The Death of Civilization in the Penny Press?

I worry about The New Yorker sometimes. You wouldn't think such a redoubtable old dowager would warrant worry, but I'm a bit of a redoubtable old dowager myself (despite being, as you all know, a stone cold super-hottie), and sometimes I wonder if The New Yorker's status as one of the foremost general-readership periodicals in the world doesn't make it a canary down one of the most frightening mine shafts imaginable.

At newsstands now is the magazine's double-sized 'Winter Fiction Issue' (it has four ... what, exactly? Short stories? Well, no - one of them is by Alice Munro, and as per the terms of the Munro Doctrine, it's both eye-bleedingly dull and 90,000 pages long; just 'stories'? Well, no ... two of the four don't bother to tell any stories; let's just say 'fictionesque writing exercises,' shall we? It has four fictionesque writing exercises instead of one), and it contains an article scary enough to make even the staunchest reader burn his Jonas Brothers CDs.

Of course I'm referring to Dana Goodyear's harrowing essay about keitai shosetsu, the cell-phone novel. In "I (heart) Novels," Goodyear traces the phenomenon, interviews several of the Japanese women who've become celebrities by ... well, again, what word to use? 'Writing' clearly won't do; 'composing' is even further off the mark; let's just say 'texting' ... by texting these titles, and even makes a valiant attempt to haul in Murasaki Shikibu. The end result is a picture of tomorrow's youth that simply couldn't be bleaker:

A government survey conducted last year concluded that eighty-two percent of those between the ages of ten and twenty-nine use cell phones, and it is hard to overstate the utter absorption of the populace in the intimate portable worlds that these phones represent. A generation is growing up using their phones to shop, surf, play video games, and watch live TV, on Web sites specially designed for the mobile phone. "It used to be you would get on the train with junior-high-school girls and it would be noisy as hell with all their chatting," Yumiko Sugiura, a journalist who writes about Japanese youth culture, told me. "Now it's very quiet - just the little tapping of thumbs."

And it's not just the reporting I worry about (although the "cell novel" clearly represents a new low even in a video-gaming world) when it comes to The New Yorker; I also worry that the analogue alternative isn't all that much better. Magazine issues seem weaker now than they did even a decade ago - culture sections have shrunk, book reviews have in many cases been eliminated, The Atlantic's new layout awkwardly apes Maxim, trendy pieces replace meaty pieces (only the TLS and National Geographic appear immune) - and surely some of that is reflected in this 'Winter Fiction Issue.'

It's not just the issue's fictionesque writing exercises, although those are pretty damn bad. There's the aforementioned grueling, gritty marathon by Alice Munro, a boring, plotless, pituitarily enlarged single paragraph by the grotesquely overrated Roberto Bolano (its last sentence sums things up rather neatly: "And we looked and looked, and the facades were clearly the facades of another time, like the sidewalks covered with parked cars that also belonged to another time, a time that was silent yet mobile (Lihn was watching it move), a terrible time that endured for no reason other than sheer inertia"), more of Colson Whitehead's extremely articulate but nevertheless flailing posturing, and most frustrating of all, a noxious concoction called "Another Manhattan" by Donald Antrim, featuring a loathsome quartet of yuppie creatures who do dumb, convoluted things for no reason. Antrim's characters spend a huge chunk of the exercise yammering on cell phones, and Antrim manages the impressive-but-annoying trick of making his account of that yammering as incredibly annoying as the real thing. His main character tries to buy a bouquet of flowers, has his credit card denied, and is so upset about this he has to be hospitalized and tranquilized. Long before "Another Manhattan" is over, you want the same for yourself. Or a double.


But like I said, it's not just the fictionesque exercises - even the cartoons, that last bastion of New Yorker excellence, seem fatefully lame. The humor of New Yorker cartoons, famously, can be elusive - whole comedy routines have been based on the allusive, effete world implied by the captions - but several of the cartoons in this issue are so poorly drawn that their inept execution actually distracts from whatever chance the caption had at getting you to smile. I'm not talking about styles of art here ... I'm talking about an artist clearly trying to draw something and doing a very, very poor job. Two policemen bending over a dead body, but before you can even read the joke, you're thinking, "Geez, what's up with the drawing? The cops look like aliens drawn by kids, and although the artist wants to show them bending forward, you can only barely tell that's what they're doing." Or Santa (I think - the rendering looks like an orangutan) outside a club, bellyaching about not being on 'the list' - but how can you laugh, when the club is called 'club,' the doorman not only has no facial expression but no face whatsoever, the wall of the club has a couple of hastily-scratched lines to suggest, I suppose, bricks, and the 'artist' can't even be bothered to draw other people in line (and can't be bothered to realize that without those other people, there's no joke in the joke)?


It's the one word I never thought I'd associate with The New Yorker: amateur.

Maybe it's just the end-of-the-year blues over at the venerable periodical (although several of these crappy cartoonists get regular work year-round), but you know an issue's in trouble when David Denby's menopausal harrumphings about movies are the best thing in it.

In the Penny Press! Heroes and Villains!

There's a horrible circular pattern that holds, stalled, over virtually all the major fiction outlets these days: the long-established names get published in their every jot and tittle, and everybody else must wait until physical infirmity or extreme decrepitude force openings in the calendar. Louise Erdrich getting a bowel-resection? Fine - let's look at the slush pile! Philip Roth's off-track betting covering his balloon payment this month? Fine - let's beat the workshop bushes!

It isn't fair, naturally, and it results in a frightful piling-up of jots and tittles. The unfairness stems from the fact that in a perfect world, EVERY SINGLE short story submitted to any major publishing venue would be read anonymously - not only so that every story would be read on its merits alone, but also so that literary dinosaurs wouldn't continue to view places like Harper's or the New Yorker as their private fiefdoms.

Two egregious examples this time around, one in the New Yorker and one in Harper's.

The case in the New Yorker is a short story called 'Bravado' by William Trevor. The title alone is warning enough: Trevor is approximately 115 years old and has never in his life written about anything closer to 'bravado' than the kitchen sink. But even so, we are trained by this damned wretched pattern to give every dog its day, and so we read 'the latest' by Alice Munro or John Updike, even though there's nothing any 'later' in them than the Crimean War.

That 'Bravado' is a shapeless, meandering mess of a thing will come as no shocking news to anybody who's watched Trevor's slow (and, it should be said, at times almost imperceptible) decline over the years. But what drew us up short, over and over, was the technical ineptitude creeping in at the edges.

Take one paragraph chosen at random:

"Less than half a mile away, the night was different. Young people prowled about outside the Star night club, it's band - Big City - taking a break. A late shop was still open, a watchful Indian at the door noting who came and went. A few cars drew away, but more remained. Then, with a thump of such suddenness that for a moment it might have been taken for a warning of emergency or disaster, music again burst from the Star night club."

Just counting up the infelicities in that single paragraph filled me with the urge to find some undergrad writing class and SUBMIT it, just to see what the smart ones would do to whip it into shape.

And it's not just the leaden repitition of 'the Star night club,' although there are at least ten ways to get around that. And maybe that 'late shop' (as opposed to 'shop open late') is some kind of UK colloquialism. And although that 'its band - Big City - taking a break,' the way it's written here, freezes the band forever on hiatus in the context of 'the night,' maybe Trevor was going for compression and just misstepped. But 'a watchful Indian at the door noting who came and went'? 'A few cars drew away, but more remained'? What are the redundant clarifications there, except sure signs of a) authorial laziness and b) an empty hole where an editor should be?

Over in Harper's we have our resident bete noir, Alice Munro, turning in yet another endless story in which two provincial female characters (usually, as in this case, the narrator and her sister - although this story intensifies the miasmic horror of it all by having the two women be identical twins... as if anybody would read a Munro story and think otherwise) natter on for 90 pages. For all we know here at Stevereads, they may natter on a good deal longer than that - 90 pages is the longest we've ever been able to subsist without light or air.

In this latest story, "Child's Play," there are no technical clunkers quite so bad as those littering Trevor's piece (at 75, Munro is, after all, 40 years younger). But she more than makes up for it by troweling on the sententious sentimentality until you're accidentally slopping it all over the coffee table:

"Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person. Generally it's in the fall, when you re-enter school, take your place in a higher grade, leave behind the muddle and lethargy of the summer vacation. That's when you register the change most sharply. Afterwards you are not sure of the month or year, but the changes go on, just the same. For a long while the past drops away from you easily and, it would seem, automatically, properly. Its scenes don't vanish so much as become irrelevant. And then there's a switchback, what's been all over and done with sprouting up fresh, wanting attention, even wanting you to do something about it, though it's plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done."

Nevermind the laziness here (that 'it would seem' is so quintessentially Munro, an author so devoid of emotion that she can't even wholly trust her reportage of it), or the contradictions (if you notice the timing of this self-changing in childhood and then afterwards don't, then those changes cleary don't go on 'just the same,' etc) - no, it's the dunderheaded weirdness of the passage, the alien wrong-notedness that has always characterized Munro's prose. Honestly, has anyone ever viscerally felt anything CLOSE to what this passage describes? (Bertrand, Beepy, kindly put your hands down, ya mewling tools - the question was rhetorical)

Fortunately, not all was likewise bleak and bloated in this installment of In the Penny Press! For instance, in the same issue of Harper's, Jonathan Lethem turns in a very good, very comprehensive look at the phenomenon of plagiarism (for which we might also recommend - though it pains us to do so - Judge Posner's new booklet, "The Little Book of Plagiarism"). Of course, Lethem being Lethem, he can't do the job without a clever twist - this time in the not-quite-as-original-as-he-seems-to-think form of documenting all the plagiarisms he committed in the writing of the article.

We've seen this particular trick before (it was rife in the wake of the 'Opal Mehta' flap), and although Lethem does it more entertainingly than anybody else, we're not sure we like the implications of the gimmick itself. By persnicketishly documenting every word and echo, the writers in question seem to be implying that ANY uproar about plagiarism is, well, much ado about nothing. That if 'we' all dug around enough, we'd find that ALL of us are filching stuff from EVERYBODY all the time, so why bother getting so worked up about it? Look what you originality-Nazis are making me do, the joke seems to say - OK, I've noted every little thing I lifted from somebody else, are you HAPPY now?

Still, the piece was fun.

Also a great deal of fun in this same Harper's issue was a column of excerpts from the Chicago Manual of Style's website - poor souls writing in for grammar and style usage-tips and getting some unexpectedly spry responses:

"Q: A friend and I were looking at a poster that read 'guys apartment.' I believe it should read 'guys' apartment.' She claims it should read 'guys's apartment' and that the CMOS specifically gives the example of 'guys's' to make 'guy' possessive. I looked through every section on possessives and did not find the word 'guys's' or any rule that would make this correct.

A: 'Guys's' is acceptable in the way that 'youse guys' is acceptable; that is, neither is yet recognized as standard prose, and if your friend can find it in CMOS, I'll eat my hat. And shame on your friend. It must make you wonder what else she's capable of.

Q: O English language gurus, is it ever proper to put a question mark and an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence in formal writing?

A: In formal writing, we allow both marks only in the event that the author was being physically assaulted while writing. Otherwise, no."

Hee. Grammar is so much fun!

And lastly, of course those of you who saw it will have guessed already our thorough-going approval of Robert Kaplan's piece in the latest Atlantic - he writes in praise of Herodotus, and although he shoe-horns in one or two too many references to the quaqmire in Iraq, his main point bears repeating: reading Herodotus is entirely more enjoyable than reading Thucydides.

Which gives us the perfect opportunity to close with an unabashed plug: currently featured at a Barnes & Noble near you is the 'Barnes & Noble Classics' version of Herodotus, and it's an extremely worthy candidate for your $7 (yep, a wopping $7). Not only is it a surprisingly well put-together volume, pleasingly hefty and prettily designed, but it features the sturdy, resonant G.C. Macaulay translation, here given a well-deserved second life.

But the best feature of this edition is the editorial presence of Donald Lateiner. By some happy chance, B&N got lucky in finding Professor Lateiner, and you get to share in that luck for less than the cost of lunch. Lateiner's introduction is that perfect kind of academic prose that's bright and conversational enough to appeal equally to students and experts alike, and his notes throughout are a marvel of unobtrusive lucidity.

Nobody's classics shelf can be without Aubrey de Selincourt's seminal edition of Herodotus, but this, what can fairly be called the Lateiner edition (pace Macaulay), is certainly the first runner-up and almost equally mandatory (since everybody should have at least two different translations of any ancient classic). Our good professor also masterfully annotated the B&N edition of Thucydides, but as Kaplan (and we here at Stevereads) has already pointed out, Herodotus is where the fun is.

The Worst Books of 2006!

We here at Stevereads are as annoyed as anybody (OK, maybe a smidge moreso, but only because we annoy so dang EASILY) by the trite nature of most year-end year-in-books summary pieces. Such pieces only tend (unintentionally, one presumes) to highlight the fact that their writers spent the year doing Sudoku and are only copying the same titles from each other at the last minute. They Google up titles from the last three months and then toss reviewer-speak at each one: 'breathtaking' 'rich and colorful' 'a trenchant commentary on man's inhumanity to man' and so forth.

Of course, SOME amount of phrasifying is necessary when you're only saying a little about a lot of books. And phrases get repeated, there's no avoiding that.

What really bugs us about such lists (the Boston Globe's Gail Cauldwell is by yards and yards the worst offender) is the presumption they all seem to make that literature is a closed and stately procession, where established authors can never be bad, where midlist authors will always be interesting, and where newcomers will never simply outwrite their elders. There's a continuum, these pieces inevitably imply, and we're all agreed on it.

Part of this is, I guess, understandable. Most people - even most smart people - tend to read by herd instinct. Reading time is usually scarce, and reading speeds are usually slow - most readers have neither the time nor the inclination to go foraging much on their own. So they read what's being talked about, what other people are reading.

And sometimes what other people are reading is WORTH reading. But more often than not, it's just CALLED worth reading, with Olympian certainty, since it's easy to be sure of yourself when you're in a like-minded crowd.

Not all of this literary herd mentality is necessarily wrong. Nobody here at Stevereads is going to maintain that, for instance, Irene Nemirovsky's "Suite Francaise" isn't worth everybody's attention, or David Mitchell's "Black Swan Green," or Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma."

But quite a few things that got the clamor were crap. And quite a lot of crap went undetected. And quite a few things that everybody called crap deserves to be called crap again, here at the end of the year.

So, without further ado, we present our first annual Stevereads Worst Books of the Year roundup! Here's our rogues gallery:

Cesar's Way by Cesar Milan - Of course, we all know Rule #4 here at Stevereads (after Steve is Alway Right, Kevin is Always Wrong, and Beepy is Always Sleepy): Only Steve is Qualified to Write about Dogs. That having been said, there are degrees of incompetence, and Milan is right up there. The cover says it all: the dogs looked terrified of this squat creature hunkered down in their midst.

Digging to America by Ann Tyler - America's Laziest Novelist turns in a room-temperature tray of saline in which she'd really like the NAMES THEMSELVES to do most of the writing work, so she doesn't have to be bothered. Let's see: two white people named BRAD and BITSY want to adopt a KOREAN girl. Surely that's all I'm required to do? Wake me when the royalty checks start piling up. Yeesh.

Collected Stories by Amy Hempl - Whining, meandering, plotless, perkily morose amblings about, well, not much of anything at all. The fact that this bloated piece of Wonderbread has made so many end-of-year lists is, we firmly believe, because most Americans like the name 'Amy.'

Only Revolutions by Mark Danielewski - a big book (but 'book' only in the sense that it's a pile of pages bound between covers) that could only be written while heavily stoned, only read while heavily stoned, only liked while heavily stoned and only remembered ... wait, what were we talking about? Dude, I so totally don't remember ...

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose - of all the pompous books written by pompous writers about the wonders of books (their own books, primarily), this one is by a wide margin the most pompous of the year. Prose's fiction never really rose to the level of annoying before, but this chunk of self-admiration takes the cake this year - and then pontificates about the cake. A smart 13-year-old could give you a better idea of how to read prose.

High Lonesome by Joyce Carol Oates - a collection of short stories in which there is accurately expressed not one human emotion, not one thought process, and especially not one line of dialogue. The point of these stories is ONLY who's doing the writing - submitted anonymously to any writing workshop in the country, they'd be savaged by undergrads.

Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai - Watchers of the Booker Prize cried nepotism, and they were right! Oh, not about such paltry matters as who wins the prize - nine-tenths of the time, the Booker goes to crap in any case - but certainly in terms of literary ability. Young Kiran, it turns out, is every bit as frumpy and talky and narratively clueless as her mum. Literary dynasties are built on such creaky stuff...

Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen - this rotten little book has been much-condemned already, but a few more spadefuls of dirt can't hurt. This book is one of a handful of disgustingly self-absorbed feats of authorial whining this year, and in many ways it's the worst of the bunch. Franzen is the worst kind of dorm-floor windbag, the good-looking kid who has everything and never stops complaining about it.

Dispatches from the Edge by Anderson Cooper - another example of the whineography, and a worse one because it's painted on a bigger canvas: the Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, war in the Middle East, famine in Niger ... reading this turgid, awful book, you're constantly reminded of how much SHIT has happened to Cooper, how much INCONVENIENCE he's had to put up with in order to get his dreamy pout beamed into our living rooms on a regular basis. The book leaves you wishing that SOME enterprising sandanista or survivor or simple citizen would interrupt a heartfelt (well, after three takes) interview and POP him one, right in the middle of that oh-so-pretty face. You never know - it could still happen! That would be a LOCK for next year's bestseller list!

Point to Point Navigation by Gore Vidal - surely the Everest of the type of book I'm talking about, the whineography. For the person who's so badly let down Vidal isn't his provincial father, and it isn't a world stingy with its disasters ... no, it's the whole friggin 20th century and everyone in it, ALL of whom would have been better off ... repeat after us here, children ... If They'd Only Listened to Gore. The nominal prequel to this book, Palimsest, at least had the bite of true (albeit demented) desire in it. This thing has nothing but endless self-justification, as well as many anecdotes that struck this reader (and others! my young friend Sebastian commented 'I believe he's plagiarizing HIMSELF' - in a tone that suggested there should be some sort of legal action) as a bit familiar. The deepest sadness here is imagining what Last Memoir Gore Vidal COULD have written, if he'd all along remained in control of his powers and his ego. It would have been a book to reckon with, but we'll never see it now, and 'Point to Point Navigation' is its cartoon.

For two contemptible books we here at Stevereads refer you to another voice entirely. Oh, we could savage them in a sentence or two, certainly - but why should we give you only that when we (well, not 'we' precisely, but surely SOME well-meaning reader) can hot-link you to my young friend Sam's currently quiescent blog-site, What Do We Believe? (right here at blogspot.com) - where you can read truly stellar leave-nothing-out reviews of both books, written with all my sentiments intact, but in what some of you might find a refreshing change of tone (less rabid, more rabbinical, as it were). So look there for full-length condemnations of Philip Roth's "Everyman" and Bernard-Henri Levi's "American Vertigo" - I think these books suck, but I would be far less evaluative about them than young Sam is, so go read him.

Godless by Ann Coulter - oh, I know, I know ... some of you will say that surely SOME books are ENGINEERED to be beneath the contempt of serious readers. But I'd respond that ALL books are books, capable of being handed to anybody, at any time, for any reason. All are capable of enormous good, or enormous evil. And regardless of your political persuasion, this is a deeply evil book, so full of snide, bullying lies that the words themselves cease to resemble coherent English.

For One Day More by Mitch Albom - Once again, it could be argued that such a book should be beneath even our contempt, but we repeat: any book that can foist such treacle on so many people in so many copies must perforce make a list such as this. It's not like this pap is self-published and seen only by the author's family - it's in millions of homes, softening millions of minds like candy-rot.

The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro - In which, for about 700 pages, Hettie and Eleanor argue about who owns the curio left them by their great aunt Flora. Nobody knows how the argument turns out, since nobody has ever finished the book, the latest work from the World's Most Tedious Writer.

And lastly, the single worst book of 2006:

Good Dog by Jon Katz - Those of you who've been reading this blog regularly already know how I feel about this loathesome, contemptible piece of hypocrisy. Katz takes in a dog, windily nominates him his 'lifetime' dog, then has him put to death when he becomes inconvenient - and then goes right on windifying, without the slightest trace of guilt. That this thing could be marketed as a book that would in any way appeal to dog-lovers is proof positive that marketing agencies are fairly soulless covens.

So there you have it, the very lowest of the low for 2006, the surest wastes of your money and reading time. There were many, many other worthless books published, of course, but these were the ones that tried that extra bit harder, that stunk that little bit more.

Penny Press! Chain stores and the Apocalypse!

Every issue of the Atlantic Monthly is a little like Christmas morning. You see the bounty spread before you in the table of contents, or blazoned on the cover, and the heart races. And like Christmas morning, what you end up unwrapping is almost always a mixed bag.

(ah, the glowing memory of the one and only Christmas where the bag WASN'T mixed ... that one and only time when everybody actually LISTENED to me and gave only gift certificates! Hardly any space under the tree, and I was in Heaven for months!)

Virginia Postrel turned in a very good piece "In Praise of Chain Stores," which of course had us here at Stevereads nodding in approval.

One of the experts Postrel quotes hits the nail on the head:

"[local anti-chain activists] want specialty retail that sells exactly what the chains sell - the same price the same fit, the same qualities, the same sizes, the same brands, even. You can show people pictures of a Pottery Barn with nothing but the name changed, and they'll love the store."

In other words, anti-chain store prejudice is born and kept alive by snobby Cantabrigians.

Chain stores plant themselves sometimes in the middle of feckin nowhere, offering a clean well-lighted space, shevles that are always well-stocked with a mind-staggering variety of items. They almost always attract to their staffs people who care about their particular specialization. Their size often allows them to offer discounts.

Listen carefully, boys and girls: ONLY in America could ANYBODY consider this a bad thing.

Don't get me wrong: we here at Stevereads are big fans of strong, knowing, well-stocked, idiosyncratic local shops. We're also big fans of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

OK, they're not quite urban legends. Everyplace has at least some places that 'you gotta see' - places that owe a large part of their 'gotta' status to the fact that you won't see them anywhere else.

That is a true fact. Here'a another: in the last twenty years, America has undergone a gigantic REAL ESTATE BOOM. This boom, ENTIRELY separate from what chain stores do or don't do, what they are or aren't, has driven property rates through the ceiling. Independent of ANYTHING chain stores do or don't do, these property rates have driven many small, idiosyncratic shops out of business. The ONLY thing chain stores did was take advantage of their more stable financial footing to PAY those hugely swollen rents. That's it. That's all. The only thing they did 'wrong' was exactly what all those little 'independent' shops would have done if they could have. The hypocrisy leaves salt-clogs in the mouth.

Alas, those clogs stay firmly in place during Mona Simpson's fawning piece about Alice Munro's recent elevation to the celestial ranks of Everyman's Library.

As some of you may know, Munro is one of our bete noires here at Stevereads. Not only is she completely talentless in exactly the same way a tape recorder is completely talentless, but she's never written a 30 page short story that didn't dress out about about 170 pages of turgid, mind-numbing blandness.

The subtitle of Simpson's puff-piece is 'the living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years,' and I realize Simpson might not have had a hand in that line, but still: what a bleak future it hints at, if they're still reading Alice Munro in a hundred years! (the story she wrote last February, about two Canadian sisters, Esther and Florence, arguing about the level of their shared car's brake fluid, is, as far as I know, still ongoing)

A hundred years from now? Surely no eco-apocalypse scenario floated by the most radical environmental fringe-group is worse than that? Surely your children's children deserve better than that? Munro has built her entire 110-year career on banking that the general reading public doesn't understand - or more properly doesn't care - that there's a world of difference between simple fluency in English and actual TALENT in writing. Can it be that the progeny of a hundred years hence won't be able to tell the difference? We here at Stevereads certainly hope not! We have young writer-friends who are counting on earning royalities round about then.

Fortunately, there's always Cristina Nehring, who can be relied upon to turn in a quick, smart, snarky review no matter what.

Here she reviews a book called 'Mating in Captivity - Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic' by Esther Perel ... and she clearly revels in her intended prey:

"Perel practices couples therapy in New York, and her book's organizing principle emerge in a series of clinical vignette. A typical one might go like this: On spunky young couple has it all. The adore each other. They have wonderful times, wonderful families, spectacular careers. But they are 'in despair over what's happening to them.' "We are terrified," they confess. Why? Because their sex together is good, dear reader, but it it is not GREAT.
'Incalculable woe. Part of us wonders if Perel might best advise such couples to GET A LIFE - i.e., CARE ABOUT SOMETHING MORE IMPORTANT. Go help the homeless or the victims of war, and let your libido rebound on its own time. But the advice Perel profers her 'distressed' clients is not to help others; it is to destroy themselves. Do you, she asks them, express physical affection? 'Do you cuddle? .... Do you touch each other?' Yes, they say, in unison. Well, annouces the doctor, 'it's got to stop.' She gives them an assignment: Stop being nice to each other. Stop kissing. Stop hugging. It is sapping your sexual energy. Treat each other like trash, and you might notice a discrete rise in sexual tension.' Or just tension in general, one is tempted to add. 'About a month into it,' he says, 'I wanted nothing more to do with her.' Dr. Perel considers this plan a success. 'I knew I was onto something,' she intones."

This is odious stuff, and just when I thought I'd have to be the one to point this out, Nehring did it for me, in terms so clear and beautiful that I couldn't improve on them in any way. In fact, her words might stand as an motto for this entire blessed site. Just listen:

"It's easy to make fun of this sort of thing - and it's important to do so."

Let's hear that again, for the benefit of those out there who might be laboring under the impression that we here at Stevereads have always been ISOLATED gadflies:

"It's easy to make fun of this sort of thing - and it's important to do so."

Alas, there's plenty to make fun of in this issue, and nothing moreso than the centerpiece of the thing, the 100 most influential Americans 'They Made America' feature.

The thing was ripped from the pages of Cosmo - finding it in the Atlantic was both jarring and infuriating.

The one-sentence summaries of our worthies (an irritating number of whom aren't in fact American - allusions to the melting pot are all well and good, but what? There weren't one hundred people BORN here worthy of the list?) are puerile:

"Lewis and Clark - they went west to explore, and millions followed in their wake"

"Sam Walton - He promised us 'ever day low prices,' and we took him up on the offer"

"Elvis Presley - The king of rock and roll. Enough said."

Ugh.

In the Atlantic, of all places .... ugh.

Difficult to know what the purpose of this is, given how dumbed down it all is - the accompanying article about what exactly 'influential' is could go under a card-catalogue definition of useless, and the promo-blurb mini-summaries are better suited to Teen Beat than the country's best periodical ('Eli Whitney - his cotton gin harvested OUR HEARTS!!! OMG!!!)

As it is, the piece is two-parts hagiography and one-part misleading (you rock 'n' roll fans among my loyal followers, take a deep breath and ask yourself this: what INFLUENCE, in any way, has Elvis Presley had on ANYTHING, from the last twenty years of his career until now?), best forgotten entirely.

Unfortunately, this piece isn't the only deplorable thing in this issue, and one of those such things is very, very hard to swallow. As some of you know, we here at Stevereads consider the Atlantic's book critic Ben Schwartz to be the finest book critic currently working in English. So you can imagine how it pains us to point out that his 'Books of the Year' feature in this issue was hip-deep in sheep-dip.

He recommends these things:

Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg

The Secret River by Kate Grenville

All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward Jones

After This by Alice McDermott

The Accidental by Ali Smith

Framing the Early Middle Ages by Chris Wickham

We don't know exactly WHERE this crazy list comes from, but we feel certain it DIDN'T come from pure, clean thought. Perhaps payola was involved: we've all fallen behind on those lawnmower payments. Whatever the reasons, this list most certainly does NOT represent the best books of 2006. We here at Stevereads have read them all, and only the history, the last of them, is anything approaching GOOD, let alone great.

The rest are grasping, psuedo-intellectual hackwork, the type of prose most of my young friends currently writing would be embarrassed to see under their name even after a typical night's informal free-for-all. We can only hope Schwarz will give us all a longer, more discriminating list in the one issue he has left to do so before the year ends.

Our survey of the issue ends on a high note, however, albeit a grim one. Once again, William Langewiesche (Bill Lang) has turned in a piece of prose so well-written it's as thrilling as it is compelling.

The downside is that the piece is about how relatively easy it is to buy all the componants of a nuclear bomb in this topsy-turvy world. Wonderful prose or not, if you're not hiding under your desk by the time you finish reading this essay, you've got some kind of nuclear death-wish.

The ONLY conclusion anybody could possibly draw from all Lang's reportage is that it's a feckin MIRACLE some nutjob or 'rogue state' hasn't set off a nuclear bomb on American soil. The article is titled 'How to Get a Nuclear Bomb,' but it might just as well have been titled 'When, Not If.'

Which is depressing mainly because in a mutant-ravaged post-apocalyptic wasteland, there would be no Stevereads. Surely that's incentive enough to bring the wayward world to its senses?