On the air a minute ago, Laura Ingraham ridiculed a British reporter for a “snobby” question posed to Bush at the recent Blair talks. Turns out she wasn’t referring to the question per se but to his, um, British accent, and demonstrated by puckering up and parrotting him. “I mean, what a snob!”

Ingraham’s homepage features “John Kerry’s hideous college photo!” His hair is indeed Brylcreemed within an inch of its life, but this is the best they can do?

Hence this enthusiastically zany writeup of The Clumsiest People in Europe by William Times in the Grimes, I mean the other way around. Why not print all of it? Will the Times sue me? I think not. The boldface is mine, to indicate my favorite Mrs. Mortimerism thus far. Don’t forget that the author (rather than, as Grimes would have it, merely the “excerpter”), Todd Pruzan, is reading at the Chelsea B&N next Wednesday, June 15, at 7 p.m. He’ll be signing copies of the book, which, being the intellectually hungry person you are, you will already have bought and read. There are a lot of sad stories out there, and once in a while it pays to read a funny one.

In Mrs. Mortimer’s Best Guess, the Place Is Unspeakable

THE CLUMSIEST PEOPLE IN EUROPE
Or Mrs. Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World
By Todd Pruzan and Favell Lee Mortimer
Illustrated. 198 pages. Bloomsbury. $19.95.

Planning a foreign trip? Wales might be nice. But unfortunately it is filled with Welsh people, who are “not very clean.” Spain might look alluring, but the Spanish tend to be “cruel, and sullen and revengeful.” Portugal perhaps? Tread cautiously. “Some places look pretty at a distance which look very ugly when you come up to them – Lisbon is one of these places.”

There is almost no incentive to step out the front door in the strange, cruel, wildly prejudiced guidebooks of Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer, a tough-minded Victorian children’s writer whose astonishing thoughts on foreign lands have been excerpted by Todd Pruzan in “The Clumsiest People in Europe.” Spanning the globe, Mrs. Mortimer, in three volumes published between 1849 and 1854, delivered crisp, no-nonsense opinions on peoples and countries from Sweden to Bechuanaland, even though her own foreign travel, at that point, was limited to a brief childhood trip to Brussels and Paris.

Mr. Pruzan, an editor of the design journal Print, chanced upon Mrs. Mortimer’s first travel book, “The Countries of Europe Described,” in a second-hand bookstore on Martha’s Vineyard. Appalled and enchanted, he rustled up copies of “Far Off, Part I: Asia and Australia Described” and “Far Off, Part II: Africa and America Described,” selected the best bits and assembled them in volume that, although slim, imparts the general flavor (acrid) and point of view (perverse) of the unbelievable Mrs. Mortimer.

Mrs. Mortimer liked England best. But that’s not saying much. The English, like nearly all peoples on earth except for the Dutch, are not very clean. They make disagreeable company, they are “too fond of money” and they complain too much. “Is London a pleasant city?” Mr. Mortimer asks. “No; because there is so much fog and so much smoke. This makes it dark and black.” On the plus side, England is Protestant, unlike, say, Turkey, where the people believe in a false prophet named Muhammad (“a wicked man”), who “wrote a book called the Koran, and filled it with foolish stories, and absurd laws, and horrible lies.”

China has three religions, none good, though the religion of Confucius is possibly less bad than the others. Lao-tzu, the father of Taoism, cannot fool Mrs. Mortimer (“What an awful liar this man must have been”) and Buddhism gets short shrift. “Buddha pretended he could make people happy; and his way of doing so was very strange,” she writes. “He told them to think of nothing, and then they would be happy.”

Closer to home, and on similar grounds, Mrs. Mortimer downgrades Belgium, despite its industrious people: “Alas! they worship idols. They are Roman Catholics.” Everywhere, people do strange things and practice strange beliefs. Mrs. Mortimer never ceases to be shocked. Just picture the Bechuanas of Africa, who cover their bodies with mutton fat and ocher, and yet “they always laugh when they hear of customs unlike their own; for they think that they do everything in the best way, and that all other ways are foolish.” Strange.

Mrs. Mortimer’s prejudices are erratic. She can be much more savage describing Europeans than the darker races, some of which she finds quite attractive, doling out compliments to the “Hindoos,” American Indians and Nubians, “a fine race of people, tall and strong, and of a bright copper color.” Adamantly antislavery, she takes the American South to task and, in a perceptive analysis of the racial situation, holds the North to account as well for its poor treatment of blacks.

She makes a very weak imperialist. The Afghans, although “cruel, covetous and treacherous,” have every right to resent the British. “We cannot blame the Afghans for defending their own country,” she writes. “It was natural for them to ask, ‘What right has Britain to interfere with us?’ ” More on the United States would have been welcome. Mrs. Mortimer limits herself to the usual British complaints of the time. Americans eat too fast and spit too much. New York she finds, without actually having been there, much more beautiful than London. She understands that prairie dogs are not actually dogs, but believes that they bark, and that real American dogs do not. Lake Superior is very big. It is, in fact, so big “that Ireland might be bathed in it, as a child is bathed in a tub; that is, if islands could be bathed.”

A strong streak of sadism runs through Mrs. Mortimer’s travel writing. She likes to remind her young readers of the terrible things that can happen abroad. In Hungary, evil swineherds might order their pigs to attack you, so steer clear of the woods. In Spain, wolves have been known to tear travelers apart, leaving nothing but bones. The mountains of Switzerland may be beautiful, but when the snow begins to slide, a house can fall right on top of you.

There is a simple way to avoid all the unpleasantness, and Mrs. Mortimer’s fellow countrymen know the secret. The English, she writes, “like best being at home, and this is right.”

In Mrs. Mortimer’s Best Guess, the Place Is Unspeakable [NYT]

What’s good about the New York Post? Well, for one thing, it gets straight to the point. Here’s Sherryl Connelly on Oh, the Wilseys You’ll Know, quick and dirty.

In other news, Marty Rosen interviews David Sedaris for the Louisville Courier-Journal (former employer of my dad and of, we recently discovered, my friend Hillery Stone’s grandmother, who was his editor!). All good, plus this story from Sedaris:

And my editor at The New Yorker is really great. At first, writing for The New Yorker was very scary to me. I couldn’t imagine anything that I would write in that typeface. That typeface is just enough to scare you. I would sit down, and I just couldn’t do anything. And they said, just write anything and send it to us. Plus, their grammar rules—boy, I learned more about grammar. I just closed a story for them yesterday. It was about this argument I had with a woman on a plane and about working a crossword puzzle. This woman from The New Yorker called me yesterday and said, “4 across and 23 down would never work that way.” I figured with that story you’re gonna get a puzzle nut who’s gonna draw out a little grid and try to write all the things I wrote in these blanks, and they’re gonna think, “Wait a minute, this doesn’t add up.”… Somebody at The New Yorker … did just that.

This is interesting too:

…there was a story I wrote in “Me Talk Pretty”—I should know better by now. I think when people move to another country their first impressions are pretty typical. Everybody who moves to France pretty much says the same thing. I wrote a story about my French teacher that I wish I could take back, or rewrite it. What I left out was all the great things she did. There are laws here, like if you’re a nanny you’re only supposed to work a certain amount of hours, but then the nannies get exploited like crazy. They come here from Eastern Europe, and they’re basically slaves. Our teacher—it was a very beginning French class, and it’s murder listening to people take their baby steps in a foreign language, and there were all these nannies in the class that were being exploited. And the teacher called their employers to try to help them. And I liked her. She was funny. But I left that out of the story.

I didn’t realize when I started writing about France that by and large most people have their ideas about France and they don’t want those ideas contradicted, and that this was sort of playing into that. I didn’t do it knowingly, but people sort of wanted to hear about an evil French teacher, and she did do some pretty bad things. But to leave out the good part made it a lesser story. I guess I was thinking at the time, well that’s just too complex; if I add that she did all these great things too, that just makes it too complicated. But that’s what people are—they’re complicated. So if I had it all to do over again, if there was one thing I could go back and rewrite, that would be the first thing. Then everything else would follow it.

Sedaris says of expats in France, “There are a lot of people here—Johnny Depp lives here. R. Crumb lives here. John Malkovich lived here until last year. There’s a whole community. I don’t remember the exact figure, but it’s really astonishing the number of Americans who live in Paris. But I just know two of them.” So that’s Johnny and John, or Bob and Johnny, or…? I’d like to see a Bride of Coffee and Cigarettes, or The Wrath of Aline, where they all get together, tell risqué jokes, and brood attractively and/or productively.

Update: Hooray! Marty Rosen sent the rest of the interview. Sedaris says “asshole” in it. Heh. He also talks about Jonathan Lethem, Sarah Vowell, the sameness of food, plastic surgery, and his unhealthy addiction to the movies, which you should try your best to emulate.

By the way, should you ever find yourself in the emergency room with a badly scratched cornea, I suggest the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, on 14th and 2nd. Do not, even if blinded by a troop of blocked Shakespearean monkeys, go to the Beth Israel ER, which is your typical city screamfest (particularly at midnight). At Eye & Ear, which you can only go to with eye, ear, nose, and throat sort of things, you’re basically in a dentist’s waiting room—it’s that quiet, clean, and carpety. Highly recommended. Eyepatches make a snappy accessory, too, as I’m obviously not the first to inform you. Mine is a sanitary but unimaginative white; they come in a variety of colors for $5 each at the 826 Valencia pirate store. For those just slightly less lucky than me, designer glass eyes are $25 each, all of which look as though they’d mistakenly been to Beth Israel in the past 24 hours.

Also, I can’t believe that until this moment I didn’t link the current pirate craze with the current pirating craze. I was blind, but now I see.

Sedaris in the Flesh [Louisville Courier-Journal]

Sunday’s a good day for leftovers, and that includes links I’ve been saving in the refrigerator but that might go bad if I keep them Tupperwared up, so I’m serving a casserole (or, as we like to say in the Midwest, hot dish) instead.

There’s another nice recollection of the late New Yorker great Herbert Warren Wind, and his literary legacy, to add to the others. Art Spander writes in Scotland’s Sunday Herald:

In golf, euphoria is short lived, a bad shot lurking at any moment, so there is a state of sustained melancholy, thus leading to first-rate writing, and first-rate writers.

Bernard Darwin, of course, is considered the pioneer, followed by the post-Second World War giants, Pat-Ward Thomas, Henry Longhurst and, not that long ago, Peter Dobereiner. They must be joined in fame by an American, the great Herbert Warren Wind, who has died at the age of 88.

Wind’s seminal contribution to golf journalism was the naming of Augusta National’s arrowhead of holes, the 11th green, 12th hole and 13th tee, as “Amen Corner’’ in one of his joyously rambling essays for Sports Illustrated.

That poignant description of a place where Masters tournaments have been won and lost would today be called a soundbite of distinction, but it was the body and scope of Wind’s work that is responsible for his reputation. Cont’d.

Also, for no particular reason, 100 Things to Do in Scotland Before You Die. I’m thinking of retiring in Scotland myself, as soon as possible, so this was of particular interest. I’m sure Wind himself did at least half these things.

For the growing batallion of Wilseyists, here’s a light snack while you’re recovering from stuffing your face with the book for ten straight hours: San Franciscans cast the movie, and a piece in the Toronto Globe & Mail by Lisa Gabriele about Sean, Dede, Pat, Al, Indira, Todd, Menachem, Trevor, and all your newfound preoccupations. It’s a smart review, although I disagree somewhat with this:

Much of the writing in McSweeney’s comes from creative minds who suffered childhoods likely interrupted by despairing adults and their loud concerns. And because the stories are often elliptical, code-like and steeped in trivia, they feel as though they’re honed by writers who refuse to grow up, or have never learned how to, unable to let go of the coy trappings of innocence and curiosity…. Still, Wilsey’s memoir carries none of the so-called “McSweeney’s characteristics.'”

There’s too much McSweeney’s for me to make a pronouncement about all of it, but Wilsey helped form its famous tone, and his writing here fits into it well; it’s wry, dry, self-deprecating, absurd, expansive, and precise. (Esquire says it well: “Oh the Glory of It All is, as the title suggests, a stuffed, hyper book, its wounds still raw and glittering.”) As for trivia, I think our generation carries it for protection, as a bonding tool in the deafening midst of those very underactualized boomers Gabriele mentions. It’s also a mistake to confuse the McSweeney’s universe with the specific devices of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. There’s more than one kind of piece in McS., in any case. Some are dead serious despite the jokes; others are just jokes. Plus, and I really did like Gabriele’s review, but why are innocence and curiosity coy trappings? Surely with all the cynicism and irony we’re drowing in, those are welcome antidotes. For about a billion reasons, McS. for all its winking is anti-despair and anti-ennui—just ask anyone at 826 Valencia. And they publish sestinas, for God’s sake! Which I say with glee even though they nicely rejected mine, with encouragement. If you’ve never written one, I recommend it; it’s a real kick.

And on the subject of self-involved elders, Wilsey fever aside for a moment, this is one of the best statements I’ve ever read: “My only regret is that he’s not older than he is, since there would be more to read.” That’s George Saunders on Wilsey, and it’s in the generous spirit of my former colleague John Leonard, who often speaks of his gratitude to people who saw his gifts and energy early and let him run with them, and who never thought of witholding that same generosity even though he long ago hit the big time. That spirit is in 826 as well, and it’s absolutely right.

Here’s the fearless Chris Lehmann on the class series in the Times: “Alas, however, the New York Times is in no position to deliver. In contrast to, say, the paper’s conscientious reporting on the ’60s-era civil-rights movement in the South, its foray into class consciousness suffers from a fatal flaw. Social class is at the core of the Times’ institutional identity, which prevents the paper from offering the sort of dispassionate, critically searching discussion the subject demands….”

Finally, from a time when men were men and a serial comma was a serial comma:

The legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn ran his magazine through some magical blend of creative listening and inspired vision. But he was a copyeditor at heart.

Shawn once edited a piece by writer Philip Hamburger. It was late, around 10 at night. They came to the end of the piece, in which Hamburger described shaking hands with Argentina’s Evita Peron and finding her hand “stone cold.”

Shawn, Hamburger later wrote, “became agitated.”

“Stone cold,” he said, “requires a hyphen.”

“I became agitated. ‘Put a hyphen there and you spoil the ending,’ I said. ‘That hyphen would be ruinous.’

“Perhaps you had better sit outside my office and cool off,” he said. “I’ll go on with my other work.”

“I took a seat outside his office. From time to time, he would stick his head out and say, “Have you changed your mind?

“No hyphen,” I replied. “Absolutely no hyphen.” I was quite worked up over the hyphen.

“Sometime around two-thirty in the morning, Shawn said, wearily, “All right. No hyphen.”

“But you are wrong.”

Go back to that Sunday Herald obituary for a second. I think Shawn would’ve hyphenated “short-lived.”

Why ‘copyeditor’ should be one word [National Fellowship for Copy Editors]

Said Auntie Mame, and I concur: Live, live, live! OK, fine, don’t, but you do like a good red wine, right? How do you feel about Nutella crepes? Or crostini? Ah, I see you’re feeling a little better about leaving the house now. Well, when you wake up this afternoon head to the historic West Village to historic MacDougal St., right across from where Bob Dylan used to live, and set a spell. What are you getting me into? you say, and rightly. Well, there are six, count ’em six, poets reading, and they are Richard Allen, Kirsten Andersen, Michael Broder, Steve Roberts, Jason Schneiderman, and Maureen Thorson. They’ll take turns reading for a lively surprise-gift sort of atmosphere. The theme is Adventures on the High Seas, though likely only a few poems will adhere to it. But I hate poetry! you say. And I hate sculpture and jazz and gardens and fashion and papier-mâché, also! Well, it’s understandable that you should be suspicious of the fine arts, but don’t be afraid. These poets are comely, clever, profound in a good way, and I like them all personally very much. Plus, it’s free; plus, there’s lemonade. It’s from 5-7 at CamaJe bistro, which is not one of those MacDougal dumps you avoid, but the one with good food that all the neighbors go to. Like Bob Dylan. Well, he would if he still lived there.

MacDougal Street [Edna St. Vincent Millay, American Poems; the landscape is unrecognizable, except for “And everywhere I stepped there was a baby or a cat.”]