The Newsstand Sophisticate

If you like old French postcards (not to be confused with old “French letters”—if that’s your thing you’ve got the wrong Web site), you will enjoy this site. The googly-eyed animal postcards are especially bizarre and amusing. It’s a French site, so naturally some of the postcards are smutty. Those of delicate sensibility beware. 

Here’s a sordid story from the New York Times about Bill Clinton peddling his influence in Kazakhstan for a large donation to his foundation (allegedly, of course). It’s beginning to look as though Clinton is becoming the Billy Carter of his wife’s presidential campaign. 

I don’t know why I’m finding so many stories about old bones lately. (I’m not seeking them out, honestly! They keep popping up in my inbox and RSS feed.) The most recent reminder of mortality delivered to me through the Internet comes from the Austinist‘s sister site in San Francisco. The SFist unearths a 1902 San Francisco Chronicle story about some children in my native city using human bones to play baseball. A short excerpt:

Residents of the vicinity of Leavenworth and Broadway going home to dinner were treated to a choice assortment of cold shivers at the sight of the national game being played with the grisly loot from a tomb. Half a dozen boys were making long drives of the ball to center field with resounding thwacks from the long bones, the femur and fibula radius and ulna humerus. Between times two yellow skulls would be tossed to the batters, and the fun characteristic of the reverence of the North American youth, waxed warm until a policeman swooped down upon the players.  

Andrew Winters tells of the trials and tribulations of being Morrissey’s valet. Apparently Morrissey asks all of his employees what the first record they bought was, and there are right and wrong answers. (I believe mine was Randy Newman’s “Little Criminals,” when I was six or seven. Not sure whether that would pass Moz-muster.)

(Via Dr. Frank.)

Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh, 23, a journalism student and reporter in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, has been sentenced to death by a local court for insulting Muhammad by calling him “a killer and adulterer,” and “downloading a controversial article and adding some of his own words about the ignorance of the Prophet [sic] Muhammad on women’s rights.”

Kambakhsh has the right to appeal his sentence, and I hope the Supreme Court will be more liberal in its views of the right to free speech than the lower court has been.

Index on Censorship has more, and says it’s possible for Kambakhsh to receive a pardon from Afghan President Hamid Karzai, though he has not yet spoken on the case. Still, it is appalling that anybody could be convicted for such a victimless “crime” in the first place.

Daniel Dennett, Colin McGinn, and Massimo Pigliucci have a new blog, Secular Philosophy, which unsurprisingly will cover “all things secular with an emphasis on philosophy.” They’ll also stream a weekly podcast from the Center for Inquiry, “Point of Inquiry,” which will have “live interviews with Nobel Prize-winning scientists, social critics and theorists, as well as renowned artists and entertainers.” Sounds good, though I might have to cut back on my Fark reading time to fit it in.

(Via Norm via Andrew Sullivan.)

Back when I lived in New York, I would often wonder as I walked through Washington Square whether there were still bones beneath my feet from the square’s days as a potter’s field in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Well, I need speculate no more, as city archaeologists doing soil testing found at least three skeletons on the southern edge of the square this morning.

As the article mentions, New York’s current potter’s field is Hart Island, a small island in Long Island Sound, which was also a Nike missile silo site in the 1950s. According to this site, an estimated 750,000 people have been buried there since the Civil War. The site also has pictures of buildings and burial sites on the island.

Update, January 25: In a coincidental e-mail newsletter I received today from my college’s alumni group, I found out that the Hart Island site I linked to above is run by a fellow alumnus of Reed College. (Not someone I know; she graduated before I began). Melinda Hunt is involved in a project to identify over 50,000 anonymously buried people on Hart Island. You can read about it on the New York Times City Room blog here. 

George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman series of historical novels, died Wednesday. I only discovered the Flashman books last year, but after reading the first, Flashman, I liked it so much I read the next eight without stopping. There are three more.

The books are presented as the memoirs of Harry Flashman, a drunken bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, after he was expelled from Rugby School. “Flashy” joins the army soon after and ends up being involved in many of the significant battles of the nineteenth century, including Little Big Horn, the Charge of the Light Brigade, and the Indian Mutiny, among others. In all of them, he steadfastly refrains from doing anything heroic, trying instead only to save his own skin and make it with the ladies. He’s a coward, a cad, a bully, disloyal, untrustworthy, and self-centered, and yet, since he is completely honest about it all, ends up being an oddly endearing, ridiculous, and occasionally even sympathetic character.

Fraser’s Flashman books may be the best, and almost certainly are the funniest, historical fiction ever written. The historical information in the books is meticulously researched, so even as you are entertained by a bawdy boy’s adventure story, you end up learning a great deal about the British Empire, knowledge which provides a deeper background for much of the news that comes out of today’s troublesome hotspots.

If you’ve never read them, I enthusiastically recommend them. His creator is dead, but Flashman will live for a very long time, I think.

Rest in peace, Mr. Fraser.

When I lived in Brooklyn, New York, I discovered an odd little publication called Three Weeks in a local bookstore (Spoonbill & Sugartown, if you’re interested) some time in the late summer of 2002. Three Weeks was laid out in an anachronistic, late-eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century style and typeface, and printed on newsprint. It was an unusual format, too, printed on a paper about half the size of a tabloid sheet, and then folded in half so that it was taller than it was wide. The price was “two cents, voluntary.”

The writing was both topical and trivial (the back of each issue had an essay on “The Weather”) but arch and old-fashioned, like the publication’s appearance. I enjoyed it, sometimes in spite of its willful eccentricity, and dutifully picked it up every three weeks, until it stopped publication. I only have four or five copies, but they published eighteen in all, and thanks to an enterprising Three Weeks enthusiast and the power of the Internet, you can read them all online at the Henry William Brownejohns Appreciation Page. (Brownejohns was the name of one of the writers, all of whom, I’m guessing, used pseudonyms.)

It’s not for everybody, I’m afraid. I failed to convince any of my friends to read it even when it was being published. Here’s a typical title of a Three Weeks article:

Radiation

PALLOR VERSUS TAWN

WHITE FOLKS’ COCKAMAMIE PERCEPTION OF HEALTH, & COMMON SENSE

Also, On Shirts, and How We Feel People Ought to Wear Them

There’s also quite a bit of political writing, which despite, or perhaps because of, the archaic style, manages to be interesting and relevant. Three Weeks published from Oct. 15, 2001, till Oct. 19, 2002, and for me, at least, captured the mood of the great city (or at least my mood in the great city) after the calamity of Sept. 11, 2001, better than anything else: trying to make sense of what had happened while also trying to preserve your sense of humor and previous interests. Anyway, I’m very glad somebody’s chosen to preserve this bit of literary ephemera.