The pub frequented by Dylan Thomas has been sold to Morrissey.

This Saturday, Sony launches the ebook reader. (And if you can read Japanese, here’s the Sony page.) The reader resembles a PDA and allows a memory stick will allow 500 books to be indexed at one time. There’s no way to download books directly to the Librie. Honestly, if this is the best Sony can do, then they need to go back to the drawing board. Personally, until digital paper with flippable pages offering the same resolution as printed material comes along, I’m disinclined to stare at an LCD for several hours, even if it’s at 170 pixels per inch. (A printer, by contrast, is 300 ppi.)

From America in the Twenties by Geoffrey Perrett:

Following the declaration of war in April 1917, Congress had promptly passed the Espionage Act. Hastily drawn, it was a legal blunderbuss. In 1918, after a year’s pause for reflection, the act was amended and made worse. Virtually anything that could be construed as interfering with the war effort or offering a crumb of comfort to the Germans was a criminal offense. Words, naked, unsupported by action, sufficed for conviction. Anyone so foolhardy as to make an unflattering observation on American military uniforms, for example, risked going to jail.

Mrs. Rose Peter Stokes, a noted feminist and Socialist, wrote in the Kansas City Star, “I am for the people and the government is for the profiteers.” For this dangerous utterance she received a ten-year sentence. Mrs. Kate Richards O’Hare also received a ten-year sentence for advising women not to bear sons, because the government would noe day consider them cannon fodder. Victor Berger, a noted right-wing Socialist, was under indictment when the war ended for his Milwaukee Leader editorials, which suggested that combat drove some men mad, that there were young men who did not want to be drafted, that the Bible sanctioned pacifism, and that the United States had entered the war to protect its investment in Allied loans.

Under indictment, Berger ran for election to Congress from Wisconson’s Fifth District and won. The next month he won a twenty-year prison sentence from Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. He appealed his conviction. When the Sixty-sixth Congress convened in March 1919, Berger proposed to take his seat. The House proposed to take it away from him.

It was not socialism that the members objected to. Three Socialists had already served in the House. An espionage conviction, no matter how footling the cited offense, was considered tantamount to proof of treason (except in the Fifth District of Wisconsin). A new election was called for December 1919. Berger won again, by a larger margin. And although the war was over, Espionage Act prosecutions ground steadily on.

It was against this background that in 1919-20, thirty-two states passed criminal syndicalism laws. Four states that had abolished the death penalty (Arizona, Missouri, Oregon, and Washington) restored it. The loyalty of schoolteachers was screened by local vigilance committees. Hundreds of teachers appear to have lost their jobs for reading the wrong books, having the wrong friends, holding the wrong opinions, or joining the wrong groups.

A committee of the New York State legislature, chaired by Clayton R. Lusk, an upstate Republican, led the grass roots attack on radicals. His committee raided the unaccredited Soviet embassy, the IWW headquarters in New York City, and the Rand School of Social Research. These raids were illegal from start to finish. That made no difference. In 1920, over governor Smith’s veto, the legislature passed a clutch of statutes known as the Lusk Laws. These imposed a loyalty oath on teachers, made the Socialist party illegal and set up a bureau of investigation. This last measure proved Lusk’s undoing. The hero was a crook. He hired investigators only after they agreed to split their salaries with him. The hero went to jail.

The New York legislature had meanwhile held hearings on five Socialist members, decided that they were “plotting to overthrow our system of government by force,” and expelled them.

State criminal syndicalism statutes were more than empty gestures. In Chicago, 1920 saw the prosecution of a score of defendants in a single trial on charges of Bolshevism. An undercover agent from the Justice Department claimed that there was a special Communist party yell for important occasions that went, “Bolshevik, Bolshevik, Bolshevik, bang!’ He appeared on the stand wrapped in a red banner. He swore that one of the defendants had an American flag covering his toilet floor. All the accused were convicted.

In Connecticut a clothing salesman named Joseph Yenowsky attempted to discourage a persistent bond salesman by making crucial remarks about capitalism and John D. Rockefeller. To Yenowsky’s astonishment, the bond salesman went for a policeman. Connecticut had what amounted to the shortest sedition law ever, and probably the broadest. In its entirety it read: “No person shall in public, or before any assemblance of 10 or more persons, advocate in any language any measure or doctrine, proposal or propaganda intended to affect injuriously the Government of the United States or the State of Connecticut. ” Yenowsky received a six-month jail sentence.

An aroused citizenry was inclined to take matters into its own hands. In Hammond, Indiana, in February, 1919, Frank Petroni, a naturalized citizen, was tried for murdering Frank Petrich, an alien. The defense was that Petrich had said, “To hell with the United States.” The jury, after solemn deliberations that lasted two minutes, set Petroni free.

On May Day that same year Socialist red-flag parades were broken up in a dozen cities by outraged mobs. Three people were killed, more than a hundred injured. In New York the offices of the Socialist Daily Call were ransacked by uninformed servicemen to ecstatic applause from a crowd in the street. In all these riots the people arrested, and later tried, were Socialists. Their attackers were left alone.

It was also in May that a spectator refused to rise for the national anthem at a Victory Loan rally in Washington. As the strains of “The Star Spangled Banner” faded, a uniformed sailor ended his salute, drew a revolver, and fired three shots into the back of the lone seated figure. The man fell over, critically wounded. The stadium crowd broke into ecstatic applause.

This spontaneous identification with wanton violence occurred because many Americans believed the country was under violent attack.

As noted by Maud and others, Toby Young is guesting at Slate this week. But apparently, some folks are pissed. I wasn’t aware that a seedy memoir had this much staying power. In 2002, I took a look at the book for Central Booking (now defunct) and I reproduce the review here:

There was a time when memoirs involved deliberation. Whether it was Frank McCourt recalling his impoverished childhood or Caroline Knapp probing a conquered alcoholic wraith, memoirs hit the stacks without the obligatory run-in with a celebrity or boastful chapters of self-affirmation. But when Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius became the dog-eared darling on every slacker’s bookshelf, the rules changed. Everyone from Dave Pelzer to Rick Moody published memoirs well before experiencing a midlife crisis, much less the beginnings of a hoary head. Remarkably, these thirtysomething memoirists never offered a single excuse for why their tomes were so premature. They didn’t need to. They were more than happy to receive lucrative advances, even if it wasn’t intended to pay for any terminal illness.

Enter Toby Young, the bad-boy British journalist who has no problem trashing himself and former employer, Condé Nast in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (Da Capo Press, 368 pp., $24.00). Young’s tell-all book carries the moniker “A Memoir,” but it has about as much in common with Eggers’ much-loved book as guano has with chocolate mousse. Same color, different texture.

Young, “a short, balding, Philip Seymour Hoffman look-a-like,” didn’t coax Judd Winick into a Might Magazine photo shoot. He interviewed Nathan Lane, first asking if he was Jewish and then asking if he was gay, before being led away by jittery publicists. Young didn’t watch his mother and father die within 32 days or have a younger brother to care for. But he did let a girl freeze outside of his apartment. He was supposed to pick up her cab fare. She didn’t have the cash. Why? He was too busy sleeping off a nose candy binge. Young didn’t audition for The Real World. He dated supermodels with little success and hired a company for $750 to have a focus group rate him on his dating “marketability.”

Young’s shit stinks, but, unlike other memoirs that hide behind self-important WASP flummery, his memoir pulls no punches. The book became an unexpected bestseller in Britain partly because of its pugnacious approach. And it translates well here. One of the book’s virtues is its determination to relay the first-person account of a scoundrel. The memoir mixes assessments on America (Tocqueville is unfurled as a repeated, but surprisingly unsuccessful qualifier) with Young’s problematic life. While coming up short in the insight department, it does make for some funny observations.

Young jetted out to Manhattan on the dime of Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, portrayed here as an avuncular snob. Young was a hotshot Oxford man and Fulbright scholar who had made a name in the Fleet Street skids with The Modern Review, a highbrow look at lowbrow culture that featured early work from such contributors as Will Self and Nick Hornby. On his first day of work at Vanity Fair, Carter’s secretary told the Brit that staff dressed “real causal.” He showed up in vintage Levis and a Keanu Reeves T-shirt with the tagline “Young, Dumb and Full of Come.” Months into the gig, Young hired a stripper to bare all on Take Your Daughters to Work Day.

Before the reader can condemn Young as an exhibitionistic blowhard, Young manages to explain his motivations early enough to qualify some of his apocryphal tales. He has a passionate view of the Algonquin American journalist, “somewhere between a whore and a bartender,” lovingly lifted from the plays and films written by Ben Hecht. He bemoans political correctness and “clipboard Nazis.” He finds Condé Nast’s treatment of messengers and freelancers deplorable. And he remains awestruck over how easy it is for Brits like Tina Brown to embrace Manhattan superficiality.

But Young’s sentiments don’t empower him to find a bit of self-abnegation himself. Ultimately fired by Vanity Fair, Young turns to drink and cocaine. Young can proselytize John Belushi-antics all he wants, but his sentiments are undermined by the despicable treatment he ekes out to loved ones and peers. And there’s something troubling about a book so astute about American journalism’s inability to take chances while hypocritical in its generalizations of Americans.

Young’s book doesn’t add too much promise for the self-absorbed memoir, but it does steer the genre down an appropriately balls-out path. It’s refreshing to read a life story that is both unapologetic and frequently funny. But it’s too bad that Young’s tome is cut from the same attention-seeking cloth as its brethren.