Literary Miscellany

• Garrison Keillor reviews "American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville" by Bernard-Henri Lévy in the New York Times. "Don't let the door hit you on the way out," he concludes.
  
• For many of us, Eudora Welty is just a belch gag on "The Simpsons". The Dallas Morning News reviews "Early Escapades", and quotes this verse she wrote about a heavyset dorm supervisor at college:
  

  "Where'er she goes forever more,
  The Butler bosom goes before.
  But still and all, I think you'll find
  That most of Butler goes behind."

  
  Sounds like she would have enjoyed the Simpsons reference.
  
• I'm currently reading "Wodehouse: A Life". There's something unsettling about Wodehouse's character, as portrayed here. While quite amiable and naive in some ways (as with the infamous Nazi broadcasts), he was a disciplined writer and "clinically decisive" in business. But what a funny man. After the French authorities ruled that he was no longer "dangerous to the Republic", he wrote to a friend:
  

  Up till now, of course, the Republic has been ducking into hallways when I come along, swallowing nervously and whispering 'Cheese it, boys! Here comes Wodehouse!'

  
  
• Arthur Golden, author of "Memoirs Of A Geisha" has admitted that he was never actualy a geisha. He was merely a courtesan.
  
• Will Oprah have Krusty the Klown on her show next, and attack his autobiography as "self-serving with many glaring omissions"? How about Monty Burns and his "Will There Be Another Rainbow?" (Interesting web find: a Disney artist called Carl Barks made many collectible paintings of Scrooge McDuck, including one called "Always Another Rainbow".