In the Penny Press! New Yorker, 31 August 2009

There's a fact about magazine-reading that you rarely hear, mainly because its conditions are so incredibly rare: when it's good, The New Yorker is better than any other periodical in the world.

The reason you rarely hear that fact is because The New Yorker these days is, alas, almost never good. Oh, there are some reliable sources of quality - Anthony Lane seldom misfires, and other usual suspects - but far, far too often the magazine is a long, gray soup-line of broken-down shabby pieces of heavily-bestubbled pieces nobody gives a damn about. Week after week after week, The New Yorker seems determined to punish those of us who ever once upon a time liked it, or those of us who have the temerity to remember the days when it was sold in a brown paper wrapper - the days when every issue was a virtual song of perfection, when a critic could call it perhaps the greatest magazine in the history of magazines and not sound foolish or over-reaching.

In the post-Tina Brown era? Not hardly. The political reporting is too often choked with hyperbole and buzzwords (if I read another sentence in a national periodical that's followed by the single word "Really?" as though the author were a friggin teenage girl - or thought friggin teenage girls were something worth emulating - I'm going to cancel a whole LOT of subscriptions), the short satire pieces have everything going for them except the smallest shred of humor, the various 'quirky' profiles go on at lengths utterly unsupported by their idiotic, self-serving subjects, and their longer features soar to new heights of tedium (a recent two-part piece on Siberia was more torturous than actual exile to Siberia would have been). And that's not even taking into account the state of that New Yorker staple, the cartoon ...

But every once in a great while, all the tumblers will fall into place and The New Yorker will once again do that particular thing that was once its reliable specialty: it will fill you up. The great issues of this magazine used to tell you things you never knew, fascinate you about subjects you hadn't even heard about until you opened the issue, and show you old familiar topics in new and interesting lights (in addition to making you laugh, with the aforementioned cartoons) - it was like being a listening guest at some great salon of a party, and no matter where you turned or which room you entered, there was a fascinating conversation taking place, and when you left your head was buzzing with ideas.



The 31 August (oh, how wonderful to type that date!) New Yorker is just such an issue. From the wonderful, wistful "No Trespassing" cover by Istvan Banyai (which manages to be romantically touching despite the fact that it automatically summons to mind the open scene of Jaws) to the fascinating - if repellent - 'Talk of the Town' piece by Laura Secor on Iran's political show-trials (and a heartbreaking notice by Ian Frazier on the devastation done to Central Park's trees by a recent "microburst" storm), to the hilarious "Shouts & Murmurs" piece "For Immediate Release" by Paul Simms.

There's a fantastic, extremely alarming article by Steven Brill on the failed teachers in the New York public school system, people who've been taken out of their classes for one reason or another (drunkenness, it seems, or plain old incompetence) but, thanks to their union, still get paid, usually while sitting in a place they've dubbed "The Rubber Room." The fact that these people are getting paid not to teach instead of getting fired is bad enough, but toward the end of the article we get to the really scary part:

The Rubber Rooms house only a fraction of the 1.8 per cent who have been rated unsatisfactory. The rest still teach.

Yikes.

Then there's Burkhard Bilger's fun piece on Bob and Mike Bryan, twins who are also luminaries in the doubles-tennis circuit. Of course any piece on twins promises good old-fashioned freakshow fun, but in this case that payoff is overshadowed by the sad truth of Bilger's opening:

Few sports have evolved so dramatically in the past forty years, or been so utterly transformed by technology. Drop a young Pele onto a modern soccer field and he would still dribble circles around most players. A DiMaggio in his twenties could go on a hitting spree in the major leagues tomorrow. But even Rod Laver in his prime, when he twice won all four grand-slam tournaments in a calendar year, would be flummoxed by today's game: the giant carbon-fibre racquets, the synthetic strings that send every shot spinning and dipping over the court, and Andy Roddick at the baseline, blasting serves at one hundred and fifty miles per hour. It would seem less like tennis than like target practice.

Naturally, this is as true as it is tragic, and anybody who ever sat through the ode to boredom that was a Stefan Edberg match could have seen it coming. The problem isn't the racquets or the strings - the problem is that evil, money-grubbing parents have figured out that if they treat their promising children like livestock - get them up at dawn, give them the right feed, keep them focused 24 hours a day on their purpose on this Earth, and most of all work them, train them, practice them during every waking minute - they stand to cash in on some rather lucrative endorsement deals when their animal starts paying off. There are two inevitable results of this new program: first, the resulting creatures, although only able to perform one small fraction of the actual game of tennis (100 percent entirely power-games from the backcourt), are able to perform that fraction at superhuman, eugenically engineered levels. Roger Federer can hit a penny one inch from the baseline with a 120-mph shot, and he can do it over and over again, without ever missing, without ever pausing, for upwards of twenty straight hours, if his father/manager tells him he should. The noises that Rafael Nadal makes on the court (which would have got him peremptorily disqualified in Laver's day) can be heard a city block outside the arena, because what he's doing isn't tennis, it's weight-lifting. And second, the resulting creatures are entirely vacant animals which have no intellect, no ability to reflect or learn, and not even a small amount of self-control (their controls have, literally since birth, always been imposed on them by their manager/parents). When somebody asks Michael Phelps or Sidney Crosby a question about their sport, the usual pre-learned patter snaps automatically into place, "We were really looking forward to this game/match, it was really challenging, we gave it our all, it was a learning experience," etc. But if they're left alone and unsupervised at, say, a restaurant or party, they stare blankly, mouth slightly ajar, as clueless and overstimulated as a five-year-old. If a young woman walks by, they blurt out, "ME WANT RAPE!" - and somebody quickly cell-phones their manager/parents for a quick retrieval.

Fortunately, the article is redeemed throughout by Brill's great skill as a writer, and that skill is abundantly on hand elsewhere in the issue. In that rarest of rarities these days, the issue's short story is excellent: it's called "The Fountain House," and it's by an author I've never heard of (I'm pretty sure I would have remembered): Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. It's about a man who loses his daughter in a bus-bomb explosion - only maybe he doesn't - and it's wonderfully sparse and strong, even in its English translation.

James Wood turns in an unusually meaty review of Terry Eagleton's new attack on the "New Atheists" like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, and Wood's piece is good right from the start:

Nothing more clearly shows that atheism belongs to religious belief, as the candlesnuffer does to the candle, than the rise of the so-called "new atheism.

Of course, Wood still manages to write a few boneheaded things, as when he refers to A Brief Inquiry Into the Meaning of Sin & Faith "a posthumous publication" of the late, great John Rawls (it was nothing of the kind, being rather a particularly bothersome case of literary grave-robbing), or when he uncorks this little beauty:

The Christian God is personal - that is precisely the stumbling block for many of us who cannot persist in belief. And how does one go from the idolatry-hating God of the Old Testament to the fleshily incarnated God who died on the Cross? The bridge between the two seems not to stretch all the way across the river.

(Any intelligent Christian - not a heavily-populated subset, I admit - would tell Wood that he himself has supplied the answer to his own confusion: Jesus. The compassion, the frailty, the humanity of Jesus ... these things are the bridge across that river, and if your faith is true, they do indeed stretch the whole way).




The back of the issue is held down by two of The New Yorker's trustiest standbys: Alex Ross and Anthony Lane (although David Denby's magisterial take down of "Inglorious Basterds" last week was a tough act to follow). Ross writes an extremely interesting piece on the almost-lost art of classical improvisation:

Beethoven carried on the tradition - the darkly rumbling cadenza that he devised for Mozart's D-minor Piano Concerto is a fascinating case of one composer meditating on another - but he also helped to kill it. In the first movement of the "Emperor" Concerto, the soloist is told not to make a cadenza but to play "the following" - a fully notated solo. Performers gradually stopped working out their own cadenzas, instead turning to a repertory of written-out versions.

The issue features three poems by Richard Wilbur, and two of them I actually liked:

Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last look at that white house she knew
In sleep alone, and held no title to,
And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.

What did she tell me of that house of hers?
White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;
A widow's walk above a bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.

Is she now there, wherever there may be?
Only a foolish man would hope to find
That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.
Night after night, my love, I put to sea.

- The House

and

Treetops are not so high,
Nor I so low
That I don't instinctively know
How it would be to fly.

Through gaps that the wind makes, when
The leaves arouse
And there is a lifting of boughs
That settle and lift again.

Whatever my kind may be,
It is not absurd
To confuse myself with a bird
For the space of a reverie:

My species never flew,
But I somehow know
It is something that long ago
I almost adapted to.

- Flying

Of course, liking an issue of The New Yorker this much will make next week's inevitably crappy issue all the more bitterly disappointing. But for now, I can savor it all again here in the writing about it and imagine that the whole thing still cost $1.50 and came wrapped in brown paper to protect the front cover from wear and tear - and to make unveiling that cover all the more happy.

august in open letters!

Let the word go forth that the August 2008 issue of Open Letters Monthly is live and a thing of beauty! As usual, we have a bounty of intellectual goods on display, in a variety that will take your breath away! We have impressionable young freelancer Steve Brachmann telling you all about how Somerset Maugham's novel Of Human Bondage helped him steer his life through a rocky patch; we have Lianne Habinek exploring the relationship between legendary pianist Glenn Gould, his favorite piano, and the man who tried to keep them both in tune; we have Laura Tanenbaum reviewing a couple of new books about stupidity of the current American voter (not to be confused with those worshipful hordes in Oregon, as pictured above); Daniel Green takes us through James Wood's criteria for what does and does not constitute good fiction (the blurb for Green's piece refers to Wood as the world's most influential critic, a happy exaggeration we here at Stevereads will magnanimously pass over in silence!); Greg Waldmann makes some mighty big objections to Robert Kagan's mighty small new book; father and son freelance team Thurlow and Zack Truman relate the low point of Samuel Pepys' career; far-flung correspondent Bartolomeo Piccolomini tells us all about the navigation of Christopher Columbus; King Henry VII gets his turn in the sun in "A Year with the Tudors."

And this month Open Letters has something special for you all: the site's founding editors, Sam Sacks, John Cotter, and yours truly, have each turned in a review of Evan Connell's new collection of short stories, Lost in Uttar Pradesh. And true to Open Letters form, each of those pieces is not only a much broader look at Connell's work than just one book, and each of them wonderfully reflects the stylistic tri-corner hat that is that founding trio: Sam's is wonderfully dense with analysis of all the deeper issues, John's is dancingly alert to the glories of the prose itself, and mine harps on a couple of minor points and then mostly talks about me. The three pieces together form an unprecedented tribute to one of America's greatest living literary figures - if it doesn't make you want to go out and read Evan S. Connell, nothing will!

Add to all that a poem by Matt Klane, a playful issue-photo by Sven Vorkmeister (and people say my pseudonyms are transparent ...), and some eye-catching new graphics by Tom Hartley, and you have a literary confection fit for every aesthetic sweet tooth! So click on over and dig in - and as always, feel free to leave copious comments! Comments are the currency of the Web, and we're always looking to add to our stash!

Looking for God in the Penny Press!

The New Yorker's current double-length extravaganza is being billed as its "Summer Fiction Issue, so naturally there's barely a word in it about fiction (unless you count a "new" short story by Nabokov, but surely "dentistry" would be a better term, as far as actually reading it goes?). Instead, a large chunk of the issue seems dedicated to matters of faith and doubt (the issue's highlight is a two-page piece by George Saunders called "Hypocrites" that's worth the cost of the whole damn thing).

The piece that caught our attention was "Holiday in Hellmouth" by the redoubtable James Wood, an omnibus review of various books that deal with the iniquities of the world and the problems faith has confronting them. Wood stays in book-reviewer mode for nine-tenths of his very deep, very thoughtful essay, but near its end a more passionate, personal note starts sounding more prominently:


Heaven, one of the tenderest verses in the Bible has it, is where God will wipe away all the tears from our faces. In her novel Gilead, Marilynne Robinson adds, in a line just as tender, if a little sterner, "It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required." Robinson, herself a devout Protestant, means that the immense surge of human suffering in the world will need, and deserves, a great deal of heavenly love and repair; it is as close as her novel comes to righteous complaint. But one could also say, more skeptically, that Christianity needs the concept of Heaven simply to make sense of all the world's suffering - that, theologically speaking, Heaven is "exactly what will be required." In the end, Heaven, it seems, is the only tenable response to the problem of evil. It is where God's mysterious plan will be revealed; it is where the poor and the downtrodden, the sick and the tortured, will be healed; it is where everything we went through on earth will suddenly seem "worth it."

This personal note of doubt achieves almost anguished undertones at the close of the piece, when Wood chooses to end with a series of implored open-ended questions that will sound familiar to anybody out there who's struggled with personal religious beliefs:

If God supposedly wipes away all tears from our faces in Heaven, why does he not do it now? Why does God not now establish paradise on earth, as the Jehovah's Witnesses believe he will do? And what is the purpose of these eighty years of not having the tears wiped from our faces?

As some of you may know, we here at Stevereads detest the Church. We hate its hypocrisy, we deplore its smugness, and we've fought our whole life to pry open the whalebone corsets it puts around any of its faithful who dare to think for themselves, to create, or to question. And you all know how we'd answer Wood's questions, since they all have the same answer: there's nobody out there, no magical Neverland where phantom selves get transported at the moment of death, no mystical father-figure carefully measuring everything we do.

But we're nothing if not fair here at Stevereads, and so we showed Wood's article to Father Terry O'Brien of Boston for a different viewpoint, and we'll now turn the podium over to him. As always, your thoughts are welcome:

God is all-powerful, and for that reason alone He tends to get blamed for everything. I read the article our host showed me, and there's implied blame on every page of it. The problem with blame, I think, is that it assumes a greater degree of involvement with the world than God exercises - or rather, I should say a greater degree of interactivity, for God is very involved in our lives; He may not be "carefully measuring" as our host says, but He believes in each and every one of us, and if we clear our heart of clutter, we can feel that belief and take strength from it. I believe this is what praying is: quieting our inner chaos long enough to feel God's loving presence and maybe even lean on it a little. That presence is what awakened my own faith, it's what drew me to my service, and it's been my rock during all the very worst times of my life.

But God's support isn't interactive. He doesn't make earthquakes happen; plate tectonics do. He doesn't cause floods; tidal currents and earthquakes at sea do. He doesn't cause cancer; rogue cells do. It's true He created the superstructure of the world in which those things happen, and of the universe in which that world exists (something more and more physicists are declining to debate, I think), but He no more continues to prompt each manifestation of those things than you or I individually decide to grow our hair or toenails. He created the world and everything in it, but He hasn't directly interacted with His creation since the Flood. He saved one family (and representatives of all his wild creatures) and then destroyed all the rest of His creation; but after He did that, He decided never to do it again. In other words, He changed.

That's essential, I think: God changed, and it's in that very aspect that we all were made in His image, for in all of creation, only mankind can change. I know our host will disagree with this, but this is one case where his activist zeal has got the better of his insight (to say nothing of his theology). I shouldn't say animals can't change - obviously, they can be traumatized, they can grow stronger or faster, and they can mourn. But those experiences don't change their selves, unless to break them. If a horse develops bone cancer and goes through operations and chemotherapy for months, that horse may recover, but whether he does or not, he'll still be the same horse. His 'personality' will not have changed, nor will his emotional makeup. But if a man goes through the same experience, his self may change drastically. He may become more giving, more honest, more loving - I've seen it happen. A young child stricken with some disease or burned badly often changes in like manner: the bravery and grace that may lie dormant in most of his playmates becomes so clear as to be blinding.

Take the example of a young woman I know. Some years ago, she fell into debt and drug addiction. She did nothing to help herself, and her friends and family turned away from her. She reached rock bottom, and there she found strengths within herself she hadn't guessed she had. With a lot of hard work (and yes, with prayer, but she did the work all on her own), she reclaimed her life, and her friends and loved ones, astounded at the finding of this lost lamb, in turn examined their own hearts. That young woman is now a source of strength to others, and her friends and loved ones will never be so quick to turn away from helping someone in need.

I'm not saying God gave that man cancer to make him more loving. Rogue cells (or other factors, but you take my point) caused the cancer. I'm not saying that child was stricken by God in order to make him shine with light. Tragedies happen in the world, even to the very young. And I'm not saying God caused that young woman's drug problem or hardened the hearts of her family (although I know He has a rep for that!). People make bad choices every day, and sometimes they correct them, with or without their family's help.

What I'm saying is, none of those things could happen in Heaven. Heaven is our relief from all of that, and for all I know God really is ready to wipe the tears from our eyes when we get there. But James Wood (and Marilynne Robinson) is wrong when he implies we're all somehow owed that gesture by God. God didn't create the suffering and evil of the world - much of it is the accidental by-product of the world being the world, and much more of it is the product of mankind itself. God wants mankind to be perfect, as He is perfect. He believes in that potential, for everybody. Whether or not we achieve it is entirely up to us. And I feel one thing very strongly: when the tear-wiping is over, the questions will begin: when tragedy happened to you, did you rise to meet it? Did you make sure it changed you for the better? When tragedy struck someone you love, did you go to their aid, or count yourself lucky that it wasn't you? When you looked upon the evils of the world, did you fight them, ignore them, or worsen them? How did you let your one and only stay on this world change you, and how did you change the world while you were in it?

I've always believed the central question about Heaven is this: will God be happy to see you?

We are here in this harsh world to make it better, to make as much of it better as we can, and to make ourselves better in the process. None of that would matter if God just reached in and helped us every time it was hard, or even impossible, to do. I'm sorry James Wood seems not to see that, but he should trust me that it's true. After all, I wear the collar: it's my job to help explain God to those who are having a hard time seeing Him. If I'm ever having trouble writing a magazine article, I'll hope Wood returns the favor!