In The New York Times this morning, Janet Maslin had very positive things to say about True Prep, the new book from my friend Lisa Birnbach and Chip Kidd, which is a sequel to her huge hit of a couple of decades ago, The Official Preppie Handbook. Says Maslin: “Ms. Birnbach has returned to the subject she knows best. Together with Chip Kidd, the graphic designer and writer with the certifiably preppy first name, she has come up with “True Prep: It’s a Whole New Old World,” a surprisingly worthwhile sequel to the now-creaky “Handbook.” This new compendium moves beyond school days to address matters newly relevant for the core readership: how to remarry, how to dress for a funeral and how to deal with the collateral damage caused by decades’ worth of the party-hearty behavior described in the first book.” On Slate, Mark Oppenheimer is also enthusiastic: “The good news is that Birnbach. . . and Kidd, well-known as book-jacket designer, novelist, and natty dresser, have produced a book as witty as, and more thorough than, the original.” Congratulations, Lisa!

Currently on Slate, a photo album from Magnum Photos of the Mad Men era, including this shot of a 1963 literary cocktail party at George Plimpton‘s Upper East Side apartment. Plimpton is seated at left with literary agent Maggie Abbott next to him. At top, left to right: Jonathan Miller, Gore Vidal, Ricky Leacock, Robert Laskey, and Paul Heller. In background, left to right: Ralph Ellison and Peter Matthiessen. Center: Walter Bernstein (seated on couch with back to camera), Sydney Lumet (behind Bernstein to right), Mario Puzo (leaning against mirror), Jack Richardson (tall man, front, right foreground), Arthur Kopit (foreground, right), Frank Perry (left of Kopit), Eleanor Perry (left of Frank), Arthur Penn (obscured behind Eleanor), and Truman Capote (center on couch), 1963.
© Cornell Capa C / Magnum Photos

The oddest entertainment story of the week reports that Aaron Sorkin has agreed to write the screenplay and direct the film of The Politician, Andrew Young‘s account of his disappointing time as an aide to the vain, dishonest and dishonorable Senator John Edwards, and Young’s complicity is hiding the extra-marital affair  and pregnancy that Edwards and his ditsy gal pal Rielle Hunter that the conducted while running for the presidency. This seems like an unlikely pairing of artist and subject matter. I admire Sorkin quite a bit; I’m a loyal fan of The West Wing. But Sorkin, though hipper and occasionally cynical, is really very romantic about politics.  Nobody likes a hero more than Sorkin; nearly every character he created for The West Wing had a clean mind and a full heart and a staunch belief in America, and suffered a crisis of conscience if he or she so much as deposited a gum wrapper in the wrong recycling repository. (The same was true with A Few GoodMen! And for The American President, in which even Michael Douglas played a square-jawed hero! It was even true of Sports Night, which practically oozed integrity!) Even Charlie Wilson’s War, for which Sorkin wrote the screenplay, sanitized the coke-snorting, skirt-chasing congressman of the title, rendered him an innocent bystander in all those hut tubs he frequented, and had him tear up over poor Afghan orphans. How much of that transmogrification can be blamed on Mike Nichols and Tom Hanks is an open question, but I didn’t see Sorkin take his name off the whitewash of the wascally Wilson. But there are no heroes in The Politician. Edwards comes across as an odious charlatan, Elizabeth Edwards as a harridan and a user, Hunter as a homewrecker, and Young as pathetic, self-deluding, enabling, complicit doormat. If ever a subject called for the talents of black-hearted satirist like Armando Ianucci, this was it. Instead, it goes to a man who is only slightly edgier than Steven Spielberg.

Went over to Borders in Scarsdale last week to hear the novelist Jonathan Tropper read from his novel of suburban disintegration This Is Where I Leave You. I just finishing reading the book myself, and enjoyed it very much. Tropper has a very nice touch. The book is a gallery of male archetypes, and pretty funny. During the Q&A session he said that he’s frequently compared to Nick Hornby, and I can easily see why. Both have a way of being funny and at the same time very generous about their characters’ shortcomings.

Yesterday the New York Times reported that in November, the University of California will publish the first three volumes of the 500,000 (!) word Autobiography of Mark Twain. The opinion is that this will restore acid to a writer who has come to be seen as “’Colonel Sanders without the chicken, the avuncular man who told stories,” as his biographer Ron Powers put it. “He’s been scrubbed and sanitized, and his passion has been kind of forgotten in all these long decades. But here he is talking to us, without any filtering at all, and what comes through that we have lost is precisely this fierce, unceasing passion.” Earlier versions, the paper says, were bowdlerized by editor Albert Bigelow Paine, a Victorian who was a stickler for propriety and who cut entire sections he thought offensive.

Reports the paper, “In a passage removed by Paine, Twain excoriates “the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish War” and Gen. Leonard Wood’s “mephitic record” as governor general in Havana. In writing about an attack on a tribal group in the Philippines, Twain refers to American troops as “our uniformed assassins” and describes their killing of “six hundred helpless and weaponless savages” as “a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory.”

He is similarly unsparing about the plutocrats and Wall Street luminaries of his day, who he argued had destroyed the innate generosity of Americans and replaced it with greed and selfishness. “The world believes that the elder Rockefeller is worth a billion dollars,” Twain observes. “He pays taxes on two million and a half.”

Other reappearing gems:

“Theodore Roosevelt is one of the most impulsive men in existence … He flies from one thing to another with incredible dispatch — throws a somersault and is straightaway back again where he was last week. He will then throw some more somersaults and nobody can foretell where he is finally going to land after the series. Each act of his, and each opinion expressed, is likely to abolish or controvert some previous act or expressed opinion. That is what is happening to him all the time as president.”

“Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for — annually, not oftener — if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man’s side, consequently on the Lord’s side, consequently it was proper to thank the Lord for it.”

“The multimillionaire disciples of Jay Gould — that man who in his brief life rotted the commercial morals of this nation and left them stinking when he died — have quite completely transformed our people from a nation with pretty high and respectable ideals to just the opposite of that; that our people have no ideals now that are worthy of consideration; that our Christianity which we have always been so proud of — not to say vain of — is now nothing but a shell, a sham, a hypocrisy; that we have lost our ancient sympathy with oppressed peoples struggling for life and liberty; that when we are not coldly indifferent to such things we sneer at them, and that the sneer is about the only expression the newspapers and the nation deal in with regard to such things.”

In The Guardian today: “The playwright Sir Tom Stoppard spoke today of his fears that the “printed page” is in danger of being edged out in a `world of technology’.  “I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there’s more competition for one’s attention nowadays,” he said. “The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them.” The “moving image,” he added, was taking precedence in many children’s lives over “the printed page … [and] I think that’s to the detriment”.

Reported in a British paper, read on its website in New York, on a screen, of course.

Thanks once again to my friend Lewis Burke Frumkes for inviting me to appear at the Marymount Manhattan Writers Conference. This was my third and unfortunately final year at the event, because the school has decided after sixteen years to close the program because it needed the space. Too bad; the conferences were very stimulating, as were the courses that I taught there. Lucette Lagnado has a warm and lovely farewell to the program in the Wall Street Journal today. She quotes Cynthia Ozick, a friend of the program, rising to its defense: “Is it the intent of this philistine decision to declare to New York, an indispensable matrix of publishing, that the art of writing…..is a waste of Marymount Manhattan College’s time? Or of its President’s time?” Ozick asked. “What other conclusion can be drawn from so abrupt a withdrawal of a valuable program?” I hope those of us at today’s last Editors’ panel gave everybody their money’s worth. From left: Linda Sherbet, features editor of Veranda; the eminent Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, author of the delightful memoir Me and DiMaggio which I so enjoyed when I read it years back; Joanne Miller, formerly of Basic Books; Ed Brown, the president of Bedford Communications; me; and Dana Cowin, editor of Food and Wine. Good luck to Lewis, Bob, Karen and my other friends from the program; here’s hoping they find a place that allows them to keep on keeping on.

I had a delightful time yesterday meeting with McCracken Poston, a lawyer and former state legislator from Georgia who told me a warm and delightful story about, of all things, a murder case he tried a decade ago. He and I are going to work to try to turn it into a book. McCracken and I met at Soho House, a private club on Ninth Avenue that I had never heard of, but which was pretty terrific. We saw Stanley Tucci. Almost everyone we saw was young and svelte. Well, not Stanley, but he looked good nonetheless.

A belated thanks to my friend Michael Gross, who came up to Briarcliff a couple of Sundays ago. The Garden Club was having its annual Arts Abloom Festival for the benefit of the library, and Michael was the special celebrity guest, reading  from his book Rogues Gallery and signing copies. Michael enjoyed his sojourn into suburbia (he’s a Long Islander himself) and even got his car washed by the our Girls Varsity Softball team (Is every one of them a budding Elena Kagan?)  It was awafully good of him to come. (Thanks to Phyllis Neider for the photo.)

Peter O’Donnell, who created the comic strip Modesty Blaise for the London Evening Standard in 1963 and who chronicled her adventures for the next 38 years, died over the weekend at age 90. O’Donnell began writing comic strips when he was 17, a nascent career that was interrupted by a stint in the army during the Second World War. Serving in a mobile radio detachment in Persia, O’Donnell had a chance meeting with a hungry little girl. According to the Guardian, she “eyed them warily but accepted some food. Before she left, O’Donnell gave her two tins of stew and showed her how to use a tin opener. “To this day, I can see in my mind’s eye the smile she gave us and the sight of that upright little figure walking like a princess as she moved away from us on those brave, skinny legs.” Twenty years later, that encounter sparked the creation of Modesty Blaise , “a woman who, though fully feminine, would be as good in combat and action as any male, if not better”. Over the years, the alluring secret agent was called upon  to thwart a multi-million pound diamond heist, foil a private army of professional killers, and defeat Caribbean drug traffickers and homicidal Norsemen. Modesty was drawn first by Jim Holdaway and later Enrique Badia Romero (see left), but O’Donnell also produced Modesty Blaise novels, whose most ardent admirer may have been Kingsley Amis. O’Donnell once said that the proudest moment of his career was receiving a letter from the Lucky Jim author who praised the books as “endlessly fascinating.”