I’m making myself talk about something other than Harriet Miers, with whom I’m becoming obsessed (and if you haven’t seen her “blog” yet, do yourself a favor and check it out; it’s a thing of beauty). And while she is the Original Sixty-Year Old Teenager, who will have a flourishing career in any number of areas besides the administration of justice, should she not be confirmed to the S.C. (talk show host, porn star, celebrity knitter, to name just a few of her choices), I’m turning my attention very briefly elsewhere this morning. I am talking, of course, about the other H-Dog, Harold Pinter, who just bagged the Nobel Prize for literature. This H-Dog is so totally gangsta (if you can imagine a playwright being gangsta, please try for a moment) he makes Suge Knight look like Diddy. Have you read The Homecoming or The Birthday Party lately? Not upskis, let me tell you. And while they’re threatening and menacing and really pretty damn scary pieces of work (imagine Interpol writing plays), it’s not entirely clear what any of them are really about (imagine Interpol writing plays), if I might use a hopelessly unfashionable way of looking at literature. I wonder if he and Beckett ever went out on the town, and what that would have been like, and if they ever rolled home at three in the morning, singing fight songs? I’ll bet that was a laff riot.

So raise a sullen and morose glass, if you please, to HP, whose Chamber of Secrets is much scarier than the other HP (and in the interests of symmetry, could we please let Harold have a crack at the screenplay for the next offering of the Harry Potter movie franchise?). If we’re going to scare our children, let’s scare ‘em right.

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