Comics! Adventure Comics #1!

Well naturally, I read DC Comics' new relaunch of Adventure Comics - how could I not? After all, Adventure Comics and I go back a long way, and the two DC creations here - Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes - well, I go back a long way with them too.

Once again, Superboy is the star of Adventure Comics - only it isn't young super-powered Clark Kent, sole survivor of the planet Krypton ... it's a vat-grown clone created in a lab using DNA from both Superman and Lex Luthor, a clone now called Conner Kent, since he's been quasi-adopted by saintly Ma Kent in Smallville, Clark Kent's rural hometown. This character already has a long and eventful history in DC Comics (had Stevereads existed back when he had his first series, with fantastic artwork by Tom Grummett, I'd have praised it then), including dying in some mega-crisis or other.

He's back now, and this first issue has the languid pacing and extensive backgrounding that's actually a canny way to kick off a series obviously meant to re-introduce the character to readers. In this issue, he respects Ma Kent, plays with Krypto the super-dog, has a long heart-to-heart with Superman, and secretly agonizes over the fact that one of his two daddies is the most evil man in the world. Geoff Johns does a good job drawing readers into what feels like a longer, more careful story than the usual first issue these days, and the coloring job Brian Buccellato does over Francis Manapul's oddly stiff artwork is nothing less than breathtaking.


And it was tough for me to notice those things, because the issue's back-up feature, "Long Live the Legion" (also by Johns, with artwork by Clayton Henry), is why I paid attention in the first place. Here were all the marbles in one inertron basket: the dust had settled from the Legion of Three Worlds, a couple of weeks had passed, and all I wanted was the answer to one question: is the Legion, the real Legion, back at last?

It is indeed. Right there on page 23, I get literally everything I've wanted from Legion creators for what? About six or seven years now? I'll quote:

It all began when Jor-el and Lara sent their only son to Earth to escape the destruction of the planet Krypton. Kal-el became the first documented alien immigrant to Earth [picture here of Clark Kent flying, where his Superboy costume]. A thousand years later, Kal-el's legend paved the way for extraterrestrials from across the universe to venture to Earth. That included three teenagers who saved the life of the 31st century's greatest entrepreneur, R. J. Brande, from a mysterious assassin. Inspired by their unity, Brande funded the Legion of Super-Heroes - an organization made up of representatives from across the universe. Eventually, the three founding Legionaires even traveled back in time and recruited their inspiration, Kal-el, a.ka. Superboy. And the rest, as they say, is history.

So there it is, and thank you, DC Comics. Just leave it like that and tell stories, and I'll stay happy.

Well, almost. This issue contained an embarrassing little mistake in the two-page spread of the adult Legion. The spread was meant to be impressive (although Henry hasn't yet fully crafted his own sense of what the Legionaires look like ... I trust that'll come with time), but no geekoid Legion fan is going to notice that, since right there on the left hand side, the identifying boxes for Shadow Lass and Night Night Girl have been transposed (these things are moved around the finished art by computer? Are such things possible?). The blue-skinned young lady in the black bikini is actually Shadow Lass, Tasmia Mallor, the planetary champion of Talok VIII, who can generate vast fields of impenetrable darkness. The beehive-haired young woman in the black leotards is actually Night Girl of Kathoon, whose father - in the time-honored tradition of comics - experimented on her to give her super-powers. Just to head off the geeks who'll no doubt be talking of little else for the next week.


I liked this relaunch of Adventure Comics, despite my slightly wistful tone here. The format itself - a comic split between a main story and a Legion back-up story - has never worked, not once in the entire long history of its use at DC or Marvel; one of the two features always, always ends up being the readers' clamored-for favorite and taking over the title. I'm betting the winner here will be Superboy, and that the Legion will have to do more wandering in the desert of book-less creations before getting a nice new #1 of its own.

I'm just hoping when that nice new #1 comes, it won't contain a retooled origin story! Let's just make that sweet, perfect template on page 23 THE origin of the Legion, shall we?

Some Good Open Letters - Part 1!

Our books today comprise a quick tour through that most maligned and rewarding corner of the Kingdom of Good Letters: book criticism.

On one easy level, book criticism has the rare distinction of being one of the only types of writing every single literate person has done at one point or other. We do it first as children - the most honest and most brutal of literary critics - because on its simplest level, book criticism is simply a matter of telling another person whether or not you liked a book in question.

Further refinements accrue. From saying whether or not you liked a book, it's short step to saying why either way. And saying why necessarily entails saying whether or not the stuff the author tries succeeds, and to what extent. And if it doesn't succeed, why doesn't it? Before you know it, you've launched upon that much--vexed subject, the writer's craft. That ultimate refinement might look forbiddingly rarefied, but the best literary critics never forget its incredibly simple origins.

'The best literary critics' covers more territory than this single entry can encompass, of course. I've got no Addison for you this time around, no Johnson, no Coleridge or Arnold or Macaulay, no Lamb - even though they're all great and will all have their entries in due course (we've been on this little literary excursion for roughly 500 entries, so by now I assume you'll all trust me when I say: sooner or later, I'll get around to everything).


No, this time around we'll just dip in quickly to some juicy, delightful passages from some of my personal favorites in the genre - and some of the greatest exponents of the genre that all of us over at Open Letters strive to continue every month. These are writers I return to over and over again - and they're certainly among the literary figures who taught me how to read in the first place, how to think about reading, eventually how to write about books. The furthest back we'll go this time around is Walter Bagehot, who began his 1869 review of the poetry of Henry Crabb Robinson in this irresistible way:

Perhaps I should be ashamed to confess it, but I own I opened the three large volumes of Mr. Robinson's memoirs with much anxiety. Their bulk, in the first place, appalled me; but that was by no means my greatest apprehension. I knew I had a hundred times heard Mr. Robinson say that he hoped something he would leave behind 'would be published and be worth publishing.' I was aware too - for it was no deep secret - that for half a century or more he had kept a diary, and that he had been preserving correspondence besides; and I was dubious what sort of things these would be, and what - to use Carlyle's words - any human editor could make of them. Even when Mr. Robinson used to talk so I used to shudder; for the men who have tried to me memoir-writers and failed, are as numerous, or nearly so, as those who have tried to be poets and failed. A specific talent is as necessary for the one as for the other.

There's a perfect combination there of the pose of humility and the careful seeding of its opposites, and the combination has the effect of placing all your confidence in the reviewer, come what may. Very, very smart writers (and they didn't come much smarter than Bagehot, despite a certain inclination toward tub-thumping) can use this facile admission of fallibility in just this way to attest to their aesthetic purity, although another of my favorite writers on books (also a passably talented writer of books) actually meant his such protestations seriously:

For my part, I have a small idea of the degree of accuracy possible to man, and I feel sure these studies teem with error. One and all were written with genuine interest in the subject; many, however, have been conceived and finished with imperfect knowledge; and all have lain, from beginning to end, under the disadvantages inherent in this style of writing.

That's Robert Louis Stevenson, and those 'disadvantages' he's referring to are a part of the writing school I'm celebrating today: pressing deadlines, deadpan unfamiliarity with your putative subject, obdurate editors - in short, the pitfalls of literary journalism. The best writers who indulge in this kind of writing find ways to get around these pitfalls, ways to turn them into strengths (not to mention how good such writers get at researching their subjects with incredible speed and depth), and Stevenson was one of those writers, half-apologetic, half-defiant of his own results:

Short studies are, or should be, things woven like a carpet, from which it is impossible to detach a strand. What is perverted has its place there for ever, as a part of the technical means by which what is right has been presented. ... But this must not be taken as a propitiatory offering to the gods of shipwreck; I trust my cargo unreservedly to the chances of the sea ...

Those chances can be harsh - most of the best book-writing is resoundingly out of print today. Usually, the occasional essays authors write for cash and recognition (and free review copies) are collected, dolled up with a new Introduction, printed in low numbers, and remaindered almost instantly. We've seen some critics like that, here at Stevereads, and the reverse is also true: famous authors of other kinds of stuff get their book-writings bound and publicized even if those writings are worthless. Luckily, one of the greatest novelists of the last century was also one of the greatest book-critics, so we'll always have the pure, cool pools of Virginia Woolf's Common Reader series to dive into, always sucking in a sharp breath at the clarity of it all, always emerging refreshed:

In her [Jane Austen's] masterpieces, the same gift is brought to perfection. Here is nothing out of the way; it is midday in Northamptonshire; a dull young man is talking to rather a weakly young woman on the stairs as they go up to dress for dinner, with housemaids passing. But, from triviality, from commonplace, their words become suddenly full of meaning, and the moment for both one of the most memorable of their lives. It fills itself; it shines; it glows; it hangs before us, deep, trembling, serene for a second; next, the housemaid passes, and this drop in which all the happiness of life has collected gently subsides again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordinary existence.

That of course is genius writing about genius, a rare and stunning combination - but I submit that it happens more often in book-criticism than any other field of writing, for reasons that are pretty obvious once you start thinking of them. Reading is one of the most personal things anyone, including writers, can do - even on deadline and badly hung over, that's a deep well to tap. There are charlatans aplenty, of course, stupid, mulish faux-readers who scan pages for a living only in order to find the shopworn little collection of literary prejudices they haven't changed since high school (the mind recoils in horror at the prospect of a Collected Michiko Kakutani). But there are also entirely wonderful times where even the bagatelle indisciplines of an inveterate autodidact can be brought to a perfect pitch by the fires of reading passion. The best example of this in the 20th century was Randall Jarrell's Poetry and the Age, in which our singingly honest critic tackles the very question of what it is to be a critic - at times obliquely, as in his shouted exhortations to young critics:

Write so as to be of some use to a reader - a reader, that is, of poems and stories, not of criticism. Vary a little, vary a little! Admit what you can't conceal, that criticism is no more than (and no less than) the helpful remarks and the thoughtful and disinterested judgment of a reader, a loving and experienced and able reader, but only a reader. And remember that works of art are never data, raw material, the crude facts that you critics explain and explain away. Remember that you can never be more than the staircase to the monument, the guide to the gallery, the telescope through which the children see the stars. At your best you make people see what they might never have seen without you; but they must always forget you in what they see.

And at other times directly, seeking classification:

What is a critic, anyway? So far as I can see, he is an extremely good reader - one who has learned to show others what he saw in what he read. He is always many other things too, but these belong to his accident, not his essence. Of course, it is often the accident and not the essence that we read a critic for: pieces of criticism are frequently, though not necessarily, works of art of an odd anomalous kind, and we can sympathize with someone when he says lovingly about a critic, as Empson says about I. A. Richards, that we get more from him when he's wrong than we do from other people when they're right.

In that first duty of the book-critic, the duty to be out there reading and reporting back, Jarrell is always nothing less than superb - reading him on the heart-breakingly few authors he ever bothered to write about always throws a new and blinding light on those authors and on the process of reading itself.




That process gets its most sensitive, probing, intelligent evaluation from a writer we don't fist think of in this metier: in 1961 C. S. Lewis published An Experiment in Criticism, and it's an astonishing, humblingly brilliant prolonged meditation on the nature of both reading and writing about reading. I could fill an entry this long simply by quoting the best of Lewis' virtually limitless store of great lines: "We are so busy doing things with the work that we give it too little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet only ourselves." "Forced to talk incessantly about books, what can they [critics] do but try to make books into the sort of things they can talk about?" "I would say that every book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment, in this sense, is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can't provide even that, we may be excused from inquiry into its higher qualities." "The best safeguard against bad literature is a full experience of good." "The ideally bad book is the one of which a good reading is impossible." "If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him." And so on, smiling the whole time.

The 'experiment' in Lewis' book is tongue-in-cheek daring: to read books, to return to a more honest reading of them, to give to each of them that "inner silence" that, Lewis maintains, is the only path to any book's heart. "The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender," Lewis writes, and he's alive to the differences between people who read and people who don't:

In that way, the judgement that someone is unliterary is like the judgement that 'This man is not in love', whereas the judgement that my taste is bad is more like 'This man is in love, but with a frightful woman.'

But his own allegiances couldn't be more clear:

Those of us who have been true readers all of our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated.

And he reserves his closest approximation of scorn not for the unliterary but for bad critics, who would have no place in the world that resulted from his novel 'experiment':

Thus one result of m system would be to silence the type of critic for whom all the great names in English literature - except for the half dozen protected by the momentary critical 'establishment' - are as so many lamp-posts for a dog. And this I consider a good thing. These dethronements are a great waste of energy. Their acrimony produces heat at the expense of light. They do not improve anyone's capacity for good reading. The real way of mending a man's taste is not to denigrate his present favourites but to teach him how to enjoy something better.

Most book-critics - even the best ones (some of whom I've had the privilege to work with) - never achieve this kind of elevation; Lewis did perfectly what they must often do quickly and as best they can. But there's a real art to be found in those fast-honest appraisals and condemnations, especially if they, too adhere to Lewis' call that they be entertaining. And if you get some insight, a good line or two, and maybe a new discovery in the bargain, well then the gods of shipwreck have been kind.

This Duchess of Mine!

Our book today is This Duchess of Mine, a 2009 entry in Eloisa James' ongoing series of Romance novels featuring Georgian duchesses with various kinds of marital dilemmas. Which, as a one-sentence overview, doesn't distinguish these books much from hundreds of other Romance novels published every year - it often seems like the half that don't feature the sultry undead feature the idle landed gentry.

The important difference - in these as in all books, in all genres, at all times - is the tenor of the prose. Clever plotting helps, and a sturdy premise is quite useful (and neither of those things is ever as common as I'd like), but the basic math of fiction still applies: the more energy and wit the author pours into their work, the more enjoyment you'll get out of it.

In this respect, the genre of Romance virtually belongs to Eloisa James. It's a given in this series of hers that her love-plagued duchesses are always smarter and quicker-witted than everybody around them (including, with satisfying regularity, their husbands), but the same could be said of James herself - her prose sparkles with lively dialogue, tastefully understated descriptions (over-elaborate descriptions being the bane of period Romances), an easy assurance (including - and extreme rarity here - action sequences, which James handles with exciting ease), and a continuing awareness of 'the Big Picture,' a broader perspective than you usually find in genre novels.


The problem faced by Jemma, the beautiful and slightly imperious Duchess of Beaumont in This Duchess of Mine, is mischievously simple: she's in love with her husband. Which sounds simple enough in 2009 (or, considering the divorce rates in America, maybe it doesn't), but in 1784 London's smart set, it's positively gauche. Neither the Duke nor the Duchess has a spotless romantic history (he has a mistress, she dabbles in naughty affairs)(although never, she somewhat limply asserts, with a married man), and when the book opens he's hardly thinking of passionate affairs with his wife - he's far too absorbed in helping William Pitt run England. His wife isn't the only character to refer to Elijah, the Duke, as 'puritanical,' but she's determined to add some actual passion to their arranged marriage. It's a serious mission and she's serious about it, despite being surrounded by fawning fops who advise against seriousness of any kind:

"Are we allowed to be serious only about stockings?" she asked.

He thought about it longer than she thought necessary. "I am quite serious about scandal," he offered.

"But never about passion itself?"

He wrinkled his nose but his eyes were sympathetic. "Thank God, infatuation has never forced me into seriousness. A beautiful woman should never be serious, Duchess."

"Why not?"

"It implies that there is something you cannot have. And we who are not as beautiful prefer to believe that you have everything you wish for in life. That is the essence of beauty, after all."

One of the little hallmarks of a good Romance novel is audience participation - if the author knows her business, she'll have her readers so frustrated with her main characters that they won't know whether to cheer for them or strangle them. This is certainly the case with Elijah and Jemma, both extremely intelligent, willful chess players, and - it turns out - both wanting the same thing: the complete devotion of the other. As each proceeds through a series of harmless flirtations and stumbled-into misunderstandings, they alternately infuriate and exasperate each other, as in a tense scene where the Duchess shows the Duke an expensive new chess set:

"Where did you acquire this?" he inquired.

"Oh, it was a gift," Jemma said. "Look, Elijah, the rook has a tiny person inside the window."

"Would you say that I am a restrained person?"

Jemma looked up. Her husband sounded as if he were speaking through clenched teeth. "Yes, of course I would, Elijah."

"In short, my face never takes on a seething expression like that on the face of this king."

She was starting to wish she had just gone to bed.

"This is a gift from a man, isn't it?" Elijah said, still with that curiously flat intonation.

"If you are planning to boil with rage over that fact," she said. "I believe we should cancel our game until tomorrow."

"This chess set is worth a small fortune."

Jemma put down the piece she was holding and rose to her feet.

"I know exactly who sent it to you. And I won't have it."

This Duchess of Mine is pure, vivacious fun, with two central characters who are compulsively interesting. James' writing rewards readers with a smile or a surprise on every page. This last week saw the publication of her next Duchess book, A Duke of Her Own - I haven't read it yet, but I'm betting I'll like it.

The Flesh and the Spirit!

Our book today is The Flesh and the Spirit, the best-selling 1952 WWII novel by Charles Shaw that was later adapted into the hit 1957 movie starring Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr. That movie was called Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, which is a long mile better title than The Flesh and the Spirit, but then, movie producers know catchy.

The book is excellent from start to finish (that isn't a journey - the thing's not even 200 pages), and it shouldn't be. Dramatically speaking, it does virtually everything wrong. First there's the set-up, as trite and hackneyed as any could be: it's wartime, and Hank Allison, a grunt of an unlearned marine, has been stranded on a South Sea island after a Japanese attack on his ship. On the island he finds a pretty young woman who's also stranded there - and she's a Roman Catholic nun! D'oh!

Mr. Allison and Sister Angela are trapped on the island behind enemy lines - Japanese planes continually site and strafe the place, and Japanese soldiers eventually take up residence, forcing our pair into hiding in the jungle hills. And that's it as far as the gross tonnage of plot goes: the pair hide from the Japanese until they're eventually rescued by the Allies. The situation should be lethal to drama, even on top of the cliches (there aren't one or two other stranded survivors? Allison isn't just a bit more educated or self-controlled? Sister Angela isn't - as Allison himself bewails on more than one occasion - old and ugly?).

But there are other dramas going on in this book, and they're absorbing, almost against the reader's wishes. Because despite being hungry, exhausted, disoriented, and in mortal danger, Allison is also horny, and Sister Angela has a pretty face and a winning smile (and freckles, he's later disconcerted to notice). He resists his urges as long as he can (if Sister Angela were a typist, you immediately suspect, she'd have been nailed as often and as vigorously as a piece of plywood), and that adds an underlying current of tension to the story.

There are underlying rewards as well. The Flesh and the Spirit is deceptively well-written, with a lean, confident prose style that relies on silences far more often than any contemporary author would dare. Shaw uses a very understated brand of narrative omniscience, gently and quickly telling us of things his characters can't see, very deftly letting us know the thoughts they don't share. Take for instance a scene early in the book where the two refugees watch from the hillside as passing Japanese warplanes bomb the little settlement where Sister Angela had just been:

All the jungle was silent, appalled by the fury that had fallen upon it. The marine and the nun, partly dazed and feeling the deadly weakness of reaction, stood on shaky legs, not knowing quite what to do. It was as though their will had been shocked out of them. Both of them were conscious of the frightening implication behind the bombing, the implication that they were not unknown to the enemy. They could not escape the feeling that the enemy knew they were there, that the bombing was a personal attack. They felt that the night and the sky were peopled with the enemy, leering at them, waiting to strike them down.

Allison recovered himself somewhat, and heard his companion murmuring.

"What did you say?"

"I am praying."

"Pray harder," he said a little brutal because he thought praying was a silly thing to do. "They'll be back. They'll sure be back."

They came back twice that night, the last time in greater force and with heavier bombs.

Shaw was an Australian hack journalist, and in some ways it's obvious from this novel (it's completely obvious from the detective novels he wrote under a pen name - they're all unspeakably dreadful) - and not only bad ways. There's a clarity in the narrative line, for instance, an surely something of the novel's leanness can be attributed to journalistic habits. And then there's the dialogue, which is the strongest thing about the book; it's meticulously shaped and rigidly controlled - this whole thing could be adapted for the stage in about fifteen minutes. One example: Allison has just learned that the Japanese soldiers have women along with them (he's attempted the unenviable task of trying to tell Sister Angela what exact purpose those women serve on the island - he's assured her they aren't nurses), and this fact makes Sister Angela feel oddly better:

"Strangely enough," said Sister Angela pensively, "it gives me some small comfort to think about other women near me, even though I can't speak with them."

"Look," he said, startled, "don't you get no ideas them women could do anything for you if you got nabbed. Them Japs don't give their women no say at all. Don't never forget they're enemies, all of them!"

She sighed. "Enemies? Yes. Made so by men who have forgotten God. But we are not enemies in His sight, only weak, foolish, quarreling, sinful children. Only because somebody has ordered it so are those women and I enemies. In our hearts we aren't enemies. We -"

He interrupted her. "Don't you fall for that stuff. If you'd seen what my outfit seen, after we got cut off in the Philippines, you wouldn't talk like that. Give that stuff away, Sister, it don't make no sense, no sense at all."

(a bit later she chastises him coldly, "Mr. Allison, I'll obey you in most things, because you are a soldier and we are in peril. But you cannot give me orders about my religion, or my thoughts or opinions. Let us not talk like this again. I don't like it.")

The Flesh and the Spirit isn't without flaws - like I mentioned, the setup is too pat, and the fact that Allison can't go a few weeks without sex, the fact that after such a small interval he'd be so crazed he'd violently consider deflowering a nun, for cripes sake, is just too easy, a cheap way of pushing forward the drama. But overall Shaw's performance here is marvelous: there's an elementary simplicity to the tale, and the story benefits enormously from the fact that Shaw is smart enough neither to have Allison be a complete brute nor to have Sister Angela be a world-class theologian. Despite the cardboard cut-out nature of the book's central contrivance, the two people at the heart of it are undeniably, winningly human.

An anonymous book-critic for the long-defunct Boston Traveler made the same points half a century ago (with lots of extraneous references to Dryden and Wordsworth), and it's still true today: The Flesh and the Spirit is considerably better than it has any right to be, and it's well worth your time, should you ever run across a copy at library or yard sale.

Frustration and Relief in the Penny Press!

Since I'm fairly prompt and fairly consistent with my icy glares, most of my friends have stopped asking me if I've yet acquired a Kindle from Amazon. Those friends have now moved on to a question almost as annoying and no less illogical: have I yet read Nicholson Baker's New Yorker article on how he acquired a Kindle from Amazon?

Well, since reading that article a) doesn't cost me the price of a month's rent, and b) doesn't involve a basic betrayal of everything I've stood for since 1520, I can actually get around to answering the second question. After all, I read The New Yorker virtually every week (it used to be 'religiously' every week, but ever since major non-industry magazines started indulging in 'Fashion Issues,' I've stopped indulging in blind loyalty - virtually nothing will elicit an icy glare from me faster than a gallumping old dowager like The New Yorker springing for a Fashion Issue) anyway, so Baker's article would have come across my path eventually (it's late crossing my path this week only because I was waiting for a certain young acquaintance to finish reading the issue so I could 'borrow' it - but since he's only just finished lip-moving his way through Talk of the Town, I went ahead and sprang for the issue myself).

Why those friends of mine were so eager for me to read this particular piece on the Kindle, as opposed to any of the other gazillion that have appeared, is a bit of a mystery to me. From the tone of their questions, I got the impression they somehow think I like Nicholson Baker, that he and I are simpatico somehow, that there'll be a fun and intimate correlation between his reactions to exploring the world of the Kindle and my own reactions. I'm not sure where this imagined correspondence comes from; to the best of my knowledge, Baker has never written a single book, fiction or nonfiction, that I even remotely liked - even merrily drunk, I've never expressed a sneaking admiration for his prose style or command of subject. Maybe it's just as simple as that he professes to care about books, and so do I.

Anyway, I finally read his article - and it was dismaying as all Hell. He starts out with the usual fey pose of wary detachment ("this object arrived today in the parcel post" .... etc.), talks a lot about the design flaws and aesthetic shortcomings of the Kindle and other devices designed to simulate the experience of reading a book, and in the end champions a twist in the tale I, for one, didn't see coming (I won't spoil it, since that aforementioned acquaintance will be getting to the end of this article sometime in 2010, and I wouldn't want to ruin it for him). Electronic reading receives no blanket condemnation in Baker's article - indeed, although he never comes right out and says it, he makes it pretty clear he views electronic reading as the inevitable fate of all reading. Which is a thought (expressed in a blog, yes, I'm aware of the irony) I abhor, of course.

But it was one glancing paragraph that really stopped me, a point where Baker is discussing some of the limitations of the Kindle:

Here's what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon ... Kindle books aren't transferrable. You can't give them away or lend them or sell them. You can't print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.

Doesn't really invoke the communal, infectious glory of the world of books, does it? Half an hour after reading Baker's article, I was happily sorting through used books I intended to buy at dirt-cheap prices, all books previously owned and perhaps loved by somebody else, and half an hour after that, I was either handing some of those books to new owners or mailing them to prospective new owners - and to put it mildly, I was having a great time. The Kindle and devices like it reduce books to mere text, to raw data - and the dismaying thing about these devices is how popular they are (the sales figures Baker quotes are staggering). It turns out that books have very likely always been raw data to most of the people who read them, and that's a sad and sobering thing to think about.

Not that I can't imagine an electronic book that I'd personally like - far from it, a version of that ideal alternative is briefly alluded to in Baker's article. My ideal electronic book would be a book, first of all: it would have a spine, a flexible front and back cover, and pages (at least four, anyway). Its power source would be a battery-stick that slides unobtrusively up into its spine, and that power source would last a very, very long time (in fact, I'm sure there's a way to link it to micro-photovoltaic panels embedded in those flexible covers, thus recharging the thing whenever it's exposed to light). The contents would be delivered to the book electronically (through a quick download at the library, I'd prefer), but once they were delivered, they'd be cut off from the outside world, manipulable only by me (stories of Amazon being able to reach into every Kindle on Earth and summarily remove an edition of a book whenever they choose ... well, such stories hardly make for comfortable reading, do they?). And I'd be able to manipulate the hell out of that text - underline, make margin notes, move footnotes from one edition of 'The Tempest' to another, cut and paste my own preferred illustrations, etc. And unlike with the Kindle, nobody would be able watch me do any of those things - the changes would be happening in my electronic book and nowhere else.

I'm not so much of a Luddite I don't drool at the prospect of such a device. An object that preserves the spine-handling and page-turning of paper-pulp books, but that has infinite options? So I could build my absolute ideal, say, "Paradise Lost" from a) the best text, b) the best annotations, and c) the best illustrations (right now, each of those things is attached to a separate edition)? The book equivalent of a mix CD - or even better, the book-equivalent of a blog? That would be wonderful beyond description. Having my entire library in that one sturdy, intuitive device (even if I kept a hundred actual physical books around, for old time's sake)? That would be wonderful. But that's not the Kindle, and the fact that so many thousands of consumers think what the Kindle is works just fine is dismaying.




When I turned to the latest issue of Men's Journal, I expected a certain undercurrent of dismay to follow with me. After all, although Men's Journal very often publishes fantastic, thoughtful articles, they're also a magazine that panders to a particular stratum of stupid young white American men - a stratum I absolutely hate, since they're not honestly dumb ... these are young men making a lot more money than they need who consider themselves intelligent, even clever, and who make that consideration explicitly and exclusively on competitive grounds.

In other words, it's a magazine for douchebags.

(The fact that every issue is absolutely LADEN with adds for cigars and cigarettes doesn't help any, either - although there IS something faintly comforting about the thought of so many douchebags acquiring unquittable wastingly fatal addictions)

And I was right: this issue contains its usual quota of really good writing, and it also contains an incredibly frustrating article on what a kick-ass awesome guy accessory a dog is. Sigh.

Bill Gifford writes the main little piece, called "Your Dog: A User's Manual" even though it covers virtually no aspect of living with a dog (and deepens the dismay by referring to these living beings as though they were items of gear like the stuff that fills the ad-space of the issue). One aspect that's given lots of attention is where you get your dog (magazines like Men's Journal always do this - they know their target audience is almost entirely concerned with the acquisition part of any new experience ... after which, boredom almost immediately sets in) - pet stores can be nefarious, we're told, and the Internet is rife with scams - so you'd better line up with a reputable breeder and put your name on a 2012 litter of puggles! Yeesh.

Animal shelters all across this country are killing record numbers of abandoned dogs every month (in shelters in the South, they're often stuffed into gas chambers 15 at a time - but for cost-cutting reasons, the amount of gas pumped in at each killing would only be quickly lethal to 5 or 6 dogs - thus guaranteeing all of those dogs a protracted, agonized death), but what are we told about the prospect of adopting one of those abandoned dogs? "Adopting a pre-owned pup from a shelter is a great option, but finding the right match can be tricky." Translation: Dude, it'll take, like, mad amounts of time! You wanna be shreddin' it with your dog, like, today!

And of course, wherever two or more of you are gathered in the name of speaking nonsense about dogs, there too shall Cesar Milan be: he's referred to as "the Dr. Phil for dog owners" (I'd actually agree with that entirely), and he gives five tips for prospective dog owners. True to form, the tips are either self-evident (walk your dog, we're helpfully told) or ridiculous ("reward the good, ignore the bad," we're told - if your dog does something wrong, just ignore it, don't acknowledge it at all ... just reward the good behavior, and you'll be fine. Yeesh. A word to all you prospective dog-owners out there: if you do this, your dog will learn one message and one message only from it: that he'll be praised for the good things he does - and that he can get away scott-free with all the bad stuff he feels like doing. If that sounds ideal to you, let Cesar show you the way ...)

I had to get all the way to the very end of this issue of Men's Journal - to the very last page - to have my spirits lifted, but it happened! The last page features a 'Survival Skills' interview they do with a different celebrity each month, and this time around it's aging tough-guy actor James Caan, and his answers are sheer delight. I'll quote two choice ones:

Q: What should every man know about women?

A: They're fucking nuts.

Q: What article of clothing should every man own?

A: What kind of fucking question is that?

Ah ... sweet, sweet relief ....

Poetry Class!

Pentheus - man of sorrows, king
of Thebes - despised the gods, and had no time
for blind old men or their prophecies.
'You're a fool, Tiresias, and you belong
in the darkness. Now leave me be!'
'You might wish, sire, for my afflictions soon enough,
if only to save you from witnessing
the rites of Dionysus.
He is near at hand, I feel it now,
and if you fail to honour him - your cousin
the god - you will be torn to a thousand ribbons
left hanging in the trees, your blood
fouling your mother and her sisters.
Your eyes have sight but you are blind.
My eyes are blind but I see the truth ...'

But before Tiresias had finished with his warning,
even as the king pushed him away,
it had already begun.

He was walking on the earth,
and you could hear the shrieks
of the dancers in the fields, see the people
streaming out of the city, men and women,
young and old, nobles and commoners, climbing
to Cithaeron and the god
who was now made manifest.

Pentheus stared out in disbelief.
'What lunacy is this? You people
bewitched by cymbals, pipes and trickery -
you who have stood with swords drawn
in the din of battle on the fields of war -
now dance with a gaggle of wailing women
waving tambourines? You wear garlands
instead of helmets, hold fennel wands
instead of spears, and all for some boy!
If the walls of Thebes were to fall
- which they will not - it will be
at the hands of soldiers and their engines of war,
not by the flowers, the embroidered robes
and scented hair of this weaponless pretty-boy.
Find him! Bring him here, where he'll
confess that he's no son of Zeus and these
sacred rites are just a shaman's lie.
Bring him here to me now, in chains!'

His counsellors gathered, muttering restraint,
which just inflamed the king who
like a river in spate
boiled and foamed
at any hindrance in the way.

His men returned, stained in blood
and claiming they saw no sign
of Dionysus, just this priest of his
- a comrade and an acolyte - and they
pushed forward the man, an foreigner,
hands tied behind his back.
Eyes bright with rage, Pentheus
spoke slowly:
'Before you die, I want your name,
your country, and why you came here with this
fraud and his filthy cult.'
Unblinking, the prisoner replied:
'I am Acoetes, from Lydia,
son of a humble fisherman,
now a fisherman myself.
I learnt how to steer, set a course,
to read the wind and stars,
so I left the rocks of home and went to sea.
I'd raised a crew, and on our way to Delos
a storm forced a landfall
on the shores of Chios. The next morning
I sent the men to fetch fresh water
and they came back with a child.
The bosun pulled him up on board, saying
they'd found him in a field, this prize,
this boy as beautiful as a girl, stumbling
slightly from sleep, or wine.
I knew, by the face, by every movement,
that this was no mortal, that I was looking at a god.
"Honour this child," I said to the crew,
"for he is not of us." And to the boy:
"Show us grace and bless our labours
and grant these men forgiveness,
for they know not what they do."
One slid down the rigging, calling
"Don't bother with your prayers on our account,"
and the others circled, nodding and shouting,
their voices fat with greed.
"I am the captain, and I'll have no
sacrilege aboard this ship, and no
harm to our fellow traveller."
"Our plunder," said the worst of them
taking me by the throat
to the cheers and yelps of the rest.
And their noise woke Dionysus for it was him
who opened his eyes -
"Tell me sailors: what's happening?
How did I get here and where am I going?"
One told him not to worry, asked him
to name his port of call.
"Naxos. Turn your course for Naxos,
my home, and you'll find a welcome there."
And so the mutinous crew
swore by all the gods of the sea they would do
just that and told me to set sail.
Naxos lay to starboard but
winking and laughing
they made me steer to port.
"I'll have no part of this," I said,
and was shouldered from the helm.
"No one is indispensable, captain.
Our safety does not lie with you alone."
And the painted prow was turned
away from Naxos, out to the open sea.

Then the god began to toy with them.
Gazing out from the curving deck
across the ocean, feigning tears, he cried:
"These are not the shores you promised me,
these shores are not my home.
What glory is there when men
deceive a boy: so many against one?"
My tears were real, but the mutineers
just laughed at both of us and kept rowing.

Now I swear to you by that god himself
- and there is no god nearer than him -
that this is true: that the ship just stopped.
It stood still on the sea as if in dry dock.
The panicked men pulled harder,
letting out sail to try and find the wind,
but ivy was swarming up the oars
twining tendrils round the blades,
whipping along the decks and up the mast,
dragging at the encumbered sails
till they sagged in heavy-berried clusters.
And now the god revealed himself at last.
Around his brow a garland of grapes;
in his hand a wand, tight-twisted with vine;
and at his feet, the slinking
phantom shapes of wild beasts:
tigers, lynxes, panthers.

Illusions, perhaps, but the crew began to leap
overboard, in terror or madness or both.
One body darkened and went black,
back arcing in a curve; another started to call out
just as his jaws spread wide, his nose hooked over,
his skin hardened into scales. Another, still
fumbling with an oar, looked down
and saw his hands shrinking till they were
hands no more, just fins.
And I watched one, reaching up for a rope, finding
he had no arms
and as he toppled over,
finding he had no legs either:
all torso, he back-flipped into the sea,
tail horned like a crescent moon.
They leapt on every side in a shower of spray:
bursting free of the water, plunging down again
like dancers or tumblers at play.

The only human left of twenty
I stood there shaking
till I heard the god speak out:
"Hold your nerve
and this empty ship
and track us down the coast to home!"
And so I did. And there I joined
his rites and sacrifices, and now I follow him:
Iacchus, Bromius, Liber, Dionysus.'

'Well,' said Pentheus, 'I have listened patiently
to this long, rambling fantasy of yours:
an attempt, no doubt, to diminish my anger
and delay your punishment. Well, it didn't work.
Take him, men, and break him on the rack.
Send him down to Hell.'
And so Acoetes was dragged away
to the cells; but while the fire, the steel,
the instruments of pain, were being prepared
the doors flew open of their own accord
and the chains feel from his hands.

Hearing this - not trusting anyone now -
Pentheus stood and went
to settle things, once and for all.
Alone, he clambered up Cithaeron, the mountain
chosen for these rites, now ringing
with the songs and chants of the maenads,
the celebrants of the god.
And he was stirred by them, roused like a warhorse
at the sound of battle trumpets, their
shiver in the air. The long cries
thrilling through him
he pressed on:
skittish, fevered, feeling again
some passion in him flare.

Halfway up the mountainside,
surrounded by woods, was an open clearing.
Here he stood, in full view. Here he looked
upon the naked mysteries with uninitiated eyes.
The first to see him, the first
to rush at him, the first
to hurl her sharpened wand into his side,
was Agave, his mother,
screaming: 'Come, my sisters, quick!
There is a wild boar here we must kill!'
And the three sisters led the rest
and fell on him in a frenzy,
and Pentheus the king was terrified, crying out,
confessing all his sins. Blood
streaming from a hundred wounds
he called to Autonone: 'I am Pentheus!
Don't you know your own nephew?
Would you do to me
what was done to Acteon, your son?'
But the names meant nothing to her,
and she simply
tore his right arm out of its shoulder.
Her sister, Ino, wrenched off the other
like a chicken's wing.
With no hands left to pray, no arms
to reach for his mother, he just said,
'Mother, look at me.'
And Agave looked, and howled, and shook
the hair from her face, and went to him
and took his head in her hands
and in a throb of rapture
twisted it, clean off.
In her bloody grip, the head swung
with its red strings: 'See,
my sisters: victory!'
And quicker than a winter wind strips
the last leaves from a tree,
so all the others ripped Pentheus to pieces
with their own bare hands.

By this lesson piety was learned,
and due reverence for the great god Dionysus,
for his rites and for this holy mountain shrine.

Pentheus and Dionysus by Robin Robertson ("after Ovid")

August 2009 in Open Letters!

It's 1 August people, and you know what that means! Yes indeed, it's another cram-packed issue of Open Letters Monthly! This time around, we've got great articles on boxing, the whole Christopher Hitchens/Richard Dawkins "God Debates," a posy of contemporary fiction, our crack sleuth Irma Heldman holding court on the perils of Brooklyn, our gaming savant Phillip Lobo writing about The Sims, our movie maven Sarah Hudson firing a warning shot across Oscar's bow, our zombie queen Deirdre Crimmins writing about really angry people who aren't bloggers, and Brad Jones writing about the Hollywood magic of Vincente Minnelli. I do my duty by the Romans and the Tudors, and we've got new poem and an eye-opening cover photo. And of course you all already know that Open Letters is very active all month long - especially on the OLM blog, where you'll find lots of fascinating stuff, including quite a few book-reviews by yours truly that you won't find here at Stevereads. So click on over there and read to your heart's content! You'll be glad you did!

Bunny Redux!

Our books today take a second buck-toothed bite at the subject of bunny-centric kids books. In response to a deluge of emails (well, eight - but still....) from the silent majority, I've belatedly realized that what bunny books lack in zoological verisimilitude, they make up for in the near-psychotic enthusiasm they inspire in their fans, and I've been informed by a number of those fans (well, eight ...) that although I might have covered the three biggest, most popular, most influential bunny books here on Stevereads recently, I didn't do the subject full justice. So we're back for a quick P.S. before hopping on to other subjects.

I was sent many suggestions! Of the many bunny-books I cruelly neglected, however, three titles seemed to crop up on most of the lists I was sent, and that helps to narrow the field.

The earliest of these three titles is 1979's Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe (with oddly appealing scratchy-line illustrations by Alan Daniel), the psychologically fraught story of what happens when the unsuspecting Monroe family brings home a bunny to keep as a pet. This ill-omened homecoming takes place on a dark and stormy night, and naturally the Monroe's two other pets - large, good-natured dog Harold and nervous, slightly spastic cat Chester - are curious. Harold, in his doglike way, placidly accepts the newcomer (at least, we're told this is doglike - having had a platoon of anal-retentive beagles in my life ... and now having a hyper-excitable pointer and a basset hound who is legally, medically certifiable, I wouldn't know first-hand), but Chester becomes convinced the bunny is in fact a vampire who intends to do in first
the Monroes - and then the world.

As all fans of Bunnicula will know - and as anybody who's ever met a cat will guess - it turns out the bunny is fairly harmless and that the real focus of the drama is how insane Chester is.



The bunny is also innocent in Mo Willems' great 1974 classic Knuffle Bunny, and how could it not be so, since the bunny in question is a stuffed animal? And not a Velveteen Rabbit-style stuffed animal that thinks and feels, but a just-ordinary stuffed animal (like my Barnesy the Noble Bear, for instance) that gets carted around from place to place.


The person doing the carting in Willems' funny little 'cautionary tale' is young Trixie, who takes her beloved Knuffle Bunny along when she accompanies her father to the laundromat. Trixie and her young parents live in New York City, and the lazy genius of Willems' story is to make the backgrounds of her pages actual photos, with the cartoon characters drawn onto them (this has also facilitated the Knuffle Bunny 'tours' that have sprung up in the city, since it's possible, 'Seinfeld'-style, to identify landmarks)(this is much the same reason why Japanese tourists who love Make Way for Ducklings always take pictures of real-life enormous Irish beat cops in Boston).

As Trixie and her dad are leaving the laundromat, Trixie has a horrifying realization: they've left her beloved Knuffle Bunny behind - in a washing machine. Hilarity ensues, and a heartwarming little happy ending is served up. The book is delightful and eminently re-readable, despite having only 30 words.

The third most popularly-suggested bunny-centric title will not, alas, be discussed here on Stevereads. It's something called Guess How Much I Love You, and it stars not only bunnies but jack-rabbits, and it's just too unbearably, mindlessly saccharine for inclusion here (ditto Pat the Bunny, for you handful of over-zealous advocates out there). No, these two late-breaking additions will have to do for now - but who knows what species we'll cover next, when we eventually return to the always-delightful world of kids books? Dogs would be too predictable coming from me, but there's always birds - and dinosaurs - and believe it or not, another round of BEARS wouldn't even come close to exhausting the treasures that are out there. We shall see!

Geographica: Venice and BOOM!

It''s bad news and much, much worse news in this month's National Geographic. Don't get me wrong: the magazine itself is still fantastic, fascinating, and grippingly beautiful. But sometimes the balance of its tidings is decidedly tipped toward the glass-half-empty side of the wet bar.

Under the 'bad news' heading: Venice is still sinking, and Venetians are still being mulish assholes about it. Sigh. Some things never change. Although to be fair, Cathy Newman's article is so heavy on Venice-cliches ("What is Venice - so seductive, so lethally attractive - except the most sublime setting for the thrilling of the heart?" And so on) that it doesn't help things any.

The problem is the same one that's plagued Venice for its entire history: the incoming tides are swamping the city. When we're talking about tides of water, from the lagoon, the wrangle revolves around Venice's celebrated MOSE project, which would erect man-made walls across the mouth of the lagoon. The gates would rise into place when dangerously high tides are predicted, and the thinking is that this would save the city from any more excessive erosion. The MOSE gates will allegedly be finished around 2014, but the Venetians have been arguing about it for more than a decade now, and it's unlikely they'll stop any time soon - starting with the city's mayor, who often and publicly sneers at the idea of gates doing any good for his city.

And when we're talking about human tides, the problem takes on an even bigger scope. Venice is visited by roughly 2 billion fat people every day, each and every one of whom a) complains about how crowded it is, b) complains about how hot it is, c) complains about how everybody's talking I-talian, d) complains about how much stuff there is to see, e) complains about how narrow a lot of the streets are, f) complains about how expensive everything is, g) complains about the flooding, h) complains about the plumbing, i) complains about the long waits for all the famous restaurants and bars, j) complains about the smell of the water, k) complains about the Lido (its size, the quality of its sands, etc), l) complains about the dog-poop on the sidewalks, m) complains about how every living Venetian seems to expect a generous tip for every single thing they do within sight of even one tourist, n) complains about the fact that the houses and gardens of real Venetians seem permanently closed to them, o) complains about the differences between the real city and the one they've read about in Donna Leon (this complaint is most often heard during the many 'Donna Leon' tours that wind through the city every day), p) complains about how many churches are in their guidebooks, q) complains about how much of the artwork in those churches is so religious in nature, r) complains about the prevalence of typical American food in restaurants ("we came all this way for this?" etc), s) complains about the native food (too spicy, not spicy enough, too 'watery,' and the perennial #1: portions too small), t) complains about the noise during the day ("I can't hear myself think!" brayed by Methodists who haven't engaged in that particular activity since grade school), u) complains about the sounds at night (favorite American complaint among Venetian hotel staff: "There's a dripping sound"), v) complains about the fact that even restaurants, churches, and islands their guidebook assures them are "seldom visited" are, in fact, crammed to the rafters with people from Spokane, w) complains about how tiring it is to walk around the city (Venice is, roughly speaking, the size of your average K-Mart), x) complains about how rude the Venetians can be (on your average 1-week vacation, every single Venetian you talk to will be in the process of being evicted from their apartment because they can no longer afford the rent, but still ...), y) complains about how all these people are ruining Venice for the rest of us, z) complains about, for the love of God in Heaven, all the canals, then tosses all their plastic bags off their hotel room porch and gets back on their plane for home.


One sensible solution to this human inundation is floated briefly and sarcastically in the article then seemingly dismissed: charge people a lot of money to visit the city. I'm thinking 60 euros per adult, 20 per child, with a significant chunk of the proceeds going to subsidizing the rents of Venetian citizens.

But then, Venetian citizens might have worse things to worry about than long lines for coffee in the morning - and those things would fall under the 'much much worse' news: we're all gonna die.

Apparently, lurking underneath Yellowstone National Park (which, we're informed, contains half the geysers located on the entire planet) is a massive super-volcano that has erupted three times in the very distant past - each time with results several orders of magnitude worse than anything the living memory of the world has ever seen. Vesuvius? An after-dinner belch. Mount St. Helens? A minor night of food poisoning. We're talking about sooper-dooper eruptions that leave holes in the Earth big enough to be seen from Mars.

As Joel Achenbach writes:

Volcanoes form mountains; supervolcanoes erase them. Volcanoes kill plants and animals for miles around; supervolcanoes threaten whole species with extinction by changing the climate across the entire planet.

So we've got that to look forward to. Naturally, the various geologists interviewed in the article are cagey with their comments - nobody's willing to come right out and say when this sooper-dooper eruption will likely take place. Instead, like earthquake experts, they obscure things in the cant of probability - the odds are that, the likelihood is that, etc. But a caldera building towards a major eruption has many very specific signs, and the Hayden Valley in Yellowstone is showing all of those signs. You'd think at least one of Achenbach's specialists would say, "well, nobody can predict the future, but this sure looks like an area that's going to erupt in a big way, certainly in our lifetime." But noooooo ... the bastards.

By now you're all probably asking if there's any good news in this issue of National Geographic. Well, not much: life is still hell for refugees, policing efforts are still failing against fish-poachers in Kamchatka, and the issue still ends with that idiotic crossword puzzle instead of one last glorious photo.

Actually, there's your tiny bit of good news right there: the photos throughout are, as usual, excellent. I know that's not much to counter-balance stupid tourists and killer volcanoes, but hey, there's always next month.

Bunnies! Bunnies! Bunnies!

Our books today are three kids books starring bunnies, in response to the surprising number of you (almost all card-carrying members of the silent majority, alas - so many people reading and, presumably, enjoying Stevereads, so few people bothering to tell Steve that!) who reacted to my bear-themed kids books posting with what could only be called ursophobic levels of species-baiting. This was hardly a personal affront: I dislike bunnies every bit as much as I dislike bears. But it's true that bunny-themed kids books number among my favorites, so a sequel of sorts seemed called for.

Naturally, the place to start is the one that started it all: Beatrix Potter's 1902 story The Tale of Peter Rabbit. With their big eyes and preternatural air of innocence, bunnies are the kids storybook equivalent of Jesus (almost all of their stories are about redemption and reconfiguration)(whereas in the actual animal kingdom, almost all of their stories are about violent sex and eating their own poo), but Peter Rabbit is pure Old Testament. Peter is a nattily-dressed little rapscallion, not a picture-perfect child like his siblings Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail. The minute his long-suffering mother leaves for the bakery, Peter sneaks onto the property of Mr. McGregor, the gigantic, bearded figure who killed and ate Peter's father in a pie. Is it any wonder Peter turned out to be a trespasser, a thief, and quite probably gay?



Mr. McGregor chases Peter all over the property. Peter has several close calls, then manages to find his way back to the cozy den he shares with his mother and his sisters. He's exhausted from his raucous extracurricular activities, and as he lays there semi-conscious, his womenfolk brew him some tea. It's like something out of Trollope, only everybody has pug noses and buck teeth. Come to think of it, it's exactly like something out of Trollope.



Twenty years after The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Margery Williams wrote The Velveteen Rabbit, another genuine bunny-blockbuster. It's the story of a brand-new velveteen rabbit toy who's given to a young boy one Christmas (ding ding). The boy and the rabbit are inseparable, and the boy loves his rabbit dearly. The rabbit yearns to be Real, and an ancient toy from the house's collection, the Skin Horse, assures him it can happen:

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked. "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

(Needless to say, none of that is written for children ... Margery Williams was a wise woman)

As everyone knows, the Velveteen Rabbit goes through one horrible near-tribulation and is then reborn (ding ding) as a real rabbit, to live in Rabbitland forever and ever. This is sugary glop, it's true, but the final coda of The Velveteen Rabbit is worth swallowing a little glop.




Twenty years after The Velveteen Rabbit, another bunny blockbuster hip-hopped down the garden path: Margaret Wise Brown's The Runaway Bunny. The earlier theme of a rebellious rapscallion rabbit is resumed - the little bunny who wants to run away spins one scenario after another to his mother (again, the long-suffering kind ... a virtual maternal requirement, when you pop out sixty kids a year): he'll become a fish in a stream, he'll become a rock on a mountain, he'll become a crocus in the garden, he'll even become a boy and run inside, etc.

To each of these scenarios, the mother bunny has an unperturbed answer - she deftly inserts herself into her child's fantasies, always there to chase him, find him, catch him, love him.

"Shucks," said the bunny, "I might just as well stay where I am and be your little bunny."

And so he did.

"Have a carrot," said the mother bunny.

The book's Christian allegories have been noted before (most poignantly - and devastatingly - at the conclusion of Margaret Edson's brilliant play Wit)(watch the film version of that final scene, and see if you don't bawl your eyes out), but its real staying power lies in how effortlessly enjoyable it is to read slowly, out loud, page by page, to an audience of children. Because in this as in so much else, timing is everything. Jesus would have understood.

Comics! Long Live the Legion!

Well, the celebrated and much-anticipated "Legion of Three Worlds" storyline is now concluded, and if DC's own gossip is to be believed, the Legion timeline is now fixed and canonical again. "No more Legion reboots" was the editorial refrain - star writer Geoff Johns was entrusted with creating the 'real,' final version of the venerable Legion of Super-Heroes and nailing that version to the mast once and for all.

A brief big picture recap:

In the 31st century, three alien teenagers - who'll later be known throughout the galaxy as Saturn Girl, Lightning Lad, and Cosmic Boy - use their combined superpowers to save the life of mega-zillionaire R. J. Brande, who in gratitude (and perhaps out of nostalgia) finances the creation of a super-team just like the legendary ones from the 20th century (The Justice League, the Teen Titans, etc). This team - the Legion of Super-Heroes - soon boasts teenage members from many planets throughout the United Federation of Planets, plus one spectacular guest-star: using time-travel technology, the Legion recruits Superboy, Clark Kent before he grew up to be Superman. For thirty blissful years, DC Comics published the adventures of Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, and the team developed a rather intensely devoted fan base. The team's enormous roster changed from time to time (members died, members were added, etc), but the basic concept of the team itself - future teenage superheroes living, loving, and fighting evil in the far future - stayed the same. And I loved it, as I loved no other comic book in the world (not even Superman).



Then DC Comics ran the Crisis on Infinite Earths mini-series that changed the very nature of all its continuity. In the new clean-slate comics world that resulted, Clark Kent had only adopted a superhero identity as an adult - he'd never been Superboy, so he obviously couldn't have shared adventures with the Legion. Which threw the Legion into creative limbo. First one set of writers and editors rescued it from that limbo, re-creating the Legion from the ground up, then later a different set of writers and editors used a reality-altering plot gimmick to re-create the Legion again, differently ... and so on. By the time all these successive reboots were done, nobody - and I mean nobody - could tell what the 'real' Legion was, what had and hadn't 'happened' in its past.


In the decades since Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC writers have been slowly, systematically dismantling the changes it implemented, and one of the last to go was that no-Superboy change (the reason it was so slow to change was entirely corporate: the whole while, Paramount was making money off its successful TV series "Smallville," which featured a young Clark Kent who most certainly never puts on a costume and calls himself Superboy). And as that no-Superboy stance started to crumble, writers and editors naturally started thinking of ways to re-integrate some kind of Superboy into the Legion again. A couple of recent storylines came right out and said Superman did indeed have a career as Superboy (the exact parameters of it are still very vague), during which he shared many adventures with the Legion of Super-Heroes.

A brief small picture recap:

In this current plot, the Legion who shared those adventures with young Superboy has grown up, just as Superman has. They're seedy, unkempt adults now, with lots of burned-out cynicism where their hope and optimism used to be, and the United Federation of Planets has grown distinctly disenchanted with them. Into this charged relationship comes an insane, alternate-reality Superboy who's dumb as a post and homicidally inclined. He assembles pretty much every 31st century super-villain the Legion has ever faced and attacks the team with the rather uncomplicated goal of killing them all. Superman comes to help from the 20th century, and the Legion also manages to summon two of those other-incarnation versions of the Legion to help out in the epic battle that follows.

While that epic battle is raging, Superman, Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy are off in another dimension, fighting the long-time Legion adversary the Time Trapper, who has opened up portals to a gazillion other dimensions and times - thus creating the narrative potential for Johns to use "Legion of 3 Worlds" to reboot Legion history one last time. I could almost picture it happening - big climactic fight, gigantic time-space explosion, Time Trapper defeated and destroyed, and from the wreckage, a new Legion, teenagers full of hope and happiness, who thank Superman for all his help and send him off to the 20th century so they can go back to having adventures with his teenage self from a bit earlier in the 20th century.



Well, the battle does rage, although it shouldn't at all. The single biggest flaw of this imperfect mini-series is the way Superboy-Prime (the crazy alternate Superboy) is presented as virtually unstoppable. He manages to kill several Legionaires without really trying all that hard, and they don't manage to do more than slow him down, which is absurd. For the course of three entire issues, Superboy Prime is engaged in one long fist-fight with, by my count, seven individuals who are as strong or stronger than he is - such fist-fights, when conducted by nutso teenagers with no combat experience, end in said nutso teenagers getting pounded into tapioca in about ten minutes. In addition, this Superboy Prime is fighting several opponents who can a) blind him, b) freeze him, c) render him completely immobile, d) turn his blood into daffodils, or lead, or kryptonite, and e) make him think he's won and so convince him to just stand there while he gets his lights put out. None of that happens. One of his opponents is an adult Daxamite (i.e. already more than his physical match) wearing ten Green Lantern rings. That's as close to God as you get in a secular world, and yet Superboy Prime is still going strong at the climax of this issue.

But it doesn't matter. The important thing is, there is a climax, and the bad guy is defeated (in fact, he becomes what I can safely refer to as the most reviled figure of evil in the world of comics, in a turn of events that's actually flat-out hilarious - no matter what I was expecting to feel about the long-delayed ending of this series, I certainly wasn't expecting to laugh out loud), and for about half a page, I eagerly wondered if any of my expectations would come true - I wondered exactly what kind of new Legion Johns would create.


Needless to tell any of you who've already gobbled up this issue, I was disappointed - and not in the way I was worried about. Johns didn't create a new, definitive Legion I didn't like - he spent the issue's last ten pages telling readers we already have a definitive Legion: the skeevy, downtrodden adult version, low on manpower, embittered by losses, and at odds with the United Federation of Planets. The other two alternate versions of the Legion (either of which I prefer) are sent packing back to alternate dimensions, and the remaining incarnation - the disgruntled adults - settles down to what I presume will be a series of stories starting in the upcoming revival of Adventure Comics.

One of the issue's epilogues tells us that years ago, Clark Kent as Superboy went to Smallville High School and joined a team of super-heroes - and we're shown a skinny Superboy flying through the sky with members of that original, youthful Legion of Super-Heroes. And when I saw that panel, my first reaction, thinking about this upcoming Adventure Comics, was "Yes! Show us those adventures!"

Then I realized we've already had those adventures, for all those years and all those wonderful issues in the old Adventure Comics, and in Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, and in The Legion of Super-Heroes. What DC has managed to do, at last, is bring its continuity back around to a point where at least we can say those adventures 'really' happened. Hundreds of Legion back-issues are now DC continuity again, instead of being the weirdly dislocated oddities they've been since Crisis on Infinite Earths. I should call that a win and count my blessings.

But it wouldn't be Stevereads if I did that, now would it?

Because dammit, I wanted more. I wanted more of those adventures. I wanted the Legion to stay uncontaminated by the gritty realism that infuses the rest of superhero comics. I wanted them to stay heroes, appreciated by the people they protect and serve. I wanted Superboy on the team, somehow.

Whatever I get in the upcoming run of Adventure Comics, it's unlikely to be that. Apparently, the "no more Legion reboots" roulette wheel has stopped on an adult Legion of grizzled souls in a world that hates and fears them. The definitive Legion is here, and probably most fans are happy about that. And hell, if that happiness translates to keeping the Legion in some kind of regular publication, then to that limited extent I'm happy about it too.

But I've got my fingers crossed for a reboot ....