Gone with the Whiskey.

“The memo..[is] candid in its assessment of the writers’ strengths and weakness. Of William Faulkner, who had written a few screenplays in the early 1930s, the anonymous memo author notes that he was now living in Mississippi but ‘can fly anywhere in his own plane.’ On the downside, Faulkner was ‘not very reliable in his plane nor his habits.'”

But has he taken a stab at the rasslin’ form? Rebecca Onion of Slate birddogs this memo to David O. Selznick on possible Gone with the Wind screenwriters. The quip above reminded me of Mencken’s review of Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, from the dissertation: As good as Babbit “except the last 30,000 words, which you wrote in a state of liquor.”

RIP, AP.

Well, 162 years is a good run…but, sadly, the lowest-common-denominator, hyper-partisan idiocy derailing so much of the media these days seems to have now infected one of our oldest and most venerable American media institutions, the Associated Press. The handwriting’s been on the wall ever since conservative ideologue and almost-McCain-employee Ron Fournier moved up the pecking order. But, in the past two days, AP has completely embarrassed itself no less than twice. First, the AP analysis (by some stone-hearted fellow — paging Sinclair Lewis — named Charles Babington) bashed Obama’s nomination speech in purely Republican terms. Then, check out Fournier’s headline on McCain’s grotesque Palin pick: “Analysis: Palin’s age, inexperience rival Obama’s .” Uh, yeah.

Update: “As many of you know, some political groups and left-leaning blogs have aligned to organize a newspaper letter-writing campaign against AP Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier…Below you will find some talking points to help guide you as this issue plays out.” The AP issues CYA talking points to its affiliates defending Fournier.

Preaching to the (Re)Converted.

“The two faiths have struggled with each other for years…In fact, probably no other organization in the nation has played a bigger role in perpetuating the idea that Mormonism is a cult than the Southern Baptist Convention.” In light of the Huckabee-Romney race to be seen as Christian-in-Chief (subliminal ads and all), friend and colleague Neil J. Young of Little Bit Left ruminates on the enduring Mormon-Baptist divide for Slate. And, in related news, DoL Robert Novak argues that Huckabee may suffer from lingering internecine disputes within the SBC — Apparently, for some of his co-religionists, he hasn’t been conservative enough. (Finally, while on the subject of Republican candidates, religion, and history, I was heartened to see Ron Paul knows his Sinclair Lewis.)