On Masafuera’s sister island — originally named Masatierra, or Closer to Land, and now called Robinson Crusoe — I had seen the damage wrought by a trio of mainland plant species, maquis and murtilla and blackberry, which have monotonously overrun entire hills and drainages.

[Here, Franzen goes on to a facile metaphor about how "the blackberry on Robinson Crusoe Island was like the conquering novel, yes, but it seemed to me no less like the Internet, that BlackBerry-borne invasive". Ugh. Anyway, back to Franzen's take on the island.]

I felt desperate to escape the islands. Before leaving for Masafuera, I’d already seen Robinson’s two endemic land-bird species, and the prospect of another week there, with no chance of seeing something new, seemed suffocatingly boring…

Although I no longer wanted it, or because I didn’t want it, I had the experience of being truly stranded on an island. I ate the same bad Chilean white bread at every meal, the same nondescript fish served without sauce or seasoning at every lunch and dinner… I hiked over the mountains to a grassland where the island’s annual cattle-branding festival was being held, and I watched the horseback riders drive the village’s herd into a corral. The setting was spectacular — sweeping hills, volcanic peaks, whitecapped ocean — but the hills were denuded and deeply gouged by erosion. Of the hundred-plus cattle, at least ninety were malnourished, the majority of them so skeletal it seemed remarkable that they could even stand up. The herd had historically been a reserve source of protein, and the villagers still enjoyed the ritual of roping and branding, but couldn’t they see what a sad travesty their ritual had become?

All of this is so callous and worthy of unalloyed hatred that I’m pretty sure I’m never going to read anything by Franzen again. According to something he says in the story about Super Bowl XLV, Franzen was on Robinson Crusoe Island on February 3, 2011. Which means he was there less than a year after Robinson Crusoe Island was all but destroyed by the tsunami which followed massive Chilean earthquake of 2010:

A wall of water – possibly nearly 5 metres high – ravaged everything in its way. Within a few minutes, the scene of the adventures of Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk – marooned on the island from 1704 to 1708, and immortalized in Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe – had been razed to the ground.

“Everything that had been along that three-kilometre stretch just disappeared,” said Fernando Avaria, the first pilot to fly over the area after the disaster. The cemetery, the churches, sports facilities and the area’s only school were reduced to planks of wood and broken glass. The buildings of the local authority simply disappeared. “It was devastating, really out of a horror film,” said Margot Salas, a local who toured the area with Chilean state television cameras almost 24 hours after the disaster. As the sea receded, Robinson Crusoe Island faced a new flood – one of despair. Mud covered everything within three kilometres of the coast.

Sixteen people died; the entire economy of the island was wiped out. If you’re interested in helping, or finding out more, there are good resources here.

It’s into the aftermath of this disaster that Franzen wanders, thinking in his Important Novelist way about how selfish David Foster Wallace turns out to have been. He reaches the island, and he sees the damage wrought — by blackberries. He sees the islanders trying to recover some semblance of their former lives, and sneers at the “sad travesty” of their ritual. He moans about how “nondescript” his food is and how “skeletal” the cattle are, while somehow failing to notice that the reason is that the islanders, recovering from a terrible natural disaster, have nothing left.

As for Franzen, he’s only on the island at all because he has a stupid dream of “running away and being alone” on Masafuera. “Like Selkirk”, he says. But he only manages to hack being alone for the grand total of one night. Like Selkirk, my arse.

Franzen attacks Wallace in this essay, criticizing “the extremes of his own narcissism” and his self-deception. Ha! The extremes of narcissism and self-deception needed to visit Robinson Crusoe Island 11 months after the tsunami and not even notice what had happened make Wallace look like an amateur in such fields. (And if Franzen did notice, but decided to ignore it, that’s even worse.)

I was obviously wrong to give Franzen any benefit of the doubt after the Oprah fiasco: he really is as boorish and narcissistic as he seemed back then. Clearly it’s long past time to ignore everything he does from here on in.

(Update: This seems to be getting a bit of traction, so let me clarify a couple of things. Franzen spent about two weeks on Robinson Crusoe Island — at least that’s how I read the line about him spending “another week there”. The island, pre-tsunami, had a population of just over 600. So Franzen lived for two weeks on a small island, being hosted by a traumatized population. And in the wake of that experience, felt happy to describe their cattle-branding festival as a “sad travesty”. I still can’t work out which would be worse: that he wrote such a thing in full knowledge of the tsunami, or that he somehow contrived to remain ignorant of the devastation despite living in its aftermath for two weeks.)

The bien-pensant consensus surrounding l’affaire Weigel is that it’s wrong he got kicked out of his position blogging for the Washington Post. And that of course is entirely correct. But even many of the people who are on #teamweigel will quickly add that he demonstrated poor judgment in writing what he wrote, and that this should be a lesson to us all.

I don’t think that’s true. Our wired and Twittered world is increasingly blurring the distinction between the personal and the professional, and in such a world honesty is a much greater virtue than mealy-mouthed meekness when it comes to expressing the truth as you see it. Especially in a blogger. People have opinions, and it’s kinda hilarious to see conservatives try to simultaneously complain that Weigel had erroneously been counted as one of their number while at the same time complaining that he wasn’t “objective”.

I do believe that Weigel resigned rather than was fired, and it’s easy to see why he’d want to do that after reading the absolutely horrendous column by their lame, sad toady of an ombudsman today. Weigel is a great talent, and he’ll land somewhere which will be positively encouraging to say in public what he was confined to saying in private while housed at WaPo. He’s a very funny guy, and he should be able to let rip as much as he likes, without then feeling the need to apologize for being who he is.

Meanwhile, a horrible little turd somewhere is gleefully if quietly celebrating his coup (I’m sure it’s a guy) in leaking Weigel’s private correspondence to Fishbowl DC and the Daily Caller. Maybe he’s genuinely disturbed in some way. But, to coin a phrase, this would be a vastly better world to live in if he decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.

The obvious question, of course, is what is the significance of those dates? The 1209 and 2009 dates are obvious. And to find out about the others, the obvious place to look is the website at the bottom of the banner, which has a handy timeline. The problem is that although the timeline includes no fewer than 80 different years between 1209 and 2009 (not including the ones at both ends), only one of them coincides with the seven in-between years on the banner: 1446, which marks the founding of King’s College. So what are the others?

Less than 24 hours after Felix returned from Shanghai we cycled over the B’Burg Bridge for more summer weekending in Brooklyn. This time 85 degrees with thunderstorms and tropical showers, but that didn’t keep us away from an anticipated pork feast. No way. We hit the 3rd Ward 2nd annual pork roast which included the entire population of Williamsburg hispters plus us, all packed into one building.

We waited in a very long line which did not move for almost one hour, and yet I was completely content drinking a beer patiently (generally not my greatest virtue) while arguing whether or not we were in East Williamsburg or Bushwick as a very loud garage punk band entertained the crowd.

Rockstar butcher Tom Mylan carved up the most gorgeous roasted pig while a team of folks assembled tacos for distribution. Felix and I watched the tacos roll out with small bits of pork as we frowned and looked at each other, “Forget THAT.” I was hardly about to wait in a one hour line for tacos. When it was finally our turn, I pushed Felix up to the counter and whispered in his ear, “No rice. No beans, no tortillas – just try and get us the pork”. Felix then asked, “Can we order pork only?” and the lady looked back at him with a glare, “That will be $12… EACH.” Like it was out of the question or something… Done.

She wrote on our paper plates: “Plate Of Pork” and passed them back to the taco team. They rolled their eyes and passed the plates back to the pig. Yay! Bring it on… large juicy mounds of pork wobbled around on the flimsy plates as we snatched the goods and found a corner to merrily eat in silence.

A wave of euphoria swept over us, like some crazy grease high. Showers came plummeting down from the sky and the crowd took cover, but never left the line. You don’t wait that long for Tom Mylan roast pork and leave just because there’s a monsoon. Thank you 3rd Ward, thank you Tom & crew. Happy Sunday in Brooklyn, Happy Dead Pig.

It was touch-and-go there, pretty much all the way. In the days leading up to today, Stefan was obsessively checking the forecasts and the satellite pictures, looking at an enormous thundercloud, at least 1,000km across, which was right in the way and which would make the eclipse a total wash.

But then, yesterday, the cloud broke up, and Moganshan — where we’re staying — was bathed in sunlight. The people operating the resort said that it’s always clear in the mornings, and when we climbed the hill to look east over the plain, we were excited to get a perfect eclipse at 9:33am.

When we woke up, however, it was overcast and drizzling, and by the time we were looking out over the plain, you could barely see it, let alone the sun. We were convinced it was going to be a complete washout, where we wouldn’t see anything but the sky getting dark and then light again.

Happily, we were wrong. Just as the eclipse was approaching totality, the sun started peeking out from between the clouds, and at one point there was an astonishing sight where you could even see what was left of the sun in the middle of a tiny swatch of blue sky, with sunbeams streaming down between almost-black clouds.

And then it arrived: the sun was blacked out, the corona appeared, and the eclipsed sun spent 5 minutes and 47 seconds peeking in and out behind the clouds. It wasn’t dead-of-night dark, but it was definitely late dusk. And decidedly cooler than the normally-sweltering temperatures, too.

We didn’t get the Full Eclipse Experience: the dark-indigo sky, the view of the orange horizon, the vision of the shadow of the moon rushing towards you and then away from you at 3,000 miles per hour. But we got something truly special all the same. It was my first total eclipse, I don’t know if I’ll ever see another. And I’m not in the slightest bit disappointed.

(The photo is by Stefan Geens. That’s exactly what we saw.)

Wine A was the most expensive, a Vacheron Sancerre which sells for about $30.

Wine B was brought in especially by Pasanella to get a US wine: it was a Walter Hansel Sauvignon Blanc from Sonoma, which retails for about $25.

Wine C was another French wine, a Domaine Massiac from the Languedoc which Pasanella was selling for $10 a bottle.

Wine D was Dog Point from New Zealand, which Pasanella sells for about $20.

Wine E was Basa from Spain, sold by Pasanella for $15 per bottle.

Armed with our range of similar whites at dissimilar prices, we embarked on a not-remotely-blind tasting, and everybody tried to rank the wines in order from most expensive to least. I also asked people to rank each wine out of 20, with limited success, since that wasn’t part of the competition and a lot of people didn’t bother. And as a tie-breaker we asked everybody to guess the price of the Dog Point. The results are in a Google spreadsheet here.

Looking at the people who judged the taste and not just the price of the wine, the results were close, but unambiguous: the best wine was C, the Massiac — more people judged it their favorite than any other wine, according to a show of hands I asked for, and it also got the highest average rating. It was certainly my favorite wine. The worst wine was D, the Dog Point.

No one really believes the efficient market hypothesis when it comes to wine: they know that Sancerre and Californian wines are generally more expensive. Still, when they ranked the wines, they tended to say that the ones they liked cost more, and the ones they disliked — especially the Dog Point — cost less.

Wines A and C — the two French wines, which were also the most and the least expensive wines respectively — both got 13 (out of 44) votes as being the most expensive wine, and both got 4 votes as being the cheapest. People clearly liked them. And people clearly didn’t think much of the Dog Point, which was voted cheapest wine by 17 people and second-cheapest by a further 16. Still, they didn’t think it was cheap cheap: the average price they put down for it was just over $20, surprisingly accurate.

No one got the exact right result (ABDEC), but two people came very close with ABCED, elevating the better Massiac and pushing down the less good Dog Point. Rolfe Winkler came in second place — he won the Jill Platner gift certificate — after guessing that the Dog Point cost $45 a bottle. That seems weird, since he also said it was the cheapest wine. But then again, we’d all had quite a lot to drink by that point. The winner, David Snowdon-Jones, was pretty much spot-on, guessing $22 a bottle. He also had something of an artificial advantage: he arrived quite late, and tasted all the wines systematically, instead of just drinking them in sequence like most of the rest of us. And his dad’s a sommelier.

But many congratulations and thanks to everybody for turning up on a rainy night — we raised a lot of money for the South Street Seaport pirate-flag public art exhibition, which means it’s definitely happening. Yay!

Michelle and I have organized a wine contest to be held in the beautiful tasting room at the lovely Pasanella and Son vintners, in the South Street Seaport where Michelle’s Sea Warriors public art exhibition is going to be held. The contest will double as a fundraiser for the art project, which will involve flying pirate flags from vintage lampposts; if you donate more than a certain amount, you get to keep one of the flags for yourself when the project comes down.

The wine shop is at 115 South Street, between Beekman Street and Peck Slip — come along at 6pm on Tuesday June 30. We’ll be tasting five different wines, all similar, but which have quite a wide range of prices. Your $40 entry fee will get you a ballot, where you will attempt to rank the five wines in order of price; you can buy as many additional ballots as you like for $20 each. The winner will get an original Michelle Vaughan pirate painting; second prize is a gift certificate to Jill Platner.

Bring as many people as you can — it’s all for a very good cause! Once again:

See you there!