“Thought this would give you a smile,” he wrote. “Look whose book shows up in the first pic of this article.” It appears from the photo that my biography of the Hollywood director William Wyler, “A Talent for Trouble,” turned up in the secondhand book sale of the late Robert Gottlieb’s private library.
Archives for July 2024
War Crime Outcomes —
Two Coverups in the Slaughterhouse of War
From the podcast IN THE DARK: “On November 19, 2005, a small group of U.S. Marines killed 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq. The case against them would become one of the most high-profile war-crimes prosecutions in American history, and then it would all fall apart. … No one was held accountable.” Why not?
On March 16, 1968, more than 500 Vietnamese men, women, and children in the village of Mi Lai were slaughtered by a platoon of U.S. soldiers. It became known as the Mi Lai massacre. The soldiers were led by Lieutenant William Calley. He was later court-martialed and convicted of murder after an Army cover-up.
D. H. Lawrence on the ‘Bitch-Goddess of Success’
The other day I took a drive over to Toby Pond and looked in at the house where I’d spent six months during the Covid lockdown. My favorite room there was a little library. It had two steep book-lined walls and high windows that gave plenty of light for reading. With nothing better to do, I pulled down Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Having read it many years ago, I had failed to appreciate it. This time it bowled me over. Here’s a small excerpt. It offers a taste of one of the novel’s major themes.
Leave It to Flaubert to Tell It as It Is
Three excerpts from the recently published edition of ‘The Letters of Gustave Flaubert,’ edited and translated by Francis Steegmullers, seem to me an apt commentary on our own time.
Malaise . . . In the Middle of Nowhere
Not helped
by late disasters
and no idea
of what to do
but write these lines
and think of better times.
Just in Time for Independence Day
America’s top shitholer goes
whole hog at the public trough,
and never mind the rest of us,
because that is the hog’s nature. …