mistakes, exaggerations, and outright lies in the Penny Press!

A particular contentious day in the Penny Press today, as the cold rain drizzled down outside my favorite little Chinese food restaurant! For ever stretch in which I was just enjoying what I was reading, there was a stretch of rumpled macadam, attracting muttered grumbling and aggravated underlining with my trusty ever-present pen. Of course, it's usually that way when I engage with the Penny Press (or anything else, for that matter - I'm an immoderately involved reader ... as all of you must know, else why would you be here in the first place?), but today felt extra irritating, and I don't think it was the food.

Speaking of food! Surely that's the topic that tops the snit parade! Last week, the New Yorker ran a review of Jonathan Safran Foer's new book Eating Animals (they largely gave the ridiculous little confessional a free pass, but then, almost everybody's given it a pass - except for my good friends over at The Second Pass, ironically enough - John Williams' review, "The Oy of Cooking," is not to be missed), and this week the magazine runs some letters from readers. One of those letters was from Kevin Jablonski, and he writes:

First, environmental degradation and cruelty to sentient beings are not unique to industrial animal agriculture; rather, they are characteristic of industrial agriculture as a whole. I wonder if Foer has ever visited, or considered the impact of, a thousand-acre soybean monoculture. We have demanded cheap food, and so we have received cheap, destructive food production. Second, vegetarian moralism denies an essential fact of living: death. Everything dies, and not always in its due time.

This is really bad stuff, but at least it's stupid rather than anything worse. Far be it for me to defend a pretentious little putz like Foer, but his book wasn't only - or even mainly - about environmental damage; it was about the mind-staggering cruelty that accompanies large-scale meat production. Hauling in soy beans isn't any way to refute anything, it's just nonsensical clouding of the issue. And so is that windy claptrap about death being an essential part of life - again, Foer isn't railing (in his precious, nit-picking way) about creatures dying, he's railing about creatures being bred in their hundreds of thousands for the sole purpose of not only dying but dying horribly, in systematic and wild-eyed terror, often after prolonged torture. "Not always in its due time" falls just a bit shy of that mark.

But Jablonski's letter wasn't the worst of it, hoo-no! The worst of it came from Paul Gahlinger, who compounds Jablonski's sophistry with genuine evil:

There is only one good reason not to eat meat: because you don't like it. If vegetarians think they consume less by eating lower on the food chain, they should keep in mind that humans, whether they eat meat or not, use the vast majority of the earth's resources. Their most effective contribution to global well-being would be to simply not exist. Is it better for aging animals to suffer, blind, arthritic, starving, or cancerous, until merciful death? I grew up on a farm and can say with certainty that our animals gave their bodies in gratitude for a well-cared-for life.

At first I kept thinking this had to be some kind of joke; the animals you raised in captivity for food were grateful for your care? "Hey, you know what? Since you were kind enough to house me and forty of my closest friends from the rain (not the cold, but hey, you're not made of money!) these past two years, we've got an idea: why don't you eat us? Really, it's the least we can do." The mind staggers, trying to figure out how this Gahlinger person could resist adding the line, "A cow would eat you - if he could!" It's almost enough to make me feel sorry for Foer, who must be encountering evil little loonies like this guy at every whistle-stop along his book's publicity tour.


There were other things in this New Yorker, mind you - it's another fantastic issue, from a funny Roz Chast cartoon to a fascinating article about abortion and the so-called 'right to die' to a piece on world champion runner from Limpopo who appears to have some people (including Ariel Levy, the piece's author, who keeps using the wrong pronoun) convinced he's a woman, despite the fact that every photo purporting to be this person, Caster Semenya, are all clearly photos of a muscular young man. You read the oddest things these days in the Penny Press.



(Pop culture fans such as myself also couldn't help but be intrigued by the fact that the adorable little Zac Efron from "High School Musical" manages to get the ultimate high-culture thumbs up - David Denby caught his performance in "Me and Orson Welles" and liked it: "Efron draws on his confident good looks (from certain angles, this Jewish hoofer from California looks like, of all people, Tyrone Power) without being smug. He's an actor, after all - maybe even a genuine star")

But the good things weren't enough to counterbalance those horrible, evasive, the-Jews-like-their-ghettos letters, and the same tension was on display in the TLS as well. Here, again, there were very good things in abundance - including Daniel Karlin's review of Georges Connes prose translation (into French, that is) of Robert Browning's "The Ring and the Book," which manages to be both hard on Connes and refreshingly benign to Browning, who tends to take it in the teeth from critics these days. "The Ring and the Book" is a long, absolutely wonderful poem (I literally cannot conceive of a reason to offer a prose translation of it in any language), so it was all the more ruefully that I was forced to agree when Karlin writes, "I doubt there are 6,000 English readers of The Ring and the Book alive today." More's the pity, he's probably off by about 5,600 readers.


But not all the Browning in the world can compensate for what the normally-sensible Sylvia Brownrigg writes about the insufferable Dave Eggers in her review of Eggers' screenplay for the new movie-travesty of Where the Wild Things Are and his new collection of short stories, The Wild Things, that purports to flesh out the world Maurice Sendak created in 1971. It's going to be physically painful to copy this stuff out, but I'll endure it for my readers:

Dave Eggers is the self-anointed king of the influential empire that is McSweeney's: begun as a wittily designed literary journal, it subsequently became an "Internet Tendency" (ie, website), a publishing house and the purveyor of an all-round sensibility and style, in which high irony is laid over a base of sincerity and optimism. The co-founder of 826 Valencia, a non-profit writing centre for youth, Eggers this month received the Literarian Award for "outstanding service to the American literary community". Reading The Wild Things, I could picture the multi-faceted Eggers as Max, governor of an unruly but lovable group of creatures, and wishing from time to time that he could run away from them all and enjoy a calm, hot dinner. With all that he does and presides over, it is possible to forget that Eggers is also a very good, very daring writer of prose, who can produce images and characters of complexity, empathy, and humour.

Yeesh. I hope Brownrigg gets the job/endorsement/date for which she's so heinously fishing, but still - this the TLS! Surely some editor somewhere along the line should have stopped her from sullying the reputation of the finest review organ in the world by this shameless cozying with an overreaching fraud of such vast proportions as Eggers? If he can produce very good, very daring prose - characters of complexity, empathy, and humor - he's done a damn good job keeping those talents to himself. Instead, he's shared with the world only flat, boring prose and one-note allegories so heavy-handed they make John Bunyan look like P. J. O'Rourke. His books are boring in exactly the same way over and over again; they all reek of the class clown who has yet to learn that being merely clever is no sign of deep intelligence (insects do it, when they disguise themselves as something they're not). And since Eggers runs his own publishing house (whose smarmy condescension continues the lampoon the very sincerity and optimism Brownrigg says it champions), he gets to do all this without the slightest hint of editorial interference - not that running his own publishing house seems to be necessary. Your power as a literary name-dropper and taste-maker is absolute, if the TLS can so sing your praises without a trace of irony. As if that Literarian of the Year crap weren't bad enough.




On slightly less elevated levels of outrage (although hey, if you're lower down, you've got a shorter space to fall, right?), there's the cover interview with Twilight: New Moon boy-toy Taylor Lautner in the latest Rolling Stone. The interview, such as it is, is by Neil Strauss, and after only a couple of paragraphs, I was feeling sorry for every participant. I mean, here you have one enormous conglomerate, the publicity machine behind New Moon, instructing its newly bepected thespian to submit to an interview and photo shoot, and you have another enormous conglomerate, the media company of which Rolling Stone is but one outlet, instructing its obviously talented interviewer to turn out juicy copy despite the fact that it's obvious from the start the first conglomerate has instructed its star to say virtually nothing at all. What follows is pretty much mathematically destined to be a complete waste of everybody's time, and apart from the enjoyment to be had from Strauss' snappy prose, it is.



The young star is in pure LautnerBot mode, responding in noncommittal monosyllables to all but the most innocuous questions (and lying outright, telling Strauss he's never so much as smoked a cigarette or had a beer, despite the fact that he just got done shooting a movie on location for months with a cast that party like Fellini extras). In this he's much the same as Zac Efron when he's in Efronocon mode, and Strauss is quick to pick up on it and speculate: "With such polite, and seemingly oblivious, responses, it sometimes appears as if Lautner has taken a press-training course in evading answers." The best part of this puff piece is Strauss' deconstruction of the whole genre of young stardom:

There are two kinds of child stars: the Lindsay Lohans and the Zac Efrons. The Lohans are from broken homes, were abandoned in some way and witnessed or were victims of some form of abuse. The Efrons are raised by two parents who love them and support them, and are brought up in some sort of religious faith. The Lohans end up in the tabloids for doing stupid, destructive things to themselves and others, usually fueled by drugs, alcohol and self-esteem issues; the Efrons tend to work hard, discourage any attention paid to their personal lives and stay away from clubs, drugs, and the back seat of police cars. Lohans are interesting but unstable and depressed, while Efrons are boring but grounded and happy.

Needless to say, Strauss concludes that the LautnerBot is an Efron.

So if the writing is snappy and the piece itself is fluff, you might be asking what could possibly cause irritation! Well, it's this: at the beginning of the article, Strauss is trying to find some "dirt" on Lautner (that's when the lying about tobacco and alcohol happens, as well as some probably true denials of doing coke or getting arrested) - trying and failing. You almost forget about that angle of the piece until you reach the very end, when Strauss, obviously irked by his star's teflon question-deflecting all throughout their interviews, starts to ask leading questions:

Strauss: Like you said on "Valentine's Day" you and Taylor [Swift] got along really well. My guess is there is something romantic going on, and you're seeing how it developes.

LautnerBot: You're pretty good with the analysis. So I don't know. I guess I'm going to trust you.

Strauss: Of course, there are other possibilities.

LautnerBot: Yeah, what other possibilities?

Struass: Another possibility is that you're just sort of discovering yourself ...

LautnerBot: OK.

Struass: ... as a young person trying to figure out his sexual identity in the world ...

LautnerBot: OK. I see where you're going. Interesting choice.

Strauss: It is a possibility.

LautnerBot: There are lots of rumors out there.

Reading that, the small naive part of me irritatedly asked, "So being gay is the equivalent of having a drug problem?" Of course I instantly recalled the conglomerates involved; the LautnerBot has obviously been programmed not to alienate any of New Moon's gazillion potential ticket-buyers - most certainly including the vast undulating sea of gay men (of all ages) who won't exactly be sighing over Lautner's acting abilities. Lautner has said in half a dozen interviews that he isn't gay, but now the stakes are higher, and ambiguity sells, and the vortex of all that lying and manipulating is enough to irritate me regardless of my food's quality.

Fortunately, there'll be other weeks in the Penny Press! Even though it's always nice to read good press for Robert Browning, I'm calling this one a rain day.

Train Wrecks Possibly Avoided in the Penny Press!

Naturally, like all the rest of the blogosphere, I can't resist commenting on the Zac Efron article in the latest GQ, if only to weigh in on one of the foremost questions other bloggers have had: what's with the cover photo? Not only have many posters commented on the eerie similarity between that shot of teen heartthrob Efron and Steve Carrell from the movie poster of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," but almost everybody has wondered about the proportions of the photo - surely, they've said, something about the shot is Photoshopped? It just doesn't look right.

Such doubters are reckoning without two things: first, Efron is eensy-weensy. He's not what those of us In the Know refer to as Kennen-sized, but he's not far off: five feet tall in his argyle socks, and tipping the scales at barely 100 pounds. And second, every single day he puts roughly 2 pounds of polychemicalized gunk in his hair, causing it to attain the size and molecular consistency of a second head. When you combine these two things with the fact that Efron is apparently deeply lost in the current ridiculous fashion of skinny clothing - not just jeans but suits as well - you see at once that the cover photo need not be doctored: it's entirely possible for Efron to look that epicene naturally.


Ah, but the real pith isn't in the photos, despite how many gay computer monitors now sport that hanging-from-the-parking-meter shot as their background! No, the real merit is the article (made of boring old words) that accompanies the pictures. "The Graduate" is by the always comment-worthy Alex Pappedemas, and it's consistently, gloriously better than its material.

That material is incredibly skimpy. Not only does it seem like Pappedemas got very little time with with his superstar subject (one brief hike in the Hollywood Hills, one brief drive to one brief lunch on an outdoor deck)(both of which combine to assert one big omission, of course - if your reedy little star is first hiking outside and then, despite oft-voiced anxieties over intrusive paparazzi, lunching outside, the reason is because your reedy little star regularly needs to smoke, which can't be done indoors in California these days; there's no mention of this in the article because, almost certainly, the reedy little star - or his handlers - asked that there not be)(similar omissions were regularly made on Justin Timberlake's behalf, back when he was Zac Efron), but all during that time, the portcullis is firmly locked in the 'down' position. This isn't just the result of a studio ordering its breakout star not to set tongues wagging - it's also genetic at this point, since Efron has been conditioned by Disney since he was a fetus. The Mouse's control of the Dark Side makes Palpatine look like a piker.


So Pappedemas has an interview with the hottest young male star on the planet, and he knows before he starts that he's not going to get much in the way of meaningful dialogue, although Pappedemas can be such a good interviewer - and, you get the impression, such a personable guy - that he gets more than you expect and turns it out nicely:

When Efron talks about these guys [Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, believe it or not], or when he talks about meeting DeNiro and how all the "dedication and hard work" DeNiro had put into all those great roles was written in the lines of DeNiro's face, or when he talks about how the movies of the '70s were better because they didn't test-market everything, you get the feeling he just wants to say the right thing. That he wants to make sure we know that everything he's done up until now - the basic-cable ratings record set by the second High School Musical TV movie, his decision to take a smallish role in Hairspray that winked charmingly at his own decidedly retro teen-idol persona, even his leap into the world of PG-13 movies with the winningly goofy old-dude-becomes-young-dude comedy 17 Again - means exactly jack, cinematically. That at least for now, he does not yet have the kind of history a man can hang in a barn.

To his credit, Efron throughout the interview seems wary not only of interviews themselves (Pappademas must be GQ's go-to guy for this kind of assignment)(either that, or he knows where all the bodies are buried) but of the easy way he could lose everything he has. Pappademas is very good on some of the raw variables that come into play:

You can tell this is what got him here, what drove him through the endless basketball drills and dance rehearsals High School Musical required - this sense that the work was a challenge and that the challenge was necessary. Sure, he's cute as a damn button - but he's pushed himself this far with the iron will of a mathlete bent on crushing his crosstown rivals. Whether this is going to be enough to get him into better films - as opposed to just bigger ones, which will undoubtedly come - remains to be seen. Better films demand certain intangibles, stuff an actor can't necessarily pull out of himself by buckling down and studying hard. He could smack the ceiling of his talent and that'll be that. But it won't be for lack of drive.

Other things we learn about the teen heart-throb in the course of the interview? He's got a potty mouth (rule of thumb: if sixteen "fuck"s got onto the printed page, sixteen thousand were uttered into the L.A. air), he respects his parents, and he's never worn false eyelashes. And he's not much more satisfied with the shape of his career thus far than anybody else. Here's hoping Pappademas is still interested in interviewing him in another ten years.

books! crocodiles and kings!

Two books in our interval, both continuing my little streak of good reads.

Karleen Koen's big book Dark Angels turned out to be a quite enjoyable piece of Restoration historical fiction. This was a relief, since the Restoration, worse than any period (except of course the Regency), tends to bring out the Amelia Nettleship in so many writers (for those of you who don't know the name, it refers to a lady novelist and "bottler of historical bilge-water" in John Mortimer's immortal story "Rumpole and the Bubble Reputation"). Certainly Koen herself gave me cause to worry, since right there in her Author's Note she refers to Charles II as "the merry monarch." That's usually a sign of trouble.

But Dark Angels is almost entirely free of trouble! Happily, Koen has done a large amount of research - a student of the Restoration (such as myself, for instance) will find comparatively little to wince at in this book. Of course the squalor possible even at the highest levels of court is omitted (Regency novels are especially guilty of this), and I can assure you all that never in his life did Charles II ever utter the word "gadzooks." But these are minor things - the overall feel of the book is historically accurate.

The book is a prequel to Through a Glass Darkly. It tells the adventures of one of that book's best-drawn characters, Alice Verney, when she was a girl at the court of the King, and it moves along with a surprisingly light touch. The King, the Queen, Monmouth, Clarendon, Nell Gwynn - they're all here, and Koen brings a very enjoyable freshness to her portrayal of all of them.

Charles himself is the toughest nut to crack, for historians and novelists both. He was extremely intelligent but also lazy and doubting and self-doubting, and the overall combination is almost impossible to catch in all its facets. Rose Tremain gives a very good modern spin to it all in her novel Restoration, and of course the gold standard here is the mighty Forever Amber, so far unequalled and certainly not seriously challenged by Dark Angels. Kathleen Winsor's huge, bawdy, funny, smart novel hangs over almost every page of Koen's book - not in a bad way, but impossible not to notice.

Fortunately, Dark Angels succeeds on enough of its own terms to avoid being hurt by the comparison. This is a big, readable novel set in a perennially favorite time period: it'll be a snap to recommend.

Likewise the second book here, Beast by Ally Kennen. It's the story of young Stephen, living in foster care, not all that bright, lunatic mother and seedy, criminal father, working jobs he hates in order to afford the biggest secret of his life: that he's keeping an enormous salt water crocodile captive in an abandoned reservoir.

The crocodile is huge and always hungry, and of course the secret gets out and of course the crocodile gets out, and all of it is just begging to be made into a movie starring Zach Efron.

Nevertheless, it's a very good read - utterly unpretentious and utterly without cutesy-poo preciousness. No attempt is made to polish up the fact that Stephen, though a decent enough kid, is a loser from a family of losers. And the crocodile itself is never in any danger of being turned cutesy or wise - it's just a big vicious animal that'll do anything to survive.

I resisted the urge at any point in the novel to consider the crocodile a metaphor for something else, and I'm grateful to Kennen that the book ALLOWED me to refuse to do that. With all due apologies to Kafka, extended metaphors like that virtually never work. Despite whatever other levels are operating in it, this is very much the story of a kid who's secretly keeping a giant crocodile caged and fed, period.

And of course my liking of the book was increased by one little sub-plot handled well. At one point early in the novel, Stephen comes into possession of a miserable little stray dog he names Malackie. Almost as soon as he acquires the dog he gives him to his derelict father, which caused me as a reader to clench my teeth. The whole time I was reading the book, the whole while I was following the building tensions involving the crocodile, I was praying Kennen wouldn't simply forget about the dog. But I got all the way to the end and there was no mention of it, and I was prepared to hate the book on that account alone. Then I reached the last page, where Stephen goes back to his father's abandoned shack:

I see him.
He's so thin he looks like a starvation victim. He's too weak to move far, but there's a stagnant bucket of water he must have been drinking from. Just enough to keep him alive. There's rubbish all around. Turds and food, a broken-open box of cookies, a wrapper of ham. A bread bag.
"Poor old bugger," I say gently, and touch his head. He looks up at me and sighs. His coat is wet through. I wonder how he hasn't died of exposure. I reckon he's been out her for nearly two weeks. I untie my top from around my waist and wrap it around him.
I loosen the rope. It's so tight it's bitten right into him. The skin is red and raw underneath. I only allow myself to think briefly about what it must have been like tied up out here, day after day, night after night, slowly starving to death.
"It's going to be alright," I say. "I'm back. I'm looking after you now."
I pick him up and hug him to my chest. He's so light.
"Come on, Malackie, my boy," I say. "Let's go."

That's the way I like books to end (although it was, of course, the water and not the bucket that was stagnant) ... although it'll be tricky recommending this to people, since it's a hardcover and I'm still a little unclear on exactly who buys hardcover teen novels.

Up next? Why, I'm not really sure! Tonight I'll be re-reading Chapterhouse: Dune in preparation for reading - gigantically against my better judgement - the new 'sequel' to it by Frank Herbert's son. But my next brand-new book? It eludes me at the moment! I expect by this time tomorrow I'll have read it, and your faithful scribe shall divulge!