Promise of Plenty in the Penny Press!

An exceedingly enjoyable day in the Penny Press, proving once again its unending (one hopes) plenty, its aggregate ability to laughter, stimulation, and irritation to even the dreariest afternoon.  My old standbys could do no wrong today, starting, of course, with the mighty TLS, which this time around had as many quotable little bits as an episode of Deadwood. In Maren Meinhardt's wonderfully clear-headed review of the controversial Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which does more justice to the book in four paragraphs than most reviewers have managed to do in four or fourteen pages, she sums things up nicely:

Behind the posturing and special effects, the tenets underlying Chua's position are surprisingly sensible and relatively tame: most things that are worth doing need application and tend to become enjoyable once once one gets good at them; it is the job of parents to help their children get to that point.

I haven't yet managed to understand the outrage and commentary this book has produced, but then, my own tenets of parenting went out of fashion 400 years ago; practically every day, I see children launch themselves into utterly abominable public behavior, and they do it in the very consciously calculated certainty that their parents will not under any circumstances simply physically force them to mind their manners. Instead, such spoiled brats get to indulge themselves, scornful of the fact that the worst their parents will do is try to talk to them, to reason them out of their merchandise-destroying tantrum. "Amethyst," as I heard one over-pronouncing young mother say during one such tantrum, "remember what we discussed about social discourse?"

Elsewhere in this issue, P. J. Carnehan turns in a meaty review of a new art exhibit called "Georgian Faces" and wins this week's prize for Best Opening Line in a Review:

It's good to know that, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, the defense of Dorset against the prospect of invasion was in the hands of well-dressed men.

But then, the TLS has always been a showcase for linguistic pith - most often at the expense of the poor authors whose works fail to impress. It's true that Edmund Gordon over-praises Philip Hensher's merely good novel King of the Badgers (his follow-up to his genuinely great The Northern Clemency), but oh, the sweet compensation found in Matthew Adams' demolition of David Baddiel's The Death of Eli Gold! I haven't read Baddiel's book myself, which is about four narrators recalling the life of the title character, but after the working-over Adams gives it, I'd be happy to buy the author a consoling drink:

Ascribing to each character a distinct narrative voice, the novel attempts to offer a picture of their psychological and emotional development as they adjust to the great novelist's passing. It is a potentially effective idea, but Baddiel's frivolous approach to language and characterization, combine with his evident disregard for the reader, means that that potential is never recognized.

... The novel is sore with afflictions of this kind. To a different kind of enterprise, they might not have been so comprehensively damaging. But The Death of Eli Gold is a long, static, ostensibly reflective work, and as such it is almost totally dependent on precision, weight, and authenticity of voice. It has none of these qualities ...

Hee.

One magazine-reading need my beloved book reviews don't fill is my foolishly persistent need for short fiction (well, almost never - the London Review of Books can keep running Alan Bennett's marvellous novellas forever, as far as I'm concerned) - 'foolish' because I'm so often disappointed you'd think I'd have stopped voluntarily long ago. Granted, writing a good short story is devilishly difficult, so I should keep my expectations low. But Penny Press days like today inflate those expectations - I found not one but two excellent stories. The first, "Twin Forks" by Daniel Woodrell, is in the latest Esquire - it's about a man named Morrow who buys a camp ground and general store out West hoping to escape some of the demons he left behind in Nebraska; it's got some very effective imaginings of loss and pain that a very different main character might have called a mid-life crisis, and the central scene, in which Morrow (with a little backstage help from his shop assistant Royce) confronts two machete-wielding drug addicts who pull up in front of his store in a beat-up car with two women in the back seat:

The women climbed from the beater and stood beside it, the elder subdued and expectant of the worst, the younger dark and expressionless, staring at Morrow. He looked back and could not believe how pretty her eyes were - what color is that? - then couldn't believe he'd noticed. He abruptly fired into the air while yet lost in her eyes and presence, said, "One more step."

The men halted at the sound, looked at each other, laughed till they bent in the middle and had to lean together. The machetes fell to the ground. The driver turned to the staring girl, "Toss me the keys to the trunk."

Royce said, "Don't let them open that trunk. You won't want that."

Woodrell is unknown to me, but the bio-note in Esquire indicates his a fairly seasoned writer, which might help to explain how effective most of "Twin Forks" is - although when it comes to short stories, I've seen many, many seasoned hands fall flat. My notorious case in point would be Alice Munro, who has never written a single well-done short story despite having spent an entire lifetime doing nothing but trying. So imagine my surprise when I turned to her preferred venue, The New Yorker, and found - not a well-done Munro short story, of course (what were you thinking?), but an utterly fantastic tale written by a newcomer to the field. The writer's name is Ramona Ausubel, and the story is called "Atria," and if it's any indication of her talent, her forthcoming book of short stories is worth pre-ordering right now.

"Atria" stars teenager Hazel Whiting, an intelligent and quirkily introspective high school student with a dead father and a hapless mother ("Hazel and her father were never in the world together - by the time she entered, he had already closed the door behind him"). Hazel is a fairly dispassionate observer of the world around her, and when she loses her virginity to a convenience store clerk one afternoon, she does so with almost clinical detachment ("This is it?" she thought. "This is the whole entire thing?"). Shortly after, she's raped by a different man and becomes pregnant, although she refuses to believe she's carrying an actual human baby:

She thought of the men who could have created this. "How could you be a person?" she asked her growing baby. She dreamed that night, and for all the nights of that summer, of a ball of light in her belly. A glowing knot of illuminated strands, heating her from the inside out. Then it grew fur, but it still shone. Pretty soon she saw its claws and its teeth, long and yellow. It had no eyes, just blindly scratched around, sniffing her cave. She did not know if this creature was here to help or to punish her.

The story is told in writing so confident and yet loose-limbed that I'm hard-pressed to think of a similar style - maybe early George Saunders, but there's an ease here that he has yet to achieve (and, to be fair, doesn't seem to want to). There's ample dramatic control as well - the final eight paragraphs of this story will have your heart in your throat, and the effect is entirely uncontrived, springing from Hazel's character itself. It was a thrill to read, and it'll be a thrill to add another young writer to my 'must read' list. Going from "Atria" to the next Munro aunt-a-thon will be a harsh thing.

And since today is the first of the month, there's another entry in the Penny Press I naturally want to mention - and since this post marks the 800th entry here at Stevereads, I'm allowing myself a little indulgence! The first of every month marks the appearance of a new issue of Open Letters Monthly, and since it's the best online literary and arts review there is, it not only qualifies as a part of the Penny Press but also stands implicit comparison with the best of its paper-and-staple brethren. I play a part in the creation of OLM every month, but this in no way cheapens my evaluation - I was a periodical reader long before I was any kind of periodical participant, and I'm well able to click on over to the latest issue of OLM on the first of the month and simply encounter it as a reader. It's true that I know the genesis of the pieces with an intimacy I don't have with other magazines (in this case, for instance, I know the title Jeff Eaton's fantastic review of Colonel Roosevelt had before it got the boring-ass snoozer of a title it currently sports - stuff like that), but knowing that kind of thing can't make the reading experience any better or worse, believe me.

So I'm indulging myself here at Post #800 by telling you this: Open Letters is a hell of a good read every month.

The secret, of course, is the strength of the writing - and I know this because the strength of the writing keeps me reading essays on subjects I'd otherwise immediately ignore. In this latest issue, for instance, one review deals with Teju Cole's novel Open City, which I found stilted, canned, and stomach-churningly egotistical. You'd think, therefore, that a review of it would hold no interest for me - but Andrew Martin's piece in the latest OLM is so urbane and allusive and chatty that I found myself reading along and happy, despite anything I might think about its subject:

The darkness and light that Cole describes seem to project themselves back onto the image of the solitary man in a flickering subway car, and forward onto the titles of Mahler’s final works. Moreover, the connections don’t feel forced. They are clearly the work of someone thinking—they are self-consciously essayistic in construction—but the prose is steady, driving. One keeps reading the book for these moments, and there are many of them.

And if I was initially sceptical about any review dealing with a junk writer like Cole, you can imagine what I initially thought about an entire feature on perfume. My first reaction was that a high-priced ephemeral vanity product like perfume didn't deserve even a glance from what is primarily still a literary review - I certainly wasn't willing to grant perfumery the status of an art. But I read Elisa Gabbert's "On the Scent" column avidly each time it appears, and I do so for her agile, confident prose:

An all-natural perfume would stick out like a sore thumb at the perfume counter in a department store, as they smell and behave in a fundamentally different way and lack ingredients found in the majority of commercial fragrances (such as synthetic musks, dihydromercenol, and Iso E Super); perhaps counterintuitively, it’s usually synthetic chemicals that make a contemporary perfume smell “fresh.”

Likewise I've been mostly uninterested in novelist Ahdaf Soueif's involvement with the recent political upheaval in Egypt, tempted to write it off as Norman Mailer-style opportunistic grandstanding - until I read Rohan Maitzen's exploration of Soueif's activism as seen through the prism of her novels In the Eye of the Sun and The Map of Love. In every piece she writes for OLM, Maitzen exhibits both a joy in meaningful complexity and an explicit faith in the power of literature - it can be an incredibly thought-provoking combination:

“I know there’s an awful lot I don’t know,” Isabel says to Amal. “That’s a start, isn’t it?” Against this epistemological humility, which enables exploration, discovery, and cooperation, run powerful countervailing certainties that, refusing empathy, instead license prejudice, inhumanity, and violence.

Soueif’s novels work against such certainties. Even the heartrending conclusion to The Map of Love is productive, because our mourning prompts us to ask why, to demand a better, more just, more hopeful resolution. Both novels also not only invoke but create their own version of the Mezzaterra: a literary common ground, an optimistic, if endangered, space well served by the novelist’s tools.

Perhaps the ultimate example of this kind of bait-and-switch occurs when a first-rate writer decides to review a book that's not mediocre (like Cole) but outright awful. This contrast is jarring enough when less talented reviewers do it (I myself, for instance, do it all the time) - when really talented people indulge themselves like this, the effect can be surreal. Perfect case-in-point: in the latest OLM, John Cotter (another of those 'Must Read' young novelists on my list) turns in a review of "Alta Ifland"'s 60-page collection of short stories called Death-in-a-Box. The booklet is flyblown garbage in its every pretentious sentence, but something in it caught Cotter's imagination and prompted a beguiling review that's several orders of magnitude more thoughtful and poetic than its subject:

Ifland’s spiky narration turns fables into essays and then into sermons, milking the efficacy of the forms she passes through; just as characters double and blend, so do forms. Not that all of this blending works all the time; generally speaking, these stories begin with strong premises and then escape themselves. Sometimes this is an uroboros (as in “Death-In-A-Box” where the premise with which we begin winds elegantly back on itself); sometimes these endings are fine disappearing acts (as in “Twin Sisters” when one character disappears into another); sometimes these escapes are just French exits, unsatisfying evasions (as in “Uncle Otto,” where a zany character piece decomposes into drunken paperwork).

And the list goes on, in every issue of Open Letters. Part of this is luck, no doubt (magazine editors dislike admitting it, of course, but luck plays a disconcerting role in whether or not a potential freelancer says 'yes, sure' - and whether or not that freelancer then delivers the goods), but a bigger part of it is hard work on the part of OLM's editors, who find, chase, shape, and polish these pieces every month. The process of that finding, chasing, shaping, and polishing is no different at OLM than it is at the TLS or The New Yorker, except in scale and number of available hands on deck, and the results of all that work were among the many Penny Press offerings that pleased me today - so I thought it deserved a mention right alongside the others. Credit where credit's due, and all that.

And for my next 800 entries? Six words: All Paul Marron - All The Time!

The Open Letters Monthly Anthology!

Our book today is one I’ve waited a long time to recommend to all of you: the very first Open Letters Monthly anthology, collecting some of the best, most interesting, most thought-provoking stuff we’ve published in the last three years.

“It’s always strange to be born/Just before the cusp of some new age” – so Sommer Browning writes in “Either Way, I’m Celebrating,” one of the many poems John Cotter (also the anthology’s editor) assembled from his days as Poetry Editor on the site, and it’s hard not to think of that line’s sentiment when looking at the print world today. Not only are publishing houses merging and shuttering offices, but newspapers and magazines are either shrinking or eliminating their book and arts coverage. Increased environmental awareness has brought the whole process of printing, shipping, returning, and pulping books under awkward scrutiny, and the ubiquity and popularity of e-readers grows hourly. Open Letters itself is and always will be a paper-free online endeavor. We may well be seeing the end of printed books as we’ve known them.

But while they’re with us, they’re more with us than anything – they’re our debate opponents, our listening ears, our sanctuaries, our respites from boredom, ignorance, even grief. If printed books are indeed on the cusp of some new age, Open Letters Monthly now has one foot firmly planted on each side of the divide: our content changes every month (and every day) online, and now we offer you a printed book, a slim, pretty anthology to put on your actual physical library shelves.

You’ll take it down from those shelves too, often, because there’s a lot more here than some great poetry. There are lively, funny, quotable, definitive essays on such a menagerie of subjects that no reader will go away empty-handed. The poetry of John Donne, the mysteries of Dorothy Sayers, the politics of George Eliot, the gossipy fiction of Fanny Burney, the pugnacity of Norman Mailer, the weird genius of The Last Samurai … all these things are gloriously illuminated for your reading pleasure. The navigation of Christopher Columbus, the desperation of treaty-making with Hitler, the endless fascination of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the verbal fisticuffs of the Founding Fathers … these thing and much more are given thorough, thought-provoking examinations.

And there’s one other intense point of light here: this anthology of necessity enshrines some beginnings, and those beginnings should compel your curiosity: Here is the first publication of the long-form multi-book fiction dissection that Sam Sacks already does better than any critic alive; here is the brooding, authoritative essay-voice of Adam Golaski still at the dawn of his career; here is the heartfelt but unsparing political commentary of Greg Waldmann seen before it becomes the scourge of the mighty; here is Phillip Lobo for the first time passionately demonstrating that we must make room for the new art form of video games; here, at last in print, is John Cotter writing about Anthony Burgess. The world of open letters in twenty years will know these names with a reflexive, ironclad regard – and that world will marvel that so many of them started here, together. Take it from me: assemblies like this don’t come along often in publishing.

We have no idea when the next Open Letters anthology will come along. Perhaps by the time it arrives, Sommer’s new age will have dawned, and we’ll no more consider printing and binding a paper volume than we would carving one in stone or scoring one onto vellum. Perhaps this will be the only such printed anthology that ever happens.

But in any case, it’s the first, and its supplies are limited. The thing’s clean, pretty design is the brainchild of Maureen Thorson, and the price is an everyman $12.  I earnestly recommend you go here and order a copy. As I’m inclined to say here when my heart is leaping with a reader’s joy: you’ll be glad you did.

In the penny press! the TLS and Jebus!

Unlike with virtually every other penny press publication in existence, the TLS never needs pruning for these dispatches. It's always great, in all its parts. The task I have here at Stevereads is to single out the things I think will be of interest to you little marmosets, not, as with other publications, to pick out what's good.

We should start with the perennially enjoyable J.C.'s NB column: it always has something to start the senses.

This issue is no exception: JC has a great deal of fun with a new issue of Perdika Press:

The poetry pamphlet is among life's gentler pleasures. Fine paper, good printing and elegant design are essential; editorial discrimination, even more so. Perdika Press has issued the first three of a projected series of numbered pamphlets, nicely printed and well designed. What about the contents? The 'Series Editors' are Mario Petrucci, Nicholas Potamitis and Peter Brennan. According to Mr Brennan, 'Nicholas undertakes design, typesetting and runs the website. Mario advises on every aspect - very much a hands on counsellor'.

From Mario's counselling emerged the decision to devote the first Perdika edition to work by Mario Petrucci ('one of the most dynamic and original poets writing in English'). Thus we have 'Catullus,' eight 'contemporary adaptations' of the Roman poet, with original facing ('No one is better equipped to present Catullus to the modern reader'). Catullus' 'Melitios oculous tuos Iuuenti/siquis me sinat usque basiare' is wittily transformed into, 'Honey - when it comes to kissing/ we'd out-score Juventus.'

That's awful, of course, and it prompts one to recall that my young friend John Cotter is a dab hand at Catullus adaptations himself - his are, in fact, breathtakingly good. Perhaps he'll share one with all my loyal readers? Or better yet, compose a NEW one, based on Melitios oculous, for our delectation? Well, he's a busy lad, but we can always hope ...

Speaking of poets, Andrew Motion has a wonderful piece in the same TLS about the preservation of original manuscripts in public libraries. He has a wonderful passage about seeing a couple of autograph drafts of Wilfred Owen's sonnet 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' with comments by Siegfried Sassoon:

I learned more about writing by looking a those two pages and in whole terms of study and instruction. To realize at a glance that first thoughts were not inevitably best thoughts; to see in the most pratical way imaginable how what we used to call inspiration needed to be combined with ingenuity and sheer hard work; to understand how valuable the interventions of a second and sympathetic mind might be: all these things made my discovery of those pages feel like a revelation. And when I later saw the pages themselves, in the British Library, the revelation deepened and the pages became almost sacred. I still glimpse them in my mind's eye now, almost forty years later, whenever I write a poem. Think harder, they say to me. Stretch your imagination. Write better.

Wonderful stuff! 'Think harder ... stretch your imagination ... write better.'

One little thing in this TLS did perturb, however. In a brief review of Cinematic Savior - Hollywood's Making of the American Christ, Stephenson Humphries-Brooks writes:

To this point Jesus movies were made by Protestants. With 'Jesus of Nazareth,' Rome takes over. Zeffirelli - and, following him, Mel Gibson - bases his interpretation on Isaiah' Suffering Servant: 'He was wounded for our iniquities ...' With Gibson, however, this theme has been joined by another, roped in, so to speak, from the Western ...

I know, I know - it says 'however.' But even so, considering a) the depth of Gibson's current public disgrace and b) the scabrous ineptitude of 'The Passion of the Christ', I felt I should stress to any of you out there who might not be familiar with Franco Zeffirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth" - it's NOTHING like 'Passion of the Christ. NOTHING. "Jesus of Nazareth" is incredibly intelligent and moving and epic. Linking it - however ephemerally - with a loud, brainless, masochistic, anti-semitic piece of crap like 'Passion of the Christ' does it a disservice that can only be remedied by all of you putting 'Jesus of Nazareth' on your Netflix list right away!

So there you have it, folks, for perhaps the first time in history: Catullus, John Cotter, and Jesus Christ!

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!