Calvin Trillin

TUESDAY at the Enoch Pratt Library, an interesting ritual was observed. The final batch of Mencken papers was exposed to public view.Present were scholars, librarians, editors and other Mencken buffs. The papers were composed of two sets of typescript volumes. One was reminiscences of Mencken's newspaper experiences, "Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work," in three volumes; the other was his experiences with writers and critics, "My Life as Author and Editor," in four volumes.In one corner of the room some thought they saw the shade of Mencken puffing a long, mean cigar under a No Smoking sign.

Calling all patriots -- Fort McHenry wants you! Beginning tomorrow, filmmaker and photographer Bill Hayward will be stationed at Fort McHenry to kick off a public portrait event called "Patriot Acts" at 10 historic sites in the United States. He will film and interview whoever shows up on what has become a controversial and politicized concept in this country: Patriotism. Hayward, a 63-year-old photographer in New York, has been touring the country since 2002 in the name of his traveling exhibition and documentary film project called The American Memory Project, of which Patriot Acts will be a part.

Of all the stories swirling around R.W. "Johnny" Apple, the late New York Times scribe who wrote with Olympian style about politics and food, the tale that intrigued me was how the great gourmand came close to being wrong about Baltimore. The story goes that in preparation for a gastronomic write-up of the town in February 2003, Apple outlined the establishments he planned to visit. Marty Katz, a local photographer who strings for the Times and is the Baltimore editor of the Zagat restaurant guide, says he saw the list and objected.

It used to be that saying goodbye to summer on the TV bea was easy. Usually a sentence or two along the lines of, "Thank God summer is over with all those awful reruns."But in the past few years TV has moved away from the dominance of the three traditional networks toward cable, independents and new configurations, such as the Fox network. And summer viewing has changed with it.Fox dared to introduce new series in the middle of summer when many of its college-age viewers were more likely to be watching.

It's a small world and getting smaller. Forget the electronic media and live-action TV, even magazines are closing in on one another and their shared universes. This month's Harper's brings the carnage in Rwanda home in a series of letters written from Kigali by American doctor John Sundin, who was from May through June the only surgeon at the Red Cross hospital there. Painfully raw, these missives depict the breakdown of civilization human by human. From descriptions of the green hills, Dr. Sundin soon passes into discussion of his patients: a 9-month-pregnant woman, beaten, who delivers a dead baby; a man with shrapnel in his head and "his personality on a stretcher."

Chicago. -- This movie -- ''Sleepless in Seattle'' -- had me hooked from one of its opening credits: ''A Nora Ephron film.'' After all, her parents wrote one of my favorite movies, ''Desk Set.'' And Ms. Ephron herself, after spending most of her life running away from her parents' world, has returned to it in order to write and direct movies that reveal her quirky sensibility.You have to be ready for aspects of that sensibility -- for instance, continuing reports on food fashion. Here, we learn about rice vs. potatoes, tiramisu and fruit platters on planes.

I like fruitcake. But admitting that in public can be painful. Mention your fondness for fruitcake at a holiday party and before you can say "chopped walnuts" some would-be comedian will snicker in your ear: "You know there is only one fruitcake and it gets passed around, as a gift, from house to house."I don't think this is funny. And it certainly isn't original. This solo-fruitcake theory was proposed a long time ago by Calvin Trillin, who can be a pretty humorous writer when he isn't attacking fruitcake.

Even a serious fire can have a silver lining. In the case of the Manor Tavern, it gave owner Mark Greene a chance to renovate more than the physical space. The fire happened in August; the Monkton restaurant opened for business again two months later with a new chef, Henry Doyle, and an updated menu. It's still not the hippest place around, but so what? Now that the weather has turned cold, the Manor Tavern has the only thing that matters: a roaring fire in the fireplace. I do think more could have been done with the newly renovated formal dining room -- it's basically brown, with no art on the walls, at least not as of our visit, and a dropped ceiling.

When my family gets together for Thanksgiving, we all try to talk at the same time. We crowd into the kitchen and bother the cooks. We interrupt each other.The other day I learned there is a name for this kind of behavior, other than annoying. It is called the "high-involvement" style of conversation. This contrasts with the "style-considerate" approach to conversation, in which, so far as I can tell, people actually sit at dining room tables and get to finish sentences without being interrupted.

Boston. -- Have you tried flying lately without taking John Grisham or Michael Crichton along? Were the people to the right of you reading ''The Client'' and the people to the left of you reading ''Jurassic Park?'' Messrs. Grisham and Crichton together have seven books on the best-seller lists. It's enough to make even an agnostic on Rush Limbaugh wonder if that's ''The Way Things Ought to Be.''But this is no time of year to get cranky. Summer is not just a season, it's an adjective. So in honor of Summer Reading, I offer a Grisham-and-Crichton-free, entirely quirky and thoroughly personal list of books that I just plain liked over the past months.