Some High Notes in the Penny Press!

I've fallen frightfully behind - not in my Penny Press reading (as so many slackers might) but in my Penny Press reporting: issue after issue cascades by, and I read and absorb them all, but then I get caught up in making lists or fighting pointless gender battles (not to mention fighting my own phlegm and mucus, which may be more than you wanted to hear), and the analysis doesn't happen. And the unforgiving thing about the Penny Press is its relentless timeliness - it just doesn't feel right to be chronicling my reactions to something that's three weeks old.

Nevertheless, I myself am a literary journalist, so I can't let some great bits go by unpraised! Just a quick few, to bring us at least partially up to speed:

From the 26 September issue of The New Yorker (an otherwise entirely pointless "Style" issue), the great Peter Schjeldahl (by a wide margin our best working writer about art, and in my opinion the finest such that America has ever produced) writing about the decidedly un-great Willem de Kooning:

The show [at MOMA, of course] demolishes a canard that the artist's work declined after the nineteen-fifties. Only his fame did. Out of fashion, and almost to the last, de Kooning made extraordinary art.

From the 3 October New Yorker (an issue which also features a long article trying - and failing, of course - to account for the deeply confounding appeal of IKEA), David Denby writing about "Moneyball" and making a point I'd never considered before:

He [Brad Pitt in most of his roles] simply couldn't convey thinking, which is not a sign of stupidity, just a failure of technique.

From Mark Danner's quietly shattering essay on the current torture-enabling American "state of exception" in the 13 October New York Review of Books, talking here specifically about how the torturers contracted by the CIA used Cold War scenarios crafted to help captured US pilots deal with being tortured by the Soviets:

We see here perhaps the prime example of the improvisation inherent in the state of exception. First, the critical security bureaucracies in the US government - the CIA and the military - derived their "enhanced interrogation procedures" from a cold war-era pilot training program that had been intentionally designed to reproduce illegal techniques. They then placed before government attorneys the through-the-looking-glass task of proving that those interrogation techniques are perfectly permissible under the tenets of international and domestic law that they were expressly designed to violate.

From the 30 September letters page of the TLS (the same issue that features a duly terrifying long literary profile of Alice Munro, about which said, the less the better), this tart response from one Gregory Currie of the University of Nottingham:

Constantine Sandis argues that we do better to rely on Henry James for insights into the mind than on brother William and the other academic psychologists, for "many competing psychological theories have come and gone" since their time. I believe he has hit on a powerful form of argument. Here's another application of it: Newton thought space infinite, but Einstein disagreed. Far better we rely on the cosmology of Genesis.

Anthony Lane's great, insightful line from his review of "The Ides of March" in the otherwise-useless 10 October "Money" issue of The New Yorker:

This film is full of great actors, but not enough people.

And finally, from Daniel Soar's anxiety-inducing great piece on Google from the 6 October London Review of Books:

Google knows or has sought to know, and may increasingly seek to know, your credit card numbers, your purchasing history, your date of birth, your medical history, your reading habits, your taste in music, your interest or otherwise (thanks to your searching habits) in the First Intifada or the career of Audrey Hepburn or flights to Mexico or interest-free loans, or whatever you idly speculate about at 3:45 on a Wednesday afternoon. Here's something: if you have an Android phone, Google can guess your home address, since that's where you phone tends to be at night. I don't mean that in theory some rogue Google employee could hack into your phone to find out where you sleep; I mean that Google, as a system, explicitly deduces where you live and openly logs it as 'home address' in its location service, to put beside the 'work address' where you spend the majority of your daytime hours.

Lots more besides, but those little quotes will have to serve - they'll sketch an attempt to bring us up to speed, so that next week's Penny Press can be represented in what the kids these days call "real time."

 

Pictures Pretty (and otherwise) in the Penny Press!

The main motif in the writing of September 5th's New Yorker gets trying mighty fast: in feature piece after feature piece, readers are subjected to some pretty unconvincing sleight-of-hand. The delightfully talented Rebecca Mead writes a profile piece about charlatan crackpot 'business guru' Timothy Ferriss and tries the whole time to strike an even tone she obviously doesn't feel. True, she occasionally uncorks a line like "Ferriss professes to be untroubled that his own freedom to live 'outside of the inbox' is bought by transferring drudgery to the inboxes of less fortunate individuals in the developing world." But for the most part she restrains herself - to a degree far, far in excess of what her ridiculous subject deserves - and that becomes a somewhat nervous reading experience. Ditto Larissa MacFarquhar's long profile piece on charlatan crackpot 'philosopher' Derek Parfit, which not only makes an amateurish blunder right out of the starting gate (it opens disastrously, with the piece's real opener not popping up until Paragraph #4) but also lavishes equal diplomacy on somebody who was as bankrupt a thinker as he was a human being. And the redoubtable Ian Frazier does the same thing with charlatan crackpot 'artists' Theo Jansen, trying his level best to write about a perpetrator of boondoggle eyesores as though he might just be Augustus Saint-Gaudens in disguise.

There were highlights in prose, of course - no issue of The New Yorker is completely barren. The always-reliable Louis Menand turns in a wonderfully-done piece on Dwight Macdonald, and Tad Friend writes a long and fascinating piece on the troubled California town of Costa Mesa, where, oddly enough, yours truly has spent a good deal of time (soaking up the hospitality of a broad-shouldered young friend who got roped into one fun activity after another, as it were). And how curiously satisfying it was to read David Denby corroborate my own impression that "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" was actually terrific!

But no, the real impacts of this issue were visual. The sharpest in the short-term was negative, a cartoon by incredible Roz Chast that hit a little too close to home:



And the best was this issue's glorious cover, a muted, melancholy, wise, fantastic illustration called "Coney Island Express" by Eric Drooker that shows a subway car in the last glimmering of sunset, its headlights already on, speeding away from the glowing horizon of Coney Island's ferris wheel and rides, speeding away from the bright lights and fun of summer, into the chilly early evenings of autumn. I have many, many fond memories of escaping the broiling heat of the city for some fun afternoons at Coney Island with good friends, and this cover's marvellous use of light brings into full effect the idea of summer's ending. It's a little masterpiece of a type you don't see quite as often in New Yorker covers as you once did (they go for topicality over lyricism almost all the time these days) - all the more to be treasured for that fact.

Penny Press addendum: the New Yorker!

The middle ground between the two Penny Press extremes I mentioned last time is of course The New Yorker, perhaps the greatest example of such a middle ground magazine in the history of magazines. I read along the whole spectrum - from the beer-guzzling boss-hating chick-scoring mags like Outside and Men's Journal, where a fist-pumping mostly-brainless hetero homogeneity is assumed on the part of every reader, to the The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, where that reader is presumed not only to read books and care about them but also to like reading about them at length. I even follow the spectrum out onto its thin branches in periodicals like the TLS and The Journal of Roman Studies, where it's presumed the reader not only cares about the subjects at hand but knows them very well and does not need his French - or Latin - translated.

But I come back to The New Yorker for balance between the two extremes. When it's done well, there's scarcely any magazine that can more feel like intellectual home base (justifiable regional bias had me giving that accolade to The Atlantic for a century, until it left Boston and became a bit dumber).

It's not always done well, and even when it is, not all of it is. This present era at The New Yorker, for instance, is a bad one for its famous cartoons: two-thirds of the current stable of regulars draw so poorly that their captions could be written by Oscar Wilde and still not save them.

And maybe the jury is still out on whether or not this is a good era for the magazine's movie criticism, even though both its regular movie reviewers, David Denby and Anthony Lane, are well-known writers with book deals and loyal followers. Lane is witty, but I suspect him of caring about that fact more than anything else connected with his job - I can't count the number of times I've seen him swerve into oncoming traffic for the sake of a punch line, and for all his obvious intelligence, I far more often remember his reviews for some sharp apercu rather than for some sound assessment.

And then there's Denby! I'll admit up front that writing a monster of narcissism like Denbys bestselling The Great Books (in which all of the Western canon, it turns out, is just there to help Denby come to terms with mid-life anomie while blandly re-affirming his life-long suspicion that he's the smartest person in the history of the human race) is a sin from which it's unlikely I'll ever grant full redemption. If Denby wants blank-slate forgiveness for creating that big chunk of lazy hypocrisy, he'll take a sabbatical and write a book called Ungreat Books in which he enthuses honestly about the twenty or thirty non-canonical books he's actually read and loved in his life. Until that day comes, I'm bound to be a bit poorly disposed toward his work.



But even so, there are highs and lows! And his recent review of the new 50-million dollar 3-D action movie "The Green Hornet" starring Seth Rogen constitutes THE Denby-low so far in 2011: it's virtually an itemized list of the things that bug me about this writer, and that list can surely be epitomized in this passage:

Rogen says that he has been obsessed with comic books and superheroes for years. Well, I'm sorry to put it this way, but "The Green Hornet" is what you get when someone who dropped out of high school to do standup comedy, then spent a decade in movies and television, conceives a Hollywood "passion project."

That's what you get? So it's a rule, like an axiom out of Euclid? Competence = grad school? Quite apart from the fact that a glance at the cv's of most of Hollywood's greatest talents in the last 100 years makes that a silly thing for a professional movie critic to hint, there's also the arrogance of such a pronouncement - it's the worst stereotype of the squinty-faced, greasy-haired, Skittles-popping, brainlessly elitist movie-critic, noisily shifting in his seat during his free screening, impatient to begin too-loudly rehearsing his pans on his cell phone in the lobby  - not to a friend, since he has none (having alienated the last of them in senior year high school), but to his own answering machine, for later meta-analysis. That's what you get? So Rogen's failure (not discernible to me - the movie fails, yes, but Rogen's by far the best thing in it) was pre-ordained? If you knew his friggin academic record going in, nothing you could see in the next 90 minutes would rise above it? And what about all the schmucks who stayed in school? We've never seen a dumb or predictable movie from any of them? Bet we have.

This kind of thoughtless elitism is the exact counterpart of Lane's manic blitheness - both prefer mannerism to substance, so both tend to leave their actual subject-movies largely undiscussed. It often makes me wish Matt Taibbi reviewed movies, or that Locke Peterseim wrote for The New Yorker.

Fortunately, the current roster of New Yorker mainstays seldom if ever disappoint. Medical writer Atul Gawande turns in a great, perceptive piece in this issue on the good - and the great deal of bad - that comes from hospitals spending lots of money and time on the care of just a handful of the most critical patients. Gawande concentrates on how much medical science can learn from those few very expensive patients, and how much of what it learns can then be applied to patients in general. To which I might sheepishly stress a point Gawande makes only in passing: some of those long-term extremely costly patients are very grateful for all the extra care and bother. They'd rather have their names changed for legal reasons in a New Yorker piece about medical expense than be dead, thanks very much.

Of course, even the magazine's big guns can occasionally misfire even in the middle of a good essay. Louis Menand, for instance, in this issue turns in a typically solid and enjoyable piece on the substance and legacy of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (like some of the best book-critics - and some of the worst! - he uses some new book about Friedan as his pommel-horse: the point of the whole exercise is what he has to say about Friedan's book - the middle-man is just there as a skimpy justification for his own more fascinating observations). But at the end of the piece, as I was happily reading along, I stumbled upon this little bit of sacrilege:

Still, you don't need to read a book to talk about it (and it is considered an accepted decorum, in talking about it, not to be obliged to admit that you never read it).

Yeesh. I'm hoping that's just a dose of middle-ground irony that went down the wrong pipe.

An Auspicious Debut in the Penny Press!

It’s an opening that would sit more comfortably at one of our estimable sister-blogs like PopWired or Pink is the New Blog, but nevertheless, it must be stated up front: actor James Franco (whom some of you might remember as the world’s bitchiest Green Goblin, or the world’s mumbliest Tristan, or the world’s least animated American WWI fighter ace, or as Robert DeNiro’s most hysterical co-star, but who is, nonetheless, a better thespian than you give him credit) is a nice guy. This is worth mentioning because a) he’s very handsome, and that can stop young men from bothering to be nice even if they remain obscure bank employees in Carol Stream their whole lives, b) he’s famous, which is a state notoriously lethal towards any kind of genuine niceness. Franco has avoided the pitfalls of nature and nurture and remained the nice guy I suspect he’s always been.

Which isn’t to say he walks on water; he can be filthy, and he does his requisite time as a partygoing lounge lizard, and more endemically, he routinely tries on and discards all the usual ridiculous rags of reinvention intellectually curious young men have always wasted time on throughout the ages – in this he’s no different than Alcibiades was at his age. Young actors are particularly vulnerable to this chameleon phase, and it’s never helped – or shortened – by having an excess of money.

That chameleon phase has lately prompted Franco to make some idiosyncratic movie-role choices, and, in a move that’s flatly baffled the Entertainment Tonight crowd, it motivated him to go back to school (his fellow actor Martin Sheen – with whom he has more in common than he’s so far allowed himself to see – did the same thing). Not to pursue acting, but to write fiction. And the fact that he’s famous – coupled with the fact that he’s not only nice but largely perceived to be friendly – creates a blurring cloud of preset reactions among those who will be the critics of that fiction: either they’ll like it because Franco’s a star, or they’ll like it regardless and be called sycophants, or they’ll hate it because he’s a star, or they’ll hate it regardless and be called jealous. It can make you feel sorry for the guy: he’s got to be wondering if this stuff he’s sweated and labored and cared over creating can get a fair hearing anywhere.

And it’s not just a question of venue, it’s a question of timing. His world-debut short story “Just Before the Black,” comes out this week in Esquire, which arrives in subscribers’ mailboxes at the same time as the 22 March issue of the New Yorker.



This would ordinarily be just another coincidence of publishing – after all, no matter when it arrives, it’s going to overlap with an issue of the New Yorker. But the 22 March issue of the New Yorker is one of those rare issues I’ve mentioned here in which every single thing goes right, in which the dreams of countless editors and sub-editors and fact-checkers and subscribers for the last hundred years all fulfill simultaneously. The New Yorker has been called the greatest magazine in the history of the world, and in issues like this one, it’s actually true.

Nobody makes a misstep, in the whole length of the thing, and we’re forced to realize that, like them or not, these writers are giants – and they’re creating an almost spooky synergy by working together right at this time. Showboating main editors come and go – several of these writers have worked for several of those editors – but quality like this is, or ought to be, eternal.



There’s the moodily evocative cover by Jorge Colombo; there’s Hendrik Hertzberg writing about nuclear power (“Converting mass to energy by atomic fission in order to achieve temperatures normally found only on the surface of stars like the sun and then using that extraterrestrial heat to boil water – well, it smacks of (to borrow a term from the nuclear dark side) overkill”); there’s an essay – doesn’t really matter on what – by the already-legendary John McPhee; there’s a piece by Jeffrey Toobin, the greatest living chronicler of America’s highest court, this time profiling Justice Stevens (“He’ll say something like ‘This is probably obvious, but I have this one question. Could you help me with this one point?’ An experienced advocate knows that you have to be on your guard, because he’s probably found the one issue that puts your case on the line”); there’s a hilarious, wonkily paranoid cartoon by Roz Chast; there’s a masterful theatre review by Hilton Als; there’s an exhibit review of the weird German artist Otto Dix by one of the greatest working art critics alive today, Peter Schjeldahl (“To truly appreciate Otto Dix, the most shocking major artist, against stiff competition, of Weimer Germany, it may help to loathe him a little … By disliking Dix, you may balance a sense that he dislikes you, too.”); there’s a great overview of the recent ‘unofficial orchestral Olympics’ recently held at Carnegie Hall, all in the mad pursuit of a nonsensical ranking as #1:

Not long ago, the British magazine Gramophone asked music critics to rate the world’s orchestras, and when the results were published there were whoops in some places and laments in others. The burghers of Amsterdam took quiet pride in the fact that the Concertgebouw placed first; their rivals in Berlin and Vienna fumed at being second and third; and Philadelphians were scandalized to find their honey-toned group nowhere in the top twenty. (I participated in the poll, but I am not about to reveal my list, for fear of being detained by the Austrian or Pennsylvanian police).

There’s even stuffy old David Denby, turning in his usual rock-solid dissection of some new movie starring one of his weird bête noirs, the cinematic non-event known as Ben Stiller (like a critical version of Stiller’s grandmother, Denby keeps urging the star, in review after review, to be more Jewish).



And perhaps best of all, perhaps the most tell-tale signal of the strength of this particular issue, is the luminously, almost sloppily brilliant short story by Junot Diaz, who in this kind of company we’re forced to consider as one of our finest living practitioners of fiction. The short story in this issue, “The Pura Principle,” is a wonderful return to form for Diaz, an utterly unsentimental account of a young man dying of leukemia and the predatory girlfriend he marries during a recuperative stay at his mother’s place. The prose is a marvel of sure control and funny as hell – an exciting experience utterly unlike the usual New Yorker angst fest.

So its appearance is great news for readers, but perhaps a bit bittersweet for Franco, because his own debut short story in Esquire is very, very good and would look dominating if it weren’t appearing in the same week as one of our greatest writers at the top of his game.

That’s just unlucky timing, though, and it can’t be held against “Just Before the Black,” which is, on the surface, noticeably Junot-esque: depressed, distracted, down-market characters talking lingo and getting wasted and bullshitting as they aimlessly wander through their lives. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this type of fiction – and it’s lucky there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, because it seems hard-wired to be the kind of fiction attractive young men write first, before they start writing the far more individual stuff that will be their literary mark on the world (before they even know if they can write that stuff). Booth Tarkington, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Richard Farina, Ernest Hemingway … the list is a long one (for all I know, Alcibiades belongs on it), and again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. It’s a legitimate enough sub-genre, and only very, very few writers can successfully mine it for longer than the one book, although many try. Nothing becomes derivative faster than simulated anomie and the reason for this is simple: there’s a waiting line a mile long behind every such author. It hardly seems like Bret Easton Ellis has time to sprout a single gray temple-hair before Nick McDonell is elbowing him out of Disaffection Central, and that’s as it should be.

Franco’s story (the whole forthcoming collection from Scribner’s unless I’m much mistaken) is firmly in this mode: two young guys, Michael and Joe, are just hanging out doing nothing at night. Michael is the narrator, and his almost inarticulate dissatisfaction with his life suffuses the whole story almost to the choking point (“I am friends with a slug,” he thinks, “and my other friends are pigs and wolves. I never make friends with nice things. Just the shit”). The portrait of Michael is alarmingly accurate of a certain type of aimless young man who wonders if he even feels anything. His reverie while driving is one many such men have had (indeed, it’s one not-so-young men have had and perhaps shared with the poor saps trapped in the car with them):

I love driving down an empty dark freeway, lit up intermittently by the lights at the side of the road, and when I see the lights, I think of all the little worlds out there, all the little animals living in their habitats out there, and how we could pull over and have an adventure at any one of those forgotten pockets of the world, just nothing zones, backwash refuse property in the wake of the great freeways, and I like passing all of them, racing down the freeway, like a tunnel into the night…

Eventually, Michael and Joe end up getting high with their dealer friend Hector, and in the drifting conversation that follows, Michael introduces into a series of hypotheticals the one hypothetical most young men couldn’t get high enough in their lives to introduce, and it stops both Joe and Hector, and it cracks open a light of revelation on Michael, and the whole of it is accomplished with a sure, caring hand. There’s some very good imagery here, and a palpable sense of longing to change.

Naturally, it’s tempting to read this story and ascribe something of that longing to Franco himself, but the story – and its companion pieces in the upcoming book – is not a psychological hypothetical, it’s a fact. And it’s not some air-thin Hollywood vanity project, as young male movies stars are unfortunately prone to perform (the hollow efforts of Ethan Hawke, the twee little curiosities of Crispin Glover, the shudder-inducing poetry of Craig Sheffer, etc.). Don’t get me wrong: Franco’s celebrity status no doubt made some aspects of this whole process undeservedly easier (getting your first story published in Esquire, for instance), but those things don’t define the end product – readers would have to take a story like “Just Before the Black” seriously no matter who wrote it.

So congratulations are in order for our new young author! A fine inaugural effort, and I, for one, am hoping there’s lots more to come.

In the Penny Press! The Many Lives of Anthony Burgess!

Here at Stevereads, we're accustomed to the reliability of certain cosmic forces. The sun being too bright and hot, for instance, or the comment-silence of 90 percent of this blog's readers, or the gassiness of basset hounds (neighbors' basset hounds, of course: our own dogs, Leni and Blondi, never pass gas at all). Enshrined on such a list from time immemorial (= since Tina Brown) is this: the content-slightness of the New Yorker.

So imagine our distress when for the second consecutive week, the venerable magazine has been relatively PACKED with interesting stuff. The world whirls.

This week's double-sized 'media' issue is so full of noteworthy stuff that it's getting an entire entry of its own. Let's hit the highlights:

David Denby reviews the new Martin Scorcese film 'The Departed' to generally lukewarm effect, writing at one point:

All the characters are unusually intelligent, and the fast, scurrilous talk binds the tightly edited short sequences together. Scorcese, however, is trying to do with words what he used to accomplish with the camera, and he doesn't produce the kind of emotional involvement that once made his movies so exhausting and also so satisfying.

I disagree that Scorcese's movies have always or even often been either of those things, but again, this isn't the blog for that. But while we're on the subject, I will say this: I can't wait for 'The Departed' to be old, to be no longer getting reviewed. Why? Because then there'll be no reason for EVERY SINGLE REVIEW to feature that same still from the movie. I'm sure you know the one I mean: Leonardo DiCaprio in the GAYEST POSSIBLE punch-windup and Matt Damon in the GAYEST POSSIBLE 'not the face! not the face!' defense posture. If I never see that picture again, it'll be too soon.

Also in this issue was Jill Lepore's review of a new Tom Paine biography (it hardly matters which one, since she says virtually nothing about it), in which she gives a lively recap of the high and low points of Paine's life and times.

I liked the piece well enough, except for this:

Adams, who had been the colonies' most ardent advocate for independence, refused to accept that Paine deserved any credit for Common Sense.

And I wouldn't object to this either, if Lepore were talking about the right Adams. But unfortunately, she's referring to John, when in fact it was Samuel Adams who'd been the most ardent advocate of independence, talking it up in taverns and farmers markets and meeting halls long before cousin John jumped on board the movement. The only reason there WAS a movement to jump on board was because Samuel Adams started one. You should all keep that in mind while taking in the Boston Public Library's excellent new show, 'John Adams Unbound.'

Under the already-alarming section headline of 'The Wayward Press,' Nicholas Lemann writes a piece about the continuing appeal of conspiracy theories, and it starts out well.

His initial focus is of course 9/11, and he points out some genuinely disturbing questions that have not been answered:

... the debris found near September 11th sites does not match debris from the purported planes; that Larry A. Silverstein bought the Twin Towers and took out a large insurance policy that specifically mentioned terrorist attacks, only days before September 11th; that the two American Airlines flights that crashed that morning had not been scheduled to fly.

But about half-way through his article he stumbles rather badly:

We've been too deeply conditioned by years of reading books with bibliographies and footnotes to be entirely persuadable by those which don't have them; and prose itself, when deployed at length by people less gifted than James Joyce, is a somewhat plodding medium, demanding the use of conventional logic and temporal sequencing. The most powerful and memorable material about what misdeeds the Bush Administration may be secretly up to appears in documentary films.

To which we here at Stevereads offer the only fitting rebuttal: Fuck you and the horse you rode your lazy ass in on.

Plodding enough for you, you illiterate dickhead?

But it's his conclusion that really irks:

It [the paranoid mindframe]'s a view of how the world works that mistakenly empowers particular, and evil, force with the ability to determine the course of events, and it misses the messiness and contingency with which life actually unfolds ... One doesn't have to deny the horrors of the story to see it as not so neatly explicable. Tragedy is more profound if it is permitted to entail not just malignancy but also people screwing up.

What irks about that, you ask (well, you DON'T ask - you wonder about it privately while reading this and then don't respond at all, but let's use it rhetorically)? I mean apart from the misuse of both 'contingency' and 'malignancy' (guess Joyce wasn't available for the rewrite)?

It's the patronizing tone, the underlying assumption that because all conspiracy theorists are paranoid nutjobs, all conspiracy theories are nutjob fantasies. But conspiracies do exist; little ones and big ones come to light virtually every day. Evil people do things, orchestrate things, that they don't want anybody to know about. I'm very much unconvinced that the plane crashes of September 11 were one such instance, but honestly - is there ANYBODY who isn't convinced that the Bush administration orchestrated a lying cover-up of its motives for invading Iraq? Some conspiracies are real, alas.

Orchestration of a different kind was the focus of Malcolm Gladwell's fascinating article on Epagogix, a company in the business of predicting - and manufacturing - Hollywood blockbusters.

I'm no expert on the movie industry (if only there were a funny, irreverent, authoritative blog by someone who was...), but I found this article absorbing. But then again, according to no less an authority than William Goldman, "Nobody knows anything ... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess ... why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on 'Star Wars'? ... Because nobody, nobody - not now, not ever - knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn't going to work at the box office."

But according to Gladwell, Epagogix would like to prove Goldman wrong. The article is full of 'hit clusters' and 'neural networks,' but the main point of Epagogix's equations is that they don't care about being in Tom Cruise's Myspace Friends list:

It doesn't care about maintaining relationships with stars or agents or getting invited to someone's party. It doesn't care about climbing the corporate ladder. It has one master and one master only: how do you get to a bigger box-office? Nobody else in Hollywood is like that.

Of course, the idea of a future in which artistic intent is entirely removed from movies - where formulae and statistics command everything that's there on the screen - is pretty depressing. But I confess to a deep fascination in the road we take to get there (and on the plus side, if you remove all personal or artistic elements from movie-making, future generations would be spared their equivalents of 'Garden State' ... no small incentive, that ...)

But by far the most interesting thing in the latest New Yorker was Ian Parker's long and beguiling profile of Anthony Burgess, an incredibly prolific and often brilliant British ex-pat with disasterous hair and posture, a penchant for dim-bulb leggy wives, and a bottomless, hopeless addiction to tobacco and alcohol.

Ooooops ... my mistake: Parker's actually writing about Christopher Hitchens! Which means either we're dealing with an uncanny coincidence, or Christopher Hitchens is, as many have long suspected, a living, breathing trope.

Either way, the piece is fantastic. Not only does Parker quote his subject liberally, but his quotes ABOUT his subject are all stellar:

He also has the politician's trick of eliding the last word of one sentence to the first of the next, while stressing both words, in order to close the gate against interruption.

He seems to be perpetually auditioning for the role of best man.

He writes a single draft, at a speed that caused his New Statesman colleagues to place bets on how long it would take him to finish an editorial. What emerges is ready for publication, except for one weakness: he's not an expert punctuator, which reinforces the notion that he is in the business of transcribing a lecture he can hear himself giving.

Regular readers of Stevereads (the Silent Majority, as it were) will recall that I myself have now joined the swelling ranks of those who've publicly tussled with Hitchens, but I nonetheless approached the article with a hopeful neutrality - the fact is, Hitchens has given me a great deal of reading pleasure over the years. His literary essays prior to about the mid-90s were almost always beautiful and startlingly eye-opening, and his evisceration of Mother Teresa, The Missionary Position, is gleeful malice (or do I mean 'malignancy'? Dammit, when is that Joyce guy getting back from lunch?) pressed between book-covers.

But I'm not the only one who's noticed a change, a diminution, in the last few years. This isn't ideological, it has nothing to do with whether or not I agree with his political beliefs (although I think his central tent-post, that it was right for the United States to remove Saddam Hussein from power, is dead wrong). It's completely about his prose, about his innumerable articles - is there anyone reading this who doesn't think the quality of these things has been in steady decline for some time now?

Parker's article holds the answer, I think. As in any profile of Hitchens, his soggy substance-abuse takes center stage. We're told that he smokes and drinks pretty much incessantly (vignette after vignette has him already drinking at noon, with the vague assertion floating around that he does a peck of work in the mornings, before the day's imbibing)(as I mentioned, the Burgess echoes are deafening, all throughout the piece), but Parker resorts to the tired, stupid old cliche of the writing man who somehow manages to keep all this incessant smoking and drinking separate from his work - the tiresome Dorian Gray dichotomy: TWO Hitchenses - one who lounges around drinking all day and partying all night, and the other who spends what would have to be vast amounts of time reading, researching, and above all writing, the physical act of writing.

Parker seems to buy this line entirely:

He was not a 'piss artist,' he explained, 'someone who can't get going without a load of beer, who's a drunk - overconfident and flushed. I can't bear that.' He went on, 'I know what I'm doing with it. And I can time it. It's a self-medicating thing.' I took his point. Hitchens does drink a very great deal (and said of Mel Gibson's blood-alcohol level at the time of his recent Malibu arrest - O.12 per cent - 'that's about as sober as you'd ever want to be'). But he drinks like a Hemingway character: continually and to no apparent effect.

Quite apart from the fact that no Hemingway character would be caught dead using such a whining, telltale word as 'self-medicating,' there's the obvious parry to such a claim: there IS apparent effect. The writing has suffered. Somebody who's very often drunk all day very often grows to NEED to be drunk all day, and there are certain things you can't do while drunk. You can teach undergrad courses while drunk. You can beat up on opposing talk show panelists while drunk. You can write sloppy, off-the-cuff prose while drunk.

But you can't meaningfully read while drunk. You certainly can't research while drunk. And despite what a million authors known and unknown have claimed, you can't write WELL while drunk. All of those thing require CONCENTRATION, which is one of the first attributes to disappear when somebody starts drinking.

Of course, this is where the Burgess comparison comes to a complete halt - since Burgess drank if anything more than Hitchens and yet was eerily, almost superhumanly productive AND good (usually) throughout his entire career. As good as The Missionary Position or The Trial of Henry Kissinger are, it's nevertheless true: Hitchens has yet to produce a book that will outlive him. But by the time Burgess was Hitchens' age, he'd produced ... what? How many books that would outlive him?

My young friend John Cotter (visit his grim website at http://www.johncotter.net and see how damn depressing it is to be young, handsome, well-friended, and talented! Search the site in vain for a single non-hipster smile!) is, believe it or not, one of the world's foremost authorities on Anthony Burgess. I'm sure the Silent Majority would be interested in his thoughts on the whole Hitchens/Burgess comparison. Alas, he stopped reading this blog once he saw that it was entirely devoted to young adult fiction ... but maybe he'll come across this entry one day and treat us all to a few paragraphs on the subject.

In any case, just LOOK at how much matter was crammed into that single issue of the New Yorker! This will certainly make the NEXT issue a colossal letdown, but let's smell the roses while we can!