Votaries and Sharecroppers in the Penny Press!

You have to do a little patient skull-duggery to get to the good stuff in this month’s Atlantic. The James Fallows cover article on what America needs to do in order to ‘bounce back’ against the onslaught of underdog India and world-dominating China starts off strong, makes lots of good points, then in the third act veers off into weird we-need-a-new-form-of-government territory (if I had a dime for every time Jefferson’s boneheaded and offhand remark about how the country “needs a little rebellion now and then” was misused, I could buy a subscription to the Atlantic). Amanda Ripley’s piece on what makes a great teacher spends a great deal of time and verbiage arriving at the conclusion that the really great teachers are the ones who work really hard at it and think about it a lot. Timothy Lavin’s profile of a loony-tune late-night radio host went, I’m afraid, right over my head. And Michael Kinsley starts a piece by willfully misunderstanding the difference between a news story and a news bulletin and then flogging an entire article out of that misunderstanding (the article announces that he’ll be heading up a new website created by the Atlantic’s parent company – making me wonder if the dumbitdown.org domain name is already taken).

But once you get to the rear of the issue, some fun stuff can be found. Not, alas, Benjamin Schwarz (he appears to have the issue off, and I’m betting he’s at home reading), but two other stalwarts of the Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan and Christopher Hitchens.

Flanagan, in full snarky-mad fettle, takes on the school-garden craze that’s sweeping her state of California – a craze that’s new to me, in which schoolchildren are assigned time during regular school hours, as schoolwork, to tend to the school’s garden, concoct recipes involving the school’s garden’s produce, harvest that produce, etc. Flanagan’s ire over this movement prompts her to a most excellent high dudgeon, right from the opening salvo:

Imagine that as a young and desperately poor Mexican man, you had made the dangerous and illegal journey to California to work in the fields with other migrants. There, you performed stoop labor, picking lettuce and bell peppers and table grapes; what made such an existence bearable was the dream of a better life. You met a woman and had a child with her, and because that child was born in the U.S., he was made a citizen of this great country. He will lead a life entirely different from yours; he will be educated. Now that child is about to begin middle school in the American city whose name is synonymous with higher learning, as it is the home of one of the greatest universities in the world: Berkeley. On the first day of sixth grade, the boy walks through the imposing double doors of his new school, stows his backpack, and then heads out to the field, where he stoops under a hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.

It’s rare for an immigrant experience to go the whole 360 in a single generation – one imagines the novel of assimilation, The White Man Calls It Romaine.

Hee.



Apparently, the mastermind behind school gardens is a woman named Alice Waters, whose restaurant, Chez Panisse, is renowned among foodies as the height of the gourmand experience. Flanagan is not amused:

… an eatery where the right-on, ‘yes we can,’ ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting man or woman of the people can tuck into a nice table d’hote menu of scallops, guinea hen, and tarte tatin for a modest 95 clams – wine, tax, and oppressively sanctimonious and relentlessly conversation-busting service not included (I’ve had major surgeries in which I was less scrupulously informed about what was about to happen to me, what was happening to me, and what had just happened to me than I’ve been during dinner there).

But her anger over school gardens isn’t born of anti-snobbery (well, mostly) – it’s purely practical:

I have spent many hours pouring over the endless research on the positive effects of garden curricula, and in all that time, I have yet to find a single study that suggests classroom gardens help students meet state standards for English or math. Our kids are working in these gardens with the promise of a better chance at getting an education and a high school diploma but without one bit of proof that their hard work will result in either.

The lack of those results, and the inevitable consequence of that lack, leads her to a ringing finale:

The state, which failed those students as children and adolescents, will have to shoulder them in adulthood, for it will have created not a generation of gentlemen farmers but one of intellectual sharecroppers, whose fortunes depend on the largesse or political whim of their educated peers.

What can I say? Writing that packs that kind of punch is to be welcomed whenever it shows up. Flanagan almost never disappoints, but this is heady stuff, even for her.

Would I could say the same thing about the other interesting piece at the rear of this issue, Christopher Hitchens’ review of W.W. Norton’s The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard!



It’s not a knee-jerk reaction, either. Long-time watchers here at Stevereads will know that I’ve taken issue with Hitchens once or twice before (including once in the letters page of the Atlantic itself), but it’s always at least as much the product of frustration as anything else. The man can be brilliant, after all, whereas the most I myself am ever able to pull off is indefatigable (a word I wanted to work into the title of our favorite literary journal, calling it Indefatigable Letters Monthly – but John Cotter slammed his ale tankard on the table and bellowed “Avast with that talk, Donoghue!”)(actually, he swished his martini glass counter-clockwise and said, “Wellllll, that’s one way we could go – and here’s another” … and “Open” Letters was born). But when he’s insufferable, he’s A-grade insufferable … and he’s A-grade in this piece.

The main problem is that it’s fashionable among New York bookstore workers who read no science fiction to say that Ballard and writers like him (Margaret Atwood’s name invariably comes up in this context) actually wrote it. This particular version of eating your cake and having it too has always bugged me; it’s snobbery trying to disguise itself as open mindedness. “See?” it says, “I read science fiction! I thought The Road was stunning!” If you’re not willing to get down and dirty with the actual tropes of a genre, you’re nothing but a hoity-toit parvenu.

Cue Hitchens:

As one who has always disliked and distrusted so-called science fiction (the votaries of this cult disagreeing pointlessly about whether to refer to it as “SF” or “sci-fi”), I was prepared to be unimpressed even after Kingsley Amis praised Ballard as “the most imaginative of H.G. Wells’s successors.” The natural universe is far too complex and frightening and impressive on its own to require the puerile add-ons of space aliens and super-weapons …

Hitchens just barrels on from here (without seeming to realize that his rationale, if followed past its cramped use in this instance, would annihilate the legitimacy of all fiction – indeed, all representative art except real-time documentary film footage), high-handedly informing us that although he’s always thought this about the “cult” of science fiction (does he apply the word to Impressionist paintings? Romantic poetry? Even murder mysteries? I bet not), this Ballard fellow is alright – then he spends five paragraphs talking about Ballard’s straight-up historical novel Empire of the Sun.

As is perhaps inevitable in a piece with such a rocky start, further frustrations await, including this rather amazing comment:

Ballard wrote his heart out, especially after the random death of his beloved wife left him to raise three children, so I don’t especially like to say that he wrote too much. (This book has almost 1200 pages). But some of the stories are in want of polish and finish.

The hypocrisy of Christopher Hitchens bemoaning the fact that another writer churned out too much prose is so pronounced as to be almost surreal, but the thing that irked me most about this piece was the unprepossessing sight of a talented writer parading the fact that his mind has always been closed on a certain subject, is currently closed, and will likely remain closed forever. That’s hardly how you want to wind up an issue of the Atlantic.

Ah, but then, that’s NOT how we wind up this issue! No, that honor goes to Jeffrey Goldberg’s asinine “What’s Your Problem?” mock-advice column, which still occupies the magazine’s entire back page, even though its appearance every month for this long must surely have convinced even a blind man that the whole thing is a criminal waste of some of the most valuable magazine real estate in the world. If the goal here is to mimic Harper’s almost equally inane “Findings” end-page, the result is failure – “Findings,” although also a disgrace to the reputation of a legendary magazine, still manages to be bizarrely interesting about once every half-year, for a line or two. There’s no danger of that happening with “What’s Your Problem?” The Atlantic Powers That Be should yank this embarrassment – and if they’re looking for a smart, funny, invigorating one-page ‘literary life’ column to take its place, I’d be happy to see if any of my sharp young colleagues at Indefatigable Letters Monthly wants the gig.

Literary hacks in the Penny Press!

Can we pause from profundity long enough to cheer a little cheer for the best hacks in the world of hackery, the literary journalists?

They don't have a beat, these particular hacks; they aren't obsessed with cutting-edge goth-fusion, or Buffy, or the United States torturing people. They aren't advocating safer parenting, or pond-lining techniques, or same-sex marriage. They don't keep up with the Palins.

Instead, they roam over the whole of the pop culture/literary landscape in search of ... well, I'm not sure what. I'm not sure they're sure what, from day to day. A steady paycheck, yes, but once you've got some momentum going, that can be obtained by writing medical safety compliance pamphlets, or vinyl siding repair manuals, or fifth grade science histories - and yet, the hacks I'm talking about here, the literary journalists, don't write about these things (or maybe they do, but it's done quietly, late at night, with much wine and much shame, solely in order to pay persistent creditors). Instead, they're constantly groping along the contours of the landscape, feelers swaying in the breeze, hunting for something they either know enough to write about or have always wanted to know enough to write about. They aren't specialists, but neither are they quite amateurs. They aren't philosophers, even though they're often pursuing a fairly consistent ideology. And they aren't experts, even though the best of them are rarely caught in open error.

That last point is explained by their peculiar work habits. Once they settle on something, some person or book or movie or school of thought or general topic, the literary journalist will do far more than simply take in the specific artistic item in question - no, in addition to that, they'll take armloads of related books out of the library, or track down endless supplementary items online. In one very concentrated amount of time, they'll allow that subject to utterly consume their lives - and at the end of that very concentrated amount of time, they'll know their subject.

It's a weird kind of knowledge, however: it's often acquired so fast - and often, truth be told, with such a lack of deeply personal reasons - that the literary journalist finds himself aesthetically bifurcated: one the one hand, he's now something of an expert on his new subject (he can tell you the relevant books, he can rattle off the extant controversies and has pet theories about all of them, etc.), but on the other hand, he's still an outsider to it all (he's only been steeped in it for a month at the most, after all).

The result can be incredibly valuable. It's as if you went to the world's leading authority on some subject (World War One? Boer society? Viking ship-building?) and gave him a month's vacation, all expenses paid, in some tropical getaway where the only thing he wouldn't do is give even one thought to his specialty - then you bring him back and ask him to write an article about something in his bailiwick. The articles that would result from such an unlikely procedure - freed for once of academic insularity and infighting, geared for once to a jocular, populist accessibility - would be wondrous invitations to all manner of subjects.

Specialists almost never write such articles, but literary journalists write them for a living - and we're all the richer for it. And the Penny Press is where you go to find such articles, and such writers.

Long-time readers of Stevereads will already be familiar with some of the people I mean. There was, once upon a time, the likes of Gore Vidal and Wilfrid Sheed and Mary McCarthy. And today, there's Christopher Hitchens and Gordon Wood and Jill Lepore and James Atlas and a baker's dozen more.

And in the Atlantic, there's Ben Schwarz, who in the latest issue reviews several books touching on what the average German citizen during the Second World War knew of the campaign of extermination being carried out by the Nazis toward the Jews of Europe. And perhaps even more so, there's the great Caitlin Flanagan, a literary journalist who possesses the quintessential gift of all first-rate hacks: she can take any subject and make her readers interested in it.

Even if the subject is Alec Baldwin.



In the latest Atlantic, she finds herself in the unlikely position of reviewing Baldwin's account of his divorce and single-fatherhood, A Promise to Ourselves. It's not anything she could have predicted:

'I never wanted to write this book,' he tells us at the outset, in a hangdog advisory that we shouldn't expect too much. It was also a book I never wanted to read, but here we are, Alec and I, making the best of a bad situation.

The focal point of that bad situation is of course the leaked cell phone rant Baldwin yelled at his daughter, castigating her for her rude behavior and calling her a "pig." The transcript of that call is, I suppose, appalling (although in all fairness, I myself have never met a teenage girl who wasn't a self-absorbed little A-hole ... my only qualm would be in using the term "pig," since I happen to know pigs are very outgoing, giving individuals); certainly Flanagan opens that it is:

his [Baldwin's] real purpose [in the book] is to exonerate himself from an incident so grotesque that it's hard to imagine any piece of written communication short of a suicide note changing our opinion of it.

Flanagan takes this unpromising material and crafts out of it a review/meditation that will keep you feverishly reading, one delicious paragraph after another (for instance, on the indifferent intimacy of families: "Dad doesn't get too excited by the sight of Mom in her shimmy anymore, for the same reason Buddy's never taken a hankering to Sissy: they've seen too much. It's not community censure that has kept incest in check all these centuries; it's stomach flu"). The piece is easily the best thing in a typically strong issue of the Atlantic, and it keeps returning to that one catastrophic phone call, which Baldwin took outside a restaurant:

Standing on the street, once again confronted by life's inability to meet him halfway with his simple desire to be the center of the universe, he snapped. He raved at the child in the ugliest language imaginable, threatening her and calling her terrible names. Shortly thereafter, the message was leaked to an Internet scandal site (By whom? Cherchez la femme.) And the incident became infamous.

Of course I urge you to read the whole of this issue - of every issue, even in these slightly dumbed-down days of the Atlantic. But even if you skip around and pick and choose, you should make sure not to miss this piece. Back in the pre-Internet days, I used to photocopy (Google it; it was cumbersome) articles like this and make little packets of them to hand to uncaring friends, because these pieces are just that good.

And they're crafted by literary journalists, those most despised of writers, those Parnassian guns for hire - so let's all raise a glass of the cheap stuff to those working professionals! May they all be as magisterial as Helen Vendler, as thrilling as William Langeweische, as well-read as Ben Schwarz, as funny as Anthony Lane, and as damn good as Caitlin Flanagan!

The Fall of an Icon in the Penny Press?

The last issue of The Atlantic was a scarifying caution, mainly because the magazine's new redesign is so damn ugly. But the mere shock of the new look was sufficient grounds for me to give the entire issue a pass, wondering if my aversion to novelty was as much to blame for the lukewarm impression I got as anything the magazine's graphic designers were up to.

This is the second issue of the new design, however, and my shock has abated enough for me to say a couple of things with clear-eyed certainty: first, the magazine's new redesign is so damn ugly, and second, the new graphics are only the surface of the problem.

The real concern here is that finally, after a century (ten times longer than most magazines even survive), The Atlantic has chosen to become dumb.

The re-design only serves to draw attention to the fact that the content of the magazine has undergone a not-so-subtle shift away from the verbose complexity that has more or less always marked The Atlantic. The average length of articles is noticeably shorter, fizzy ephemera like cooking and travel are now up front to catch potential nitwit browsers, instead of in back to reward serious readers with a nice dessert. And James Parker's piece on Jim Carrey would have been embarrassing to find in Maxim. Finding it in The Atlantic is very nearly akin to a sign of the Apocalypse.

True, there were still a few meaty pieces in the issue. Joshua Hammer's piece about the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, the resulting investigation, and the ripples it'll all have in the Middle East was involving reading and emblematic of the best of the old Atlantic. And book critic Benjamin Schwarz rightly praises Barry Cunliffe's Europe Between the Oceans (and offers an unexpected but equally right endorsement of Norman Davies' massive Europe: A History). And Christopher Hitchens - his 'trenchant book reviewer' cap firmly on - is wonderful writing about Richard Yates.


Likewise the always-delightful Caitlin Flanagan, who here is the inspired choice to dissect the phenomenon of the Twilight saga by Stephenie Meyer, although when she refers to that saga as "contenders for the most popular teen-girl novels of all time," she must sure mean very distant contenders; as impressive as the sales figures for the Twilight saga, they don't as yet come near the figures for, say, the Anne of Avonlea series (to say nothing of a certain intrepid girl detective who has - and always will have - everybody else easily beat). Still, Flanagan, Schwarz, and Hitchens are all reliably good in this issue, although even such a mighty trinity can't entirely distract from the troubling developments in the front of the magazine.


Any change, a friend recently reminded me, necessarily involves growing pains - maybe this is so with The Atlantic. I certainly hope so, although this issue gives me little grounds for such hope. We'll see what next month brings.