The Consequence of Matters

  In June 1942 the Nazis launched Operation Pastorius, a spy and sabotage mission inside the United States. It ended up being kind of a bumbling clown car of a spy operation. Operation Pastorius was the brainchild of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the German Abwehr, and named for Francis Daniel Pastorius, the leader of the first organized settlement of Germans in America. Canaris recalled that during World War I, he organized the sabotage of French installations in Morocco, and entered the United States with other German agents to plant bombs in New York arms factories, including the destruction of munitions supplies at Black Tom Island, in 1916. He hoped that Operation Pastorius would have the same kind of success they had then. Eight Germans who had lived in the United States were recruited. Two of them, Ernst Burger and Herbert Haupt, were American citizens. The others, George John Dasch, Edward John Kerling, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Harm Heinck, Hermann Otto Neubauer, and We...

  Today (well, yesterday at this point -- I've been busy) was the birthday of the novelist who wrote under the name Flann O'Brien. Born Brian O'Nolan in Strabane, Ireland in 1911, he supported himself as a civil servant. He was always impeccably dressed and was a very productive worker, and no one guessed that he was working on one of the strangest novels ever written. Flann O"Brien was a name he had already used to write hoax letters to the Irish Times. That novel was At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). The title is a rather loose transition of the Gaelic term for a narrow spot in the River Shannon (Snám dá Én, or "The narrow water of the two birds). It works entirely with borrowed (and stolen) characters from other fiction and legend, on the O'Brien's oft stated belief that there are already far too many existing fictional characters. Accordingly, he borrows characters from cowboy novels, ancient Greece, Charles Dickens, and Irish tradition. It is widely regarded ...