Shut up, Bill

First line from Nixon's memoir: "I was born in the house my father built."

First line from Clinton's memoir: "Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana."

Not to say Nixon was any great President, not by a long shot, but seriously, which page would you rather go on reading?

As one of my writing professors said of The Mists of Avalon, "This book would have benefited from some judicious editing."

I know in the previous post I had a bitch-fest about editors, but I can't even call My Life "edited," because this thing should be maybe a quarter of the eighty billion pages he rolled off. (Dear Lord, all those dead trees! Where art thou, environmentalists?) Whoever gave this the editorial A-OK merely checked for periods and apostrophes and sent it off to press. I mean, Knof didn't have to Maxwell Perkins the thing, but damn. Did he even consider the poor people who had to type and galley this crap?

One of my radio buddies read a passage on the air. It took him maybe seven minutes or so, and involved some sort of anecdote about Clinton driving up to a house to meet some guy with a McGovern sticker on his pickup truck. Then when Clinton was President he invited him to the White House. And then later on the guy died. And the host put the book down, paused, and said, "People, that was one paragraph."

argh! at blondechampagne@hotmail.com