Behind the scenes (con't) ...

I am half way through Ian McEwan's Saturday, which I am going to review on Sunday. The novel has been widely, even extravagantly, praised, and it's certainly a fascinating read. But at this juncture I can't quite say I like it. Though I can't quite say I don't, either. I mention this because I thought people might be interested in what goes through a reviewer's mind while reading the book under review. And anyone who reads this may be interested in seeing what I finally say about the book -- as I will myself.

Letters among the issues ...

A couple of blogs devoted usually to politics touch upon literature today: Power Line quotes Shakespeare and George Herbert (as quoted in a New York Times review of Camille Paglia's new book) and Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters comments on what Maureen Dowd has to say about the Vatican and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. And Wretchard at The Belmont Club has a very thoughtful post (which links to a most eloquent one by Donald Sensing) on the spirit of Easter. Note the literary power of the unbowlderized Biblical text.

Arthur Miller & the American Dream

When playwright Arthur Miller died last month, much was made in the obituaries about what his plays had to say about the so-called American Dream. Marilyn Berger, writing in the New York Times, said that Miller’s “work exposed the flaws in the fabric of the American dream.” CNN declared that his plays depicted “the American Dream gone awry.” The BBC called them “intricate musings on the darkness at the heart of the American Dream.” And Xan Brooks, in the Guardian, described Death of a Salesman, the play that won Miller the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1949, as “a savage assault on the American dream.”
Arthur Miller was decidedly a man of the left, and dissing the American Dream is a favorite pastime of the left. The complaint seems to derive from equating the American Dream with consumerism, the pursuit of material goods. Of course, the left is a bit inconsistent on this point. Only last year, in What’s the Matter With Kansas?, Thomas Frank tried to figure out why a majority of the citizens in his native state continue to vote for Republicans, who he says only cater to their “values,” and not for Democrats, whose policies he says favor their true interests — which are strictly material.
Arthur Miller embodied this inconsistency: That a man who hit the jackpot on Broadway early in life (he was only 33 when he won his Pulitzer), who lived an upscale existence in suburban Connecticut, and married Marilyn Monroe should make a career out of denouncing his fellow Americans’ desire for creature comforts is, at the very least, odd.
Moreover, the quest for wealth and comfort hardly started in America. Neither did criticism of it. Recall that Jesus warned his followers against laying up “treasures on earth, where dust and moth consume and thieves break in and steal.” And William Wordsworth, in 1807, composed a sonnet decrying how “the world is too much with us; late and soon,/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”
In this country, such criticism appeared early and has been repeated often. Henry David Thoreau, in Walden, deplored “creeping down the road of life, pushing ... a barn seventy-five feet by forty.” From Henry Adams to Henry Miller, from Theodore Dreiser to Sinclair Lewis, criticism of the downside of America’s system of free enterprise has been so common as to almost amount to a cliché.
The American Dream itself, however, can’t be easily equated with crass materialism. As it happens, the phrase “American Dream” not only had a precise time and place of origin, it also had a specific originator: historian James Truslow Adams coined it in his 1931 book The American Epic. According to Adams, it is “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” Small wonder the dream that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so famously had was, as he put it himself, “deeply in rooted in the American dream.”
In Time magazine’s obituary of Arthur Miller, critic Richard Corliss said that the playwright “saw the American Dream as a kind of curse, for it led us to mistake ambition for destiny, and to suffer the inevitable slump and crumble when reality makes mock of the dream.” I must beg to differ with my former classmate: It was Miller who was mistaken, not us. The glory of the American Dream lies in its challenging the very notion of a fixed and determining destiny for anyone. Americans prefer to shape their own destiny. Emerson, not Thoreau, sounded the authentic American refrain — when he admonished his countrymen to “hitch your wagon to a star.”

A book review editor's life (cont'd) ...

Inquirer Features copy editor Paula Goff, who handled Sunday copy a couple of weeks ago, sent me an email about March 20's book page: "Wow, Frank: Black Death. Buboes. Pogroms. Jonestown. Cat-killer. Slimy creature. Armageddon. Children killed. A 17-year-old convicted of murdering his father. Quite the cheery books section this week!"
I hadn't actually noticed any of this until Paula pointed it out, which says something about how one goes about deciding what to review and when. I started out pairing Henning Mankell's Before the Frost (Jonestown) and Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore (cat-killer, slimy creature). Then had to sub for book critic Carlin Romano's column and the review of Max Hastings's Armageddon fit the space perfectly. As for my own review of The Great Mortality, about the Black Death -- and wherein porgroms and buboes figure -- well, I had that scheduled weeks before. So the grim consort came together more or less absent-mindedly.

An encounter with the donkey man ...

I had the pleasure last week of meeting Kevin O’Hara, the author of Last of the Donkey Pilgrims, the book I reviewed on March 13. He is every bit as engaging as his book, which I think will slowly find its audience and become a classic. Click on the link and take a look at the photos, the one thing the book lacks.

Layers of poetry ...

John Perreault has some fascinating poems at Milk Magazine. In the note to the selection from Motets, he points out that the poems "can be read line by line and by separating out the odd lines and then the even ones, to read two additional poems." Stolen Rhymes, from which four poems are slected, borrow the specific rhymes of specific poems (e.g., Byron's "She Walks in Beauty"). Virtuoso stuff.

Alice Thomas Ellis (1932-2005)

Novelist Alice Thomas Ellis, author of The Sin Eater and the Summerhouse Trilogy — The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1987), The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1988) and The Fly in the Ointment (1989) — has died at age 72. Here are obits from the Telegraph and the Times of London. The Clothes in the Wardrobe was made into a wonderful film, The Summer House, starring Julie Walters, Joan Plowright, and Jeanne Moreau.

Original works at Project Gutenberg (cont'd) ...

I have been alerted to two reviews of one of Steven Sills’s books – An American Papyrus -- at Project Gutenberg.

The first is from the Arkansas Gazette:
http://www.authorzone.com/forums/showthread/t-195.html


The other is from ebookreviews.net:
http://www.ebook-reviews.net/cgi-script/csNews/csNews.cgi?command=viewnews&database=poetry.db

A mystery in real time via email ...

I visited one of the sites listed by Jill Walker, The Daughters of Freya (http://emailmystery.com/dof/index.php). This is an email mystery by Michael Betcherman and David Diamond. For $7.49 you get a few emails at random every day over a three-week period, which is how long it takes for the mystery to be resolved. You can read the first three emails for free, which is what I have just done. The story has to do with a cult in California (where else?) that thinks free sex is the answer to everything. And they do mean free: Members -- it's an all-female cult, by the way -- are encouraged to have sex with strangers. The parents of one member are less than amused and want the group investigated. That's all I know so far. Stay tuned.

Literary email

Jill Walker sends me an annotated list of email narratives that I've found online and it is very interesting. As I told Jill in an email, I don't know if this blog is doing anybody else any good, but I'm sure learning a lot from it.
It also seems people are interested in knowing more about what goes into newspaper book reviewing. So I'll continue with some behind-the-scenes info.
I get, on a good day, maybe 200 emails (not including the deluge of spam). Most are from publicists, some are from authors, others from reviewers, still others from those who would like to review, and some from readers. I actually have hundreds in my inbox that are as yet unread. Almost all of those are from publicists of one sort or another. I pretty much know what they're about and plan to get to them ASAP (of course).
I could spend every day doing nothing but responding to email. Then there's the regular mail. Conservatively estimated, about 500 books come into my office every week. Bins of letters and catalogs as well. But : I have to read a book and review it every week. I have to edit reviews and articles. Go to meetings. I have to figure out what to review and when and who to ask to review it. And so, lamentably, I am always behind. I hope that some of those who have tried to get in touch (I haven't even mentioned the phone) read this and understand that I do eventually look at it all and will almost certainly, eventually, get around to responding in some way, shape , or form.

Some interesting info ...

On Jan. 26 I wondered here concerning the whereabouts of an epistolary novel in the form of e-mail. Blogger Derik Badman assures me there is at least one such: E: A Novel by Matt Beaumont. And right he is. Came out in October 2000, just before I got this job, which gives me an excuse for not knowing about it. Derik also points out that “Novelist Richard Powers has an online story (“They Come in a Steady Stream Now”) at the journal Ninth Letter that is in the form of emails: http://ninthletter.art.uiuc.edu/FA/FA05/ Commentary on it here: http://jilltxt.net/?p=1163 and http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2004/12/14/steady-stream/ .”
Finally, Derik informs me that electronic fiction also exists and sends me to http://eastgate.com/ to check it out. This is definitely worth a look.
Also check out Derik’s own very interesting blog, MadInkBeard (http://madinkbeard.com/mt). Especially check out, on the left, Premises in Snow.

Contemporary literary works at Project Gutenberg ...

Steven Sills has published three books with Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/) . I didn't know until Steven sent me an e-mail awhile back that Project Gutenberg published original work. I thought they only published classics. Tells you what I know.
Michael Hart, the man who founded Project Gutenberg, tells me in an email that of the 15,400 eBooks at gutenberg.org, about 3 percent — some 500 books — are there “with the permission of the authors/copyright holders.” He also says that there are original works at gutenberg.cc as well — he guesses about 500 more.
I haven’t read Sills’s books and I can’t really review them. Since this blog is supposed to give readers a behind-the-scenes look at a book review editor’s world, this is a good opportunity to explain what The Inquirer does and doesn’t review and why. We don’t review eBooks, or print-on-demand (POD) books, or self-published books, including books by AuthorHouse or PublishAmerica or even Xlibris — which is part-owned by Random House.
This is not out of snobbery. If a publisher like Farrar Straus & Giroux decides to publish somebody’s manuscript, they assume the costs of printing and publicity. They are betting on that manuscript and putting their money up accordingly. In all the other cases, it is the author who is putting up the money and betting on himself or herself and his or her work. It is the fact that someone besides the author is willing to assume the risk of publishing that makes all the difference. After all, it’s hard enough to decide which books to review as it is. I believe that something like 175,000 books are being published by trade publishers annually now. The Inquirer reviews about 500 of them. In other words, most don’t make the cut.
There’s an opportunity here, though. With all the bloggers out there, maybe some people could start looking at these other books and reviewing them online. It’s a pretty safe bet that among all those other books are some — maybe a lot — worth reading. After all, there have been some pretty good self-published books. Leaves of Grass, for instance. All of William Blake’s books.
Here are links to Steven Sills’s books:
American Papyrus http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4545
Corpus of a Siam Mosquito http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5176
Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/12733

Just a thought ...

“The unexamined life,” Socrates declared, “is not worth living.” How would he have known? It’s hard to imagine Socrates ever leading an unexamined life. In fact, it’s hard to imagine that anyone does, given that we are, by nature, reflective creatures. But even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that there are people who go through life just experiencing things and not reflecting on them at all, what’s the big deal? A good meal is still a tasty repast whether we reflect upon its flavors or not. A gorgeous sunset is no less beautiful if we simply watch it fade gloriously away. The value of such things derives from the things themselves, not from our examination of them. Reflection upon our experiences may enrich our lives, but an absence of such reflection hardly impoverishes them.

Something for Lent ...

I just received a call about a lecture tonight at the International Institute for Culture. The Rev. John Bartunek will talk about his book Inside The Passion, a behind-the scenes account of the making of Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ. Information on the lecture can be found at this link : http://www.catholicexchange.com/vm/index.asp?vm_id=3&art_id=27525
Seating is limited.

A class act ...

Last night I had the pleasure of introducing William Hague, the former leader of Britain's Conservative Party and the author of William Pitt the Younger, which I reviewed on Sunday, at the Free Library. Hague gave a great talk about the man who was the youngest ever to serve as Prime Minister. Hague said he intends to stand again for Parliament in the forthcoming election but has no intention of seeking any leadership position in his party. Like Pitt, Hague's political career began early, when he was 16 and gave a speech at a Conservative Party conference (what we could call a convention) and came to the attention of Margaret Thatcher, who told those assembled that they might be looking at the next Mr. Pitt. Hague says he had only the vaguest notion at the time who Pitt was. But he said that, thanks to giving up the party leadership after the last election, he had discovered something Pitt never had: that life has much to offer besides politics. Hague has travelled, been able to spend more time with his wife, Ffion, and has even learned to play the piano. He enjoys writing, he says. Interestingly, he said that he dictated his biography of Pitt. In that regard, it surely helped that Hague is a very fluent public speaker. His book is certainly very well written.
The questions afterward were quite good, as were Hague's answers. These author events at the Library are one of the treasures of Philadelphia life. If you like reading and ideas, you should try to go. Many of them, like last night's, are free, so you can't beat the price. You can check what's coming here: http://libwww.library.phila.gov/calendar/authorevents.cfm

Something to chew on ....

Ann Althouse recently linked to a question that ought to arouse the interest of all readers of fiction:
"In a search for meaningful relationships in life, which is the better choice: a passionate engagement with a person who has obvious faults, ill-suited to your needs and temperament, or a calm and steady affection for someone who inspires little else?" Read the whole thing : http://althouse.blogspot.com/2005/02/question-chewed-over-last-night.html

My own take is that passionate engagement tends to be temporary by its very nature. And it is not of our choosing anyway. It is something that happens to us -- the word comes from the Latin passio, meaning "to suffer, to be acted upon." Love, by contrast, is something that one does. One can grow in love. Passion seems usually to fade away sooner or later. Of course, when we are in its grip, if it is satisfied we come near to experiencing ecstasy; if it is thwarted, though, we feel as if we are in hell. Better it propel a novel than one's life.

Eagles inspire (Part 2) ...

Ian Keenan also waxed poetic regarding our Birds. His live reading of the piece at the Kelly Writer's House was broadcast on WXPN.

Super Sestina

The fix is in in art, Artis Hicks,
The hood conceals our rhetoric, Roderick Hood
The swans are swallowing our Ledas, Lito Sheppard


Brown is the earth we're shelled in, Sheldon Brown,
We've trodden amongst the mines, Jeremiah Trotter
Fate's looser than crooked chads, Chad Lewis


LJ Smith will you fill in in fields of brown
With ageless Mike Bartrum your shepherd
Donovan aiming for your moving hood
wishing to make you an end zone trotter
hoping you jump in the stands to be held up by hicks
who are really trying to figure out where the loo is


for here in the timeless streets of cobblestones grey and soils brown
the muttering retreats that Possum and Archie Shepp heard
where Keith Adams, Jefferson and Franklin walked with hicks
the faces keep changing but the team always lewises
to err is more than human in this neighborhood
angels here have always feared to trod her


so assemble ye, Westbrook, Levins, and Greg Lewis,
Pinkston who turns yellow before uniform turns brown
Freddie Mitchell, Bold Kingfish of the Plebiscite Hicks
T. O.'s leg held together with a cotter
Run post patterns to the moon as legends s-hould
Where the only guy to stop you is Alan Shepherd


Tom Brady: We blitz you with Hood
We blitz you with Brown
We blitz you with Sheppard,
Brian Dawkins, Michael Lewis
Til you dribble the ball like a Harlem Globetrotter
Lie flat on your back and say "Holy Hicks


How is it now that I blew this"
And I'll tell you why the trophy goes to our 'hood
The hunt to the foxtrotter
Hounds succumbed to distemper
Our coach didn't cut his teeth as a Cleveland Brown
So is just now mastering his tr-hicks


So where the pig's skin is brown be Andy Reid thy shepherd
Stunting the Riding Hood telethon with Little Red Lewis.
Patriots they call those hicks; but we be Patriotter

bio: Ian Keenan is an area writer.

Info on sestinas from website linked below: "The sestina is an old fixed form of poetry, dating as far back as the twelfth century. It consists of six six-line stanzas and a three-line concluding stanza. The ending words of the first stanza are repeated throughout each subsequent stanza in a set pattern. The same six words appear in the concluding three-line stanza, two in each line."
http://www.geocities.com/suzstina/sestina.htm

Eagles inspire ....

Autumn Konopka (www.winterspringsummer.com) has sent me a poem -- which she read at Barnes & Noble in Bryn Mawr over the weekend -- for the Eagles:

Brotherly Love

for James Phillips and the Philadelphia Eagles

A local man [James Phillips] said he shoveled snow at Lincoln Financial Field for 30 hours getting ready for the big NFC championship game, and now he is in the hospital, in danger of losing his fingers, his toes, his ears and possibly his nose.
– reported by NBC 10, Philadelphia, January 27, 2005

We love you more than fingers or toes.

Remember that.

Remember when they call us dangerous,

when they issue warnings throughout the league

and hold him up us as proof of just how crazy we are.

Remember, we love you

more than mere digits,

more than appendages—ears or nose.

We love you more than the scent of sweet fried onions
on a cheese steak on an Amoroso roll.

We love you more than Tony Luke’s, Pat’s, Jim’s, or Geno’s.

We love you more than soft pretzels,

more than water ice, Tastykakes, or $4 Pitchers of Lager.

We love you more than the sticky floor at Dirty Frank’s,

more than Tattooed Mom’s, the Continental, or Buddakan.

We love you more than the girls at Delilah’s,

more than the men of The Cave.

We love you more than William Penn, Ben Franklin, or Betsy Ross,

more than the Constitution,

more than the Liberty Bell and its ridiculous crack.

We love you more than Cape May in August,

more than the Mummer’s on New Year’s Day.

We love you more than Rocky,

more than counting the steps at the art museum,

more than jogging along West River Drive.

We love you from the Schuylkill to the Delaware,

from the Blue Route to the Boulevard.

We love you more than South Street,

more than parking in the middle of Broad on a Sunday afternoon.

We love you so much

we shovel snow for you,

30 hours in a blizzard with no gloves

for you.

This is how we are dangerous:

after all these years, we don’t see ourselves

turning purple in the mirror,

our fingers, black and green,

the colors of your uniform.

Poems on the range ...

Reader Willis Wayde asks if Robert W. Service would be considered a cowboy poet. I think so. He was certainly mentioned enough by people I talked with at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering. In 1917, by the way, Service's Rhymes of a Red Cross Man was the No. 1 general nonfiction best-seller. Of course, the cognoscenti look down on him, in large measure, I suspect, because he was popular -- and still is, in some circles.
And reader Meridith Gresher wonders if I have any pictures of the event. A few, and when I figure out how to post them here, I will.

Cowboy add

One of the nice things about having a blog, at least if you have a job like mine, is that you can supplement what you write in the paper with material you had to leave out because of space constraints.
One of the many pleasures I had attending the 21st National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev., was getting a chance to talk -- through an interpreter -- with members of of Grupo Cimarron, the Colombian ensemble that specializes in musica llanera. One thing that stays in my memory is something Carlos Rojas Hernandez, the founder and leader of the group, told me. Seems he and male vocalist Luis Moreno were born in adjacent districts in the plains area of eastern Colombia (known as los llanos). But the whole region has been torn by violance, which is why many residents have left the area for Bogota. At any rate, Hernandez explained that the adjacent districts he and Moreno grew up in are controlled by different armed groups. So if he tried to visit Moreno in Moreno's home district he would risk being kidnapped or even killed, he said. Small wonder they prefer making music here.
The members I met -- vocalist Ana Veydo, maracas player Oscar Fandino, and Hernandez -- seemed like really nice people.
I hope they win a Grammy.

Trouble for Harry?

The Times of London reports that a 13-year-old's novel about a girl sucked into a high-stakes virtual reality game is turning into a publishing phenomenon. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1471249,00.html

High Desert Dispatch ...

I'm in Elko, Nev., at the 21st National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. I would have been blogging sooner, but the laptop I brought has been, shall we say, difficult.

Anyway, I just watched Oscar Auker, 13, recite some poems with a degree of poise and aplomb that would be the envy of many an older performer. After Oscar, a guy named Jim King recited a poem about a guy under the influence riding a motorized tricycle that was so funny I had tears running down my face.

Cowboy poetry, for those unfamilar with it, is actually a sophisticated performing art. The text no more comes to life on the page than a musical score does.

Here's a thought -- or two ...

A colleague and I were talking yesterday about how Internet reading differs from traditional reading. Obviously, it's less linear, which is why large chunks of prose seem less suited to Internet posting than snippets that get to the point. But also, when reading online, you're likely to click on a link, and maybe click on another from the site you've linked to. You may click on an audio clip. Or a video clip. It may be some time before you get back to where you started -- if, in fact, you do get back. Then there's e-mail.
All of which got me to wondering when this is going to be exploited fictionally. E-mail plays an important part in Peter Straub's most recent novel, In the Night Room, but where's the epistolary novel in the form of e-mail. Epistolary novels were all the rage in the 18th-century, when lots of people wrote lots of letters. Well, lots of people are writing e-mail. Most of it may be inconsequential, but a good fiction writer could surely do something with the form.
And what about a narrative using online techniques -- links and clips that lead the reader along the narrative path? Maybe published as a CD.

Waxing poetic ...

The Big Trunk at Powerline makes a point about poetry well worth pondering:
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/009279.php

Let it snow ...

The weather outside doesn't strike me as at all frightful, but I didn't drive in it. But I was out walking in it and I shovelled my sidewalk. A heavy snowfall always makes me want to take another look at what was once a very popular poem -- John Greenleaf Whittier's "Snowbound."
The Rev at The Book Barn didn't think much of it when he took a look a few years ago: http://www.jp41.dial.pipex.com/R289.HTML
Now The Rev admits he has problems with pre-20th-century poetry, and I think a lot of people do. It's more formal, less colloquial, and above all more leisurely than later verse. If read out loud, though, Whittier's poem demonstrates more subtlety of rhyme and rhythm than The Rev notices. It's a reminiscence in rhyme, with some pretty good imagery. I rather like this:
The white drift piled the window-frame,
And through the glass the clothes-line posts
Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts.
You can read the whole think here, with some nice pictures to boot:
http://www.darsie.net/library/whittier_snowbound.html
Just remember to take your time.

Ghosts of best-sellers past ...

One final thought regarding Hugh Hewitt's Blog. In it Hewitt proposes that someone start a blog for the publishing industry. That someone won't be me, but one of the things Hewitt suggests such a blog should feature -- links to all the best-seller lists available online -- is something I have been looking into. While looking, I came upon this link, which posts a century of Publishers Weekly's best-seller lists:
http://www.caderbooks.com/bestintro.html

The first two decades of the last century have some familiar names -- H.G. Wells, Frances Hodgson Burnett -- but one only sounds familiar. The Winston Churchill who appears regularly is not the British statesman (who did win the Nobel prize for literature), but an American historical novelist. During the first of those two decades, George Barr McCutcheon made the list seven times. Who reads him now? A lot more familar names when you get to the 1930s, and the nonfiction list for 1931 says something about changing tastes: Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy, H.G. Wells's The Outline of History, Andre Maurois's Byron, and Charles and Mary Beard's The Rise of American Civilization all made it.

Let the blogging begin ...

In my "Editor's Choice" column Sunday I reviewed Hugh Hewitt's excellent little book Blog. Hugh makes such a good case for blogging that I figure I ought to start doing some myself. It's a useful way, for instance, of saying something further about a point made in the book.

Hugh compares the rise of the blogs to the Protestant Reformation: New technology (in that case, the printing press) blows the lid off the information monopoly (then the Roman Catholic Church, now the Mainstream Media).

It's an interesting analogy and sound as far as it goes. But there was a downside to the Reformation. Not only was Christian unity split asunder, but there were those persecutions (on both sides) as well as those nasty religious wars (about a third of Europe's population died during the Thirty Years War).

Luther is also a poor poster child for free and open discussion. He proved every bit as intolerant of dissent as the Roman church. His role in the peasants' Rebellion was deplorable. Here's just one fine quote: "It is right and lawful to slay at the first opportunity a rebellious person … whosoever can, should smite, strangle, and stab, secretly or publicly, and should remember that there is nothing more poisonous, pernicious, and devilish than a rebellious man." Then there's his anti-semitism, which you can sample here:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/Luther_on_Jews.html

May the blogosphere be spared his like.

Oops! Speaking of Blog, I notice that Daniel Drezner, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago has noticed that I referred to him as a law professor at the school. Took it right out of Hugh's book. Just another example of MSM sloppiness, I fear.