Wooster Shot

During a phone call with me in the summer of 1990, a San Diego-area friend from my NYU years and sharing, almost, a surname with an English prince from the annals of the comics pages, alerted me to an attack upon my literary acumen, published in the issue of reason from February of that year, by a young right-movement apparatchik sharing, fully, a surname with an English toff from the annals of the comic novels. 

"The most unfortunate magazine review I've ever read", he in an installment on English journals of his regular column on magazines judged, reasonably or otherwise according to taste, the section profiling, favorably, the English monthly Encounter, in an article on English and American literary magazines I had published just over three years prior in the Christmas 1986 issue of National Review.

As it happened, primus inter pares among my projects over the months since the diasporational mailboxing of the issue at issue, within the graduate history program at U.Va. (Virginia, not Vienna - Ed.), was, for a seminar on twentieth-century Europe, a paper on Encounter, and its sponsor, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, to whose revision I devoted some among my spare hours that summer.

I happy was/Joy was my name, to adapt Blake, to have been granted this fugitive bit of journalist afterlife, and returned that most supreme among compliments, that of attention, with a letter to the reason editors, who in turn forwarded it to my critic, who in turn replied to me by mail.

My photocopy of his column having long since lain among the casualties on the battlefields of time, I several nights ago sought to no avail, among the otherwise comprehensive archives of reason at Unz.org , the magazine's issue for February 1990.

The irony of that archive, whose founder, with the aid of the steady and learned hands of his contest judges, had recently assayed to amplified effect my 20x expansion from last August of the Wikipedia entry on Encounter, *

     *And later, my 14x expansion of the Wikipedia entry on politics 

shielding me by omission from ancient journalistic criticism of its post-undergrad seed-packet from fully twenty-six years ago, amuses me no end.

As does the aspect of the online venue within which, just minutes later, I found my 9 MB quarry after all - within an archive, hosted by the University of California, San Francisco, devoted to documents issuing from the famous Master Settlement Agreement in 1998 with the tobacco industry, toward the polemical defense of which latter fold my critic had devoted a signature portion of his career within the nation's "free"-market "think" tanks:

Legacy Tobacco Documents Library

Digital library of internal tobacco industry documents from the files of top tobacco companies. Over 5 million documents, over 20 million pages, relating to ...

Whenever I hear about a kid getting in trouble with drugs, cigarette gangs or National Review, **

     **Or, for that matter, reason itself, whose recent covers, adorned as they are by, e.g., the Current Incumbent and his Vanquished Challenger, the Pauls père et fils, Bob Barr (the pol, not the Brunhoff pachyderm), Princess Randian, the Loughner Gunman, and, g-ds help us all, those dimmest during daylight among fickly-flickering NYT lights, Da*** Bro*** and Tho*** Fried***, remind us for all time that, bade by Mencken to return "back to Bach!" in our quest for more capital cases of Reason as from first to last we are, our so-titled subscription more wholesome lies in the reading of a like 96 pages monthly of its C17 Dutch master. And in the way of restorative magazine-cover art as it is supposed to be, was once and might still be, we must needs wash our eyes with a quick scroll down several dozen among the covers of the Vanity Fair of the Frank Crowninshield years between the world wars, much as I last night tilted a gallon jug of water to my right eye after having rubbed the latter with an unwashed hand perhaps best known over the hours preceding for having sliced chili peppers not just in their already-rockin' red-hot variant, but in green-hot as well.

I shall tell her this story, retire to my prayer chamber, and give silent thanks on behalf of the lost souls of poor sinners everywhere from Adams Morgan to Winston-Salem.