# *Oh*--*Ponder*--*Yow*

(_Oh_) “In this country more than in any other that I know of, the
relationship between writers and alcohol is a curiously close one. I
have often asked literary scholars for an explanation of the fact that
while in the nineteenth century few of our writers except Poe were heavy
drinkers, in the twentieth century almost every writer worthy of the
name has been one. Among the dead, we have only to think of Faulkner,
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Lardner, Marquand, Sinclair Lewis, O’Hara, Crane,
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, O’Neill, Barry, Millay,
Dorothy Parker, Hammett, Roethke, Benchley, and Berryman. Among the
living, the list is equally long, if not equally distinguished.”–Brendan
Gill, Here at the New Yorker, pp. 259-60.

(_Ponder_) Is anyone else bothered by the “women and children”
disaster-victim category? (As in “x people were killed, including y
women and children”.) If there’s going to be a breakdown of the victims,
surely women can have their own category, instead of having to share one
with _children_? Equating women to children is not a terribly
21st-Century thing to do. (In other situations–in stories dealing with
refugees, say, where women are treated differently to men–the phrase
makes more sense.)

(_Yow_) You can get links to open in another, already open window by
dragging them there. This is so convenient! (Does everybody but me know
about this?)