Men of the Year in the Penny Press!

Lots of disappointments in GQ's latest "Men of the Year" issue, with only a few pleasant surprises sprinkled in between. Of course they named president-elect Barack Obama (they were given about forty seconds of his time, and considering that either he or his wife seem to be on the cover of every single magazine in the Western world this month, even that much time is surprising), as how could they not? And once again, roasting tobacco addict Leonardo DiCaprio comes across in his interview as a genuinely intelligent and enthusiastic young man (when he says about the paparazzi who swarm around his life "I do not like the way they conduct themselves," you have to just nod your head). And Wil S. Hylton's tribute to Senator Ted Kennedy deserves quoting:

There is today no American who does not owe him a debt. For civil rights and voting rights. For privacy and choice. For clean air and fresh water. In an era of partisan gridlock, he forged alliances and straddled parties, aligning himself with his political nemeses - Hatch, Thurmond, Bush. ... He is a cornerstone of the country we love, a founding father of the nation as we know it. His time draws close, and the gift more precious daily.




But alas, such high point are rare. The bulk of the choices leave the reader confused and frustrated. General Petraeus? Touted as a tactical genius when he's only barely managing to occupy a Fourth World craphole of a country despite being given one of the biggest military tidal waves of reinforcements any modern general has ever received? Aaron Eckhart and Jon Hamm? Touted as era-defining actors because they've played a series (or in Hamm's case just one) chin-cleft nonentities? Gordon Ramsay, touted as a 'man's man' in the kitchen because he atrociously bullies his staff into producing bland, overpriced dishes? To say the least, one looks for more in emblems of a year.

The worst offender among the Men of the Year is probably Olympic wunderkind Michael Phelps, who comes across in Michael Paterniti's profile as a spoiled, pea-brained, douchebag who values all the wrong things, trusts all the wrong things, and prioritizes all the wrong things (in this he's undoubtedly no different from any other twenty-something guy, except his new $100 million dollar price-tag makes it just slightly more noticeable). Paterniti wants to paint a friendly, admiring picture of his subject (as far as I know, GQ doesn't do a 'Douchebags of the Year' issue), wants to tell his readers that Michael Phelps is still the same aw-shucks all-American young guy whose teammates used to call him 'Gomer' for his lack of guile. But an awful, creepy alternative to this person peeks through every vignette:

He just seems normal, except for the furtive glances of strangers and the stalkerish approach of one waiter who hides behind a tree before squeakily asking for an autograph, one Phelps signs without making eye contact, without pausing in his sentence, the diamonds of his watch sparkling as he tells of how, after leaving Beijing, he went to Portugal, where he met up with a group of friends, just to hide out for a while, and there were paparazzi literally hanging in the trees.

Bet you think I'm going to jump on that bit about the diamond watch, don't you? Nope! All young people are idiots, and all fashion is idiotic, so it's a natural extrapolation that a fantastically wealthy young man would think it was stylin' to wear a $100,000 watch to an hour-long interview at a Tex-Mex place. No, the detail that hints not only at Phelps being an asshole but at Phelps always having been an asshole (Paterniti nowhere relates any of the many stories that've cropped up about his aw-shucks paragon since his rise to fame - suffice it to say, he disliked by more people at his alma mater, especially more women, than he was liked) is that bit about signing the autograph without stopping to speak to or even look at the person asking for it. Done in a crowd of imploring note-pads, that's excusable. Done in private, one-on-one? No amount of fame or money teaches you to have that inside you - it has to be there already.

And if Phelps is the biggest disappointment among the Men of the Year, the biggest disappointment among the interviewers of those men is certainly Andrew Corsello, whose profile of morose, talentless American literary lion Philip Roth reads like a sado-masochist's love-letter to the prig who treats him like dirt all during their chat. This is how the piece opens:

Is it disdain? Not quite. Disdain requires more energy, more investment. What Philip Roth is giving me is thinner, a mix of four parts boredom and one part irritation. Here's the word that comes closest: disregard.



In case you're wondering, Corsello's attitude toward such treatment is sincere admiration - for him, Roth is the man, the world's greatest living writer, a literary figure Corsello has read and re-read so many times that Roth's various novels have become personal touchstones for him:

I myself often return to Roth not only for his words but for my own - the fervent conversations I've carried on with him in the margins that, when reread, offer clues to my past selves. When I need to consult the X-rays, I reread The Ghost Writer (the X-ray of my writing soul) and Sabbath's Theater (of my ravening male soul). When I need to reach my dad and can't get him on the phone, I sometimes hook up with Swede Levov, American Pastoral's protagonist, who's got my old man's gentle temperament (if not his savvy and smarts). When I consider the dark scenario of a Sarah Palin presidency, I return to The Plot Against America to see what would become of the country were an evangelical even more dim and anti-other than W. to begin culling the 'real' patriots from those who didn't see "America the way you and I see America."

This is nothing if not personal, and it gets more so:

Here it is: I go to Roth for that thrilling voice in my head that responds first with How dare he! then revels in the undeniable proof that Ha! It can be done! and finally arrives at Goddamn! Why can't I take a stab at thinking and writing and living like that?

And the problem with all this earnest if slightly slobbering hero-worship? It's entirely, 100 percent misplaced. In a career that now spans quite a few decades, Philip Roth has never written a single book that was worth reading, not one single work that had more than an accumulated total of three or four semi-good sentences in it. These books haven't affected Corsello because of their literary merits (his own prose is effortlessly better than anything Roth has ever condescended to put on paper), because they don't have any literary merits; they've worked whatever magic they've worked on him in the same way they've managed to win Roth so many male fans who read very few other authors: the books have lots of smutty bits, and they allow misogyny to be draped in writerly affectation. If Roth is a literary lion, he's also a literal one, mirroring the reality of the male African lion: lazy, complacent, sexist, and fond of hogging the kill. Reading Corsello's piece made me want nothing more than to email him with lots and lots of book-recommendations.

But disheartened readers can buck themselves up by remembering one great, glowing detail about this issue, a detail we started with: president-elect Obama gave them about forty seconds of his time - not because he, too, is a prig, a douchebag, or an overrated hack, but because he's just become the busiest man in the world, which is a very, very good thing. That one Man of the Year, smiling courteously at the GQ photographers but really, really needing to dash, is so optimism-affirming he makes up for all the disappointments in the world.

And there's always next year.

small consolations in the penny press!

It's been a weirdly dismaying week out there in the literary world, as some of you may have noticed. First, the Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to ... the third-best poet from the island of Mauritius (note to the freakishly wayward Nobel Committee: at best, you've only got a few more years left before Vladimir Putin conquers your neutral asses, so you might want to think about giving the next Prize to somebody known, instead of every year playing this idiotic game of watching copy-editors all over the Western world scurry for Wikipedia immediately after your announcement). Intelligent readers barely had a moment to collect themselves after that gigantic gesture of irrelevancy than the Booker Prize was awarded to an earnest nonentity from Chennai, out in the colonies (note to the Booker judges: see above, and while you're at it, try actually reading Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence).

And on top of all that, Open Letters Political Editor Greg Waldmann, attending a book-party on the Upper West Side, while talking about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, was heard to say, "The election's over. Unless something horrible happens, it's already over." Granted, Waldmann was drunk at the time (Political Editors! Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em, know exactly where to find 'em at 2 in the morning!), but still - you'd think somewhere in his mainly Slovakian upbringing there would have been a kindly Irish washerwoman who could have patiently taken him aside and said, "Jaysus Mary and Joseph! Are you wantin' trouble t'find you?" As it is, his sloshy pronouncement virtually guarantees that a) the election isn't over, and b) something horrible will happen.




It's a sentiment you find cropping up in a lot of different places, and it's damn unsettling. Say what you want about President George W. Bush, but in the ramp-up to neither of his elections did you ever read ominous prose hoping nothing, you know, happens to him. But with presidential front-runner Barack Obama, this kind of worry has crept even into the hallowed pages of The New Yorker, where the always-interesting Hendrik Hertzberg's "Talk of the Town" piece started off with some crack observations about candidate John McCain's supposed love of "town hall" style chats with his supporters ("McCain's town hall meetings have been one-man shows, based on a relationship between candidate and audience that falls somewhere between that of a celebrity to his fans and that of a king to his subjects - one important man in a roomful of little people") but ended up with that same worried expression on its face:

"I admire Senator Obama and his accomplishments," he [McCain] told a restive crowd in Lakeville, Minnesota, last Friday. "I will respect him, and I want everyone to be respectful." The crowd - the mob - booed. If McCain loses, or even if he wins, his campaign will be remembered as a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense, in which a hero is ruined through some terrible choice of his own. One can only hope that the tragedy will be his alone, and not the nation's.

This tallies neatly with comments heard everywhere in the last week, all to the effect that Barack Obama is some kind of Kennedyesque marked man, that the rabid supporters of his Republican rival (and his equally mob-baiting running mate) will stop at nothing to thwart his bid for the White House, that maybe the reason Obama seems too good to be true is because, tragically, he'll never get to be too good to be true. And this is the kind of talk certain Political Editors only encourage when they've been a little too grabby with the Glenlivets. Yeesh.

Rather unhappily, something of the dour tone of all this broke out of politics and seeped into some other parts of the latest New Yorker, most notably John Lahr's scathing review of the new Roundabout Theatre Company production of Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons." But surely, you say, scathing theater reviews are par for the course with New York magazines? Maybe so, but Lahr isn't lambasting the new production starring Frank Langella: his scathing review is of the play (with a little slopped-over scorn for Thomas More himself). You know times are tough when even Robert Bolt isn't safe:

Bolt ... spins his yarn as if he were trying to make history accessible to nincompoops. He reduces the tumult of the English Reformation to a domestic drama about a good guy with strong feelings about divorce who tangles with a king who wants an heir. Caricature, not character, is the play's idiom. Although Bolt uses Erasmus's famous encomium about More as a title, he is uninterested in complexity, and certainly unable to demonstrate it.

Again: yeesh. Eugene O'Neill better watch his back.

You'd think you could gain some respite from all this stress in the pages of the latest GQ, where inevitably a lighter tone is struck, but at first you'd be as overwrought and confused as you were in The New Yorker. For instance, there's yet another full-page ... ad? poster? ... something picturing a confused-looking Justin Timberlake sporting stubble and wearing the most gawd-ugly white trash polyeurythane jacket imaginable, and superimposed over the whole page are the words "My Name is William Rast." To which the most prompt answer is "No it's not - your name is Justin Timberlake." But clearly the thing isn't a misprint; so what is it? A clothing ad? For something that ugly? Not likely. A movie ad? Without a single detail about the movie? Just some guy's name? Who knows? Presumably Justin Timberlake, but he hasn't been updating his blog, so the subject remains dark.



Equally confusing is Carter Smith's photo-spread of outdoorsy clothes starring underrated young actor/tobacco addict Scott Speedman. Despite the wide spectrum of outdoorsy-style things he could be pictured doing, Speedman in several shots is shown holding, examining, and even perhaps writing books. This has its own layer of irony (in real life, Speedman is so sinfully lazy that he couldn't finish his morning's Sudoku, much less that pesky novel that's been germinating inside him for lo, these last 12 years), but perhaps it's wishful - if so, Speedman should email the editors of Open Letters Monthly without delay; they'll help him with his productivity, if nothing else.

But good things come to those who wait, and this issue of GQ is no exception! The hoot of the issue - the hoot of the month so far - is Devin Friedman's hilariously cringe-inducing "Will You Be My Black Friend?"

Friedman looks around his life one day and realizes it's drastically monochromatic: he has virtually no black friends or acquaintances. This doesn't sit well with him, of course:

There's a bright line there. The Condoleeza line. Admitting that you count your black friends is a violation of the Unracist White Person Magna Carta, but really, I couldn't handle walking around knowing that I have the same number of black friends as George W. Bush.

So he does what we all do when faced with a tough problem: he puts an ad on Craigslist. After first quite drolly summarizing the lay, as it were, of the land:

People basically want to do one of three things on Craigslist: buy a sofa, find a place to live, or get a blow job in the next fifteen minutes. You can do other things, I guess, like find a tennis partner or someone to read your aura. But are you sure "aura reader" doesn't really mean "guy who's willing to give you a blow job in the next fifteen minutes"?

The piece has lots of laughs in it, although even here there are somber notes being struck in the background. Ultimately, Friedman isn't saying white people and black people can't be friends - he's saying they don't want to be friends:

Amicable racial estrangement is also the story of America at large, circa right now. Demographically, studies show that the country has been quietly resegregating - and this time, self-segregating. It's the era of racism without any actual racists - 8 percent of white people say they would be "uncomfortable" voting for a black man to be president; it's the other 92 percent who say they'd vote for a black person, but as often as not aren't actually friends with one, that I'm talking about. Contemporary life can be arranged as a series of homogeneous zones that white folks can glide between - with only the most glancing, waiterly contact with all but the least foreign-seeming black people, or really with anyone different from you at all.





We'll have to hope Friedman is wrong about this growing racial complacency, or that if he's right, the presidential nay-sayers (and fate-tempters) are wrong about the bullseye between Barack Obama's shoulder blades. Twenty years ago, a wise man in Iowa said, "The only way to put race relations in America on the right track is for a black man to get elected President." Let's hope he was right about that part and not about his next line: "And that is simply never going to happen."