It’s not that I haven’t found anything good to blog about lately, but rather that I recently got hitched and was honeymooning in the British Virgin Islands for the last two weeks.

While I was on vacation, I did manage to read an old novel that I am embarrassed to admit, I hadn’t read until now: The Great Gatsby. Now there’s a book worth reading and rereading. Fitzgerald packs in more detail in one florid sentence than most of us do in one paragraph. So I agree with Mr. Last that this book deserves a reread. Or in my case, a read.

And though I am only half-way through, I will here and now declare one of my favorite books of all time to be Between Meals by A.J. Liebling, a man after my own heart. The New Yorker writer takes us on a culinary adventure through Paris during the early 1900s, the expat-saturated 1920s, and the 1950s. While some of his descriptions are outmoded (such as of clarets and civets), others could have been taken straight of out Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential (another of my favorites). If I may be permitted to quote at length Liebling’s return to an old favorite French bistro only to find out he’d been ambushed:

On the ghastly evening I speak of–a beautiful one in June–I perceived no change in the undistinguished exterior of Mme. G’s restaurant. The name … was the same, and since the plate-glass windows were backed with scrim, it was impossible to see inside…. The bar, the tables, the banquettes covered with leatherette, the simple décor of mirrors and pink marble slabs were the same…. A man whom I did not recognize came to me, rubbing his hands and hailing me as an old acquaintance. I thought he might be a waiter who had served me…. He had me at a table before I sensed the trap.

He presented me with a carte du jour written in the familiar purple ink on the familiar wide sheet of paper with the name and telephone number of the restaurant at the top. The content of the menu, however, had become Italianized, the spelling had deteriorated, and the prices had diminished to a point where it would be a miracle if the food continued distinguished.

“Madame still conducts the restaurant?” I asked sharply.

I could now see that he was a Piedmontese of the most evasive description. From rubbing his hands he had switched to twisting them.

“Not exactly,” he said, “but we make the same cuisine.”

I could not descry anything in the smudged ink but misspelled noodles and unorthographical “escaloppinis“; Italians writing French by ear produce a regression to an unknown ancestor of both languages.

“Try us,” my man pleaded, and, like a fool, I did. I was hungry. Forty minutes later, I stamped out into the street as purple as an aubergine with rage. The ministrone had been cabbage scraps in greasy water. I had chosen cotes d’agneau as the safest item in the mediocre catalogue that the [former restaurant’s] prospectus of bliss had turned into overnight. They had been cut from a tired Alpine billy goat and seared in machine oil, and the haricot verts with which they were served resembled decomposed whiskers from a theatrical-costume beard.

“The same cuisine?” I thundered as I flung my money on the falsified addition that I was too angry to verify. “You take me for a jackass!”

I am sure that as soon as I turned my back the scoundrel nodded. The restaurant has changed hands at least once since then.

As Wesley Smith and others have been pointing out for a long time, this is where assisted suicide must, by necessity, eventually lead.

If people want to live in a society where doctors make the arbitrary decisions on who lives and who dies, based upon their own belief as to what conditions or deformaties make life not worth living, then so be it.

But people should not be fooled into thinking that legalizing physician-assisted suicide is the final step. It is merely the next step.

If I read it, I’m apt to re-read it. And though it seems poor hospitality to bore GS readers with the contents of my nightstand, I’ll mention some things I’ve re-read in the last couple of years.

Shakespeare: I’ve been noodling around in Antony and Cleopatra, which I love most for its portait of feminine wiles. Act One, Scene III, the queen sends her messenger to find Antony: “If you find him sad / Say I am dancing; If in mirth; report that I am sudden sick. . . .”

Irving Kristol’s essays, esp. The Autobiography of an Idea collection, though it doesn’t include the indispensable “When Virtue Lost her Loveliness.” Irving (sorry but you’ll have to indulge me-few are the truly great individuals I get to call by their first name,) is in my opinion the most eloquent of the great anti-Communists. No other tapped so deeply into the great American essay tradition dating back to the Federalist papers.

I’ve been re-reading, with great pleasure, Florence King’s National Review columns for an eventual essay on the subject of her cruelty and wit, and I tentatively believe—meaning this was my opinion for a while and I wonder if it will survive the re-examination—that she’s the foremost conservative stylist of my lifetime.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s folkloric stories hold up very, very well, so perfectly wrought are they. I’ve also re-read Enemies, A Love Story not that long ago. What a book! When I learned that Roger L. Simon had written the screenplay for the excellent movie version, I felt like sending him flowers.

A very partial list. In truth I find it very easy to name contemporary writers worth re-reading. Even poets and novelists-whom conservatives seem to loathe almost out of habit.

Jacob Weisberg makes a clever distinction in his Wolfe review, one that Hugh Hewitt picks up on. “You may never put down a Tom Wolfe novel,” sayeth Weisberg. “But you never reread one, either.”

Well, “you” don’t, maybe, but I do.

I am a Wolfe re-reader, having for instance re-read Bonfire of the Vanities several times and The Right Stuff at least once if not twice. Bonfire, I have no doubt, will remain the quintessential fictional work of the ’80s. An important novel in several ways, it’s also a textbook of writing devices, none less effectively employed than the telling detail.

Take the half-consumed jar of mayonnaise that is hurled at Mayor Goldberg, a Jewish mayor speaking to an angry crowd in Harlem, in the opening scene:

“Something hits the Mayor on the shoulder. It hurts like hell! There on the floor—a jar of mayonnaise, an eight-ounce jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Half-full! Half-consumed! Somebody has thrown a half-eaten jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise at him! In that instant the most insignificant thing takes over his mind. Who in the name of God would bring a half-eaten eight-ounce jar of mayonnaise to a public meeting?”

The half-coherent image is perfect. Maybe the mayonnaise has something to do with the mayor being a white person. Or not. But, somehow, instead of being left in the refrigerator for future tuna fish sandwiches, the mayo’s been carried to a public meeting and thrown at the Mayor. Comic rage, the weird inscrutability of racial symbolism, the barbarism of democratic politics—it’s all there.

At writing school, they could teach a whole class about this mayonnaise.

Am, incidentally, about a third of the way through I am Charlotte Simmons. So a warning: I will blog more on the subject.

Hugh Hewitt is promoting the notion of putting a war on terror memorial at the Flight 93 crash site in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. With all due respect to Hugh, this is a terrible idea.

I’ve been to Shanksville a couple times and written about the current memorial which lives on that field. If you haven’t had the chance to take the long drive up to Shanksville, here’s what you see:

After spending an hour or so snaking up and over hills on Route 30, eventually you come to the little Buckstown Road, and from there to Skyline Road, a paved, single-lane way which comes out of the hills and slopes up and out to the fields. Off to your right you can see the hulking, rusting remains of earth-movers, left over from mining which finished years ago.

Then there’s a break, and you see little paved parking lots on either side of the road, and off to your left, a 60-foot length of chain-link fence, a couple flagpoles, and a giant wooden cross.

You see, Shanksville already has a memorial. It wasn’t planned by the government. It came out of nowhere, as people began making pilgrimages to the Flight 93 crash site entirely on their own. And when they came, they left things: Rosaries, hats, pictures, messages, jackets, shoes, pins–anything they could think of. The townspeople put up the fence so that these mementos would have a place to congregate. And in the three years since September 11, the Flight 93 memorial has grown. There’s a large marble plaque which was sent up from a grateful man in Guatemala. The giant cross, which stands next to the Pennsylvania and American flags, was installed. And people from all over America–and the world–who have visited have left messages on every singe surface available: flagpoles, guardrails, and even the port-a-johns.

As it exists now, the Flight 93 memorial is a shrine. Because it has been created, spontaneously, by the people, it has a religious character to it which makes it as powerful a monument as there is in our country. (And while the overwhelming majority of the religious sentiment is Christian, I can’t think of a religion which isn’t in some way represented.)

There are a host of reasons why a memorial to the war on terror shouldn’t be situated in Shanksville, but the best is that it would necessitate the sweeping away of the monument people have already built there–and with the government behind it, the new memorial could not possibly have the same religious character. Shanksville is, literally, hallowed ground. It should stay that way.

Reading Joseph Epstein’s lyrical essay on Truman Capote, I’m tempted to call Epstein the best writer of his generation. [These payoffs are reaaallly inside baseball. –ed Yeah, so what.]

Epstein acknowledges Capote’s genuine gifts, but is clear-eyes about his shortcomings:

Without In Cold Blood, Capote’s name would probably be forgotten today. Although his fiction is never less than skillful, with the element of charm bordering on sentimentality frequently coming into play in such stories as “The House of Flowers” and “A Christmas Memory,” it often feels a touch insubstantial, derivative, fragile, and too brightly colored. When Capote published his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), George Davis, an editor of Mademoiselle magazine known for his lacerating remarks, said: “I suppose someone had to write the fairy Huckleberry Finn.”

Ultimately, Epstein concludes that Capote was destroyed by the celebrity culture he helped create. Really, don’t miss this piece.

(Also, not that you care, but it pleases me to report that Epstein’s talent is exceeded only by his immense personal decency. As a rule, you shouldn’t meet your heroes–unless they’re Joe Epstein.)

Also, be sure to catch Glenn Reynolds’s review of Neal Stephenson’s Boroque Cycle.

Claudia Winkler has a wonderful piece on the role of religion in politics. She points out that the hysterics out there worrying about “Jesusland” haven’t been paying much attention to American history. The passage she quotes from Lincoln’s letter to Eliza Gurney is well worth revisiting:

The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance. We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this; but God knows best, and has ruled otherwise. We shall yet acknowledge his wisdom, and our own error therein. Meanwhile we must work earnestly in the best lights he gives us, trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends he ordains. Surely he intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay.