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!

In the Penny Press! Snickering at Genius!

So let's get a move on, shall we? We could start with the latest New York Review of Books, which included a long appreciation of the new exhibit of Michelangelo's pencil sketches. The review is glowing and appreciative, of course (how could it not be?), so I was surprised - and smiled - when I read this:

Leonardo's incomparably lively sketches for the Battle of Anghiari inspired a thirtyish Michelangelo to try drawing knots of men and horses for his own Battle of Cascina. But Michelangelo never shared Leonardo's fascination with nature, or the elder artist's peerless facility with pen and ink. Leonardo's sketches of galloping horses kicking up dust have a dynamism that Michelangelo simply could not equal - but then neither could anybody else.

Hee. I read that, and for a minute I felt like rebelling against it somehow, but there isn't a way. For some people, the genius gradient is just too steep. The same thing applies to Bach, I find. Ditto for any study of Bloomsbury, from an artistic point of view: there's everybody else, punting on Isis and moping about bad hygiene, and then there's Virginia Woolf, towering over everybody else.

And what about the mighty TLS? You'll recall (unless you've BLOCKED IT OUT) the piece I mentioned about Edward Luttwak's historical analysis of the Cold War ... well, David Kenney (a MAJOR A-hole, but hey ... when you're right, you're right) writes in response:

Edward Luttwak's piece misses the point. Because of their paucity and lack of accuracy, nuclear deterrents were useful only after the late 1960s. Contrary to Luttwak the Soviet Bloc did go to war, after the Second World War, on the periphery. It tried by military force to seize South Korea, West Berlin and Cuba, by covert action to own the Congo, Nigeria and Italy, and by political action and diplomacy to control the Straits of Mermara, Syria and Libya. The Taiwan Straits were a gleam in the Bloc's eye. As South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan thrived, the Kremlin's leaders watched all their initiatives, especially those in Africa, diminish to ugly internal and tribal warfare and in relevance to the West's continued hegemony. Everywhere Russians popped up, we beat them.

From the 1970s until the Soviet Union's collapse, it operated a reckless and ruinously expensive ballistic missile system. Here Luttwak is partially correct. But that system would not have been nearly as effective, if war had come, as was proclaimed, and it drove the Communist regime into bankruptcy. Their missiles could have ravaged much of the West but we would have won. Our third strike lay under the ice; theirs did not.

Secretary McNamara said that we had three nuclear confrontations with the Kremlin on his watch. I was present at two of them. They blinked and we did not. We are here and they are not.

And then there's the New Yorker, which had quite a bit of interesting stuff in it this time around - and nothing more surprising to me than the fact that I actually kinda LIKED the Martin Amis short story inside. I usually can't stand Amis (actually, I'm not all that fond of his father's novels either ... soggy academic sex-romps, exercises in tedium), but in this short story he puts himself inside the mind of one of the 9/11 hijackers, and it works. I'll be curious to see if it shows up in any 'best of' year-end anthologies.

The New Yorker also had a review of the new Veronese show at the Frick - a piece written by their art critic Peter Schjeldahl, with whom I often disagree on matters of art (mainly because he's a boob, and this piece was no exception - like, for instance, when he offhandedly mentions that Bellini was a better painter than Veronese ... not only is the statement wrong on its face, but in a typically careless fashion, Sjehdahl doesn't even specify WHICH Bellini). But he does manage to convey the bright watery genius of the man - in my opinion the best Venetian painter of them all - and that always comes with a touch of pity, since SO much of Veronese's work is lost. For whole decades in a very long productive life, his favorite thing to do was decorative frescoes, sometimes filling the entire interior of a palazzo with gorgeous, glowing works on every wall, from floor to ceiling, so that walking from room to room made you feel like you were INSIDE a painting. But Venice's climate is hell on walls, so lots of Veronese just peeled away over (very little) time. And many patrons wanted to impress their guests with his work, so they had him paint their grand entrances off the canal - and quite a few of those entrances are now under ten feet of water. There's a sermon in their somewhere about the inherent fragility of art - remind me to bore you with it someday!

(I had a roommate in college once, a frail and kind-hearted young man, and when he was in the mood, he'd take out his violin and play such winding, looping, gorgeous late-night solos that partygoers outside would stop and look up. His usual method was to start with Bach or Beethoven and then weave in longer and longer digressions that were entirely his own and entirely spontaneous - and they were heartbreakingly, astoundingly beautiful. And a couple of years later he died, with no recording ever made, no transcriptions ... no trace of any kind that such beauty ever existed, except in the memory of those who heard it. But that'll be covered in the aforementioned sermon!)

But New Yorker item of by far the greatest interest for Steve (and his severely bored audience!) is Jill Lepore's review of the new Mayflower book by Nathaniel Philbrick - a review in which she trashes the book (and rightfully so - I read a galley copy this weekend and was so disappointed I nearly hurled the copy at the nearest sleeping basset hound) - but a review in which, or reasons known only to her, she also goes out of her way to kick dirt on the reputation of Samuel Eliot Morison, whose name has surely come up in these Torrents of Tedium, no? She starts early, by telling her readers that Morison is widely considered the greatest American historian of the 20th century and then sniffingly adding "With that, as these things go, not everyone agrees." Prompting me to wonder who exactly she'd nominate in his place.

Sam Morison held the world of academic history-writing in contempt, and with good reason. I'm sure you've heard similar tirades from yours truly, about skimpy books boringly written and carelessly researched - just as you and everybody else I know has heard the opposite from me, when some new work of history or biography manages to be both challenging and well-written. Morison knew what all great historians know: that history is a STORY, the most fascinating one in the world, and that if you sacrifice that fascination for bland, please-everybody prose, you insult the Muse.

Not that I'm saying historians can get away with being inaccurate ... but if you can't overlay accuracy with narrative skill, you've no business trying the discipline at all (in 2006 so far, moreso than in any other year, I've been tempted to scrap everything I'm doing and actually try my hand at writing history ... except, what if I stink at it?). Morison firmly believed that, and in 30 books of published history, he never wrote a dull sentence.

So what the Hell does Lepore mean when she writes "Because he wrote more for the public than for his fellow historians, Morison has few academic disciples today, and if the chain reaction of dullness continues unbroken, Morison is as much to blame as anybody." Really? So the fact that he mocked boring histories, wrote only interesting ones, and urged others to write only interesting ones, those things don't alleviate his guilt at all? Geez. If I hadn't mostly liked Lepore's own work this past decade, I'd be tempted to call her a ... well, I suppose for dense women we'd have to come up with some other word, wouldn't we? I can't for the life of me figure out what Sam Morison is even doing IN this review ... he'd have hated Philbrick's latest, and he'd have dismissed it out of hand - but he didn't write anything like it, and he deplored books like it, so how does he work as a straw man? Maybe a testy letter to the New Yorker is in order, asking those very questions!

Fortunately, the issue recovered strongly with a David Remnick excoriation of the current administration in Washington, an excoriation prompted by going to an advance screening of Al Gore's new global warming documentary. At more than one point, it seems like Remnick is going to burst into tears:

If you are inclined to think that the unjustly awarded election of 2000 led to one of the worst Presidencies of this or any other era, it is not easy to look at Al Gore. He is the living reminder of all that might not have happened in the past six years (and of what might still happen in the coming two). Contrary to Ralph Nader's credo that there was no real difference between the major parties, it is close to inconceivable that the country and the world would not be in far better shape had Gore been allowed to assume the office that a plurality of voters wished him to have.

We'll leave this latest issue with a smile, though: Jonathan Stern writes an amusing little piece called "The Lonely Planet Guide to My Apartment" that had me chuckling. Here's a sample:

Local Customs

The population of My Apartment has a daily ritual of "bitching" which occurs at the end of the workday and prior to ordering in food. Usually, meals are taken during reruns of 'Stargate Atlantis.' Don't be put off by impulsive sobbing or unprovoked rages. These traits have been passed down through generations and are part of the colorful heritage of My Apartment's people.

And there you have it! Another thrilling installment of In the Penny Press! A casual glance at prospective reading material leads me to think the next installment might be rather heavily POLITICAL, so brace yourself for a double shot of tedium with a chaser of crackpottery!