In the Penny Press!

There can be little doubt: The New Yorker's Anthony Lane gets the prize for the week's most flat-out hilarious chunk of prose, the opening of his review of the Wachowski brothers' new movie adaptation of "Speed Racer":

Gluttons for "Duck Soup" will remember the scene in which Groucho is faced with an official document. "Why, a four-year-old child could understand this report," he says. "Run out and find me a four-year-old child." My sentiments exactly, as I sat in a cathedral-sized auditorium wreathed in the ineffable mysteries of "Speed Racer." This is the latest offering from Andy and Larry Wachowski, bringers of "The Matrix," and, if it is about anything, it is about the quest to overwhelm a particular stratum of the masses. A four-year-old will be reduced to a gibbering but highly gratified wreck; an eight-year-old will wander around wearing a look that was last seen on the face of Dante after he met Beatrice. But what about the rest of us? True, our eyeballs will slowly, though never completely, recover, but what of our souls?

Even before the Dante reference, it's obvious that Lane is way, way too smart to be writing pro forma movie reviews like this. Hilarious as they are, they're way too good for the humble little art form they adorn.

Lane's piece is the best thing in this current New Yorker, but only by a hair: Margaret Talbot's piece on animal intelligence, "Birdbrain," is also uniformly excellent. Talbot's a wonderful writer, and here she's sinking her teeth into a big, burgeoning subject: the cognitive abilities of animals other than man. This is a fantastic piece, in which Talbot surveys, in pitch-perfect prose, the whole fraught subject. Here's a sample:

If instinct could explain why your dog growled at your suitcase, then there was no need to cast about for a richer interpretation, one that might, as Morgan put it, "savour of the prattle of the parlour tea table rather than the sober discussion of the study." As sensible as Morgan's canon sounded, it essentially censored the question: "Do animals think?"

They do, of course, although virtually none of them think in human terms, and that's interesting for a couple of reasons, not least of which is that all of you will find the whole subject of animal intelligence ably laid out and debated in the June issue of Open Letters Monthly (this New Yorker issue also features a brief Jeffrey Toobin notice about the hardships Ted Sorensen faced writing his new memoir, Counsellor - a book you'll find also ably reviewed, in that same June issue of Open Letters).



Meanwhile, over in the TLS, the great Jonathan Bate offers us a fantastic long piece on the criminally overlooked Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton. Bate's essay is a model of all that's best in the form: it's effortlessly authoritative but also fluidly readable. Our only quibble (and you just knew we had one, right?) arose from some of the offhand assertions Bate tosses around in his final paragraph, which we'll quote in full:

The decision [on the part of Middleton's latest editors to note every textual variation in Middleton's various early editions] may, however, prove counter-productive: will this self-consciously post-modern Middleton Folio have the impact it deserves in the absence of a pre-modern or just a plain modern one? Taylor could, with the assistance of a co-editor and a few graduate students, have dashed out a modern-spelling edition of Middleton's complete plays in five years, winning his hero a more prominent place both in the college classroom and on the classical stage. He would probably have finished that in about 1993, the year of the World Wide Web. He would then have seen that the internet's hypertext facility provided the perfect medium for a deconstructive edition with full scholarly bells and whistles. By the mid-1990s, the Arden Shakespeare team had developed an electronic edition that made it possible to move onscreen between modern-spelling texts, facsimiles of original quartos, editorial variants, commentary notes, sources and part-books for individual roles. This is what is now needed for Middleton. It is good news that Gary Taylor's principal co-editor, John Lavagnino, is a computer expert and that they are even now at work on an electronic edition (the initial website accompanying the print edition is perfunctory in the extreme). Thomas Middleton has been monumentalized in print at the very moment when print is ceasing to be our primary medium of literary monumentalization. He might just have missed the boat again.

Needless to say, we here at Stevereads, despite being ourselves an Internet phenomenon, don't agree with this cavalier avowal of the print world's demise. But it's a small quibble, and it certainly didn't diminish our appreciation of the piece as a whole - Middleton has always been one of our favorite dramatists, and Bate is right in diagnosing why you're unlikely to find a standard collection of his works in your local bookstore: the problem, to paraphrase a former U.S. President, is what your definition of 'his' is. Middleton was a great collaborator, a great and creative hack willing to work with anybody. He could brush up dialog until it sparkled; he could come up with plot-twists that had his collaborators scratching their heads trying to figure out why they didn't think of that; he had a very good ear for how to work a crowd, and there was no job he thought himself too good for.

As a result, he's all over the drama map, and chasing down exactly which works he had a hand in - and to what extent - is something of a chore.

So where do you start, you ask? Start with "The Changeling," which Middleton mostly wrote himself (Will Rowley also had a hand in it, but trust us, it was a very small hand). It'll hook you immediately, and it's as good as anything in Shakespeare. If you can, find the 1993 production Simon Curtis did ... it will not only entertain you, it'll drastically increase your estimate of the acting abilities of Bob Hoskins, Elizabeth McGovern, and especially Hugh Grant. Hoskins especially does a marvelously disturbing job as the villainous DeFlores.

But by far the most disturbing thing in this go-round of In the Penny Press is a brief article in the latest Asimov's by Carl Frederick called "The Challenge of the Anthropic Universe," in which the author, a quantum theoretician and thus not a crackpot (well, not a religious crackpot, anyway) examines Australian physicist Brandon Carter's assertion that "the Universe, and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends, must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage."

Frederick goes on:

The depth of the anthropic problem is, I think, well described by the cosmologist responsible for the Steady State theory of the universe (and noted science fiction author), Sir Fred Hoyle. His appreciation for the almost miraculous coincidences in enabling carbon to be produced in stars caused him to change his very perception of the universe. He wrote, "A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintendent has monkeyed with the physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. I do not believe that any physicist who examined the evidence could fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside stars."

These are physicists talking, keep in mind. The gist of the matter is that, to many such physicists, the physical constants of the universe seem too finely 'tuned' to be the random products of cosmological development. They don't leap from this observation to God - Frederick is quick to point out that such a leap is neither the scientific community's preferred solution nor his own. But even so ... it's mighty disturbing to read about scientists working on the leading edges of the quantum field saying the things they're working on seem like they were made by somebody. Even worse, that they look like they were made specifically for humans.

Here's hoping the right-wing Christian nutjobs who currently control this country don't read Frederick's article ...

In the Penny Press!

It need hardly be said that we here at Stevereads smiled approvingly at the cover story of the latest issue of National Geographic "Minds of Their Own," written by Virginia Morell and including magnificent photographs by Vincent Musi. Natioal Geographic is of course the world's greatest magazine by such a wide margin that direct comparisons are embarrassing, but even so, this has been a significantly fantastic last roughly ten months, and this issue - and this marvellous, thought-provoking (no pun intended) article only continues the streak.

Morell's piece is refreshingly almost entirely free of humanocentricisms - which makes it incredibly rare when it comes to any writing on this particular subject. Oh, don't get us wrong - there's still quite a bit of making nonhuman animals learn new languages, decipher spatial problems in sequence, talk in English, etc. - in other words, equating particularly human intelligence for all kinds of intelligence - but mercifully, there's quite a bit of better thinking in the article too, thinking that tries to step outside the age-old paradigm of chimps wearing human clothes.

The story is structured to have stars, and there they all are, in Musi's amazing photos, set against calm white backgrounds, looking out at human readers with clear, inhuman beauty and directness. The minds behind those inscrutible faces remain a mystery, but the playfulness - and the ease - with which these stars bemusedly try to bridge the gap between their worlds and man's world is as obvious as it is shaming. They are entire alternate civilizations, and their kinds have been whipped, train-carted, butchered, food-processed, machine-gunned, castrated, mocked, tortured, and mass-executed by humans (who've been no gentler with their own kind as well) - and yet, looking at these miraculous pictures, we see no rage, no resentment ... only an elementary curiosity and perhaps an abiding desire that mankind's awakening awareness of their potentials maybe prevent mankind from wiping them out entirely.

We see Azy the orangutan (currently residing in Iowa, of all places), who can easily out-think most chimpanzees. We see Shanthi the Asian elephant, who's in captivity in a zoo and yet still manages to display some fraction of her species' vast capacities for sociability and gestalt thinking. We see Edward, a Black Leicester longwool sheep, who's as good at recognizing human faces as any human reading the article. We see JB, a giant Pacific octopus, currently held in captivity in a Baltimore aquarium, who, we're confidently told, has a "distinct personality" and enjoys squirting the scientists who study him every day. We see Maya, a bottlenose dolphin, currently in captivity in Baltimore aquarium, whose beautiful face shows all the grace and forebearance so characteristic of tursiops truncatus. We see Alex, the African Gray Parrot, who not only knew a large vocabulary but wasn't shy about advertising that fact to other birds in the lab where he lived, telling the younger ones, in English, to "Talk clearly!" when they made some mistake in their new language.

And there's our cover girl, Betsy the Border Collie, who has a vocabulary of 340 words and routinely out-performs all the higher primates when it comes to intuiting human behavior. Her owners are glowingly proud, of course, and she continues to add to her 'verbal' acquisitions.

In reality, none of those learned behaviors is technically verbal. at least not in Betsy's case. Betsy's exemplary performance has nothing to do with what humans call intelligence - dogs by and large are strangers to that function, as it's known to humans or any other species that legitimately retains it (manatees, needless to say, aren't mentioned in the article). Dogs are amazingly elastic observers of all moving things, and as for humankind - well, man has no more devoted spectator nor could have than this species, these creatures who've mapped their own genetic future to that of mankind. It's their business to intuit what humans want, and they do it better than anybody else - in reality, that's what Betsy's doing, not learning words and really knowing what they mean, or even what it means for them to mean anything.

But this is a small quibble; the article itself does a fantastic job of exploring the concepts of intellect and selfhood - exploring just how universal those concepts might be among the living creatures on this planet. We whole-heartedly recommend you rush right out and buy a copy, read this revelatory article, and then politely introduce yourself to the next non-human you meet, even if it's the Reichmarshall.

Of course, this being National Geographic, there's a lot more worth in the issue than this one story. There's a very good article on the modern ecological problems faced by Iceland, and the article on new attempts to bring democracy to the beautiful landlocked Asian nation of Bhutan has enough surrealism in it to satisfy your inner Joseph Heller. The country's revered monarch, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, recently abdicated in favor of his son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, who is introducing Western-style democracy to his land. One village woman is quoted as being confused by this: "We have a good and wise king," she says. "Why do we need democracy?"

To which we here at Stevereads would only add, "Amen," but the surrealism gets better:

Even Bhutan's chief election commissioner concedes that he would prefer not to have elections. "Given the choice, of course, we'd want to continue to be guided by the monarchy," he says. So why change? "It's a simple thing: The king wants it."

Hee.

And if quandaries like that start to make you wonder if humans aren't the least rational beings on Earth, turn back to "Minds of Their Own" and read it again - it'll only get better the second time.

In the Penny Press! the TLS!

This week's issue of the mighty TLS is a double issue, which immediately prompts the wintry knowledge that there'll be no TLS NEXT week. But at least for now, we can dig in and feast!

Ah, the TLS! The smartest, meatiest literary publication on Earth (Stevereads yields the honor!) - and yet, as enjoyable as it always is, it has its prejudices ... like a beloved grandparent whose well-worn anecdotes sometimes feature 'japs' or 'kikes.' The discordant notes cause a bit of an internal wince, but they don't kill the affection.

And so it is with Adam Kuper's review of the University of Illinois' Killing Animals in this current issue. The TLS' house line regarding books about what could sloppily be termed 'animal rights' can be summed up as bemusedly Tory: the people who write such books are obviously a little dotty, but they aren't doing anybody any harm, so we might as well pat them on the head from time to time with a review or two.

These are the only occasions when the TLS makes me sigh.

Kuper treats this anthology of animal rights essays with the strained toleration of a parent for a slightly wayward child, and you can tell right from the start that his condescension will cause him to mis-state and oversimplify everything in the book. You know going into the review that you won't be reading a fair review of the book under consideration, but you read it anyway - hoping, I guess.

But there's no hope here. The review is full of snide parenthetical asides (one hopes the book's editors won't stoop to respond) and mandarin deplorings of touchy-feely enthusiasms gone too far. This ought to suffice as an example, though it's distasteful to quote so much of it:

Clare Palmer's essay on the killing of cats and dogs in animal shelters is somewhat out of place here, since her facts are relevant to the United States. Palmer tells us that pets in America are kept for an average of only two years (does this include goldfish?), and gently mocks a new politically correct vocabulary in which pets are referred to as companion animals, while owners are termed guardians. On average, six out of ten stray dogs and eight out of ten stray cats are killed in animal shelters in the US because they are difficult or cannot be placed with new owners. But what is to be done with the stream of animals that are brought to these shelters? As Palmer herself asks, are we supposed to fund an animal welfare state? While she advocates a programme of education for companion animal guardians, it may be that sex educations for pets will be required.

... at which point, everyone at the squire's table burbled over with laughter ... and then Mimsy mentioned something about flower-children over in Pennington-by-the-Marsh ...

Ecch.

There's no end of things wrong with that passage, but note for instance how the reader is invited to read 'because they are difficult AND cannot be placed with new owners" ... the not-so-subtle BLAMING of the glut in animal shelters on the animals themselves, who, if they tried a little harder, might be less 'difficult.'

And that oh-so-clever little bit of mockery about sex education for pets - which manages not only to mock the idea of sex education for HUMANS but also to willfully ignore the possibility that human 'guardians' might take responsibility for the problem. Gawd forbid.

The review of course quotes Dr. Johnson (the calm-tide safe haven for all idiot quote-hunters): "There is much talk of the misery which we cause to the brute creation, but they are recompensed by existence. If they were not useful to man, and therefore protected by him, they would not be nearly so numerous."

To which Kuper adds: "Should everyone adopt the Jewish and Muslim taboo on eating pigs, there would soon be only a handful of pigs in existence, and they would be in zoos."

Spoken, it need hardly be pointed out, like a human. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that those few pigs wandering around in future zoos - fed every day, washed every week, able to cavort for the cameras of paying customers, wouldn't MIND being the only pigs left on Earth, if the alternative were to live their entire lives in a pen the size of a mailbox, unable to turn around, pumped full of steroids, skin burned off their hind legs by the urine they can't avoid spraying on themselves, never seeing or touching another pig (or another living being) - at least until the last four hours of their lives, where those behind get to hear those in front screaming while they're being slaughtered.

But at least they're ALIVE ...

Luckily, the rest of the issue isn't nearly so bad, although there are dim spots elsewhere as well.

Take, for instance, John Taylor Bonner's review of two massive Darwin compendiums, From So Simple a Beginning and The Indelible Stamp.

Bonner writes that Darwin's theory of natural selection met with mixed responses even among biologists of the time: "There was a strong feeling, not always openly expressed, that despite the obvious common sense of natural selection, there must be something else ... the fact that evolution went from simple to complex made it seem that there was something more than directionless natural selection."

He goes on:

What I find fascinating is that this is no more of a scientific explanation than saying it was ordained by God. In both cases there is a mystical force that is beyond the reach of science. It is a quirk of the human mind: there are some things, such as the intricate marvels of evolution, that need more than a bare Darwinian explanation. Natural selection is too simple a principle to account for the vastness of organic evolution. We think today that the current advocates of William Paley's intelligent design err in confusing science and religion, but some biologists over the years, and maybe even now, commit the same sin.

Bonner claims to be a scientist himself, so he ought to know better than to say so glibly that evolution goes from simple to complex. I'm sure my young friend Elmo would leap to the same example that occurred to me: the three-toed tree-sloth. Today, after millions of years of evolution, it a) can barely see, b) can barely move, and c) can only live on one kind of leaf from one kind of tree. Things don't get any simpler than that. Judging from tree sloth dental developement, its evolutionary ancestors were wild and crazy guys. In this case - as in so many cases (they're virtually innumerable in the insect kingdom) - natural selection worked from complex to simple, in order to exploit a very specific niche.

And of course Bonner is right to chide present-day evolutionary biologists who've lost sight of the fact that evolution by natural selection is an entirely BLIND process. Or rather, purblind - it addresses any organism's immediate needs, often (in fact, in the overall track-record of life on Earth) with fatal long-term results. Almost nothing is dinosaur-and-meteor. Almost everything is evolution-and-dead end.

Actually, looking over our table of contents, I'm forced to realize that quite a few reviewers this time around irked the daylights out of me. Take John Ray's review of Rescuing the Past, a book about the whole question of whether or not countries can demand back their great works of art currently housed elsewhere. I'm glad Ray is an amusing writer, but he's still as irritating as a late-night drunken phone call:

One of my favorite paintings is the view by Monet of Antibes which is now in the galleries of the Courtland Institute in Somerset House. I would like the original, and would try my best to dust it regularly. It may be that if I hire some teams of private investigators, and then sex up a dossier or two, I can demonstrate publicly, or at any rate to myself, that there are academics in the world of London art-history whose ethical lives sometimes fall short of that of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. I think I can see the pine tree in the middle of the painting hanging its branches in dejection, waiting to be rescued from all the mediocrity and sleaze. Clearly Monet's work of beauty would be better off in a purer environment, namely on the walls of somebody like me. In practice this will not happen, but what if I had the money and political influence to seriously challenge ownership of works of art on moral grounds which just happen to benefit me?

He goes on (and hence, so do I, ya attention-deficited little twerps ...):

Suppose I find a toddler clutching a teddy bear. I recognize the bear as one of an extremely rare transitional design, which perfectly fills the remaining gap in my collection. Intellectually, I can make sense of that bear in a way that the toddler cannot. Obviously my claim to ownership of the toy is superior, because I am a philosopher of these things. Can we demand that he sell it to me, on the grounds that he does not know what he is carrying, and the bear does not deserve such a fate?

Ray, obviously, comes down squarely against the idea that there can ever be a superior RIGHT to ownership - while deploring the author's insinuation that artworks' home countries are rude, undeveloped places, Ray unconsciously AGREES with the author by representing such countries as a child with a teddy bear. The upshot of his analogy goes something like this: OK, I accept that the child doesn't understand the significance - or even, on most levels, the beauty (and, by implication, the fragility) of what he's got ... but nevertheless! It's HIS, and we can't up and take it from him under any circumstances, even if it means we have to stand by and watch him rip it to shreds.

To which I say: horsepoop.

The world's great works of art belong to the world. If the country wherein they just so happen to originate can't PRESERVE them (and failure here is exceedingly easy to determine: you turn your head, open your eyes, and LOOK at the fucking thing), they forfeit the right to KEEP them. Any other viewpoint - especially if it involves the words 'cultural imperialism" - is just nonsense. What, there's supposed to be some kind of VIRTUE in watching a masterpiece disintegrate?

Nope, Ray is wrong. Screw the little kid - snatch that teddy bear away!

But look! There's a light at the end of the tunnel! The only other irritating thing in this TLS is a review of Roger Scruton's new memoir Gentle Regrets by A.N.Wilson.

I'm sorry - did I call it a review? I meant something closer to a sweaty, urgent, yearning hand-job. Words can be so funny, huh?

I honestly don't know what would possess the ordinarily-astute Wilson to go on at such enormous length so fulsomely praising such a monumental boob as Scruton. I assume there were Polaroids in Scruton's possession, and I assume they've now been destroyed.

Audiences were "awestruck" by his opera 'Violet'? Iris Murdoch "especially admired" his novel "Fortnight's Anger"? Scruton is "much better than Bertrand Russell at summarizing other philosophers' viewpoints"? "Professor Scruton draws a portrait of that most fascinating of beings, himself"?

What the Hell did Wilson DO, anyway? Even sheep-shagging wouldn't account for this kind of genuflection. The world may never know.

Ah, but other authors bring joy! Ruth Scurr turns in a delightful review of the diary of John Evelyn, a book you should all read (although not before you read Pepys!).

There are excellent pieces on Christopher Marlowe's poetry, and on the life and trials of Edmund Campion (including a delightful foray into whether or not Philip Sidney was a secret Catholic) ... EVER so much to delight the serious reader of history and literature, in an age where the most you can expect from most other readers along those lines will be their appreciation of Undaunted Courage or DaVinci Code.

And of course the dessert is J.C.'s "NB" column, where dry wit reigns supreme. For instance, in sampling the contents of the latest Whitaker's Almanack Pocket Reference, there's this:

The Almanack offers a catalogue of over sixty phobias, all relating to things you felt fine about until you learned of the existence of a phobia. Here are some, concerning which we invite you to provide real-life cases:

venustaphobia - fear of beautiful women
pogonophobia - fear of beards
oenophobia - fear of wine
peladophobia - fear of baldness
chorophobia - fear of dancing

Ergasiophobia (fear of work), dentophobia (the dentist) and gamophobia (marriage) are more plausible; given that rhytiphobia (fear of getting wrinkles) is practically universal, we are surprised not to have seen the word before.

To which I join J.C. in asking for examples - but from you, my legion of loyal readers! Confession time! How many of the phobias J.C. lists have haunted your darkest hours? Or what other fears might take their place (you can browse the list at www.phobialist.com)?

In the spirit of cooperation, I'll admit that I myself sometimes experience touches of two of the phobias listed (and, needless to say, I very much do NOT ever experience one of those on the list!). And judging from previous comments, my friend Beepy has at least begun to deal with the heartbreak of pogonophobia...