Great Paragraphs and Otherwise in the Penny Press!

When historians finally settle the dust of the last decade, it wouldn't surprise me if the most toxic legacy of the George W. Bush interregnum isn't an essentially unpayable 50 trillion dollar debt-chasm, or the entirely justified hatred of the rest of the world, or even the new knowledge that literally any imbecile can become President if he owns enough Supreme Court justices but rather something far simpler and far worse: the death of error. Bush famously disdained knowledge and expertise - he governed with his 'gut,' and the first and most important implication of doing anything with your 'gut' is that it's not susceptible to error. That's what the whole euphemism means: I'm consulting my heart, my instincts, my soul - because those things can't be fooled by statistics cooked up by Ivy League homosexuals. In fact, those things can't be fooled at all, because they come right from God. Aside from James T. Kirk, when's the last time you heard anybody say that something they believed with their 'gut' later turned out to be wrong?

It's a vile, preschooler's stance, and it's pervaded every inch of American society. It's especially prevalent among public figures, of course, and it always looks the same: Person X makes a stunning, jaw-dropping comment, listeners of every type express not only outrage but also scruple, pointing out factual errors and citing numerous irrefutable proofs, Person X acknowledges the outrage, acknowledges the irrefutable proofs - and then maintains that their original statement was right. A prominent radio personality says no Germans died in the concentration camps of World War II, a public figure says the American Revolution was fought over the issue of gun control, a Presidential candidate says he never said the country needs an electrified border-fence with Mexico ... within seconds, a) 4,744 historians step forward and say that quite a few Germans died in concentration camps, b) 10, 655 historians - and over a million grade school children - step forward and say that Paul Revere didn't ride from street to street saying "The British are coming for our guns! The British are coming for our guns!" and c) 16 news networks instantly produce film showing the candidate advocating an electrified border-fence just the previous day. And in all three cases - and so many more - Person X takes in the correction, blinks a couple of times, and then does a quick mental calculation: I spoke from the 'gut,' my 'gut' can't be wrong, so all these facty-things must be wrong, and the people saying them are just pinheads. Facts have become just slightly less flexible versions of opinions, rather than things that can precipitate correction.

Sadly, this toxic legacy has seeped even into the world of professional letters. Just recently we've seen Taylor Branch compare college athletes to slaves, have the manifest holes in that comparison pointed out to him - and then stand by the comparison anyway. And in the latest New York Review of Books, it happens again.

Some of you may recall the original incident, because I wrote about it here. In a review of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel The Stranger's Child, Daniel Mendelsohn inserts a damning little footnote about something he thinks Hollinghurst is saying through the use of some of his characters:

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

When I first read that, I wrote, not without dismay, that it was odious for a critic of Mendelsohn's calibre to stoop to making such insinuations of anti-Semitism. In the latest NYRB, my reaction is echoed by a reader named Galen Strawson, who writes:

I suppose this sort of prejudice - Mendelsohn's - will never end. But it requires a failure of ear, a narrowness of mind, an ignorance of the world, a capacity for unwarranted insult (the wearily regretful tone, the footnote as insinuation), that is in Mendelsohn's case surprising, and in any case squalid.

To which Mendelsohn responds by claiming that the 'old British literary habit' he was referring to was the habit of summoning the "Other-ness" of Jews, of treating them as "exotic" and "symbols of un-Britishness." Which is the most disingenuous thing I've read all week, and certainly the most pusillanimous thing I've ever read from this ordinarily bravely forthright critic. The 'old British literary habit' Mendelsohn refers to in his original footnote is anti-Semitism, plain and simple, not some lit-crit folderol about 'the Jew as Other.' He carefully doesn't name the habit in his original passage specifically because he wanted to preserve a little wiggle-room for himself should the comment draw criticism, and that's exactly how he's using it now. He goes on to write "I am a critic, and what I did was to offer a critical observation about a (small) aspect of the author's oeuvre"  - which is about as truthful as referring to John Wilkes Booth's little bullet as "a (small) aspect of the Lincoln's theater-going experience."

And this is what I meant by the death of error. What Mendelsohn should have written - what he would have written before George W. Bush got into all our drinking water - was "I am a critic, and sometimes immersion in an author's work can prompt critics to see things that aren't there. This was one of those times, and I apologize to Alan Hollinghurst." But alas, the gut wants what the gut wants.

Fortunately, most of the rest of the NYRB was superb, including a great paragraph from Charles Baxter's review of the new novel by Haruki Murakami:

This idea, which used to be the province of science fiction and French critical theory, is now in the mainstream, and it has create a new mode of fiction - Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City is another recent example - that I would call "Unrealism." Unrealism reflects an entire generation's conviction that the world they have inherited is a crummy second-rate duplicate.

That's really fine stuff, and even it is overshadowed by something over in the latest New York, a quick review of the new Broadway revival of Godspell starring the douchebag Hunter Parrish. The piece is by Scott Brown (no relation, one hopes, to the startlingly evil Senator from Massachusetts), and its opening paragraph is just about as perfect as anything you'll find in Gershwin:

I suspect - and this is just one Pharisee's opinion - that it's possible to outgrow Godspell, that right of passage for drama nerds and nascent thrift-store enthusiasts everywhere, which is now glorying in its first Broadway revival. Embalmed in patchouli yet insistently, sometimes gratingly ageless, the show began in the early seventies as a downtownish affair, a (very) vaguely provocative American-tribal-love-rock Jesusical featuring ultracatchy pop songs by a young Stephen Schwartz, a loose New Testament story arc by the late John-Michael Tebelak, and a company of charming, vocally frowsy near amateurs. Four decades and innumerable high-school and church productions later, Godspell is less a show than a songbook, a vitiated transcript of Matthew, and a brief: Be relevant to today's youth. (Translation: pack in more pop-culture cutaway gags than a season of Family Guy.) In other words: Come to Gleesus, who's here playe by Hunter Parrish, the blond Adonis of Weeds and Spring Awakening. His voice is Christly gentle to the point of featheriness, his manner ranges from very charming to practically pamphleteering, and his delivery is straight-up Montessori. He's surrounded by apostles who were clearly called from a conservatory, not a drum circle, and most sport voices strong and smooth as industrially milled fiberglass. Theirs is a Beacon's Closet Golgotha. To fully appreciate their rapid-fire eagerness to connect, it helps to have the mind of a properly medicated Nickelodeon viewer.

Hee. Something like that will cure just about any A-holery conducted elsewhere in the Penny Press. Until next time, that is.

Insults Large and Small in the Penny Press!

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

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

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

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

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

Until I got to his footnote. Here it is:

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

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

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

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

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