In other news...

Apropos of our discussion of Twain's funny/inappropriate speech at the Whittier dinner, some of you may have heard about the poet Derek Walcott's funny/inappropriate reading in May at the Calabash Literary Festival. He read a poem titled "The Mongoose" that attacked the novelist V.S. Naipaul. As an article in the Guardian puts it:

So far the incident, reported in the New Statesman, has elicited a mixed response. The Jamaican daily newspaper the Gleaner seemed to come out in support of the poet, with a story headlined: 'Walcott broadsides Naipaul.' One of the Calabash Festival organisers, the Jamaican poet Kwame Dawes, told The Observer that people in the Caribbean were likely to side with Walcott, given Naipaul's long-running antipathy to the region of his birth: 'It's not so much a case of "Naipaul had it coming", as "Naipaul constantly has it coming", because he's such an easy target.' But the writers and critics who attended the festival were less sure. 'Some people felt that it was demeaning for someone of Walcott's stature to write such a vitriolic and nasty poem,' Kay told The Observer.