THE CONSCRIPT

"Real war is not a joke"--The Travels of Babar (which then treats war as a joke, of course)

Yesterday I started reading Erckmann and Chatrian's The Conscript.  It's the first of two novels they wrote together about Joseph Bertha fighting in the last of the Napoleonic Wars.  (The second, Waterloo, is one I want to read because I've read the Classics Illustrated comic book, so I'm reading both.) 

This first one is about the campaign that culminated in Napoleon's great defeat at Leipzig, as seen by Bertha, a young man with a limp who only got drafted because they were dragging the bottom of the barrel after the annihilation of the Grande Armee in Russia.  The authors tell a straightforward story, seeing war the way it really is without the vainglory.

The other day we got the new Lapham's Quarterly, whose subject is youth.  I think I'll finish both of these novels before reading that.

This evening I went to the Bloor and saw Supermensch, a documentary about legendary agent Shep Gordon, who managed everyone from Alice Cooper to Anne Murray to Groucho Marx and has lots of stories (a few of them embellished!), directed by grateful actor Mike Myers.  I took the occasion to renew my annual Bloor membership, the real reason I went there though the movie was entertaining.  I barely got there in time, but as usual they were playing lots of trailers.

Yesterday at the memoir slam there was a girl from mainland China called Kendra, who's here on a research fellowship.  When we did the subject "The big city," she wrote about Shenzhen on the border with Hong Kong; when we did "The deaths of famous people," she wrote about her intellectual idol Stuart Hall; when we did "Sensitivity," she thought we meant "sensibility." English is clearly her second language, but this seems like a good way for her to improve it.

Last night salon.com had a good article by Patrick L. Smith about the new 9/11 museum at Ground Zero and its failure to tell honest history. (I wrote a comment repeating Dylan Thomas' famous poem "A Refusal to Mourn the Death of a Child by Fire in London.")