In which my hometown is Gill-otined

Oh dear. I opened the new Vanity Fair (the one with the creepy photos of Tiger Woods on the cover) and found my hometown slammed in the first sentence of A.A. Gill’s article on the even creepier Creation Museum: “It’s not in the nature of stoic Cincinnatians to boast, which is fortunate, really, for they have meager pickings to boast about.”

True enough, after last weekend’s drubbing of the Bengals at the hands of the Jets. And I suppose if Cincinnatians hide all of our other vices (booze, gambling, live nude girls, the airport) across the river, we’ll have to accept the wacky, anti-evolution Creation Museum--actually located in Petersburg, Kentucky--as ours, too. 

Happily, this issue also includes a spotlight on Persephone Books, the English publishing house devoted to reissues of forgotten 20th century classics. I’m a longtime subscriber to the catalog, and while visiting friends in London a while back I stopped in at the tiny Persephone shop to pick up The Shuttle, Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1907, ripped-from-the-headlines novel about American heiresses snapping up English lords--sometimes much to their mutual regret.

(Too bad the hilariously acerbic, Scottish-born Gill wasn’t around back then to warn our young women of fortune about the English, whom he memorably describes as "the lumpen and louty, course, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd" in his book The Angry Island.)