sisyphusshrugged | the wonders of the internet

I'm off with the tangible version of the Howell Raines article in the Atlantic, which I haven't gotten to all of yet (what I've gleaned so far: he's willing to go down with his ship, but he thinks it isn't fair because the deck crew wasn't really trying and he thinks it may be because he had them flogged for their own good and the good of the ship), but I leave you with this joyous thing:

Christopher Hitchens casts the dispassionate eye of literary criticism on Somerset Maugham.

One knows at once who is the object of this pastiche. One knows it before "Geoffrey," described tersely as "my Ganymede or male lover as well as my secretary," is further described as responding to the intrusion by "pulling on his overtight summer slacks." Yet one is tempted to continue quoting, about the Mediterranean villa and the goings-on there ("I lay a little while, naked, mottled, sallow, emaciated, smoking a cigarette that should have been postcoital but was not"). This is quite simply because the parody is so much better than anything that W. Somerset Maugham ever wrote himself. Poor old "Willie" was more given to openings like this...

There now. If you want to know what kind of openings poor old Willie was given to, you'll just have to read it.