Androids from the Future in the Penny Press!

Apparently, my bittersweet relationship with New York magazine will now be permanent (perhaps I should save time and just apply to work there?), so every week I'll be thrilled by great writing even while I'm appalled at dismaying subjects. First it was an extremely well-written Evan Hughes piece on how the literary world once had the temerity to ignore the Lucretius-Cicero-Catullus troika in its midst, and then it was Noreen Malone's equally extremely well-written piece on the "occupation" of Wall Street by the skinny-jeaned tobacco-addicted hordes of slackerdom, and now it's a piece in this current issue, a look at candidate Mitt Romney's past written with fantastic energy and intelligence by Ben Wallace-Wells. If writing for New York involved the privilege of working with such glowingly talented young people, it might be worth the agitation of the subjects they go after (and as an old friend of mine reminded me the other day, "they can't all be book reviewers")

But oh, sometimes that agitation is very agitating! Take this October 31 issue, for instance. Ordinarily, I try to leave worrying about the 2012 presidential election to my Open Letters colleague Greg Waldmann, but it's impossible for any resident of Boston to ignore a story like this about the financial background of Mitt (short for 'mitten'?) Romney, who briefly paused as governor of Massachusetts before he launched himself into national politics (I realize its an unpopular stance, but I miss Governor Weld precisely because Massachusetts wasn't some sort of cheap consolation prize to him - it was more along the lines of a family heirloom, to be lovingly cared for and justifiably bragged about). I've been looking at his 2012 candidacy as something of a joke, I admit. Not only has he flip-flopped on virtually every major 'official' position he's ever held (which once upon a time was the kiss of death for a candidate), but (don't tell my young Facebook friends!) I've been tremendously impressed by President Obama in the last three years and was sort of hoping the 2012 election would be a simple walk to his re-election.

That's clearly not going to happen, alas (I have abyssmal luck with '12 presidential elections, I guess) - the American voting public is still largely stupid (blaming President Obama for a recession created by his predecessor) and largely racist (blaming President Obama just for being), so 2012 will be a hotly-contested race that the incumbent stands every chance of losing. So serious attention has to be paid to his front-running possible opponents in the general election, and the aforementioned Greg Waldmann tells me with complete confidence that the foremost of these will be Mitt Romney. Sigh.

Wallace-Wells obviously believes it too. This piece, "The Romney Economy" has nothing of the jaunty tone you'd find in a profile of, say, Michele Bachmann or any of the other large number of obviously insane hopefuls spewing hate in Iowa these days. Wallace-Wells clearly thinks Romney is as serious as a heart attack, and the article's digging into his past with the financial consulting firm Bain Capital ought to get readers thinking. Reading this piece, with its pitch-perfect evocations of Romney's world ("Romney's father had been the head of American Motors Corporation, the governor of Michigan, and a member of Nixon's cabinet; the is no credible way to describe the American elite that excludes Romney"), you come away with one certainty beyond all others: if the "1%" being decried by the smelly, iPad-using occupiers of Wall Street really exists, Mitt Romney is its living embodiment. His career of raping companies, impatiently waiting nine months, then selling the babies to the highest bidder before dashing off to his next rape is clearly detailed by Wallace-Wells, who brings up a few of the many malpractice lawsuits brought against Bain but stops short - as he has to, as his editors at New York would certainly told him to - of drawing the obvious conclusions about them.

But even more unsettling than the prospect of Americans electing as President a junk-bond huckster is the prospect of that junk-bond huckster not even believing in junk bonds - or anything else. Wallace-Wells eventually confronts the subject of all that flip-flopping when he comes to the subject that'll be hardest for Romney to weasel out of in the general election: the fact that when he was governor, he passed a version of universal health-care that's extremely similar to the 'Obamacare' the President's opponents hate because he's black. Here Wallace-Wells is both instructive and insightful:

But what separates Romney's plan from Obama's - and gives some clues about his potential presidency - is its almost-accidental origin. Romney did not begin with a philosophical quest to improve American health care. He began with the idea of himself as a problem solver and asked those around him for a problem that he might usefully solve. I remembered, when I was told this story, an anecdote I'd heard from a former political staffer of Romney's. On even basic philosophical questions like abortion, the staffer said, Romney did not try to resolve the question in the abstract, as a matter of principle, and would consider instead various hypothetical cases - for instance, a late-term abortion - and build from them a politics. The line that Romney is a flip-flopper may vastly understate the depth of the condition.

That's great stuff, though terrifying, and it proves that I should never assume I've seen the worst that U.S. presidential politics can deliver. Wallace-Wells calls Romney a "perfectly objective efficiency machine," but such a thing can't be: the very nature of efficiency involves a goal, and goals preclude objectivity. More accurate to say Romney is "a perfectly efficient Romney machine" whose goal is the presidency, regardless of what he has to say or unsay, believe or unbelieve. It's the close reflection of his days at Bain: personal profit over not only ethics but everything. After eight long years of the nation and the world suffering because Americans elected a man who cared about nothing more than just being president, the country came a whisker away from doing it again by electing John McCain ("We're gonna drill right now, my friends! We're gonna drill right in the middle of Yellowstone! Drill! Drill! Drill!"). Sanity prevailed ("that one" got elected), but in America, sanity has to re-fight its title bout every four years - and, Gawd help us all, Mitten Romney is a contender.

My only consolation would be if Wallace-Wells opts to chronicle the whole sorry spectacle. But who'd want to wish that on anybody?

Insults Large and Small in the Penny Press!

It's been a rough couple of weeks for New York magazine here at Stevereads. Last week there was that noxious, fawning travesty of a piece by Evan Hughes titled "Just Kids," a gushing piece of hagiography that tried to get its readers to shudder with veneration for those literary titans, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Mary Karr, and Jeffrey Eugenides. The article tries over and over to elicit frissons of retroactive horror that once upon a time, bookstore clerks and reading audiences didn't recognize the greatness in their midst, these scruffy, unassuming kids who were, unbeknownst to all, the greatest writers to ever walk the Earth. I read the thing with white knuckles, trying hard not to bunch it up and hurl it at the nearest basset hound - my nerves no doubt strained by the fact that I only just read the exact same article in Vanity Fair - only that article was written by one of the literary titans, and it was a different group of demigods, the group right after the one Hughes writes about.

I'd no sooner calmed down from reading Hughes' piece than I saw the cover article of the following week's issue, "The Kids are Actually Sort of Alright" written by Noreen Malone. The piece springboards from the ongoing "Occupy Wall Street" farce to an analysis - such as it is - of the second-half of the "Millennial" sub-generation, the kids the issue's cover claims are 'coming of age in post-hope America.' The article itself makes for fantastic reading (Malone is one hell of a writer, if this is any indication), but it's hard to care about that when the subject is such an inherent waste of time. The young people profiled by Malone (she repeatedly characterizes herself as one of them, but I'm free to doubt it - if she's not making very good money freelancing features for Vanity Fair inside of three years, I'm the Shah of Persia) have been let down by a cratered economy, yes - but they're also, quite apart from any economy - insufferably feckless, pampered, arrogant, and brainless. And like their smelly compatriots in Zuccotti Park, each and every one of them is a walking talking chunk of pure hypocrisy. When unwashed young people marched and sat in and protested in the 1960s, they were marching and protesting and sitting in against actual things - mainly an obscene, illegal war in Southeast Asia, but also vicious, backward racial policies at home. And although those unwashed young people were every bit as insufferable as their modern-day counterparts, they at least weren't big fat liars: there certainly wasn't anything anybody could do to make them suddenly embrace the war in Vietnam, or fire-hoses in Alabama.

Nothing could be further from the truth about Occupy Wall Street and the zombie-liars effecting it today. These young people drone about the radical distribution of wealth in this country, about the evils of greed and the miseries of poverty. But not only are they not poor (every occupier I've seen on the news has in his hands a nicer computer than mine - I've lost count of how many iPads I've spotted ... I don't have an iPad)(and the iconic cover photo of this issue features a 'street performer' named Kalan Sherrand, 24, who looks to be a two-pack-a-day tobacco addict - that's hundreds of dollars a month in New York, which is certainly more extra cash than I have), but they're not sincere - if you walked up to any one of these kids when they weren't grand-standing for Youtube and offered them $4 million, they'd promptly take it. They aren't angry with the so-called 1% for their rampant, unseemly greed - they're angry at the 1% for sucking up all the money before they themselves got out of high school and had a fair chance to suck it up themselves.

I turned to a jam-packed issue of the New York Review of Books in search of a little relief, and of course in that issue I turned first to Daniel Mendelsohn, since in this issue he reviews Alan Hollinghurst's fantastic new novel The Stranger's Child. One of our very best literary journalists - who just happens to be gay - reviewing one of our very best novelists - who just happens to be gay - a perfect match, I thought, and perhaps a perfect anecdote to the rather disappointing reviews of this book I've been reading all over the place since it reached this country. The grumpy part of me has been overheard saying the reason for this is as simple as it is deplorable: that the critical community has been so ravaged by the mental scurvy of post-modern crapola that it's no longer inclined to lay out the effort to grapple with an honest-to-gosh real adult novel. Surely, I thought, that won't be the case with Mendelsohn, who, in addition to his extreme stylistic finesse, is also (along with Anthony Lane) one of our smartest working critics.

And I wasn't wrong - about that part of the review, anyway. Mendelsohn is very observant and very funny, and although he manufactures reasons to rein in his praise of the book (like lots of critics, he ends up faulting it for the very central thing Hollinghurst is intentionally doing in the book, which is a lot like having critics fault Ulysses for being "ulimately non-traditional" or Brideshead Revisited for being "a bit elegiac"), he treats it with very becoming intelligence.

Until I got to his footnote. Here it is:

I may as well mention here, not without dismay, another lapse into an old British literary habit. Daphne's marital history seems intended to suggest a descending arc: her second, untitled husband is a bisexual painter who is killed in World War II, and her third and final spouse is a certain "Mr. Jacobs," a small-time manufacturer who did not, apparently, fight in the war. This seems to be a marker of the "plain Sharon Feingold" sort. In this context it's worth mentioning that in the 1920s section of the book, the irritating photographer who plagues the Valances - he represents the distressingly crass "modern" world of publicity and celebrity - is called Jerry Goldblatt.

Naturally, I was horrified at the suggestion, and in this one case, I hope the lie authors always tell about never reading their own reviews is true, otherwise Hollinghurst has by now read himself called an anti-Semite in the New York Review of Books. It's absolutely no mitigation whatsoever to try gentrifying this kind of thing by putting it in a footnote, and it helps not at all to couch that footnote in the kind of semi-involuntary rhetoric Mendelsohn uses - it's an odious thing to suggest no matter how you do it. The names are utterly immaterial here (as a critic so expert at seeing beneath surfaces should bloody well have known) - it's the sentiment that's important, and the sentiment being imputed to Hollinghurst here is entirely absent not only from this book but from all his others. In other words, it's a cheap shot. Not the sort of thing to pick up my mood at all, especially since it was done by a writer I like to a writer I like. Talk about a no-win situation.

There was a small glimmer of hope, however, as there usually is in the Penny Press. In the 24 October New Yorker  (the second one in a row featuring a sublime cover by Barry Blitt), there's a winningly odd piece by Elif Batuman about birding in Turkey - yes, birding in Turkey - that's just bound to end up in all of those 'Best Magazine Writing of the Year' volumes in due time. The piece is classic New Yorker, everything we long-time readers come to the magazine hoping to find: an irresistibly told tale of something odd and semi-poetic. And it featured a quick, classic exchange that shows perfectly why the rest of the world finds Americans so inexplicable. At one point Batuman is being told about bird-watching contest held in Turkish wilderness, in which contestants drove around like mad and made lists of all the birds they saw. They weren't required to take pictures:

When I asked what prevented people from cheating, Cagan stared at me with ravaged eyes. "Who would cheat at a bird-watching contest?"

The answer, of course, is "your average American," but Batuman is too kind to offer it.

Rome indeed and room enough in the Penny Press!

It's been a bad week for good faith in the Penny Press. Bad enough Us Weekly ran a picture of Joe Jonas apparently preparing to kiss a girl (even the National Enquirer would've scrupled at that), worse still that National Geographic should so conspicuously lend its imprimatur to a glorified tomb-raider, but worst of all – at least from our bookish point of view here at Stevereads – is the full-blown orb-and-scepter coronation Sam Tanenhaus bestows on Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom in The New York Times Book Review.

The iniquity isn't that Tanenhaus liked the book – because despite appearances, he keeps his personal reactions entirely to himself in the course of a very long, glowing review. No, if he liked the book and wrote it a love-letter this long and gushing, I could live with that. I'd be disgusted, but I wouldn't be nearly as disgusted as I am by what Tanenhaus decided to do instead.

This huge encomium (titled “Peace and War,” as if there weren't already enough travesties going out to Westchester County this week) isn't the result of Tanenhaus really liking Freedom – it's the result of Tanenhaus' entirely political decision that The New York Times Book Review (of which he's the editor) should really like Jonathan Franzen. This isn't high-minded literary debate; it's the cat-fighting that precedes a small-town high school class president election. Oprah Winfrey started things by stepping waaaay outside her comfort zone to nominate Franzen's last unreadably awful doorstop, The Corrections, for her happy, embracing Book Club. Franzen played the 'inchoate integrity' card for all it was worth, and the American public gobbled it up (The Corrections surely contends with Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore and Robert Caro's The Power Broker as the most-bought unread book of the last fifty years). Just last week, Time magazine nominated Franzen as the best novelist since Jesus Christ. Tanenhaus spotted a wave and hopped on his board.

The man's an excellent writer (those of you who haven't read his biography of Whittaker Chambers are urged in all sincerity to drop everything and do so), and that makes it all the more sadly easy to tell when he's not even present for his own review. Pretty much as soon as his first sentence, “Jonathan Franzen's new novel, 'Freedom,' like his previous one, 'The Corrections,' is a masterpiece of American fiction,” it's obvious this is going to be one of those times. All the hallmarks of boilerplate are here, and good boilerplate it is, too – but it bears almost no relation to what Tanenhaus says (or how he says it) when he's genuinely saying what he thought about a book. Instead, it's virtually bent double under the anxiety of the Reviewer's Remorse.

The Reviewer's Remorse goes something like this: I like to think of myself as an independent thinker, and I like to think I run my blog/literary review/library desk/major publishing industry taste-maker with the same amount of independent thinking. But I don't want to be one of those critics who hated Book X when it first came out and now looks like a jackass because it's gone on to become an enshrined piece of the canon. I'll do anything, literally anything, to avoid that.

Even a casual glance at history should amply demonstrate the absolute futility of the Reviewer's Remorse. Names that were venerated a hundred, fifty, or even twenty-five years ago are today nearly-forgotten footnotes. Yes, quickie laugh-getters of the “Rotten Reviews” variety routinely collect all the initial negative notices of now-respected novels like Pride & Prejudice (dissed by a Bronte sister, no less!) or Joyce's Ulysses (famously panned by Virginia Woolf). And yes, such reviews spark a certain frisson – but it's a fraudulent one: it stems from the vague idea that in literature there's a presiding true genius that will out.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The howling irony of Reviewer's Remorse is that it directly inverts the power-structure: critics don't just stand around taking guesses (some lucky, some not) at what the true greats of the literary canon are going to be in twenty-five, fifty, and a hundred years – they determine it. They always have, and they should.

But only the honest critics, and this review of Freedom is deeply, blandly dishonest. An honest critic couldn't write “Assaultive sex reverberates through 'Freedom,' and why not? Sex is the most insistent of the 'personal liberties,' and for Franzen the most equalizing. One is at a loss to think of another male American writer so at ease with – that is, so genuinely curious about – the economy of female desire: the pull and tug of attraction and revulsion, the self-canceling wants.”

Do you know what Tanenhaus means by insistent personal liberties? Why he creates the odious euphemism “assaultive sex” when he's talking about rape? What he means when he calls sex the “most equalizing” personal liberty, when that very notion flies in the face of 17,000 years of human experience? Why he equates comfort with curiosity? Why he uses the synonyms 'pull' and 'tug' in parallel with the antonyms 'attraction' and 'revulsion'? What on Earth a 'self-canceling want' is? No? Neither do I. And neither does he. The point of this kind of prose isn't to say anything – it's to sound like you're saying something. It's the smart kid in the back of the class using lazy-clever short cuts to get his homework done. And the assignment here is to make sure The New York Times Book Review experiences no Reviewer Remorse when it comes to Jonathan Franzen.

Fundamentally, this is the way a reviewer writes when he doesn't believe what he's writing. And in this case it's appropriate enough, because in Freedom Franzen has written a nearly 600-page novel in which he doesn't believe a single godforsaken word. Every particle of the book's grotesquely self-indulgent length is pure artifice, pure hypocrisy, pure lie. Franzen started out with the idea of mocking certain things – most especially the specific kind of mindlessly opinionated and entitled suburbanites with whom he spends his every waking minute and whose ranks he himself long ago joined, if indeed he was ever outside them to begin with – but he found he actually liked them instead, viewed them as genuine civilizing forces (just for clarification: you and I, no matter who we are? We're the ones who need civilizing). But rather than abandon the envisioned evisceration, he thought to turn it elaborately, I'm-smarter-than-you-can-even-see faux-satirical, pretending to hate the thing he loves in order to torture it a little. Call it assaultive fiction. And even that quasi-plan fell apart completely, probably after endless nights spent drinking and endless mid-mornings spent speed-writing to make page counts. What's left – what gets published to unprecedented fanfare this week and collects a National Book Award (at least) in a few months – is nothing at all, a rote exercise in verbiage.

It might be fitting that a book whose own author doesn't care about it at all would generate essays from reviewers who don't care about their own verdicts at all, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. When Sam Tanenhaus isn't resorting to Reviewer Remorse hedge-betting blather, he's a first-rate writer, and I prize first-rate writers: I've always wished I were one, and I consider them incredibly thin on the ground. So naturally, after trudging through Tanenhaus lines like “Franzen's world-historical preoccupations also shape, though less delicately, his big account of the home front – the seething national peace that counterpoises the foreign war,” I went in search of some sort of corrective, somebody actually talking about Freedom.

In addition to Tanenhaus, the field of American literary reviews also sports two other first-rate critics of the current fictive zeitgeist, both also named Sam: there's Sam Anderson, who writes for New York magazine, and there's Sam Sacks, who's the editor of Open Letters Monthly and yet reviewed the new Franzen for The Wall Street Journal (one can only assume they pay better, although it's hard to believe they could match the droit de siegneur). These two never let me down; Anderson is funnier than Sacks (this isn't difficult – the spinning ceiling-fan above my head is also funnier than Sacks), but Sacks has an oddly magisterial probity that no critic currently writing can quite match. Between them, they almost always manage to say everything that needs saying about any present-day male novelist (needless to say, they're both flailingly helpless when reviewing women – but then, I don't notice Jill Lepore or Nancy Franklin stepping forward to review Franzen either).

Except this time, alas. Like Tanenhaus, like most of the best critics, Anderson and Sacks are also afflicted with Reviewer Remorse – Franzen must bring it out in reviewers, what with his ostentatiously domestic purview and the odd, Howard Hughesian stretch of time between The Corrections and this new book (a stretch of time Trollope and Dickens would have disdained; a stretch of time not warranted by anything at all actually in the novel; a stretch of time that is almost always, in my experience with writers, caused by alcohol). Like Tanenhaus, neither of these other Sams wants to believe that Freedom could simply be bad, even though, like Tanenhaus, they experienced not one moment of personal pleasure while reading it (hugely significant that both Anderson and Sacks call the book addictive, with all the word connotes of involuntary and even degrading participation). In this context Anderson's rather reaching invocation of David Foster Wallace can be seen as the desperate hail-mary side-step of somebody who knows he's backing the wrong horse and is too invested (or under orders) to admit it. And that's nothing compared to what Sacks does in the Journal – for a writer as reverential of his sources as Sacks is to drag Milton into a review of Jonathan effing Franzen (Sacks also quotes William Blake, gawd help us all, just to make sure nobody gets out alive) … well, no matter what else it is, it's certainly a cry for help.

And this is just the beginning, of course. If The New York Times Book Review is comparing Franzen to Tolstoy this week, next week The Sacramento Bee will be comparing him to the author of the Book of Genesis. It's depressing, not only because the book itself is such a completely cynical waste of time but also because of what the coronation says about the American literary landscape. Franzen costs Farrar, Straus & Giroux the rough equivalent of twenty-five talented authors who've never feuded with Oprah, and this makes two novels in a row in which he's done absolutely nothing to compensate for that loss. Is the republic of letters really so hard up for good writers that it needs to go down on its knees to this lazy charlatan? On what meat doth this Franzen feed, that he hath grown so great?

Relativism Run Rampant in the Penny Press!

Keith Miller wrote a review last week in the TLS that was, as far as I can recall, utterly unique in the annals of that venerable publication. It was a review of David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, but that’s not the unique part; Shields’ idiotic little collage was reviewed everywhere. No, the unique part was that Miller’s review was utterly free of actual aesthetic judgement. Right there in the TLS, in precincts long known for their fiercely opinionated pronouncements on all things literary, Miller turned in a piece that was to book reviewing what abstract painting is to photography. A lazy, sniveling cop-out, in other words.

Shields, as some of you will know, composed his little book of bits and pieces from the works of other people, and he shaped it all for the purpose of making the latest point that’s obsessed his sadly deteriorated mind: that literary ownership is a bogeyman of the 20th (or even – shudder – the 19th) century, that dutiful attribution is for sissies, and that only a mix-tape of memoir and meta-fiction mini-bursts has any chance of coping with The World 2.0. I’ve come across this mulish laziness before, many times (people sententiously proclaiming that the only literature they need to know is that written by their personal friends, etc.), and it never fails to both sadden me (because such morons literally have no idea what they’re missing) and enrage me (because if you’re lazy you should just admit it and slink away, not take pride in it –or worse, try to argue that it’s not actually laziness). And I guess I just count on the TLS being saddened and enraged by pretty much the same things that sadden and enrage me. It’s a deal we’ve mostly observed for half a century, and I’ve grown quite comfortable with it.

Not this time, however. Keith Miller – a TLS regular and a very intelligent writer, regardless – starts off his piece promisingly enough, referring to Shields as “involved with the McSweeney’s axis,"  but the glimmers of hope fade pretty quickly after that. Bad enough he calls Shields’ vile,  racist book Black Planet “engaging, and, in some ways, brave” – I could swallow such a mischaracterization if it were just a small detour on the road to roasting Reality Hunger, but what follows is as mysterious as anything I’ve read in the TLS. Miller puts the pieces of a review in place, but he refuses to assemble them.

“You may or may not share Shields’s skepticism about the possibilities of the novel,” he writes.

“You may agree that we live in unprecedentedly complicated times,” he writes.

“You may accept the hip hop/collage model,” he writes, “or you may find it constraining in its own way.”

“You may feel that the issues of authorship and collaboration which Reality Hunger both debates and embodies are by no means settled,” he writes.

And there’s the concluding line of his piece:

“But Reality Hunger has little to say about style except to repeat the old macho-modernist canard that it’s something you must get beyond before you can say what you’ve got to say. You might feel you have to disagree with that, too.”

In professional circles, this is known as giving a book a pass, and I can scarcely recall a time when it was last done in the TLS. It’s not that Miller’s piece is bad – it isn’t, I doubt it could be. Like I said, he’s a reliably talented writer who always has thought-provoking things to say, as in this essay when he digresses briefly about David Foster Wallace:

This sense of basic things overlooked in the scrabble to explore elaborate ones is to be found even in the prodigiously clever and tirelessly humane Foster Wallace, whose endless, and rigorous, wrangling with himself and his characters’ selves yields, at times, an unexpected, slightly creepy flavour, a ghostly aftertaste of a judgemental, impatient, reactionary man.

That’s good, but it says very little about David Shields except obliquely. Nothing in this piece speaks directly to the two central rotten tenets of Reality Hunger: its inherent contention that you can’t find ‘reality’ in novels, and its equally obnoxious implication that if you did find it, plagiarizing it wouldn’t constitute a moral wrong. Nothing Miller writes addresses the core boring reality behind Reality Hunger, which is that Shields’ powers of concentration have addled (Beer? Pot? Video games? Middle age?) to the point where he won’t make himself pay attention to anything. Not to anything long and complicated, but to anything at all. The book is a hummingbird’s manifesto, a cretin’s credo of codified sloth, and dammit, I expect the TLS to say that, not dance around the issue with ‘you mays’ and ‘you mights.’

Fortunately, we have recourse to life-saving alternatives. When the subject is contemporary American fiction (and for all the ostentatious breadth of his plagiarized sources, Shields is basically writing about contemporary American fiction; given how deeply a pantywaist like Jonathan Franzen bores him, it’s extremely unlikely Shields has ever even heard of Anthony Trollope, and he’d probably besoil his britches if he so much as caught sight of Clarissa), especially contemporary American fiction, we can always turn to the two best critics of that genre working today, New York magazine’s Sam Anderson, and Open Letters Monthly’s own Sam Sacks. These two can be relied upon, not only to invariably find the important things to write about, but to write about the important parts of those things (and it doesn't hurt that they’ve both got what John Adams referred to as a “remarkable felicity of expression”). Anderson is the more ruthless of the two, almost always eviscerating his subject instead of merely killing it. His take on Shields:

The book’s supposed profundities – that the line between fiction and reality is unclear, that genres an be more powerful when mixed, that narrative often imposes a simplistic order on the chaos of actual life – are, to anyone who’s ever thought seriously about any of these issues, a bunch of remedial Grade-A head-slappers. And yet Shields intones them with the air of a holy man whispering the final secret of the universe from his mountaintop.

Sacks is usually more magisterial, but that can make the final summation, when it comes, all the more damning:

Obviously Mr. Shields is perfectly capable of exercising the atrophied part of his mind that shuts down when confronted by traditional books; it takes a curious self-absorption to assume that the burden of change rests with everybody else. And ultimately, despite the interesting provocations in "Reality Hunger," that's the impression it leaves: Mr. Shields is espousing a movement that would valorize his own laziness. He'd like literature, and its millions of faithful followers, to conform to his own private version of reality.

Good stuff. Glad I can read it somewhere.

The Perils of Pessmissism in the Penny Press!

Two things of note in last week’s issue of New York magazine, but the first – a horrifically deceitful and self-serving article by Roger Lathbury on how he almost published J.D. Salinger’s short story “Hapworth, 1924” as a stand-alone book – is simply too harrowing to discuss at any length. It perfectly embodies the hypocrisy and outright lying that drove Salinger into seclusion (the capper is the photo accompanying the article – Lathbury and everybody associated with approving this article should be ashamed of themselves, but that emotion seems to be unknown in publishing these days).

No, it’s the second that prompts brief comment. The thing is a little squib by Lane Brown titled “The Action Figure Method Actor: Must Be Able to Run Fast. Talent Not Essential,” and it’s basically a wiseass little lament about the one-note interchangeability of today’s mega-action-movie heroes. Brown singles out Taylor Lautner from Twilight, Sam Worthington from Avatar (and now Clash of the Titans), and Shia LaBeouf from the Transformers movies and the latest Indiana Jones – three young stars who could spark wiseass little New York squibs in a nunnery, I’m thinking; like Salinger (the only time such a simile will ever apply to these three), they make a lazy freelancer’s job so much easier.

Brown claims that action movies have become so expensive, so big, so bent on sensory overload, that they’ve effectively made their action-hero stars irrelevant. “The days when audiences went to see an FX-filled action movie because of the carbon-based actor at its center (Willis, Schwarzenegger, Stallone) are ending,” Brown tells us. “Today’s moviegoers don’t really care who stars in these films.” Movie studios have handed these huge franchises to actors like Lautner, Worthington, and LaBeouf specifically because “they don’t threaten to overwhelm the effects with big personalities or a crazy need to be respected for their craft.”

[caption id="attachment_910" align="alignleft" width="122" caption="New York's graphics, obviously"][/caption]

Lazy indeed, and it puts the cart before the horse: movie studios being what they are, these ‘FX’ extravaganzas are going to get made anyway – does Brown really believe casting executives wouldn’t add the screen magnetism of a young Schwarzenegger to box office draw, if they had such an actor just sitting there? Blaming moviegoers for the lack of such young action stars is like blaming the passengers on the Titanic for the lack of life boats, and picking these three particular actors just adds to the problem: Lautner is physically pretty, but he has no screen presence whatsoever; Worthington (as every single movie critic in the entire known universe has pointed out, and as every single person who’s seen Avatar has pointed out) has no business being in front of a camera at all and seems weirdly, arrogantly aware of that fact; and although LaBeouf’s obnoxious off-screen antics have prompted all but his most die-hard Even Stevens fans to forget that he possesses an extremely acute ear for dialogue and near-perfect comic timing, his presence in two mega-loud Transformers movies is just poor casting, not a slur on his entire demographic.

What’s missing from this picture isn’t discernment on the part of the American movie-goer: it’s the right action heroes. The ones who actually can compete with the green-screen and the motion-capture and the ‘FX’ outlay – the ones who can take the movie back from such gadgetry with a confidence and a panache that movie-going audiences want to see. The rule here ought not to be zombified sleepwalkers like Christian Bale as Batman or Brandon Routh as Superman (or the worst offender in all the worst ways, Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man) – the rule should be Robert Downey as Iron Man. Would the studio have made that movie without him? Certainly. Would it have been nearly as big a hit without his utterly winning performance at its heart? Certainly not.

Warm bodies like Lautner and Worhtington aren’t the problem, and they aren’t the answer: we just need different heroes. And who knows what electrifying young (pre-derangement) Mel Gibson is even now slouching toward Central Casting to be born?

Yearning to Herd Sheep in the Penny Press!

Boy, it’s been quite a week in the good old Penny Press, hasn’t it? My reporting has been so consistent certain less steadfast members of the Silent Majority have expressed concern that I’ve given up on boring old books altogether. I assure you, that’s not the case – I still have plenty of tedium to unload on you all (including our next installment of Penguins on Parade), but I still read lots of periodicals, and this is still where I talk about what I read (swankier OLM-sponsored digs notwithstanding), so bear with me.

And besides, how could I of all people ignore the cover story of the 1 February issue of New York? “A Dog Is Not a Human Being, Right?” blares the cover, but the adorable little critter whose portrait (yet more stunning work by Jill Greenberg, the greatest portrait artist of our age) accompanies those words seems mighty uncomfortable with all the attention.



That critter is lucky not to be able to read, because the article in question, written by John Homans (and I’m accused of using flimsy aliases!), is very often very damn annoying – and as some of you will recall, I consider the ‘annoying’ bar set pretty damn high when it comes to anybody but myself talking about dogs.

I realize Homans can’t be held accountable for the stuff the copy editors attach to his piece, so the article’s subtitle, “Dogs are increasingly rootless souls, country bumpkins in city apartments. But is a vegan pup still an animal?” can’t be held against him, but the actual text of his piece isn’t all that much better.

The problem, as always, is one of focus. Homans’ shifts all over the map. At one point he’s making withering observations about the insane world of high price-tag dog-pampering, and at other points he’s talking about how all dogs are somehow mystically attuned to life in ‘the country’ and are only making compromises by enduring suburb, city, or apartment life:

The apartment is a far from perfect place for the dog. Still, they’re camp followers of our microtribes, the only beings that fully understand the customs. And unlike children, they’ll never reject them.

He’s not sure how to describe the hazy area dogs occupy in human (in his view, this always equates with “American Northeast Caucasian,” which gets a little irritating in its own right), even though that very area is the ostensible subject of his article. So at one point he says “The dog is an honorary human,” and at another he insists “Treating your dog as a person is nothing more or less than an aesthetic error.” Part of the problem stems from a doggie-fact of which Homans seems entirely unaware. See if you can spot it:

As the relationship [between humans and dogs] developed, specific canine qualities – the dog’s gaze, its unending adolescence, its uncanny responsiveness to human clues – evolved … What was created was not, precisely, a human child, but it certainly was able to push some of the same buttons.

Yes, those of you who know anything at all about dogs will have seen it immediately: our modern dogs didn’t evolve any of those qualities Homans is going on about. Those qualities – and plenty of others, intended and otherwise – were eugenically implanted into dogs by humans, who have controlled canine breeding lines (with varying degrees of intentionality, of course) for thousands of years. Dogs have been made to be childlike; they’ve been shaped to gaze upon humans with undivided attention. Once you learn this (or recall it), most of Homans’ talk about dogs yearning to get out to the country and herd things becomes just exactly the same kind of blather that usually irritates me when anybody other than myself talks about dogs. But that’s not what irritates me the most about Homans’ piece, oh no! That would be one single line, the seeming answer to the question on the issue’s cover:

No one believes, in his conscious mind, that the dog is a person.

In an article that takes pains to describe the vast strides various animal rights groups have made over the decades, such a sentence is almost vile, and it instantly begs the question: what is a person? It’s Homans’ persistent conflating of ‘human’ and ‘person’ that rubs salt in a very old wound. And Homans just won’t let up:

The dog’s innocence amplifies empathy, because there’s no ethical static, no human otherness to contend with. It’s less complicated to love a pet than a person.

This, to put it mildly, is just so much sheep-dip. As some of you will know, I’ve had many, many dogs. Some were angels of affability, perfectly happy just to lap up all the ease and comfort I could give them. Others were earnest little misses, always over-eager to please everyone. I’ve had gregarious dogs and the occasional tangled, haunted introvert. I’ve had happy-go-lucky dogs and those who were more remote (including one – my favorite, the best friend I’ve ever had – who behaved like a king and treated everybody but me – canine or human – with sometimes very visible disdain). I’ve had dog who were better at logical solutions to problems than I am, and I’ve had dogs who were (you should pardon the expression) barking insane.



I can tell you two things they all had in common:

First, they were all ‘persons’ – in that they were themselves and nobody else, every bit as individual as any humans I’ve known.

And second, they were all complicated to love. Loving anything living is complicated, and even the dogs who make it simple with their personalities make it more complex with one other canine trait (one humans almost never have to deal with amongst themselves), which Homans gets around to at the close of his essay:

In a footnote to one of his poems about the deaths of his dogs, John Updike wrote, “Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house,” a sensationally cruel observation because there’s truth in it. The dog’s mortality is never far from an owner’s mind – it’s the central flaw in this best-friend business. No one is ready for their dog to go. And the dog doesn’t know where it’s going – the dog joke turned into a tragedy.

It’s confusing that Homans could be so clear on this point and yet make that preposterous ‘the dog is not a person’ stance. He gets love, individuality, devotion, variety, humor, and now grief – and still he says the being who evoke all those things are somehow less than his fellow humans, even if those fellow humans don’t evoke them. All dog-owners know this contradiction for the shortsighted silliness it is … but Homans is a dog-owner (that's his gorgeous dog at the top), and yet he appears not to see it. I’m hoping he sees it just fine and is merely stirring the soup to make an article chat-worthy. And considering how scatterbrained that article is, I’m really hoping he entirely cleans it up if he ever decides to expand it into a book. We don’t need any more dumbass dog-books out there – especially since we’re already dealing with a flood-tide of dumbass dog- articles.

In the Penny Press!

Our reactions are all over the map in this week's Penny Press, ranging from delight to dark despair, with lots of local stops.

Sometimes the little things gave a spurt of delight. For intance, Esquire's new guide to casual style has a comment it's almost impossible not to like: "Justin Timberlake doesn't look quite as good as he thinks he does." Hee.

Other times, it's much bigger things that take the topspin right off the serve, as is the case in the latest New Yorker - it features two appalling things instead of one, probably because it's a double issue. The lesser of the two is John Updike starting off his review of a edition of the works of Flann O'Brien in pidgin Irish. Because, you know, Irish writers really don't have much to distinguish them other than how odd they talk. Jaysus.

The bigger of these two big things was yet another short story by Alice Munro, this one called 'Free Radicals.' Some of you may have noticed over the years that Munro is not one of our favorite authors. In the last decade, this contempt has become all the sharper (and all the sweeter) as more and more lazy critics have taken to calling Munro some variation of 'the greatest short story writer alive today' or (Gawd help us) 'a modern-day Maupassant.' We've had fewer and fewer converts to our age-old contention that Munro owes her fame to two factors that have nothing whatsoever to do with talent: she's stuck to just the one genre, and she's a woman. We guarantee you: if some talentless schmuck had started writing, say, really sucky one-act plays in the 1950s and was still doing it six decades later, he'd be called 'the greatest' too, even if his one-acts had grown even worse.

Such is not the case for Munro; her short stories have always been just exactly the same level of awful, and one presumes they always will be. 'Free Radicals' is exactly the same as every other Munro short story: it's plodding, soggy, doggedly quotidian, over-long, and completely void of any catharsis, insight, change, climax, or plot. Every character sounds the same as every other, and the whole thing is swathed in an amnesiatic fog that absolutely defies recall. If you can read 'Free Radicals' and then - right then - tell me what happens in it, I'll give you the hat off my head.

But don't just take our word for it! Here's the fourth paragraph of the present story, centering on a wife who's just lost her husband:

She hadn't had time to wonder about his being late. He'd died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood in front of the hardware store offering a discount on lawnmowers. He hadn't even managed to get into the store. He'd been eighty-one years old and in fine health, aside from some deafness in his right ear. His doctor had checked him over only the week before. Nita was to learn that the recent checkup, the clean bill of health, cropped up in a surprising number of the sudden-death stories that she was now presented with. "You'd almost think that such visits ought to be avoided," she'd said.

Even the most indulgent freshman composition teacher would feel compelled to savage such prose. Just look at all that's wrong with it, all the junk that's left hanging around the prose, all the equivocation, all those endless, suffocating pluperfect constructions. She hadn't had time to wonder about his being late - in other words, it never crossed her mind, so why mention it? And since some deafness in one ear isn't in any way life-threatening, what does its inclusion do except make a tedious sentence even moreso? And what's with the vaudeville impossibility of somebody draping themselves over a sidewalk sign to die? Ever hear or read of anybody doing that? And what about those last two sentences? At the beginning of the first sentence, Nita's learning about sudden-death stories is in the future, and by the end of the same sentence it's in the present. And by the end of the next sentence it's in the past. And Nita's final sentence has not one but two brake-locks on it, the almost-think and the ought-to-be. This is very, very bad prose - tortured and sloppy and obscure - and it goes on forever in 'Free Radicals,' and yet sure as sevens there are readers out there who'll slog through it and say, "Munro has done it again!" Actually, we here at Stevereads would say the same thing, but we'd mean it in a different way.

But our outrage over yet another Alice Munro slogfest is nothing compared to our outrage at Tom Chiarella's latest piece for that same issue of Esquire. It's called "Learning to Smoke," and it chronicles the author's first foray in the world of smoking, at the age of forty-six, as a story-gimmick.

We've seldom read a more disgusting piece of periodical literature, because Chiarella finds smoking wonderful, even the few bad side-effects he bothers to mention. The whole piece could have been ghost-written by an ad man from Big Tobacco (we're 100 percent sure it's emailed to every single person in the industry), only this is worse, because Chiarella is a very good writer.

His friends - even the tobacco addicts, especially the tobacco addicts - are horrified by his decision and warn him that it's not a game, that he'll become addicted. He happily assures them that even if he does, he's only going to pursue 'the lifestyle' for a month - after which, he'll just quit. He's aware that this quitting might be difficult and might involve some unpleasant symptoms, but that's OK - he wants to experience that too. The possibility that once addicted he might not be able to quit, even if he wants to, isn't mentioned in the piece. The possibility that, faced with the flat fact of that failure, he might start to rationalize, equivocate, and outright lie about this new thing in his life, sits on the piece like wet fog but is never addressed. Instead, the essay is a long love-letter to the oh-so-adult sublime pleasures of burning your own lungs. Take as one example a scene from the 'second week' of his experiment (the semi-quotes only come off if some completely impartial observer can tell me Chiarella no longer smokes - but such an observer would be lying, so it hardly matters). He and his girlfriend have just had a nice restaurant dinner, and suddenly, for the first time, he feels 'a faint pinging sound in the center of my chest.' His girlfriend asks if he's OK.

"I'm okay," I said. "It's just, I feel like, I don't know ..." I paused and swallowed to be sure this wasn't just some weird new need for more food. "I think I need a cigarette." She smiled and stood, held out her hand, and we went to the exit, stood on the handicap ramp, and smoked two American Spirits. She didn't like my smoking any better now, but she accepted it and even allowed herself to enjoy it in moments like these. Up and down the street, now blanketed by darkness, the streetlamps formed friendly circles of light, so it looked like a kind of orchard. People stood, one or two per light, out there smoking cigarettes, looking up quietly at the stars or the cars or the windows of houses and stores. "Wow," I said.

Yech - disgust prevents further quotation. The whole thing is like that, pretty prose enslaved in the praise of the ugliest thing humans have yet devised doing to themselves. Nowhere in the article is there any mention of some of the worst non-lethal effects of the addiction: the way hard mucus clogs the vocal chords and flattens the vocal register until all addicts have the same android raspy monotony; the jumpy, incessant clock-watching between doses (the addicts who breezily say something like 'oh, I don't even think about it most of the time' are lying their asses off); the sticky, chelatinous yellow armor-plating that coats the tongue; and most of all the pervasive reek that surrounds the addict in a ten-foot sac of nauseating stench at all times. Chiarella doesn't mention any of this stuff - his piece makes it seem as though smoking isn't much different from, say, chewing gum: easy to take up, easy to do lots of, and easy to stop. Revolting, that Chiarella would shill like this for a freelance gig.

Fortunately, all is not lost in the Penny Press! Over in the latest issue of New York magazine, Sam Anderson turns in a spiffy, first-rate review of Toby Barlow's wonderful new verse-novel called Sharp Teeth. Here's the opening paragraph of the piece, to give you a sample of the joys to come:

Let's say that you've recently polished off your local library's collection of vampire sonnets, and perhaps even flipped, with a melancholy hand, the final page of your older brother's three-volume haiku sequence about a marauding colony of Minotaurs - that you've exhausted, in other words, the literary exploration of monster subcultures written in obscure forms. Well, take heart. Toby Barlow's first book, Sharp Teeth, is a verse novel about werewolves. This makes it not only a decisive answer (nay!) to the age-old question 'Is long-form monster poetry dead?' but also a perfect marriage of form and subject: Both the werewolf and the verse novel (which lopes across the centuries from Pushkin to Browning to Vikram Seth) are shaggy hybrids that appear once in a blue moon and terrify everyone in sight.
Hee. As fun as that is to read, it's even more rewarding to re-read; that final sentence is the funniest damn thing we've read so far this year.


The whole piece is just as good, and to make matters even better, it's not misplaced praise: Sharp Teeth is a wonderful, fizzy joyride of a book, well worth your time when it comes out in paperback next year. We'll be sure to remind you.

The Devil's Work in the Penny Press!

A great deal of interest in the week's harvestings from the Penny Press!

We'll start with the New Yorker and the brouhaha reported there over Google's much-ballyooed plan to scan bee-llions and bee-llions of books into a gigantic, enormous, gargantuan text-database that will be searchable in ever so many ways.

As with so much that Google does, your first response is 'well then, what's the possible harm that?' Such is the ultimate game-plan of the most powerful force in the Western world.

Apparently, though, there are those who do indeed find harm in the idea. Two different groups of plaintiffs are suing Google over the idea, according to Jeffrey Toobin's article on the whole subject in last week's issue.

As far as we here at Stevereads can tell (the issues get a bit murky, or at least murkily reported), the issue revolves around whether or not Google is telling the truth about what it's doing, and what it plans to do. Right now, it's scanning these bee-llions and bee-llions of books under a carefully-controlled regimen: works in the public domain will be fully scannable, fully readable, fully accessible. Works protected by copyright will only be available in 'snippets,' with the bulk of the work still available only through paying. And the vast middle-ground of printed works, the ones whose copyrights are somehow in doubt, well ... they're getting scanned too, and I guess we'll let gawd sort 'em out.

The bug up the ass of our plaintiffs is this: that Google is lying. That once they've scanned every book in the known universe, from medieval books of hours to the latest John Grisham, they won't, in fact, abide by 'snippets' like they promise. The basis of the case, so far as we can make it out, is that Google is simply too big to tell the truth.

But let's envision Google's version of things for a moment: an unprecedentedly gigantic book-database cross-indexed six ways from Sunday, with tantalizing tidbits of copyrighted stuff thrown in. Let's ignore the copyrighted stuff for a second and concentrate on Google's projected database of things for which no conceivable copyright claim could exist.

In other words, the many hundreds of thousands of good, worthy, and entirely forgotten books that molder untouched on library shelves all across the world. Books that you will never read even if their topics interest you, for the simple reason that you'll never know they exist. According to Toobin's article, Google is now scanning those books (or will be, once these lawsuits are settled, as everyone involved seems sure they will be) literally by the truckload, with the intent of making them readable, searchable, and cross-indexable to anybody with Internet access.

So you happen to hear one of the lovely hymns of Henry Francis Lyte and conceive a desire to learn more about him. You Google him, ironically enough, and perhaps you read a Wikipedia entry on him that, in Wikipedia's wacky way, has, shall we say, a playful, coquettish relationship with factual accuracy. Perhaps there's an audio file of 'Abide with Me.' But after that? If you're still curious, you better get out your beleagured credit card and spend time truffle-hunting on Alibris.

This projected Google database would change that process more dramatically than anything since Gutenberg. Lyte wrote volumes of poetry that were well-liked in his day, and there were at least two literary memoirs of him published in the mid-19th century. There've been considerable entries in hymnology reference works. All of this is not only long since out of print - it's also lock-solid certain to STAY out of print, if left to the devices of conventional publishing.

The sprawling, compulsively detailed journal John Quincy Adams kept throughout his long life on the world's stage? Likewise. The papers and letters of astonishing autodidact polymath Sir George Cayley? Likewise. The magisterial historical writings of Frantisek Palacky? Likewise.

Right now, if you're lucky enough to live near a first-rate research library (if you live almost anywhere between Cleveland and Salt Lake City, you probably aren't), and if you have several weeks to devote to your quest, you MIGHT be able to locate a couple of these works. In Google's proposed future, you'd be able to call them up at the touch of a button - and not only them, but works that have mentioned them.

With all due deference to litigious New Yorkers, such a future sounds like paradise.

The problem, as far as we can make it out, is that writers and publishers are afraid a) that Google isn't putting enough effort into determining whether or not the works it's scanning are, in fact, lapsed in copyright and b) that Google can't guarantee its copyrighted materials won't eventually find their way before the eyes of the public.

A) seems like sheer lunacy to us. If you're a major author and your copyrights are violated, well ... you're a major author! The courts are at your disposal, and Google has deep pockets. And if you're not a major author, if your best success in publishing landed you way, way back in the cheap seats of the midlist (or more likely, landed your dad there, or your grandfather, or your wacky uncle who nobody talks about), well ... are you saying you DON'T want two million people seeing your work who didn't see it before? Do you really think that isn't going to work out to your benefit?

No, the people who are worried here are retail publishers and bookstores (needlessly, since nothing, and that means absolutely NOTHING, will ever replace the feeling - the NEED - to curl up with a good book) and textbook publishers (deservedly, since after trial lawyers and CEOs, they're probably the most evil, money-grubbing SOBs in the country). What Google's proposing can only help the rest of us, wondering, as we are, what Pitt the Elder wrote about Cicero.

Names such as Pitt the Elder and Cicero don't enter into the standout story in last week's New York magazine - and delightfully so. 'Even Bitches Have Feelings' is by Vanessa Grigoriadis, and it's about the delicious rise and fall of publishing creaturatrix Judith Regan.

As should be obvious to everybody reading this blog, books are summitly important here at Stevereads. Books, literature, reading - the whole whirling world of it, highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow, everything from the latest Musil translation to the latest "Smallville" novel. We search for quality everywhere we might find it - just like the rest of you.

That's why we're in the perfect position to tell you without doubt: Judith Regan is the Devil.

It's not just that she commissioned, bought, and publicized bad books. Tastes vary, after all, and not everybody is lucky enough to read this blog (and if by chance you ARE reading this blog, Ms. Regan - it's a longshot, admittedly, but still: none of us can be sure who Sebastian might currently be sleeping with - take our advice: stay away from publishing 100 percent entirely, forever. You are the Devil. Never even touch a book with your hands again).

No, it's not just that she championed bad books. And it's certainly not that she had a track record of hit bestsellers - one should never be faulted for having great instincts (although in this case it's distressing, since it makes her eventual return to publishing rather likelier than not).

No, the reason Judith Regan is the Devil is this: she championed anti-books. She championed - and got gigantic, other-author-pauperizing publishing deals for - books that are meant not to be read but to be SHOT UP, directly into the limbic system. Books that were conceived and packaged under the gross and cynical assumption that most of the book-buying public actively DISLIKES the act of reading. Anti-books, designed to GET YOU OFF in between video games.

Can it come as a surprise to ANYBODY, then, that the Devil would solicit a book from one of her foremost living minions, O.J. Simpson?

As some of you will know, we here at Stevereads think the O.J. Simpson trial was a twenty million dollar waste of the taxpayers' money. The suspect had motive, means, and opportunity, and he fled from the police. In any jurisdiction of any court in the entire history of jurisprudence, those four factors together obviate the need for a trial: they are in and of themselves an admission of guilt.

Nevertheless, the late great Johnnie Cochrane was a full-blown magician, and the American trial system respects the work of full-blown magicians, so O.J. Simpson walks unimpeded under the all-seeing sun.

And he's hurting for money, especially since a civil court found him guilty of killing his wife and her friend. That's where Judith Regan came in: she championed a book by Simpson, "If I Did It," in which he hypotheticizes about killing his wife. Regan is on record saying she viewed the book as a confession, which might or might not be true (she seems to have lied like it was a bodily function) - but one thing is certain: she didn't view the book as a BOOK. It was an event, a phenomenon, a happening, whatever you want to call it .... but it wasn't anything you sit down and READ - and more importantly, it wasn't anything you were SUPPOSED to sit down and read. Sitting down and reading ANYTHING ... actually reflecting on ANYTHING .... is and always has been antithetical to what the Devil wants. The Devil doesn't want readers - the Devil wants addicts.

Once Harpercollins and Rupert Murdoch fully realized what a noxious thing they'd been coerced to sign on for, they not only dropped the book, they dropped Judith Regan too.

This is hugely, overwhelmingly a good thing for the entire publishing industry. No shades of opinion: it's just a good thing. Judith Regan was a pea-brained potty-mouthed opportunistic misogynistic anti-Semitic manipulative least-common-denominator blabbermouthed force of Evil. Just the simple fact of her absence raises the publishing level of discourse across the board.

We can only hope there isn't some eager young Regan wannabe out there, dreaming of bagging a ten million dollar advance for a collection of Paris Hilton's text-messages ...

in the penny press! dodos and Ramsey Clark!

Interesting tidbits in the penny press this time around, starting with the latest issue of Esquire.

We here at Stevereads have a certain fond indulgence for Esquire - it's resolutely moronic and reductive in tone (its endless style tips and lifestyle guides only reinforce what the rest of us have suspected all along: that all those interchangeable-looking young business-suited drones we see crowded at the crosswalks on our way to work really ARE interchangeable - not that they're extremely similar to each other, but that they are, in fact, the SAME PERSON, cheaply mimeographed hundreds of times), but it has the financial clout to commission some first-rate pieces. And since hunting for first-rate pieces is the first duty of truffle-sniffing in the penny press, we must go everywhere, even to the depths of cash-and-titty-worshipping magazines like Esquire.

And it's not all uphill! Every issue of Esquire is guaranteed to produce something eminently worth reading. Fortunately for the rest of you, we here at Stevereads do the soup-straining.

One quick bit of fun comes from the always-reliable Answer Fella, who gets a peculiarly theological question: a reader asks if a cloned human being would have a soul.

The Answer Fella gathers testimony from various experts and comes down in the affimative. To quote one of them: "If humans have souls, then clones will have them, too."

Well, not hardly. As many of you know, we here at Stevereads were trained in our youth by Jesuits - and so we are, in young adulthood, completely atheistic. There are no gods, and all their appurtenances are and always have been mortal folly.

But.... that having been said, if we allow the premise, the Answer Fella and his experts are still well and truly wrong.

The problem lies in an all-consuming faith in the powers of science, alas. These experts say that if you reproduce the biology with complete fidelity, the soul must surely follow. The fallacy of this is obvious: it mistakes the soul for being a PRODUCT of biology.

Of course, from a theological standpoint (we have our own experts on this, in addition to knowing the enemy's territory quite well in our own right), this misses one crucial point: the soul is not a product of biology. It comes from God - it is the singular gift that God gives to human (and, according to Holy Scripture, only human) beings. It's not biological - it, like God, stands outside the biological process.

Fortunately, not everything in this issue is fraught with theological implications. For instance, John Richardson's wonderful piece "How the Attorney General of the United States Became Saddam Hussein's Lawyer" is purely secular, a delightful piece of research and extrapolation regarding former attorney general Ramsey Clark.

Before reading this article, we here at Stevereads would have assumed the present age had long since forgotten Ramsey Clark. Once upon a time, in a long-lost age, he was one of a brace of fearless greyhounds in the kennel of the Kennedys. He caught from them the bug of doing good work, and he pushed on with that good work even after they were gone (and new boss, Lyndon Johnson, was, shall we say, considerably less interested in doing good work).

Surprised therefore at finding Ramsey Clark in the latest issue of Esquire, of all places, we dispatched one of our Stevereads interns to conduct a thorough search of the Interweb in order to confirm the stuff we read in the article.

Turns out it's all true. He's been defending Nazis, the PLO, Lyndon Larouche ... and Saddam Hussein. And there in the article is Clark's face, once matinee-handsome, now suddenly old. Through the rice-paper skin can be seen one last flickering of the light that was Camelot.

Ramsey Clark is a virtuous man, but this has become an almost unbelievably wicked world. He looks like an anachronism, jetting from one self-evidently guilty client to another, always self-effacing, always quietly reposing his deepest faith in the rule of law. Robert Bolt's Thomas More in 'A Man for All Seasons' was written with a different person in mind, but his most famous bit of dialogue might well have been spoken by Clark.


It's no mystery in our current world that pundits and commentators would feel free to mock and malign Clark. We live in a vicious, 'Mission Accomplished' world in which the powerful routinely break the law, where they're the FIRST to break it, and then sneer transparent lies to a fawning media.

We here at Stevereads wish him well. There's nothing he can do about the way of the world, except keep doing what he's always done, even though virtually nobody believes in doing it anymore.

We took that slight feeling of disenchantment with us when we moved over to the latest issue of New York magazine, which (amidst its usual gathering of great stuff) featured an article in which writer William Georgiades tries Allen Carr's celebrated 'method' to quit smoking. Georgiades is a smart, savvy writer, so we were happy to watch him explode the manipulative myth that Carr's book has been slinging since its publication.

You don't need to do much more than attach 'the easy way' to ANYTHING to make it bestseller in America. 'Lose Weight in 10 Days - And Eat as Much as You Want!'- and such titles crowd the bookstore shelves and trumpet the quintessentially American mindframe that results should never be bought at the cost of work - surely nowadays, a pill or a program will suffice?

Contrary to the jejune speculations afloat here at Stevereads (that we were tormented with cigarettes as a small child, or even that we ourselves were once addicted), our hatred of tobacco addicts stems from the particular TACK they've always taken in rationalizing their addiction, the particular TACK the 10 billion-dollar tobacco adverstising industry always takes - i.e. that tobacco addiction is the THINKER'S addiction, that standing outside philosophically dragging on a cigarette is somehow synomymous with ... well, with pausing, with re-assessing, and most of all with ADULTHOOD. Those bitter minutes we adults take outside, burning our own lungs and bestenching ourselves for hours afterwards, are what SEPARATE us from more shallow thinkers, goes the advertising. We're not callow anymore; we realize that THIS is the price we pay for being adult, artistic, realistic, REAL.

Needless to say, any pretence that presumes superiority is guaranteed to tick us off (the typical pothead assertion that they hear music 'better' when high comes close to being the same thing). So we were glad to read Georgieades tear the program to pieces. It doesn't work for Georgiades, and his backgrounding for the article reveals how many others have been similarly let down. This only makes sense: tobacco addiction is the fiercest of all addictions to even barely control, much less 'beat.' Now if only 'The Easy Way to Stop Smoking' would stop selling so well ...

And lastly, over in the New Yorker, there's an interesting article by Ian Parker on the long, strange afterlife of the famously extinct great Mauritius dodo. Parker very gently, very forgivingly writes about the eccentrics and, to speak plainly, the lunatics who staff the 2006 Mauritius Dodo Expedition.

The picture is that of a hopeless muddle, a pathetic tangle of island politics, petty scientific rivalries, and of course the money-guys getting everything wrong (at one point they half-seriously joke about cloning a dodo, and you can just hear all the scientists within earshot cringe).

The story is ultimately sad - reading Parker's piece, you get the distinct impression that it's way, way too late for any kind of clear-eyed science to take root on Mauritius. But then, the dodo's story is a sad one anyway - you picture these big fat birds so docile and unaccustomed to mankind that they were all dead within just a century of their first contact with humans.

But there's one silver lining in the story: it gives us here at Stevereads a chance to offer a shameless plug for one of the best science fiction short stories ever written: "The Ugly Chickens" by the criminally underrated Howard Waldrop. We have yet to quiz our interns on whether or not this gem of a story is available on the Interweb, but if it is, oh, you should all read it! It's a smart, playful, pitch-perfect exercise in adumbration and irony.

Needless to say, if the story ISN'T available online, we here at Stevereads will provide as many copies for my little guppies as they require ... I am, as always, their humble servant ...

In the penny press!

The only noteworthy thing about this week's extra-big 'fashion' issue of the New Yorker (well, aside from a really offensive Muslim-baiting cartoon about which I've already written them) is a little piece up at the front of the issue called 'Air Kiss.'

The incident recounted took place on an American Airlines flight. Four male friends were reprimanded for kissing each other and resting their heads on each others shoulders. The friends become understandably irate and ask to see the plane's purser (we won't digress on what an exceedingly GAY request that is).

When the purser shows up and asks them to identify which stewardess (sorry ... flight attendant) did the tsk-tsking, and when the guys point out a beehive-hairdo'd fiftysomething woman, the purser rolls her eyes and sympathizes with them.

Then the men asked 'if the stewardess would have made the request if the kissers had been a man and a woman,' at which point the purser stiffened visibly and started toting a no-kissing party line.

I think even at this point we're still supposed to be sympathizing with the guys, but it was at that point I started sympathizing with the entirely helpful purser, who naturally took offense at the thinly-hidden accusation of bigotry.

SOMETHING happened on that American Airlines flight, but after reading this little account, I'm fairly convinced it was ugly on both sides of the aisle.

(The issue also featured a tribute by Alex Ross to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and it's Ross at his least pompous, because this was a loss that hurt. Most professional singers develop a repertoire and a manner, and more often than not it then becomes them. Pavarotti has been more or less unconscious on stage for the past twenty years. The divine Beverly Sills once, after an evening of sumptuous vocal beauty, was asked by an adoring fan what sublime mindframes she was in during her performance. She chuckled and said, 'I was going over my taxes.' Lorraine was different. Her music was endlessly, renewably personal to her. What's so often said of so many sawhorse hacks was literally true of her: no two performances were ever the same. And that applied to all performances, including the impromptu ones. Like the one more than twenty years ago very close to Christmas, when she and two newly-acquired friends stumbled, a little drunk, down into Boston's Park Street T-stop around 10 o'clock one snowy night. A raggedy man in fingerless gloves was playing a very clearly-realized version of Handel's 'Hallelujah' chorus, and Lorraine went over to him and listened enraptured exactly as if she'd never heard it before in her life. When he was finished, she shimmied up to him and asked if he knew any OTHER arias from what she called 'the sacred text' - he said he knew them all, and she asked for 'O Thou That Tellest' ... the man's grimey face brightened a little and he started playing, and a few seconds later she started singing. She started singing, and by the time she was done, the man had stopped playing, the crowds on both platforms had stopped moving, and the train conductors were hanging out of their windows, mesmerized. That voice is gone from the world now, but Ross does a good job of capturing what it was like)

Over in New York magazine, there's a very nice, openly nostalgic piece by James Atlas on the New York Review of Books, concentrating on the state of that mighty organ in the wake of Barbara Epstein's death. The piece takes you through all the usual highlights of the Review's history - a story's no less good for being often told - and ends on a somewhat troubling note, wondering if there's a place in the modern world for something like the New York Review. I read the piece with fond remembrances - how many train trips, how many boring lectures, how many long solitary lunches have been saved, just outright saved, by having a big fat New York Review in my bag? - but also with a little anxiety.

Atlas can't be right, can he? Surely the world will always need the New York Review of Books? I guess the only way that might change is if the Review itself changed, presumably after Robert Silvers steps down.

If only this blog were frequented by someone with INSIDER KNOWLEDGE of the New York Review!

Plus, the magazine's Approval Matrix had two items of note, both in the 'Lowbrow Despicable' quadrant: first, 'the Gothification of Jared Leto' featuring a funny picture of the actor (he DOES still act, right?) in heavy eye-liner. And second, the simple, direct assertion: "Brett Favre should be considering retirement." Sad, but true. There's really no POINT to being a quarterback if you're not Tom Brady.

And in this month's GQ (the one with roasting tobacco addict Josh Hartnett's vapid, utterly clueless face on the cover), there's a wonderful, subtly nasty piece by Jeanne Marie Laskas on self-outed former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey.

Laskas crucifies McGreevey mainly by letting HIM provide the cross and nail himself to it. She asks him frank, simple questions - how did his decision to come out affect his wife, his parents? And then she steps back, turns on the tape recorder, and faithfully recounts how McGreevey - lost in his contemplation of himself - doesn't actually ANSWER anything.

The picture of McGreevey that emerges from the article is that of a narcissistic creep - gay, straight, or otherwise. Which is a little ironic, given how well his book is selling in the bookstores.

In the Penny Press! New York and Grass!

Today's edition of In the Penny Press will pass over the current New Yorker virtually in silence. This isn't just because the issue was a little short on interesting content, although it was.

No, the main reason is because the issue's MESSAGE is a little irritating.

The black and white photo accompanying Antonya Nelson's boring short story "Kansas" shows an 8-year-old girl, deep in thought, sucking on a cigarette. The very next piece, about Bob Dylan, has a black and white photo of the singer, about 18, deep in thought, sucking on a cigarette.

The issue's message: all smart, cool people smoke.

So on we skip to the latest issue of New York magazine.

The issue in question is a double-sized fall preview thing, with lots of room devoted to upcoming fall books. There's an interview with Heidi Julavits and one with Nell Freudenberger, and the relative merits of those interviews notwithstanding, I couldn't help noticing that both women are very pretty.

This could be coincidence, of course. Considering all the young authors out there snapping up six-figure book deals, it stands to reason SOME of them will be easy on the eyes.

But I doubt it. Here in the brackish stillwater of Stevereads, allow me to vent my suspicion that these young women get their six-figure book deals BECAUSE they're pretty, not ALONGSIDE that fact.

Not to say they don't have talent (although I've read their respective books, and I wasn't exactly tripping over all the great prose, if you follow my meaning) - but today's publishing industry seems to want more than talent or probity from the new young names from whom it's hoping for so much. It's not enough anymore that you write well - you have to LOOK good doing it, enthusing on Oprah in a halter top.

I know, I know - some of you might be wondering if this is sour grapes (although not all THAT sour, since I, unlike many of my young friends, don't work especially hard to get published). I'm not published, and my envy is causing me to cast asperions on those who are.

Well fine! If you think that way, hie thee to the nearest Barnes & Noble and start flipping books over! Show me one DEBUT novel currently in hardcover whose jacket photo reveals its author to be anything below, say, an 8.

You won't be able to. They aren't there.

Now one or two pretty girls getting book deals I'm prepared to accept as the statistics of a wide spectrum. But if ALL the young men and women are gorgeous or near to it, I start to think that's part of why they got the job.

And if that's the case, I'm not outraged for myself, of course (as you all know, I'm a stone-cold super-hottie). I'm outraged for Dawn Powell, who could write the pants off any of these sleeveless runway models, but who'd never get published today because she strongly resembled ticked-off English bulldog.

Fortunately, there was the Approval Matrix! Here's a sample of this week's breakdown:

Highbrow Brilliant: "Paul Giamatti has signed on to play Philip K. Dick"

Lowbrow Brilliant: "The new superhero stamps"

Highbrow Despicable: "Have you read a Philip K. Dick novel? Great ideas, horrible prose."

Lowbrow Despicable: "The JonBenet Ramsey murder circus lurches back to creepy life."

Hee.

But the most arresting piece in this issue was John Leonard's essay on Gunter Grass' revelation of his membership in the Waffen SS.

Leonard shows himself to be a sensitive and appreciative reader of Grass (something I fancied myself to be, at one point), and the gist of his essay is that what Grass has given to Western intellectual life is greater than what his revelation takes away from it.

About Grass he writes "He was not pure. Surely that is as much a part of his authority as of his psychodynamic. What else are his books about, and not secretly?"

This is a spirited defense, and many of you have responded to my earlier post on the subject with strong echoes of it. 'The disgrace can't touch the novels,' you say, and because the one thing all of you posters to this site seem to have in common is your impressive intelligence (except for you of course, Beepy), it's made me pause and think.

You've pointed out that an author's personal life - and any failings therein - CAN'T factor into our appreciation of their work. Many of you have cited all the superb authors in the course of history who were also horrible human beings.

So I was deeply engaged with Leonard's piece, right up until the last paragraph, where two things happen: first, his spirited defense of Grass goes too far, and second, he stops writing in English -

Never mind, because we live in a culture where all confessions must undergo a scarifying rite and assume a therapeutic form as rigid as Kabuki, usually involving cable television and Betty Ford; where instant opinions are available in color-coded blister packs, for niche shopping; where everything, including great novels and soul-shriving secrets, will be read through a screen of prurient self-interest by fat-back bravos and heat-seeking piffles in the moral indignation racket. I wonder what planet these people come from.

Presumably one in which hyperventilation doesn't count as a writing-style, but that's not the point. The point is, this isn't "Repo Man." You don't get to blurt out "I blame society."

When a world-renowned and respected novelist comes forward and reveals that he was a card-carrying Nazi, you don't have to be part of a blame-game society to be disgusted. For Leonard to insinuate that we're all somehow ganging up on Grass, that the disgust and outrage that have greeted his announcement are somehow artificial or insincere ... well, that's turning the whole story on its head.

The fact is, Grass' story reeks of self-serving deception, even now. His claim that the reality of the Holocaust only came home to him when he saw the glasses, the shoes, the coats - the un-abstractable evidence of mass slaughter ... and his repeated allusions to some kind of 'drafting' process ... they smell of cod liver oil.

Here's what I think happened: the teenage Grass didn't need to be dragged kicking and screaming from the bosom of his family to join the Waffen SS - like thousands of similar young men, he did it willingly. Proudly. And most of all, informedly. Hitler had been making speeches for TEN YEARS about the iniquities of the Jews. For TEN YEARS, he'd been promising large-scale race-violence if he were ever given the power to carry it out. Grass wasn't some tallow-maker's imbecile bastard; he was plenty smart enough to know what he was doing.

Then the war was lost, and Hitler was gone, and right alongside those things, perhaps, Grass (again, like thousands and thousands of his countrymen) started ... I almost want to say he started waking up, as from a bad dream. He started realizing that regardless of his motives, regardless of the outcomes, he had joined in doing something EVIL, and he was increasingly aware of that fact and ashamed of it.

I don't allow to any half-way intelligent German citizen during the Nazi regime the alibi of saying they were hoodwinked, about anything. But likewise I don't forbid them the validity of exactly that kind of moral awakening, or re-awakening.

So the question is: what do we do with the novels of a man who, fifty years ago, was an fervent, party-line believing Nazi (as opposed to a weekends-only partial indoctrinee, like the current Pope)?

The novels are strange and strong and almost invariably memorable. And several of you tell me that fact should stand separate from everything else. Leonard clearly believes that - it can't touch the novels.

But these were the NAZIS! Where does this literary non-judgementalism take us? What if Idi Amin wrote beautiful poetry? Hell, what if Hitler did? You tell me I'm hasty and Jesuitically absolute for declaring the novels anathema because of what the man did decades ago and then came to regret. But what the man did was morally enormous. Giving his novels a free pass in spite of that fact feels ... I don't know - tolerant? Hypocritical?

Collaborative?