Only you, Dick Diver

(Talking of various literary things in sff.net . ..  )

The Guns of August is a truly great book, Dave, though I’d say Tuchmann’s A Distant Mirror is even better.  What a terrifying time trip!

She was at Harvard and Radcliffe the first six years I taught at MIT.  I only got to see her once – a talk she gave defending funding the humanities – and she was good.  (Of course the subject is complex and studded with hot buttons.)

Nice pens, Steve . . .  I’d love to have the Charlie Chaplin, the sci-fi-ish one with gears, but googling, I find that it runs £15,000  -- which is within spitting distance, or fountain-pen-squirting distance, of what I’d make from a book written with it.  So maybe I better put the checkbook away.

Found a picture of Gay and me in a surprising place this morning, leafing through the _F. Scott Fitzgerald Review_ -- it’s a group photo taken in Ezra Pound’s Paris garden.  Gay and I were there July 3rd with a bunch of Fizgeraldites.  On our way to lunch at Michaud’s, a restaurant famous in the annals of literary penis length.  (It was here that Fitzgerald confided in Hemingway that he was worried about his stature in that regard; EH took him into the john and, upon observation, pronounced him normal.  The lesson here is never to divulge anything too interesting to a person whose life’s work is the contrivance of an interesting autobiography.)

Off to work – good company coming for lunch, Rick Wilbur.

Joe