of the Dewey Decimal System.

But that's neither here nor there. Ms. Bryan and her comrades don't enjoy priest/penitent or doctor/patient confidentiality. They deal with public documents and if they are germane to police or prosecutors' investigations, then they must be turned over.

If Ms. Bryan disagrees, she's free to take her chances in court, but the feds don't need the shiny new Patriot Act to put her away -- a good old-fashioned obstruction of justice rap will suffice.

However, as Hentoff goes on to note, the ALA is curiously insouciant when it comes to countries where librarians are in serious danger when they dare to disagree with the government:

A member of the ALA's policy-making governing council, Mark Rosenzweig, says patronizingly that "we cannot presume that all countries are capable of the same level of intellectual freedom that we have in the U.S. Cuba is caught in an extremely sharp conflict with the U.S. . . . I don't think [Cuba] is a dictatorship. It's a republic."

I haven't read Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird for a long time, and it's surprising how much of the plot I'd forgotten.

Especially the burning shark, the pirates and the flying galleons. You doubt me?

Warning: SFX and general zaniness.

Via memepool

Today is the 150th anniversary of the birth (July 26, 1856) of George Bernard Shaw. By coincidence, I was going through some notes and I came across this rememberance of him by Bertrand Russell. I'd been unsuccessfully looking for it on the Internet for years. It seems to sum up the old fool nicely:

He wanted to be witty at all costs and it led him into unbelievable cruelties. He taunted [H.G.] Wells with facetious remarks about his wife -- Wells's wife -- when he knew very well she was dying of cancer.

Alistair Cooke, Six Men, p. 166, Knoph, 1977

(The title of the post comes from an anecdote in Richard Ellmann's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Oscar Wilde. One day Wilde ran into GBS. Shaw said that he was thinking of starting a new magazine. Wilde asked him what it would be called, to which he replied, "Shaw! Shaw! Shaw!"

"Oh. And how will you spell it?")

CORNISH, NH - In this big dramatic production that didn't do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud. "He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers," said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don't have to look at them for four years.

The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wrist watches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between fifteen and twenty pounds, depending upon a man's habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-size bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April. By necessity, and because it was SOP, they all carried steel helmets that weighed five pounds including the liner aid camouflage cover. They carried the stand ard fatigue jackets and trousers. Very few carried underwear. On their feet they carried jungle boots-2.1 pounds - and Dave Jensen carried three pairs of socks and a can of Dr. Scholl's foot powder as a precaution against trench foot. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was 2 necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RT0, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, Carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother's distrust of the white man, his grandfather's old hunting hatchet. Necessity dictated. Because the land was mined and booby-trapped, it was SOP for each man to carry a steel-centered, nylon-covered flak jacket, which weighed 6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier. Because you could die so quickly, each man carried at least one large compress bandage, usually in the helmet band for easy access. Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost two pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away.

Every war seems to take on its own artistic identity. World War I is thought of mainly through the poets: John McCrae; Siegfried Sassoon; Wilfred Owen. By the Second World War novelists had taken up the torch -- Norman Mailer; Joseph Heller; Kurt Vonnegut. The only connection most people have with Korea is the film M*A*S*H, but that was also inspired by a series of books by Richard Hooker. By Vietnam, though, the focus was very much cinematic, as befitted the "Living Room War": Apocalypse Now; Hamburger Hill; and Oliver (ick) Stone's Platoon.

There was good writing to come out of Vietnam, though. Some of the best is by former infantryman Tim (Going After Cacciato) O'Brien. His The Things They Carried achieves a poetic intensity in its cataloging of the common and prosaic. I'd never read the complete book, just some chapters published in Esquire.

While Googling around for some quotes from it, I came across the entire text here. (It's not an official site, judging by the number of typos, just something put up by someone who really liked the book.)

Update: Oops. That wasn't the complete work. Just an excerpt.