Penny Press addendum: the New Yorker!

The middle ground between the two Penny Press extremes I mentioned last time is of course The New Yorker, perhaps the greatest example of such a middle ground magazine in the history of magazines. I read along the whole spectrum - from the beer-guzzling boss-hating chick-scoring mags like Outside and Men's Journal, where a fist-pumping mostly-brainless hetero homogeneity is assumed on the part of every reader, to the The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, where that reader is presumed not only to read books and care about them but also to like reading about them at length. I even follow the spectrum out onto its thin branches in periodicals like the TLS and The Journal of Roman Studies, where it's presumed the reader not only cares about the subjects at hand but knows them very well and does not need his French - or Latin - translated.

But I come back to The New Yorker for balance between the two extremes. When it's done well, there's scarcely any magazine that can more feel like intellectual home base (justifiable regional bias had me giving that accolade to The Atlantic for a century, until it left Boston and became a bit dumber).

It's not always done well, and even when it is, not all of it is. This present era at The New Yorker, for instance, is a bad one for its famous cartoons: two-thirds of the current stable of regulars draw so poorly that their captions could be written by Oscar Wilde and still not save them.

And maybe the jury is still out on whether or not this is a good era for the magazine's movie criticism, even though both its regular movie reviewers, David Denby and Anthony Lane, are well-known writers with book deals and loyal followers. Lane is witty, but I suspect him of caring about that fact more than anything else connected with his job - I can't count the number of times I've seen him swerve into oncoming traffic for the sake of a punch line, and for all his obvious intelligence, I far more often remember his reviews for some sharp apercu rather than for some sound assessment.

And then there's Denby! I'll admit up front that writing a monster of narcissism like Denbys bestselling The Great Books (in which all of the Western canon, it turns out, is just there to help Denby come to terms with mid-life anomie while blandly re-affirming his life-long suspicion that he's the smartest person in the history of the human race) is a sin from which it's unlikely I'll ever grant full redemption. If Denby wants blank-slate forgiveness for creating that big chunk of lazy hypocrisy, he'll take a sabbatical and write a book called Ungreat Books in which he enthuses honestly about the twenty or thirty non-canonical books he's actually read and loved in his life. Until that day comes, I'm bound to be a bit poorly disposed toward his work.



But even so, there are highs and lows! And his recent review of the new 50-million dollar 3-D action movie "The Green Hornet" starring Seth Rogen constitutes THE Denby-low so far in 2011: it's virtually an itemized list of the things that bug me about this writer, and that list can surely be epitomized in this passage:

Rogen says that he has been obsessed with comic books and superheroes for years. Well, I'm sorry to put it this way, but "The Green Hornet" is what you get when someone who dropped out of high school to do standup comedy, then spent a decade in movies and television, conceives a Hollywood "passion project."

That's what you get? So it's a rule, like an axiom out of Euclid? Competence = grad school? Quite apart from the fact that a glance at the cv's of most of Hollywood's greatest talents in the last 100 years makes that a silly thing for a professional movie critic to hint, there's also the arrogance of such a pronouncement - it's the worst stereotype of the squinty-faced, greasy-haired, Skittles-popping, brainlessly elitist movie-critic, noisily shifting in his seat during his free screening, impatient to begin too-loudly rehearsing his pans on his cell phone in the lobby  - not to a friend, since he has none (having alienated the last of them in senior year high school), but to his own answering machine, for later meta-analysis. That's what you get? So Rogen's failure (not discernible to me - the movie fails, yes, but Rogen's by far the best thing in it) was pre-ordained? If you knew his friggin academic record going in, nothing you could see in the next 90 minutes would rise above it? And what about all the schmucks who stayed in school? We've never seen a dumb or predictable movie from any of them? Bet we have.

This kind of thoughtless elitism is the exact counterpart of Lane's manic blitheness - both prefer mannerism to substance, so both tend to leave their actual subject-movies largely undiscussed. It often makes me wish Matt Taibbi reviewed movies, or that Locke Peterseim wrote for The New Yorker.

Fortunately, the current roster of New Yorker mainstays seldom if ever disappoint. Medical writer Atul Gawande turns in a great, perceptive piece in this issue on the good - and the great deal of bad - that comes from hospitals spending lots of money and time on the care of just a handful of the most critical patients. Gawande concentrates on how much medical science can learn from those few very expensive patients, and how much of what it learns can then be applied to patients in general. To which I might sheepishly stress a point Gawande makes only in passing: some of those long-term extremely costly patients are very grateful for all the extra care and bother. They'd rather have their names changed for legal reasons in a New Yorker piece about medical expense than be dead, thanks very much.

Of course, even the magazine's big guns can occasionally misfire even in the middle of a good essay. Louis Menand, for instance, in this issue turns in a typically solid and enjoyable piece on the substance and legacy of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (like some of the best book-critics - and some of the worst! - he uses some new book about Friedan as his pommel-horse: the point of the whole exercise is what he has to say about Friedan's book - the middle-man is just there as a skimpy justification for his own more fascinating observations). But at the end of the piece, as I was happily reading along, I stumbled upon this little bit of sacrilege:

Still, you don't need to read a book to talk about it (and it is considered an accepted decorum, in talking about it, not to be obliged to admit that you never read it).

Yeesh. I'm hoping that's just a dose of middle-ground irony that went down the wrong pipe.

Literary hacks in the Penny Press!

Can we pause from profundity long enough to cheer a little cheer for the best hacks in the world of hackery, the literary journalists?

They don't have a beat, these particular hacks; they aren't obsessed with cutting-edge goth-fusion, or Buffy, or the United States torturing people. They aren't advocating safer parenting, or pond-lining techniques, or same-sex marriage. They don't keep up with the Palins.

Instead, they roam over the whole of the pop culture/literary landscape in search of ... well, I'm not sure what. I'm not sure they're sure what, from day to day. A steady paycheck, yes, but once you've got some momentum going, that can be obtained by writing medical safety compliance pamphlets, or vinyl siding repair manuals, or fifth grade science histories - and yet, the hacks I'm talking about here, the literary journalists, don't write about these things (or maybe they do, but it's done quietly, late at night, with much wine and much shame, solely in order to pay persistent creditors). Instead, they're constantly groping along the contours of the landscape, feelers swaying in the breeze, hunting for something they either know enough to write about or have always wanted to know enough to write about. They aren't specialists, but neither are they quite amateurs. They aren't philosophers, even though they're often pursuing a fairly consistent ideology. And they aren't experts, even though the best of them are rarely caught in open error.

That last point is explained by their peculiar work habits. Once they settle on something, some person or book or movie or school of thought or general topic, the literary journalist will do far more than simply take in the specific artistic item in question - no, in addition to that, they'll take armloads of related books out of the library, or track down endless supplementary items online. In one very concentrated amount of time, they'll allow that subject to utterly consume their lives - and at the end of that very concentrated amount of time, they'll know their subject.

It's a weird kind of knowledge, however: it's often acquired so fast - and often, truth be told, with such a lack of deeply personal reasons - that the literary journalist finds himself aesthetically bifurcated: one the one hand, he's now something of an expert on his new subject (he can tell you the relevant books, he can rattle off the extant controversies and has pet theories about all of them, etc.), but on the other hand, he's still an outsider to it all (he's only been steeped in it for a month at the most, after all).

The result can be incredibly valuable. It's as if you went to the world's leading authority on some subject (World War One? Boer society? Viking ship-building?) and gave him a month's vacation, all expenses paid, in some tropical getaway where the only thing he wouldn't do is give even one thought to his specialty - then you bring him back and ask him to write an article about something in his bailiwick. The articles that would result from such an unlikely procedure - freed for once of academic insularity and infighting, geared for once to a jocular, populist accessibility - would be wondrous invitations to all manner of subjects.

Specialists almost never write such articles, but literary journalists write them for a living - and we're all the richer for it. And the Penny Press is where you go to find such articles, and such writers.

Long-time readers of Stevereads will already be familiar with some of the people I mean. There was, once upon a time, the likes of Gore Vidal and Wilfrid Sheed and Mary McCarthy. And today, there's Christopher Hitchens and Gordon Wood and Jill Lepore and James Atlas and a baker's dozen more.

And in the Atlantic, there's Ben Schwarz, who in the latest issue reviews several books touching on what the average German citizen during the Second World War knew of the campaign of extermination being carried out by the Nazis toward the Jews of Europe. And perhaps even more so, there's the great Caitlin Flanagan, a literary journalist who possesses the quintessential gift of all first-rate hacks: she can take any subject and make her readers interested in it.

Even if the subject is Alec Baldwin.



In the latest Atlantic, she finds herself in the unlikely position of reviewing Baldwin's account of his divorce and single-fatherhood, A Promise to Ourselves. It's not anything she could have predicted:

'I never wanted to write this book,' he tells us at the outset, in a hangdog advisory that we shouldn't expect too much. It was also a book I never wanted to read, but here we are, Alec and I, making the best of a bad situation.

The focal point of that bad situation is of course the leaked cell phone rant Baldwin yelled at his daughter, castigating her for her rude behavior and calling her a "pig." The transcript of that call is, I suppose, appalling (although in all fairness, I myself have never met a teenage girl who wasn't a self-absorbed little A-hole ... my only qualm would be in using the term "pig," since I happen to know pigs are very outgoing, giving individuals); certainly Flanagan opens that it is:

his [Baldwin's] real purpose [in the book] is to exonerate himself from an incident so grotesque that it's hard to imagine any piece of written communication short of a suicide note changing our opinion of it.

Flanagan takes this unpromising material and crafts out of it a review/meditation that will keep you feverishly reading, one delicious paragraph after another (for instance, on the indifferent intimacy of families: "Dad doesn't get too excited by the sight of Mom in her shimmy anymore, for the same reason Buddy's never taken a hankering to Sissy: they've seen too much. It's not community censure that has kept incest in check all these centuries; it's stomach flu"). The piece is easily the best thing in a typically strong issue of the Atlantic, and it keeps returning to that one catastrophic phone call, which Baldwin took outside a restaurant:

Standing on the street, once again confronted by life's inability to meet him halfway with his simple desire to be the center of the universe, he snapped. He raved at the child in the ugliest language imaginable, threatening her and calling her terrible names. Shortly thereafter, the message was leaked to an Internet scandal site (By whom? Cherchez la femme.) And the incident became infamous.

Of course I urge you to read the whole of this issue - of every issue, even in these slightly dumbed-down days of the Atlantic. But even if you skip around and pick and choose, you should make sure not to miss this piece. Back in the pre-Internet days, I used to photocopy (Google it; it was cumbersome) articles like this and make little packets of them to hand to uncaring friends, because these pieces are just that good.

And they're crafted by literary journalists, those most despised of writers, those Parnassian guns for hire - so let's all raise a glass of the cheap stuff to those working professionals! May they all be as magisterial as Helen Vendler, as thrilling as William Langeweische, as well-read as Ben Schwarz, as funny as Anthony Lane, and as damn good as Caitlin Flanagan!

In the Penny Press!

There can be little doubt: The New Yorker's Anthony Lane gets the prize for the week's most flat-out hilarious chunk of prose, the opening of his review of the Wachowski brothers' new movie adaptation of "Speed Racer":

Gluttons for "Duck Soup" will remember the scene in which Groucho is faced with an official document. "Why, a four-year-old child could understand this report," he says. "Run out and find me a four-year-old child." My sentiments exactly, as I sat in a cathedral-sized auditorium wreathed in the ineffable mysteries of "Speed Racer." This is the latest offering from Andy and Larry Wachowski, bringers of "The Matrix," and, if it is about anything, it is about the quest to overwhelm a particular stratum of the masses. A four-year-old will be reduced to a gibbering but highly gratified wreck; an eight-year-old will wander around wearing a look that was last seen on the face of Dante after he met Beatrice. But what about the rest of us? True, our eyeballs will slowly, though never completely, recover, but what of our souls?

Even before the Dante reference, it's obvious that Lane is way, way too smart to be writing pro forma movie reviews like this. Hilarious as they are, they're way too good for the humble little art form they adorn.

Lane's piece is the best thing in this current New Yorker, but only by a hair: Margaret Talbot's piece on animal intelligence, "Birdbrain," is also uniformly excellent. Talbot's a wonderful writer, and here she's sinking her teeth into a big, burgeoning subject: the cognitive abilities of animals other than man. This is a fantastic piece, in which Talbot surveys, in pitch-perfect prose, the whole fraught subject. Here's a sample:

If instinct could explain why your dog growled at your suitcase, then there was no need to cast about for a richer interpretation, one that might, as Morgan put it, "savour of the prattle of the parlour tea table rather than the sober discussion of the study." As sensible as Morgan's canon sounded, it essentially censored the question: "Do animals think?"

They do, of course, although virtually none of them think in human terms, and that's interesting for a couple of reasons, not least of which is that all of you will find the whole subject of animal intelligence ably laid out and debated in the June issue of Open Letters Monthly (this New Yorker issue also features a brief Jeffrey Toobin notice about the hardships Ted Sorensen faced writing his new memoir, Counsellor - a book you'll find also ably reviewed, in that same June issue of Open Letters).



Meanwhile, over in the TLS, the great Jonathan Bate offers us a fantastic long piece on the criminally overlooked Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton. Bate's essay is a model of all that's best in the form: it's effortlessly authoritative but also fluidly readable. Our only quibble (and you just knew we had one, right?) arose from some of the offhand assertions Bate tosses around in his final paragraph, which we'll quote in full:

The decision [on the part of Middleton's latest editors to note every textual variation in Middleton's various early editions] may, however, prove counter-productive: will this self-consciously post-modern Middleton Folio have the impact it deserves in the absence of a pre-modern or just a plain modern one? Taylor could, with the assistance of a co-editor and a few graduate students, have dashed out a modern-spelling edition of Middleton's complete plays in five years, winning his hero a more prominent place both in the college classroom and on the classical stage. He would probably have finished that in about 1993, the year of the World Wide Web. He would then have seen that the internet's hypertext facility provided the perfect medium for a deconstructive edition with full scholarly bells and whistles. By the mid-1990s, the Arden Shakespeare team had developed an electronic edition that made it possible to move onscreen between modern-spelling texts, facsimiles of original quartos, editorial variants, commentary notes, sources and part-books for individual roles. This is what is now needed for Middleton. It is good news that Gary Taylor's principal co-editor, John Lavagnino, is a computer expert and that they are even now at work on an electronic edition (the initial website accompanying the print edition is perfunctory in the extreme). Thomas Middleton has been monumentalized in print at the very moment when print is ceasing to be our primary medium of literary monumentalization. He might just have missed the boat again.

Needless to say, we here at Stevereads, despite being ourselves an Internet phenomenon, don't agree with this cavalier avowal of the print world's demise. But it's a small quibble, and it certainly didn't diminish our appreciation of the piece as a whole - Middleton has always been one of our favorite dramatists, and Bate is right in diagnosing why you're unlikely to find a standard collection of his works in your local bookstore: the problem, to paraphrase a former U.S. President, is what your definition of 'his' is. Middleton was a great collaborator, a great and creative hack willing to work with anybody. He could brush up dialog until it sparkled; he could come up with plot-twists that had his collaborators scratching their heads trying to figure out why they didn't think of that; he had a very good ear for how to work a crowd, and there was no job he thought himself too good for.

As a result, he's all over the drama map, and chasing down exactly which works he had a hand in - and to what extent - is something of a chore.

So where do you start, you ask? Start with "The Changeling," which Middleton mostly wrote himself (Will Rowley also had a hand in it, but trust us, it was a very small hand). It'll hook you immediately, and it's as good as anything in Shakespeare. If you can, find the 1993 production Simon Curtis did ... it will not only entertain you, it'll drastically increase your estimate of the acting abilities of Bob Hoskins, Elizabeth McGovern, and especially Hugh Grant. Hoskins especially does a marvelously disturbing job as the villainous DeFlores.

But by far the most disturbing thing in this go-round of In the Penny Press is a brief article in the latest Asimov's by Carl Frederick called "The Challenge of the Anthropic Universe," in which the author, a quantum theoretician and thus not a crackpot (well, not a religious crackpot, anyway) examines Australian physicist Brandon Carter's assertion that "the Universe, and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends, must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage."

Frederick goes on:

The depth of the anthropic problem is, I think, well described by the cosmologist responsible for the Steady State theory of the universe (and noted science fiction author), Sir Fred Hoyle. His appreciation for the almost miraculous coincidences in enabling carbon to be produced in stars caused him to change his very perception of the universe. He wrote, "A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintendent has monkeyed with the physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. I do not believe that any physicist who examined the evidence could fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside stars."

These are physicists talking, keep in mind. The gist of the matter is that, to many such physicists, the physical constants of the universe seem too finely 'tuned' to be the random products of cosmological development. They don't leap from this observation to God - Frederick is quick to point out that such a leap is neither the scientific community's preferred solution nor his own. But even so ... it's mighty disturbing to read about scientists working on the leading edges of the quantum field saying the things they're working on seem like they were made by somebody. Even worse, that they look like they were made specifically for humans.

Here's hoping the right-wing Christian nutjobs who currently control this country don't read Frederick's article ...

In the Penny Press! The Many Lives of Anthony Burgess!

Here at Stevereads, we're accustomed to the reliability of certain cosmic forces. The sun being too bright and hot, for instance, or the comment-silence of 90 percent of this blog's readers, or the gassiness of basset hounds (neighbors' basset hounds, of course: our own dogs, Leni and Blondi, never pass gas at all). Enshrined on such a list from time immemorial (= since Tina Brown) is this: the content-slightness of the New Yorker.

So imagine our distress when for the second consecutive week, the venerable magazine has been relatively PACKED with interesting stuff. The world whirls.

This week's double-sized 'media' issue is so full of noteworthy stuff that it's getting an entire entry of its own. Let's hit the highlights:

David Denby reviews the new Martin Scorcese film 'The Departed' to generally lukewarm effect, writing at one point:

All the characters are unusually intelligent, and the fast, scurrilous talk binds the tightly edited short sequences together. Scorcese, however, is trying to do with words what he used to accomplish with the camera, and he doesn't produce the kind of emotional involvement that once made his movies so exhausting and also so satisfying.

I disagree that Scorcese's movies have always or even often been either of those things, but again, this isn't the blog for that. But while we're on the subject, I will say this: I can't wait for 'The Departed' to be old, to be no longer getting reviewed. Why? Because then there'll be no reason for EVERY SINGLE REVIEW to feature that same still from the movie. I'm sure you know the one I mean: Leonardo DiCaprio in the GAYEST POSSIBLE punch-windup and Matt Damon in the GAYEST POSSIBLE 'not the face! not the face!' defense posture. If I never see that picture again, it'll be too soon.

Also in this issue was Jill Lepore's review of a new Tom Paine biography (it hardly matters which one, since she says virtually nothing about it), in which she gives a lively recap of the high and low points of Paine's life and times.

I liked the piece well enough, except for this:

Adams, who had been the colonies' most ardent advocate for independence, refused to accept that Paine deserved any credit for Common Sense.

And I wouldn't object to this either, if Lepore were talking about the right Adams. But unfortunately, she's referring to John, when in fact it was Samuel Adams who'd been the most ardent advocate of independence, talking it up in taverns and farmers markets and meeting halls long before cousin John jumped on board the movement. The only reason there WAS a movement to jump on board was because Samuel Adams started one. You should all keep that in mind while taking in the Boston Public Library's excellent new show, 'John Adams Unbound.'

Under the already-alarming section headline of 'The Wayward Press,' Nicholas Lemann writes a piece about the continuing appeal of conspiracy theories, and it starts out well.

His initial focus is of course 9/11, and he points out some genuinely disturbing questions that have not been answered:

... the debris found near September 11th sites does not match debris from the purported planes; that Larry A. Silverstein bought the Twin Towers and took out a large insurance policy that specifically mentioned terrorist attacks, only days before September 11th; that the two American Airlines flights that crashed that morning had not been scheduled to fly.

But about half-way through his article he stumbles rather badly:

We've been too deeply conditioned by years of reading books with bibliographies and footnotes to be entirely persuadable by those which don't have them; and prose itself, when deployed at length by people less gifted than James Joyce, is a somewhat plodding medium, demanding the use of conventional logic and temporal sequencing. The most powerful and memorable material about what misdeeds the Bush Administration may be secretly up to appears in documentary films.

To which we here at Stevereads offer the only fitting rebuttal: Fuck you and the horse you rode your lazy ass in on.

Plodding enough for you, you illiterate dickhead?

But it's his conclusion that really irks:

It [the paranoid mindframe]'s a view of how the world works that mistakenly empowers particular, and evil, force with the ability to determine the course of events, and it misses the messiness and contingency with which life actually unfolds ... One doesn't have to deny the horrors of the story to see it as not so neatly explicable. Tragedy is more profound if it is permitted to entail not just malignancy but also people screwing up.

What irks about that, you ask (well, you DON'T ask - you wonder about it privately while reading this and then don't respond at all, but let's use it rhetorically)? I mean apart from the misuse of both 'contingency' and 'malignancy' (guess Joyce wasn't available for the rewrite)?

It's the patronizing tone, the underlying assumption that because all conspiracy theorists are paranoid nutjobs, all conspiracy theories are nutjob fantasies. But conspiracies do exist; little ones and big ones come to light virtually every day. Evil people do things, orchestrate things, that they don't want anybody to know about. I'm very much unconvinced that the plane crashes of September 11 were one such instance, but honestly - is there ANYBODY who isn't convinced that the Bush administration orchestrated a lying cover-up of its motives for invading Iraq? Some conspiracies are real, alas.

Orchestration of a different kind was the focus of Malcolm Gladwell's fascinating article on Epagogix, a company in the business of predicting - and manufacturing - Hollywood blockbusters.

I'm no expert on the movie industry (if only there were a funny, irreverent, authoritative blog by someone who was...), but I found this article absorbing. But then again, according to no less an authority than William Goldman, "Nobody knows anything ... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess ... why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on 'Star Wars'? ... Because nobody, nobody - not now, not ever - knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn't going to work at the box office."

But according to Gladwell, Epagogix would like to prove Goldman wrong. The article is full of 'hit clusters' and 'neural networks,' but the main point of Epagogix's equations is that they don't care about being in Tom Cruise's Myspace Friends list:

It doesn't care about maintaining relationships with stars or agents or getting invited to someone's party. It doesn't care about climbing the corporate ladder. It has one master and one master only: how do you get to a bigger box-office? Nobody else in Hollywood is like that.

Of course, the idea of a future in which artistic intent is entirely removed from movies - where formulae and statistics command everything that's there on the screen - is pretty depressing. But I confess to a deep fascination in the road we take to get there (and on the plus side, if you remove all personal or artistic elements from movie-making, future generations would be spared their equivalents of 'Garden State' ... no small incentive, that ...)

But by far the most interesting thing in the latest New Yorker was Ian Parker's long and beguiling profile of Anthony Burgess, an incredibly prolific and often brilliant British ex-pat with disasterous hair and posture, a penchant for dim-bulb leggy wives, and a bottomless, hopeless addiction to tobacco and alcohol.

Ooooops ... my mistake: Parker's actually writing about Christopher Hitchens! Which means either we're dealing with an uncanny coincidence, or Christopher Hitchens is, as many have long suspected, a living, breathing trope.

Either way, the piece is fantastic. Not only does Parker quote his subject liberally, but his quotes ABOUT his subject are all stellar:

He also has the politician's trick of eliding the last word of one sentence to the first of the next, while stressing both words, in order to close the gate against interruption.

He seems to be perpetually auditioning for the role of best man.

He writes a single draft, at a speed that caused his New Statesman colleagues to place bets on how long it would take him to finish an editorial. What emerges is ready for publication, except for one weakness: he's not an expert punctuator, which reinforces the notion that he is in the business of transcribing a lecture he can hear himself giving.

Regular readers of Stevereads (the Silent Majority, as it were) will recall that I myself have now joined the swelling ranks of those who've publicly tussled with Hitchens, but I nonetheless approached the article with a hopeful neutrality - the fact is, Hitchens has given me a great deal of reading pleasure over the years. His literary essays prior to about the mid-90s were almost always beautiful and startlingly eye-opening, and his evisceration of Mother Teresa, The Missionary Position, is gleeful malice (or do I mean 'malignancy'? Dammit, when is that Joyce guy getting back from lunch?) pressed between book-covers.

But I'm not the only one who's noticed a change, a diminution, in the last few years. This isn't ideological, it has nothing to do with whether or not I agree with his political beliefs (although I think his central tent-post, that it was right for the United States to remove Saddam Hussein from power, is dead wrong). It's completely about his prose, about his innumerable articles - is there anyone reading this who doesn't think the quality of these things has been in steady decline for some time now?

Parker's article holds the answer, I think. As in any profile of Hitchens, his soggy substance-abuse takes center stage. We're told that he smokes and drinks pretty much incessantly (vignette after vignette has him already drinking at noon, with the vague assertion floating around that he does a peck of work in the mornings, before the day's imbibing)(as I mentioned, the Burgess echoes are deafening, all throughout the piece), but Parker resorts to the tired, stupid old cliche of the writing man who somehow manages to keep all this incessant smoking and drinking separate from his work - the tiresome Dorian Gray dichotomy: TWO Hitchenses - one who lounges around drinking all day and partying all night, and the other who spends what would have to be vast amounts of time reading, researching, and above all writing, the physical act of writing.

Parker seems to buy this line entirely:

He was not a 'piss artist,' he explained, 'someone who can't get going without a load of beer, who's a drunk - overconfident and flushed. I can't bear that.' He went on, 'I know what I'm doing with it. And I can time it. It's a self-medicating thing.' I took his point. Hitchens does drink a very great deal (and said of Mel Gibson's blood-alcohol level at the time of his recent Malibu arrest - O.12 per cent - 'that's about as sober as you'd ever want to be'). But he drinks like a Hemingway character: continually and to no apparent effect.

Quite apart from the fact that no Hemingway character would be caught dead using such a whining, telltale word as 'self-medicating,' there's the obvious parry to such a claim: there IS apparent effect. The writing has suffered. Somebody who's very often drunk all day very often grows to NEED to be drunk all day, and there are certain things you can't do while drunk. You can teach undergrad courses while drunk. You can beat up on opposing talk show panelists while drunk. You can write sloppy, off-the-cuff prose while drunk.

But you can't meaningfully read while drunk. You certainly can't research while drunk. And despite what a million authors known and unknown have claimed, you can't write WELL while drunk. All of those thing require CONCENTRATION, which is one of the first attributes to disappear when somebody starts drinking.

Of course, this is where the Burgess comparison comes to a complete halt - since Burgess drank if anything more than Hitchens and yet was eerily, almost superhumanly productive AND good (usually) throughout his entire career. As good as The Missionary Position or The Trial of Henry Kissinger are, it's nevertheless true: Hitchens has yet to produce a book that will outlive him. But by the time Burgess was Hitchens' age, he'd produced ... what? How many books that would outlive him?

My young friend John Cotter (visit his grim website at http://www.johncotter.net and see how damn depressing it is to be young, handsome, well-friended, and talented! Search the site in vain for a single non-hipster smile!) is, believe it or not, one of the world's foremost authorities on Anthony Burgess. I'm sure the Silent Majority would be interested in his thoughts on the whole Hitchens/Burgess comparison. Alas, he stopped reading this blog once he saw that it was entirely devoted to young adult fiction ... but maybe he'll come across this entry one day and treat us all to a few paragraphs on the subject.

In any case, just LOOK at how much matter was crammed into that single issue of the New Yorker! This will certainly make the NEXT issue a colossal letdown, but let's smell the roses while we can!