Full and Proper Credit in the Penny Press!

It's a bit unnerving, getting royally hacked off at Christopher Hitchens these days. The man's health is fragile, after all, and it hardly feels sporting to get riled up at somebody in such a position. So I read his latest piece of Kennedy-bashing in the new Vanity Fair with my fist knotted around a napkin, trying to maintain a caring, indulgent silence while he yet one more time slanders the dead. Nothing new in the slanders, either - while purporting to write about the newly-released (and hugely best-selling) book of interviews Jackie Kennedy did with Arthur Schlesinger fifty years ago, Hitchens bloatedly mentions that JFK, while maintaining a "stupefying consumption of uppers and downers," took credit for Profiles in Courage even though it's an "often exploded falsehood" that he wrote it, took credit for his inaugural address even though "it has been well established" that John Kenneth Galbraith and, God help us, Adlai Stevenson wrote it, and took credit for While England Slept even though "full and proper credit may not have been given to the book's chief author, the biddable journalist Arthur Krock." At first, reading all this envious garbage, I felt the blood boil ... but then, as I scrutinized the paragraphs, I realized the truth: Hitchens, no doubt maintaining a stupefying consumption of cancer medications, was clearly in no shape to write even two slanderous pages for Vanity Fair. Once I'd exploded this falsehood, it became pretty well established that the piece's chief author was obviously that biddable journalist, James Wolcott. I hope someday when Hitchens is no longer around to defend himself, Wolcott gets full and proper credit.

That issue of Vanity Fair had other irritants as well, including a half-page notice about the new Broadway revival of Godspell starring the douchebag Hunter Parrish as Jesus Christ. The only way I could be pleased with such casting would be if opening night concluded with an actual crucifixion.

Fortunately, it's Vanity Fair, and that means it's not possible the an entire issue will disappoint. This one has a wonderful, nostalgic look at "The Invincible Mrs. Thatcher" by Charles Moore, a perfect in-depth prep for the upcoming "Iron Lady" movie.

And over at The New Yorker, Louis Menand turns in a long, excellent review of John Lewis Gaddis' new biography of that arch architect of Soviet containment, George Kennan - by far the most comprehensive, readable, and intelligent review that book has so far received. And in the same issue, David Remnick is also in top form in a scathing "Talk of the Town" piece about the idiot Herman Cain that also manages to get in some good whacks at the frankly terrifying Mitten Romney:

The knowing people who know things in Washington generally believe that, once the electoral process begins in January, Romney will shed Cain, Perry, Bachmann, and the rest in rapid fashion. Perhaps. To look at Romney is to see plausibility. But a large portion of the Republican electorate seems determined to hop from one fantastically flawed alternative to the next rather than settle on him. A few may be loath to vote for a Mormon; others have ideological difference that make it hard to embrace him. It is Romney's spooky elasticity, his capacity to reverse himself utterly on one issue after another - health care, climate change, abortion, gun control, immigration, the 2009 stimulus, capital-gains taxes, stem-cell research, gay rights - that seems to bother voters most. They might rightly ask if there is even one thing that Mitt Romney believe in with greater conviction than his inevitability.

But it's New York that takes the prize this time around, not only for David Edelstein's masterful review of the new movie "J. Edgar" -

You might wonder: "Who is the gay, pinko, subversive director behind this Tommy-gun assault on our national security and masculinity?" Clint Eastwood, of course. J. Edgar is the latest chapter in Eastwood's never-ending project to deconstruct the macho, jingoist, homophobic, right-win archetype he once embodied - and prove himself an artist whose simplicity of style belies the most sophisticated understanding of the dual nature of the American character of any living filmmaker.

But pride of place rightly goes to this issue's cover story by Jesse Green, "What Do a Bunch of Old Jews Know About Living Forever?" The idea of the piece is interesting enough - studying extremely long-lived Ashkenazi Jews and what, if any, secrets of longevity their genes might hold - but the true reward here is Green's sheer, glowing writing. Even on a conceptual level, he hits nothing but home runs - including his decision to insert as many Jewish jokes as the piece will support:

"Oy," says Sophie.

"Oy vey," says Esther.

"Oy veyizmir," says Sadie.

"I thought we weren't going to talk about our children," says Mildred.

Or:

Klein brags to Cohen about his new hearing aid: "It's the best one made - I now understand everything!"

"What kind is it?" Cohen asks.

"3:15."

And the single best thing in this issue of New York? In the "Party Lines" page, Princess Charlene of Monaco is asked, "What do you think about how the royal family of Monaco is portrayed on 'Gossip Girl'?"

To which she responds, "What's 'Gossip Girl'?"

Hee. A little of that goes a long way toward easing my disappointment at learning that John F. Kennedy was a functionally illiterate gibbering pill-popper.

 

 

Sheer Virtuosity in the Penny Press!

Granted, the Penny Press might let me down from time to time - but the main reason I love it is on full display at the newsstand this week. Clever people writing prose on deadline can be (present company of course excepted) moved to write the damndest things, and if you root through a huge swath of periodicals every week the way I do, you're therefore of a certainty going to encounter your fair share of crapola. At which point, if you're an old fan of the Penny Press as I am, you'll do what comes naturally: you'll fire off a peppery letter to the editor, tear out and archive the pieces that move you favorably or otherwise (always only a small fraction of the whole - most deadline writers being alarmingly forgettable), and move on. After all - infamously - magazines like The New Yorker tend to just keep coming, so if you pause for even a moment, you'll be pulled to the dirt like an impala in the middle of a lion pride.

So you keep reading, hoping for the best. And the last two decades of the 20th century have spilled into the first two decades of the 21st an amazing inheritance: we live in an age of great literary journalists, people who routinely do fantastic work even though they're working on deadline for money.

Take last week's New Yorker - it featured a fantastic, sumptuously detailed review by Daniel Mendelsohn of Stephen Mitchell's new translation of Homer's Iliad, complete with shrewd insights into both the poem's history and the art of translation in general. Or take The New York Review of Books, in which Gary Wills rounds off a fascinating little chunk of his smart new book Verdi's Shakespeare and makes a fine short essay out of it - an essay that's frustratingly short on Verdi but delightfully long on Shakespeare:

There are many signs of Shakespeare's crafting roles for particular boys. In three plays of the late 1590s, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It, he had one boy who was short and dark and another who was tall and fair. The contrast was so striking that Shakespeare made his lines play on it. He began with particular boys' talents, and then wrote his scenes around them. He must have had a boy from Wales when he wrote I Henry IV, in which a woman speaks and sings in Welsh. One of the experienced boys, in As You Like It, was good enough for Shakespeare to create his second-longest woman's role for him - Rosalind (686 lines).

True, even the NYRB has its idiosyncracies (NO idea how long they're going to let Robert Darnton keep writing about his cockeyed and retrograde dream of a National Digital Library, for instance), but oh! they fade into the background when put alongside something as flat-out wonderful as Helen Vendler's Olympian review of the new Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove. Her review is titled "Are These the Poets to Remember?" - and her answer is a resounding 'no.' I myself dipped into the Penguin anthology with mixed feelings. Dove is a bad poet - a creation entirely of gender and demographics rather than even a shred of actual literary talent - but literature is full of great anthologies assembled by bad poets, so it's no confirmed impediment. But I was immediately struck by huge problems in the works selected, and Vendler puts it better than I could:

Multicultural inclusiveness prevails: some 175 poets are represented. No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading, so why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value? Antologists may now be extending a too general welcome. Selectivity has been condemned as "elitism," and a hundred flowers are invited to bloom. People who wouldn't be abl to take on the long-term commitment of a novel find a long-for release in writing a poem. And it seems rude to denigrate the heartfelt lines of people moved to verse. It is popular to say (and it is in part true) that in literary matters tastes differ, and that every critic can be wrong. But there is a certain objectivity bestowed by the mere passage of time, and its sifting of wheat from chaff. Which of Dove's 175 poets will have staying power, and which will seep back into the archives of sociology?

The issue had a larger-than-average amount of great stuff (the letter exchange in the back between Peter Singer and Herbert Terrace is alone almost worth the price of the thing - and will certainly lead to a second round), and reading it all and rejoicing in it all very handily compensates for tepid weeks and dunderheaded deadline stuff - which we all on occasion write, alas.

Some High Notes in the Penny Press!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Right and Wrong (and a little comfort) in the Penny Press!

Ordinarily, the running disagreements I have with the Penny Press are matters of degree, of shading, and they're conducted sotto voce over a heaping plate of food in the little hole-in-the-wall restaurant I frequent solely for the purpose of keeping up with all my periodicals. It's rare that these disagreements aren't essentially pleasant things, the rewarding tingling of stimulating disagreement; it's rare that I'm confronted with things that are flat-out wrong.

But I was cursing over my kimchi bokkeumbap this time around, and of course things started to go wrong at the mention of the ten-year 9-11 anniversary. Every periodical in the Western world has latched onto that anniversary and used it as an occasion to unleash some threat-matrix-level amounts of pretentious bloviation onto an innocent reading public, and The New Yorker is at the front of the pack (in defense of the concept, New York magazine's dedicated issue last week was superb). The heart of the problem is the seeming inability of pretentious people to understand the difference between a momentous event happening and a momentous event happening to them. Unless you were one of the survivors or one of the victims, the 9-11 attacks didn't happen to you - as impossible as it may be for you to believe, considering your SAT scores, you were only a bystander to the events that tragic morning.

As these commemorative editions continue to flow off the newsstands, the pretentious young writers providing the copy are reacting to that bystander status in two ways: by ignoring it ("I was on my stoop in Dumbo playing educational games with my two kids, Castorp and Always Question, when we were hit") or exalting it ("I was in a tiny village 200 miles upland from Puerto Mayo, just about to file the story that would take down a local drug kingpin, when I happened to glance at the bar's little TV and saw grainy footage that would very nearly make me miss my deadline ..."). Neither of these two approaches is exactly preferable to respectful silence, but then, editors don't a dollar a word for respectful silence.

If anything, though, the commentaries are worse than the commemorations, and that brings me to George Packer writing in the 12 September issue of The New Yorker. Specifically, to this paragraph (although the piece he writes contains many like it):

A great many counterfactual histories could be written about those [George W. Bush] years. If Al Gore had been allowed to take office, if bin Laden had been captured at Tora Bora, if the focus had stayed on Al Qaeda, if real nation-building had been tried in Afghanistan, if America hadn't gone to war in Iraq. All these alternative paths would have been helpful, but none of them would have been decisive, because the deeper problem lay in an ongoing decline that was greater than any single event or policy.

This isn't a question of shading - this is just plain wrong. That extremely even-handed 'we-musn't-be-seen-to-judge' non-committal might be de rigeur in the Whole Foods aisles in Cambridge, but it smacks of craven equivocation out in the rest of the world. In reality, every single one of those 'alternative paths' Packer writes about would indeed have been utterly 'decisive,' and it's borderline delusional to say otherwise. Not decisive, if George W. Bush hadn't stolen the election? Not decisive, if we'd had a thinking individual (with extensive experience of both government and foreign policy) in the White House instead of a biddable idiot? Not decisive, if the leader of Al-Qaeda had been caught and Al-Qaeda itself destroyed in the immediate aftermath of 9-11? This is serene historical contextualization run absolutely amok, and it chaffed me to read it. The real way to desecrate the memory of 9-11 isn't to forget the anniversary - it's to affect to being blithe about the moral imperatives at play on that day.

Naturally, I turned to the mighty TLS for some relief, but alas - none was forthcoming. Not only was the provocation on the cover in pretty poor taste (in case you're wondering - and you're not, because you were never meant to - the 'them' refers to 'canonical authors' not gays), and not only was the rotting fraud Michel Houellebecq given serious attention by a writer who ought to know better, but even in the issue's hindquarters, in the little 'In Brief' reviews that are usually such a joy, there were nettles. Specifically, somebody named Jacques Testard reviews Alan Jacobs' well-intentioned but soporific book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, plays with it a bit like a bored kitten, and then finishes up his 200 words with this little doozy:

Readers of this review, however, will be well connected to the world of books, if not to a Kindle. The Pleasures of Reading in the [sic] Age of Distraction is an informed piece of democratic didacticism, but those confirmed readers of literature have no need to look here. Just remember that it's OK to read anything, anything at all, so long as it gives you pleasure.

Well, yes, I muttered over my zeeuwse bolus, but that kind of dictum is also mindlessly blithe. Granted, in a free country without censorship, it's OK to read anything, anything at all, that gives you pleasure - but if you stop there, your reading life will be pretty damn cramped. 'OK' here is clearly meant to shield serial readers of romances or Star Trek novels from the criticism of their betters, but it gets a little too definitive for its own good. I often premise my own book-recommendations to strangers along the same initial lines - what sorts of things do you like? - but my end goal is to move them a bit beyond their comfort zones, not to keep them happily penned in their back yards forever. After all, pleasure is a complex thing, and (especially when it comes to reading) parts of it have to be learned. Yes, you should feel OK reading anything, anything at all, that gives you pleasure - condescending readers are missing the big picture - but if you blithely stop there, as this Testard person implies you should, you'll miss the big picture too.

Turning from the TLS, I had scant hope of finding relief anywhere else, especially in the customarily-infuriating pages of Graydon Carter's Vanity Fair. This is the venue where I often find the very best long-form freelance writing anywhere on the newsstand, but it's also the place to find some of the most arrogant, shoddy workmen in the business, and my nerves were already frayed.  And at first, this current issue boded poorly. True, it was a relief that the editors decided to forego a 9-11 cover-theme, favoring us instead with what I presume is a CGI close-up of some forthcoming Hollywood space alien (or is it abstract art? Could it be a rendition of the scar-pits of lower Manhattan on 9-12?). But once you're done being frightened by whatever that is on the cover, you're forced to wade through the first 100 pages before you get to any actual content. Those initial pages are wholly given over to fashion ads, which in and of themselves are invitations to incomprehension. True to form, this current batch has some high points



... and very, very low points



But miraculously, relief did indeed arrive, and from the place I least expected it. Right in the middle of a long, almost physically excruciating piece recounting debut novelist Chad Harbach's rise to glory, there's a simple and utterly restorative little paragraph about the much-maligned publishing industry:

And yet every single person I met while writing this article - the publishers, the editors, the marketing and sales people - genuinely loved books. That's why they were working in a business that, in the end, wasn't particularly lucrative. They liked reading books and cared enough about them to devote their lives to making them. For every company or editor or agent who no longer cared, there were a number of younger people who did.

I've been connected with that industry in one way or another for many, many years, and I can attest to the truth of every word of that paragraph - well, except for the one four words from the end. In the publishing world as everywhere else, 'younger' is still mostly a well-deserved pejorative term: it's the older reps and publicists and editors and publishers and even novelists who tend to have long-cultivated enthusiasm for the written word (I know of roughly 150 young novelists currently working in the field, and if you handed each of them a check for $1,000,000 and told them it was valid only on condition they never write another word of fiction, 147 of them would instantly agree). A one-word quibble is hardly significant, on such a grim Penny Press day as this.

I'll have to hope for better luck with the London Review of Books, in due time.

 

Pictures Pretty (and otherwise) in the Penny Press!

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

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

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



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

Back to some familiar faces in the Penny Press!

Predictably, the short story "Reverting to a Wild State" in the 1 August issue of The New Yorker has the gay literary world all a-twitter (we can't use that word anymore, can we? Not without sending dozens of people scurrying for their feeds). The story is by Justin Torres, and it's about a cute young gay man who begins to cheat on his nice, normal boyfriend with an older man who likes to pay him to clean house in his skimpies ("The man passed comment on all the usual parts of my body, but the unusual as well - my calves, the notch at the top of my spine. To comment is not necessarily to compliment, we were both aware"). The narrative is rather pretentiously fragmented into four numbered parts counting down backwards (we start at 3 and end up at 0), but readers can ignore such details and concentrate on the important stuff. There are four important things about this story, and the first two are the ones getting it so much attention this week: it's gay-themed, and it's published in The New Yorker. Those two things don't coincide very often (New Yorker readers of any standing will remember the first story to break that particular barrier), and this occasion is made all the more noteworthy due to the third important thing: the story is well-written - it captures with agility the mercurial flashes of breaking up, of the weird little things you remember when a relationship is ending, and the weird reactions those memories produce:

Nigel was always finding discarded plants and taking them home to regenerate. Everywhere in our apartment were plants, thriving. This, too, infuriated me - and when Nigel instructed me not to come home that night, when he told me to come by the next day, while he was at work, and remove all my shit and never come home again, I thought of those plants, of a space in the world without them.

"It's over," Nigel said. "You're free."

[caption id="attachment_3352" align="alignleft" width="249" caption="illustration by autumn whitehurst"][/caption]

It's the fourth important thing about the story that bugs me, however: it's bigoted. The main character is in a long-term relationship with a loving partner, and then - out of the blue - he reverts to a wild state, apparently the wild state from which all cute gay boi's come, a wild state that's always with them, calling them to abandon their lovers and start polishing some rich guy's woodwork for pocket money. The main character doesn't leave poor earnest Nigel because he's in love with someone else or even attracted to someone else - he leaves a stable, caring relationship for a cash-and-carry arrangement in which he's mainly a sex object, and the title of Torres' story leads us to think he does this because it's his nature, like a salmon. There's a segment of the American population that believes all gay men are by nature shallow, sex-obsessed bed-hoppers, and that segment of the population has used this characterization to deny gay men civil rights and equal legal treatment (in addition to denying them jobs, physical safety, and sometimes the right to go on breathing). I'd bet my last basset hound Torres doesn't consider himself a part of that segment of the population - he went to the University of Iowa, after all, and trained dogs, and worked in a bookstore. So why this story? Something he himself experienced but lacked the patience to transmute? Or is it that a significant chunk of The New Yorker's subscribers come from that aforementioned segment of the population, and what little gay fiction they ever force themselves to read must be of this 'I can't help myself' blackface variety? Neither answer is good enough, and I find myself wondering about a third.

Leaving a magazine wondering something unsavory is of course part of the risk you run when you read as many magazines as I do. But there's one that almost always leaves me feeling the clean, uplifting kind of wonder - National Geographic, of course. Specifically, the current issue, the one with the polar bear on the cover - only NO! That's not a polar bear - it's a white black bear, a "spirit bear" from the deep rain forests of British Columbia! In an article by Bruce Barcott, I learned there may be as many as a thousand of these remarkable animals roaming the forests and feeding on fish, and that nobody quite knows why they've developed their distinctive coloring, and that their existence was largely kept a secret by the local tribes, who venerate the animal and don't want outsiders hunting it (a laudable intent utterly undone by this issue - if even 1 percent of the world's insane trophy-hunters read this article and realize there's a whole new kind of bear they've never killed, the spirit bear will be extinct before the next issue of National Geographic hits the stands). I myself have trekked all over those very same rain forests of British Columbia (with beagles in tow), and although I was perfectly well aware of all the other animals lurking about, I had no clue I was sharing those mossy glens with a creature I'd never even heard about. Leave it to National Geographic to show me something that wonderful.

I've likewise been staring ardently at the moon for a very, very long time, loving the light it sheds in the night, taking a comfort I can't explain from its placid stability - and yet before this issue of National Geographic, I would never have guessed that the moon had a liquid outer core just bubbling there at some 2,600 degrees F. The accompanying article mentions the possibility that in the distant past, the moon might have been actively molten, although speculation is that it's core is stagnant today and has been for millions of years. But still - the idea that the moon, this planetoid that for my entire life I've considered beautiful in large part for a tomb-like beauty dependent on the lack of a beating heart, actually has a fire burning under all that grey rock ... the idea is jarring, although not necessarily in a bad way. Thanks to this issue, the world around me will be different in my mind because it contains a big, fierce animal I never knew existed, and the moon itself will be different because I now know it harbors a fire to match its rock.

National Geographic makes me burble like this, as some of you will know.

Agreeing to Disagree in the Penny Press!

The linear procession that is my weekly plow through the latest furrow of the Penny Press couldn't have started off worse this time around - not even with a 'short' story by Alice Munro: The New Yorker featured a long piece by Jonathan Franzen that was just about as appalling an exercise in narcissism as anything I've seen from somebody who doesn't run a book-blog. Franzen, of course, is the author of Freedom, the big gaseous novel that's going to win the Nobel, Pulitzer, and Zee-Magnee Prizes for Greatest Thing Ever Created By Anybody, Including When God Created the Universe. He's also one of the ground-zero survivors of the suicide of his friend and fellow author David Foster Wallace, and I understand and accept where that confluence leads. It's probably inevitable that some writing would result from it - after all, in such circumstances, even the least literary person in the world might be moved to put pen to paper. Franzen is not the least literary person in the world - he himself has commented many times on his apparently uncontrollable urge to, as he puts it, "narratize" himself - so something like this essay was probably going to happen at some point.

But I find myself asking the same question about this piece - a clumsy half-cloning of a literary appreciation of Robinson Crusoe (for which an expedition to Selkirk Island was enacted, of course - nobody reads at home anymore, silly!) and a reminiscence of a lost and troubled friend - that I ask about so much of Franzen's work: did it have to be so bad? Did it have to show so little thought, or rather, so much completely misdirected thought? I know Franzen would probably say it's his arch and awkward impulses that make him worth our time as a writer, but there's a difference between adopting an arch and awkward kitten and working full-time at the animal shelter.

Franzen's been writing things - fiction, nonfiction, and the pure self-absorption he and Wallace perfected for a whole new generation - for years; how could he not have seen how maladroit this piece would end up being, if he insisted on keeping the mechanical framework of the Defoe device? It's maddening to watch him churn out the requisite travel-essay paragraphs (it's so windy there!), the requisite lies (tobacco addicts always, always, always claim their vacations from the busy world were also vacations from tobacco, when if that's how addiction worked, nobody would be addicted), and the requisite posturing (litt'rary authorities are startled awake and hauled on stage, as though Franzen felt compelled to say, "hey, don't forget - I'm an incredible intellectual heavyweight, in addition to being this shy and sensitive guy") - especially maddening because behind all that stuff, he's actually got something to write about this time. I would have read a Daniel Defoe essay from him with interest, but yoking it so stubbornly like this to a very, very different kind of essay - more interesting, yes, but also more shameful to actually publish - is a beginner's mistake, or else the mistake of somebody who no longer has those 'first readers' every writer needs so badly.

So our author goes to Selkirk Island to read Robinson Crusoe - but also because he has to do something in the wake of his friend's suicide. As a result, neither the trivia nor the trauma is well-served, but the trauma is at least arresting ... and interestingly conflicted. I was surprised - and I shouldn't have been - by the sharpness of the anger in Franzen's writing about what Wallace did. And of course I was fascinated, who wouldn't be, by the new personal details Franzen reveals about Wallace's final year and downward spiral, the idea Franzen has that Wallace considered his suicide to be, in drug addict terms, "one last score" and an act of vengeance against both himself and his closest friends. But just because such details are fascinating doesn't mean I should have been reading them - the personal, wounded parts of this weird piece are the best writing Franzen's ever done, but they should have remained in his journal where they belong. I wish I could get this point through the Yaddo-addled brains of all our most lionized young writers: the reading public doesn't, in fact, need you to "narratize" every aspect of your lives - exercising more restraint and more narrative control would actually make you better writers.

Fortunately, that first course didn't ruin the meal. I moved on to the new Harper's, and once there I did what I now happily always do: I turned straight to the "New Books" column and settled in to read Zadie Smith. I don't know Smith, and I have no idea what she thinks of her new gig as Harper's fiction critic, but sometimes even Irish Catholics know when not to question a good thing, so I just sit back and enjoy the show. I've rhapsodized here before about Smith as a literary critic, and here that rhapsody is put to the worst test the love of any book critic can face: what do you do when a great critic writes about a book you just don't care about?

In this case, Smith writes about Edouard Levy's Suicide and Peter Stamm's Seven Years, and I couldn't care less about either book, which made the going tough. But even so, the wonderful, winning tone, the voice Smith is creating in these columns won me over (finding the right voice being, of course, essential to the long-term business of writing anything) - won me over to her column, that is, not to the pretentious pieces of poop she reviews in it this time around. Here's hoping next month she gorges herself on murder mysteries, or else takes in Black Lamb and Gray Falcon and tells us all about it. And in the meantime, this particular issue of Harper's has one other thing that's enormously worth your attention - no, not that laughably hideous cover illustration, which struck me as a bizarre practical joke until I remembered what century I live in ... no, Nicholson Baker's scintillating essay "Why I'm a Pacifist" is the non-Smith highlight of this issue, a refreshingly meaty essay where I'd expected to find yet more Franzen-style narcissism. It was so good it almost convinced me that some of its daffiest contentions just might be true.

But, much to my surprise, the real saving grace of my Penny Press trawling this time around came from a source I'd almost completely discounted: the good old Atlantic, whose slide into just another Beltway glossy has been decried here and elsewhere. Much to my dismay, I've come to associate the Atlantic with reading disappointment, and certainly a glance at this issue seemed to confirm that: a 'genius' issue without one true genius on display, a 'culture' issue as though that were a special, distant place (Selkirk Island, perhaps?) for which we should designate an isolated visit once in a while ... and that Editor's Note! Has 2011 yet seen so vertiginous a combination of arrogance and cringing? The Editors intend, I think, to offer some kind of justification for their decision to include to short stories in their 'culture' issue even though they've long since banished fiction from their ordinary (non-culture?) issues. Airy words are aired about the special qualities shared by the two stories in question, one by Stephen King, the other by Mary Morris, but I knew better than to get my hopes up, and I was right: the stories have a lot in common, beginning with the proudly-declared triviality of their origins and ending, I suppose, in how boring and awful they both are, but when the Editors describe them as "entertaining, interesting, and gloriously open," they're adding a whole lot of sawdust to the bread.

No, it wasn't the special 'cultural' offerings on hand that made the issue for me: it was the workhorse rear-end (...) of the thing that did the trick, as always. Once all the 'geniuses' are done being interviewed about how incredible they are, the real power-hitters come out, and we get three fantastic essays in a row. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes the impossible: an essay about Malcolm X that I actually found interesting. Christopher Hitchens reassures me that his medical treatments must be going well, because he turns in a long and utterly beguiling essay on yet another subject that doesn't usually interest me at all: the poet Larkin and his various smutty doings. And best of all, towering over this week's Penny Press offerings, there's the mighty Benjamin Schwarz, writing about James M. Cain's novel Mildred Pierce - and in the process writing about yet another subject that doesn't interest me at all: Los Angeles. Only a whole lot of money could ever possibly induce me to visit Los Angeles again, and nothing on Earth could make me re-read Mildred Pierce - and yet there I was, eagerly lapping up every word Schwarz wrote about both, solely on the basis of how wonderful those words are:

Moreover, in Mildred Pierce, Cain wrote the greatest work of American fiction about small business. He made compelling the intricacies of real-estate deals and cash flow, of business planning and bank loans, and of relations with suppliers and customers ("She had a talent for quiet flirtation," as Cain explained of Mildred's technique, "but found that it didn't pay. Serving a man food, apparently, was in itself an ancient intimacy; going beyond it made him uncomfortable, and sounded a trivial note in what was essentially a solemn relationship.") He rendered the plodding method and the fundamental gamble of small-time commerce - the foundation of Los Angeles's service-oriented economy - not just absorbing but romantic.

As usual with this critic, I could go on quoting (Hitchens on Larkin is equally quotable), and reading this piece by him and that piece by Zadie Smith (and knowing that Sam Sacks is there, every week, over in the Wall Street Journal) reminded me yet again that the current state of heavyweight American book-criticism is in good hands. Even if they all occasionally write about books I wouldn't cross the street to read.

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!

Penny Press addendum: the New Yorker!

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Harlot High and Low in the Penny Press!

As I've had occasion to inform you all from time to time, I read a LOT of periodicals. I subscribe to more than two dozen (it's oft said but bears repeating: subscribing is the only way to go), which means I actually read a lot of periodicals every week, ranging across almost the whole gamut of intellectual content.

The magazine industry spent quite a bit of money in 2010 on in-house ads assuring readers that magazine-reading has seldom been healthier, and I like to believe that - for one simple reason: if magazines were to die, I'd lose a great deal of first-rate reading from my life. For while it's true that roughly a quarter of my subscriptions are for periodicals I use far more than savor (and virtually all of my non-subscription impulse-buys are of this nature - sometimes, certain Australian-produced magazines will have such alluring nature photography on their covers that I'm prompted to pick up the issue and learn all about that wildlife's mating habits), I read the vast bulk of it in search of the same thing I search for in books and in online literature: first-rate writing.

Of course, first-rate writing can take many forms, from the slash-and-jab buzzings of 'lad mags' to the Churchilllian eloquence of the stately literary reviews. But that very spectrum is one of the strongest appeals periodical literature has for me: it keeps my aesthetics limber - it keeps my eyes open for how well some piece of writing works, not just how many times it references Religio Medici. We're all prone to a calcification of our likes and dislikes - but that calcification is deadly to the brain, and every safeguard we can take against it is well-justified.

That's one of the main reasons I subscribe to the number of 'men's interest' magazines I do, even though a) I disagree completely with their world-view (in which it's presumed that if you graduated from business school and are male, you will share a lock-step 100 percent of the dreams, desires, irritations, preoccupations, and relaxations as every other male who graduated from business school) and b) I dislike intensely their hypocrisy (which are impossible not to notice, when every three-page article on some new fat-burning way to exercise is interspersed with colorful full-page ads for cigars, and when magazines devoted to exercise feature on their covers male celebrities who are devoted to tobacco and couldn't exercise for more than ten consecutive minutes without coughing up slush-balls of blood-flecked sputum that writhes on its own for a full minute after ejection): they tend to have comparatively deep pockets, so they tend to attract some talented writers.

And sometimes, the little confluences are fun too - like the resonance between the latest Outside magazine, featuring a black-and-white photo of head-shaved, dead-eyed tobacco addict and champion surfer Kelly Slater on the cover, and the latest GQ, the cover-feature of which is a list of the 'coolest' sports stars since 1957 (when GQ was launched, naturally) - a list on which Slater appears. The Outside editors felt defensive enough about putting Slater on their cover to include an editorial note defending the decision - largely on the grounds that Slater -and pro surfing in general - doesn't get the coverage he deserves anywhere else. It was amusing to see a little of their 'if not us, then who?' grandstanding defeated by the generous write-up William Finnegan gives him in GQ, including this little hymn of praise:

I didn't get him when he first burst on the scene. He came out of Cocoa Beach, Florida, and had the choppy, histrionic style that small, crummy waves encourage. But his raw talent was supreme, and his surfing smoothed out in bigger, better waves. His balance, reflexes, speed, and wave-reading ability were off the charts. His thinking, moreover, about the mechanics of wave riding is densely analytical. Hearing him break down what actually happened inside a barrel from which he emerged, seemingly miraculously, is a master class in what makes the previously impossible possible.

Boston readers might remember that Slater is connected through one of his few non-surfing-related organs to local sports, since back before he started shaving his head Slater was briefly the owner of Gisele Bundchen, who's currently owned by New England Patriots star quarterback Tom Brady (Brady's studious mug graces one of the issue's many alternate covers; there is no version that features Slater). Bewilderingly, Brady is also featured in this issue, even though calling him in any way 'cool' is a open-palmed insult to other nominees like Muhammad Ali or Julius Erving. The always-entertaining J. R. Moehringer digs deep into his b.s. bucket for some justification:

You can't watch Brady stroll the sideline like the love child of Clark Kent and Grace Kelly without imagining every detail of his private nirvana. The trick is not letting it torment you. Even if you live in Indy or Jersey or Pittsburgh, don't begrudge him. Next time Brady hoists the Lombardi Trophy, put your hands together, give it up. Recognize that the game has been elevated, sanctified, by his artistry. Celebrate his good fortune and good looks with good cheer. Surrender. Only then, if karma exists, will you have any chance of coming back as Brady in your next life.

What you'll do in that next life - apart, apparently, from carrying a man-purse, walking your chattel's pocket-pet, and choking at crunch time - will presumably be up to you. One thing's for sure: a shaved head would be such an improvement.

I'm perfectly willing to admit that stuff like GQ and Outside (and let's not even get started on Details, which makes those two look like serialized installments of The Gulag Archipelago)(seriously, if you're actually able to read an issue of Details, get yourself to the nearest emergency room as fast as possible - you have suffered a concussion, and every minute could count) often represents the shallow end of the periodical pool, but in both these issues, well toward the back, after the broads-and-brewskis antics have calmed down, there are serious - and seriously good - pieces of writing. By far the most entertaining example this time around is Mark Harris' hilarious and thought-provoking screed "The Day the Movies Died," in which he laments the way Hollywood has been overtaken by marketers packaging multi-million-dollar products rather than directors creating art. He locates the origin of this evil in the moment Top Gun struck American theaters like a fratboy-hurled brick to the intellect. I of course find this touching, since it's exactly what both Locke Peterseim and I were writing (I ponderously, he entertainingly) thirty years ago (I'll include relevant links as soon as the dear old Daily Iowan joins the rest of us in the 21st century).

Of course, thirty years ago we had no idea how bad the phenomenon Harris describes could become, although that phenomenon is rendered at least a bit more palatable by how damn zingy Harris is in describing it:

In Hollywood, though, not all [marketing] quadrants are created equal. If you, for instance, have a vagina, you're pretty much out of luck, because women, in studio thinking, are considered a niche audience that, except when Sandra Bullock reads a script or Nicholas Sparks writes a novel, generally isn't worth taking the time to figure out. And if you were born before 1985 ... well, it is my sad duty to inform you that in the eyes of Hollywood, you are one of what the kids on the Internet call "the olds." I know - you thought you were one of the kids on the Internet. Not to studios, which have realized that the closer you get to (or the farther you get from) your thirtieth birthday, the more likely you are to develop things like taste and discernment, which render you such an exhausting proposition in terms of selling a movie that, well, you might as well have a vagina.

Hee.

Harris allows that all his doom-and-glooming has a silver lining (basically, cable TV), but whether he's right or wrong about Hollywood today, reading prose like that is a pure pleasure.

Of course, when it comes to the pure pleasure of reading prose, much is determined by the subject of that prose - heck, that's where the term subjective comes from. The very best writing on big-wave surfing or Hollywood blockbusters will always interest me less than even second-rate writing about books - precious little book-writing in the mighty TLS ever descends to second-rate. I've mentioned countless times here what a banquet of delights every issue is, and the 14 January issue was no exception.

The highlight for me was an intensely, memorably thoughtful review of the new volume of Christopher Isherwood diaries. The piece is written by James Fenton, and from first to last it's searching where it could easily have been merely summarizing. It's a perfect demonstration of how the very best book-criticism makes fascinating and worthwhile reading entirely independent of the books on which it's predicated. When Fenton is writing in this key, I could read him forever:

If the sexual world of Isherwood seems in some ways dated, that is partly because some of its assumptions have indeed dated. It would be one thing, perhaps, to propose sexual freedom within a relationship, as a way of asserting that the gay man belongs to bohemia rather than the bourgeoisie (although it seems hard to insist that every gay man should live by the laws of bohemia). But supposing, buried somewhere in the psychology of this phase of a social revolution, there was a pessimistic assumption about male sexuality - an assumption that the homosexual male would be promiscuous because he couldn't be otherwise. And suppose this pessimism derived from a source (religious, psychiatric, conventional) which was fundamentally anti-gay, and which had an interest in warning men off what it conceived as a lifestyle choice: don't go down that road, sonny, or you will end up sad and alone. Then we might just conclude that the whole matter of gay promiscuity deserved a second look.

"But what do I know?" he writes. "I know only what I read." But when a reviewer has range and wit enough to invoke Thom Gunn to counter the self-pitying morbidity of somebody like Christopher Isherwood, I'd say he knows plenty.

Two ends of the spectrum, then, in some ways, in every reading of the Penny Press - but the quality-hunt is thrilling in its own right, and being provoked to laugh out loud or re-examine an old opinion over a heaped plate of cheap Chinese food ... well, that's plenty thrilling too.

Pomes, Proems, and Porkers in the Penny Press!

In the waning months of 2010, I got quite a few comments from the Silent Majority asking me whatever became of regular In the Penny Press updates. And it's true: I neglected writing about my vast magazine-reading, mainly because the year's impending end had me thinking more and more about all the books I still wanted to write about.

 

But as the American magazine industry is forever reminding us these days, despite the Internet and the decline of literacy, magazine-reading is as healthy as its been in decades. And I certainly contribute my share to that! I read every issue of National Geographic, Esquire, GQ, Vanity Fair, Men's Journal, Outside, The American Scholar, Royalty, Majesty, Natural History, Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, New York, Rolling Stone, Asimov's, the TLS, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Publisher's Weekly, The Romantic Times Book Club, The Boston Review, and the New York Review of Books, and I usually find something noteworthy about every single issue of every single one of those ... so it's a tad laggardly if I stop blogging about them here. If Stevereads is the autobiography of my reading, scanting on magazines would be like skipping a chapter.

 

Hence, I started off the year with a Penny Post entry, and I'll keep it up - starting now, with a very strong little pod of titles consumed at my usual table at my little hole-in-the-wall Chinese food place in Chinatown (not the same hole-in-the-wall place that served me for a whopping 30 years - it closed! - but a newer, even smaller place that's unknown both to stupid American customers and, I suspect, to the Boston Board of Health... I get a HUGE plate of food for a pittance, and I'm left alone to read in sweet peace for as long as I want, because the staff is wonderful and also because there are never any other customers). The opening dish, as it were, was The New Yorker, which featured, among other things, a poem I rather liked and which I include here in place of my late, apparently unlamented 'Poetry Class' feature:

 

In the little house filled with dogs and resilient plants

She left only a glass and a blank sheet of paper.

The stadium up the road like a siren called with silent applause

To climb up, climb beyond the seats and the grass

Where a team of young girls kicked a white ball.

Maybe she knew they were there, maybe she was calling back

A line a male poet committed to the page a decade ago,

About time made simple by the loss of detail.

Maybe she then cast out every detail but the unencumbered air

To keep it simple. And then fluttered away from us.

That's called "Air" by Daniel Halpern, and I like it quite a bit.

 

Amazingly, I also liked the beginning of this issue's short story - and the reason it's amazing is because the story, called "The Years of My Birth," is by the dreaded Louise Erdrich, whose work I've hated since the Great Depression. And keep in mind, I still hate her work - this story is slightly less wretched than her usual blather, it's true, but it still falls apart almost completely on both a plot and an execution level. But the opening is, against all odds, first-rate:

 

The nurse had wrapped my brother in a blue flannel blanket and was just about to hand him to his mother when she whispered, "Oh, God, there's another one," and out I slid, half dead. I then proceeded to die in earnest, going from slightly pink to a dull gray-blue, at which point the nurse tried to scoop me into a bed warmed by lights. She was stopped by the doctor, who pointed out my head and legs. Stepping between me and the mother, the doctor addressed her.

 

"Mrs. Lasher, I have something important to say. Your other child has a congenital deformity and may die. Shall we use extraordinary means to salvage it?"

 

She looked at the doctor with utter incomprehension at first, then cried, "No!"

 

While the doctor's back was turned, the nurse cleared my mouth with her finger, shook me upside down, and swaddled me tightly in another blanket, pink. I took a blazing breath.

 

"Nurse," the doctor said.

 

"Too late," she answered.

Any story that begins with that kind of crackle just naturally compels you to keep reading - which I unfortunately did, but still.

 

(The issue also features a droll, enjoyable essay by Joan Acocella about the popularity of the Stieg Larsson novels. She makes a few good stabs, but ultimately she can't figure it out either)

 

And as enjoyable as I find practically every issue of The New Yorker, I turned with special eagerness - I always do - to my own metier,  book-criticism. And boy, what a great double-barrelled blast of book-criticism you get when you read The London Review of Books and the TLS back-to-back! In the London Review this time around there's an absolutely howlingly great take-down of George W. Bush's Decision Points, which is sly and vicious and fleet-footed and would be sufficient to induce authorly catatonia, if the former president ever actually read it. Which seems, all in all, unlikely. The piece is by Eliot Weinberger, and surely its most glorious paragraph is this one:

 

This is a chronicle of the Bush Era with no colour-coded Terror Alerts; no Freedom Fries; no Halliburton; no Healthy Forests Initiative (which opened up wilderness areas to logging); no Clear Skies Act (which reduced air pollution standards); no New Freedom Initiative (which proposed testing all Americans, beginning with schoolchildren, for mental illness)l no pamphlets sold by the National Parks Service explaining that the Grand Canyon was created by the Flood; no research by the National Institutes of Health on whether prayer can cure cancer ('imperative' because poor people have limited access to healthcare); no cover-up of the death of football star Pat Tillman by 'friendly fire' in Afghanistan; no 'Total Information Awareness' from the Information Awareness Office; no Project for the New American Century; no invented heroic rescue of Private Jessica Lynch; no Fox News; no hundreds of millions spent on 'abstinence education'.

Hee. Of course, many of the items on that list are very nearly as fraudulent in their glancing mention here as their omission from Bush's book is (Open Letters' own Greg Waldmann, taking the less fun but more measured tone here, no doubt renders things more correctly, even at the cost of pyrotechnics), but the spittle flying off the piece was hugely enjoyable just the same.

 

(And while we're on the subject of OLM-echoes, Peter Campbell turns in a piece in this same issue in which he takes in the Thomas Lawrence exhibit now at the National Portrait Gallery and appreciates Lawrence's work as much as I did here. He writes: "There are some tremendous pictures among the things gathered here. Pictures of 'real genius'? Well, 'genius' is not an easy word, but certainly vivid, appealing and, sometimes, as in the case of the military or of fashionable ladies, necessarily tawdry")

 

If I had to pick one highlight of the issue, however, it would be the utterly sui generis meditation on wild boars (and Paul Celan? I still haven't figured that part out yet) by the great novelist Lawrence Norfolk (whose greatest novel, In the Shape of a Boar, almost certainly generated this piece by accident years ago), including this little gem: "In the late 1980s, two young boars attacked an F16 fighter plane attempting to land at Jacksonville International Airport in Florida, causing its destruciton." (The anecdote is no more true than some of Weinberger's slung-around accusations, but it's just as much fun)

 

And the riches on hand in the TLS were, if anything, greater - starting with a wonderful extended explanation for the dismayingly phoned-in little squib I took Adam Hirsch to task for in the Book Review here. In this issue of the TLS, he delivers a long and gloriously intelligent review of a thoroughly unworthy subject, the letters of Saul Bellow, and the piece is every bit as smart as his Book Review piece was vapid, every bit as detailed as his Book Review piece was vague. Virtually every paragraph of this spectacular review sparkles with nerve and insight:

 

The soul makes the flesh, which is why it can't survive the flesh. And this insight is guaranteed, for Bellow, by the very vividness with which the physical world appeals to him - an intensity so powerful that he could not believe it was merely subjective. This very early intuition is what led Bellow to his late enthusiasm for Rudolf Steiner, whose books are so dreadfully written that only a deep spiritual aspiration could have led a reader of Bellow's sensitivity to tolerate them.

I find I can forgive any number of fatuous essays on the Role of the Book-Critic Today if the essayist in question is still capable of knocking reviews like this one out of the ballpark. If a tongue-lashing from Stevereads was all it took to get Kirsch back in line, I'm happy to serve.

 

And speaking of tongue-lashings! Some of you may have noticed the pan I gave to Ron Chernow's new hagiography of George Washington, so of course I read Mark Spencer's review of the same book with great interest. Alas, he decides mostly to praise the thing despite the fact that its manifold deficiencies are in full display on every page. This is as close as Spencer comes to invective: "Convincing us to trade in our "frosty respect for Washington" for a "visceral appreciation of this foremost American" sometimes leads Chernow beyond the evidence of the historical record."

 

Needless to say, I disagree with such a positively Jeevesian level of restraint. Maybe Spencer would profit from a tongue-lashing ...