The cyber dust-up that my Monday posting about The Morning News’ Rod Dreher caused caught me completely unaware. Call me naïve, but I’m honestly surprised by all of the commotion. I’m not naïve any more, of course, and I learned a lesson: there’s a lot of heat in the blogging kitchen.
Tim Rogers of D is correct. I don’t speak French, which is one reason why I’m not an academic. I had been accepted into the graduate program at the University of Illinois in 1981 to study 17th- and 18th-century European history. But the program required French, and I have no aptitude for foreign languages. So I stayed in the newspaper business, and the world was spared a thesis on the Duke of Marlborough’s relationship with his Dutch allies during the War of the Spanish Succession. If Tim would like to read something of mine in English, I refer him to my essay on the hard-boiled novelist Chester Himes in volume 226 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
I’m a little more disappointed with Dreher, if only because we apparently have a bit in common. I worked in south Louisiana for a couple of years while he was growing up in Baton Rouge, and we may know some of the same people (especially at the Morning Advocate newspaper). There used to be a terrific restaurant called The Cabin in Burnside, near the Sunshine Bridge. I also learned much about Louisiana cooking, thanks to a grand woman named Merlin Boudreaux Kleinpeter, who taught me the secrets of gumbo, jambalaya and crawfish etouffee (though I never did figure out redfish courtbouillon). Rod is more than welcome to come by the house to eat. My only request is that he bring the Dixie beer.
It’s not the name calling that bothers me about this foolishness; I’ve been called names for years. It’s that a serious discussion about something of importance to the neighborhood degenerated to this -– something that one of the regular commentators here, Norm Alston, warned about. This blogging takes a bit of getting used to,
