In the Penny Press!

Just the other day we were coming back inside from the rooftop garden here at Stevereads when we chanced upon a young intern crying in the stairwell. Foolishly, impulsively, we inquired as to the cause. The intern turned her bloated, tear-blotched face up to us and said, “I miss In the Penny Press!”

Which got us to thinking (well, actually it first got us to firing, since any hapless intern given to such bouts of soppy sentimentality obviously deserved the old heave-ho) that perhaps the occasional In the Penny Press might not be such a bad thing, even though we’ve re-consecrated the site to books.

So in light of the fact that there’s actually a good deal of interesting stuff to discuss in the recent Penny Press, and in memory of that poor weak intern (who’s already been tasered out of the building by Steveread’s elite security forces), let’s have a look, shall we? And what better place to start than the current New Yorker?

The July 9 & 16 issue has several things to recommend it, not least Hendrik Hertzberg’s withering column on Vice President Count Cheney in ‘Talk of the Town.’ Hertzberg is redacting multi-part examination of Count Cheney done in the Washington Post, and his summaries are pure, gleeful gold - or worth their weight in it, anyway, to those of us who watched with horror as a Marvel Comics super-villain came an inch away from literally stealing the country away from its people:

“Given the ontological authority that the Post shares only with the New York Times, it is now, so to speak, official: for the past six years, Dick Cheney, the occupant of what John Adams called ‘the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived,’ has been the most influential public official in the country, not necessarily excluding President Bush, and his influence has been entirely malign. He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy, and ignorant president he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that an plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable ‘war on terror.’”

Granted, the end of that last sentence kind of breaks away from Hertzberg and starts galloping around the ring, but honestly, can you blame it? Count Cheney learned his dark arts from his Sith Lord Richard Nixon - that the White House cannot do wrong because it defines right and wrong, that power must be exercised only for power’s sake, never for the sake of good, or in the benefit of the people from whom it comes (except that in W. & Cheney’s case, that power didn’t come from the people - the people used their power to elect somebody else; but stealing sort of counts). And for a while there, it actually looked like evil would win. But the tide of public opinion has at last turned on the Dark White House, and we here at Stevereads predict the process will only continue, as more and more subpoenas are handed out and more and more evil misdeeds come to light. We further predict that on the eve of finally being brought to justice by good ol’ Mace Justice Department, Count Cheney will suffer his 121st heart attack and escape punishment of any kind. But those are the breaks.

Elsewhere in the New Yorker, an equally baneful-looking figure, a 1949 black and white photograph of surly, whiney, Finnish composer Jean Sibelius looms over a very good appreciation by the always-reliable Alex Ross. The composer’s lifelong pessimisms and lifelong dependence on copious amounts of alcohol to fuel his creative endeavors are woven by Ross into a profile very much worth reading. Our only problem with it? We here at Stevereads object to Ross’ calling legendary Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Serge Koussevitzky ‘garrulous.’ Koussevitzky was outright told in no uncertain terms by Sibelius himself that the composer’s much-anticipated Eight Symphony would be premiered by the BSO; it’s hardly ‘garrulous’ for Koussevitzky to, you know, tell people that. How was he to know Sibelius was fatally locked in a block-struggle with the work and would never, in fact, deliver it? Serge Koussevitzky was many things, but ‘garrulous’ wasn’t one of them. But aside from that one little quibble, the article made for some great reading.

And speaking of great reading, in a rare development for the New Yorker, the short story, “If I Vanished” by Stuart Dybek, is actually very, very good, very nearly worth the price of the issue all by itself. Summarizing short stories is about as tedious as summarizing dreams (note to Beepy: they’re both very, very tedious), but suffice it to say the Kevin Costner movie “Open Range” manages to play a fairly large part in a story that has, in the end, nothing to do with it at all ...

Closing out our look at this New Yorker double issue is Anthony Lane’s very funny review of the new Michael Bay smash-fest “Transformers,” starring Shia LaBeouf. This is the movie in which our young hero’s yellow Camaro turns out to be a crusading alien Autobot, and as you can guess from such a summary, Lane has lots of good stuff to work with:

“Certainly, the director can’t decide on their [the Autobots] level of moral sophistication; early on, they seem merely aggressive and willful, not unlike a real Camaro, but then suddenly the Autobots - led by Optimus Prime, whose name suggests an ambitious, moist-palmed young curate out of Trollope - begin gushing sermons like oil.”

‘not unlike a real Camaro’ ... hee ...

Shia LaBeouf also turns up in the latest Vanity Fair, in a cover-featured interview by Michael Hogan that does its level best to hide what is obvious from the third paragraph anyway: the kid’s no Einstein. In the typical way of such interviews, Hogan tags along with LaBeouf asking pro forma questions while LaBeouf does his level best to pretend he doesn’t really have anybody in the car or at the restaurant with him. This behavior among Hollywood’s young stars (the cake would have to be taken by Ashton Kutcher a few years ago when he took a cell phone call in the middle of an interview with GQ. For an hour. From his pharmacist.) has always amazed us here at Stevereads. After all, every one of these self-absorbed little shits started off life as a person. At what point did they morph into ass-talking egomaniacs capable of banally mouth-shitting to somebody who’s actually getting paid to interview them? We feel fairly certain if somebody had been paid to interview LaBeouf when he was, say, thirteen, he’d have puked himself with anxiety at the honor; but here he is, acting like he’s free-associating on his Bluetooth to Teen Beat.

Hogan gets past the patter only once, when he asks the kid if his unconventional upbringing (pothead mother, drug-dealer father) has impaired his ability to function well in romantic relationships. Shia says yeah, that’s certainly the case, he’s the bad guy in relationships.

No mention, of course, is made in the article to LaBeouf’s own drug use - at least, no honest mention. He says he’s basically high on life these days, that he won’t let drugs derail is burgeoning career - says, in fact, that he won’t drink a drop until after the next Indiana Jones movie, in which he has a big part (exactly five seconds googling his name will fill your computer with cell-phone pictures that contradict this assertion, but we here at Stevereads can’t honestly recommend you waste those minutes in such a way). No mention is made of how many cigarettes LaBeouf smoked during the interview - probably because Hogan lost count. In any case, one thing more than anything else becomes clear by the end of the piece: roughly two months after the ‘wrap’ on the new Indiana Jones movie, Shia LaBeouf is going to have the mother of all meltdowns. Somebody should start writing his part in ‘National Lampoon’s Family Vacation VIII’ right now.

Fortunately, elsewhere in this issue of Vanity Fair there’s another profile, this one of somebody entirely smarter, funnier, more honest, and in the end more courageous than poor little Shia LaBeouf could ever hope to be.

We refer, of course, to Barbaro.

In a lamentably-titled piece called “Gone with the Wind,” the lamentably-titled Buzz Bissinger tells the uplifting, heartbreaking story of the Kentucky Derby champion whose horrific injury at the Preakness (Youtubing the final stretch is recommended only for the strong of stomach) eventually claimed his life.

Bissinger does a fantastic job of capturing the nature of the largely wacky, largely insular world of thoroughbred horse-racing, and in a very refreshing take, he decides from the beginning to refer to Barbaro in no different terms than he would to an up-and-coming baseball star, or basketball phenom: not as a bought-and-paid-for animal with no personality or control over his destiny, but rather as a physical prodigy with a prodigy’s good and bad points, and boat-loads of personality.

Bissinger describes in touching, accumulating detail the ways in which Barbaro slipped inside the oft-repeated #1 rule of thoroughbred horse-racing: never fall in love with a horse.

His owners, trainers, handlers, riders, and eventually veterinarians and doctors all were helpless to forget that rule, and there are wonderful little portraits of all of them. But by far the most vibrant and memorable personality in the piece is that of Bararo himself.

We’re aware here at Stevereads that there will be those among you who grant no personhood even to those non-human animals who display it far less problematically than horses. Dogs, dolphins, elephants, even cats all behave in ways that are far more analogous to human ways than horses do, and even we here at Stevereads have enjoyed an only very spotty relationship with the beasts ourselves (they don’t much like dogs, so the inferences are right there to hand). But nevertheless, we hope (in league with our dear little Elmo, who knows from first-hand observation that complexity lies all around us like air) that in the not too distant future ALL animals of any complexity whatsoever will be granted the hithertofore human preserve of personhood. To say that Barbaro was forced as a calf into contact with the life-consuming sport that would consume his life is to say nothing different than you’d have to say of Michael Jordan, or Tiger Woods, or David Beckham. And to keep saying it, after you’ve seen the film footage, any film footage, of Barbaro running - or more accurately, on the testimony of his riders, Barbaro in flight - well, if you don’t see a creature absolutely loving what he’s doing at least as much as any steroid-addicted, endorsement-hunting human athlete, you’re just plain bigoted, or just plain blind, or both. Look again: you’ll see a very distinct form of poetry, visceral, physical, and entirely, voluntarily luminous. And then, once you’ve looked, bow your head for a couple of seconds to notice the passing of Barbaro the way you’d ordinarily do for an extremely promising young college student, taken early.

The last item on our agenda today is something of a postscript, a nod to the wild old days when we here at Stevereads reviewed anything that moved. We couldn’t help but notice this week the premiere of Thor #1 from Marvel Comics, otherwise known as the House of Loathsome. Those of you who are comic book snobs can feel free to stop reading at this point (side note: those of you who are Stevereads readers had better not even think of ceasing to read here).

A quick background update for those of you who’ve already lost your virginity: in the immediate prelude to the infamous, disastrous ‘Civil War’ storyline, Marvel killed off their resident super-hero Thunder God, Thor. They killed him off but good: no more Thor, no more Asgard, no more gods - all of it gone. A daft idea in and of itself, yes, but nevertheless wrapped up to be really, truly, completely, and utterly final.

Which, in the magnificent first issue of this relaunch, takes writer J. Michael Straczynski all of two pages to get around, with some mumbo-jumbo about how gods can never really die as long as humans are around to believe in them (this will be good news for Jesus, if his comic book is ever cancelled). There’s some great, juicily ambiguous stuff about how the gods of Asgard are only sleeping, awaiting awakening. It’s classic Marvel stuff, of the type that is certainly not being floated about the alleged ‘death’ of Captain America.

The plot - such as it extends beyond ‘bring Thor back’ - has some little kinks in it that on the surface appear to be inconsistencies (a free book - shush, Kevin - to the first person who points out the biggest of these; a quick hint: it’s on page Page 6) or just plain mistakes, but we here at Stevereads have a battered but intact faith in Straczynski; he’ll see this title well-launched before he decamps, six issues from now.

Six consecutive issues is much more than we can expect from the series’ sensational artist Olivier Coipel, naturally. Coipel’s artwork has never been stronger than in this issue - like all ‘cool’ young artists, he’s slowly, surely making his way back to the basics Jack Kirby laid out fifty years ago. You can be as artistic and diaphanous as you want, but this is four color comics, in the end: if you can’t tell a story, visually, you aren’t doing your job, period.

But nonetheless, Coipel and his higher-profile brethren are horrible, embarrassing disgraces, not only to the profession of comic book artists but to all professions, to anybody who actually works for a living. The final Warren Ellis/Brian Hitch issue of ‘Ultimates’ was one year late - one year late - entirely because of artist Brian Hitch. Ellis is a workhorse professional, and he had his completed, detailed drafts of the final issue of his run done roughly three weeks after the penultimate issue went to press.

The artist was the problem, as they always are these days. They sign on for a hot new series, they sign on for a large amount of money, they spend that money, and then, like locusts, they move on to something else. It’s disgusting, but we have to live with it, at least among comics-readers.

And certainly the results in this issue are spiffy. This is the real Thor, the eternal warrior-god and thunder-lord - not a clone, not some super-sophisticated space alien (anybody remember that retooling?), not even changed in personality. He’s once again bonded to the mortal Don Blake (who seems too cool for school this time around, so we’re hoping Jane Foster is paying attention), and Coipel’s artwork captures that dichotomy - the mythic and the mortal - perfectly. The two issues he’s on the title should be great to look at (after which a back-bench reliable will be called in - is George Tuska still alive?).

So there you have it, an old-fashioned installment of In the Penny Press, complete with miscellaneous topics, copious digressions, and a baker’s dozen frothy screeds. Hard to believe we once indulged in this three times a week, no? Now that it’s out of our system, we’ll return to our more state

in the penny press!

The trifecta of book review organs - the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and of course the mighty Times Literary Supplement - are guaranteed to provide a solid hour of the highest quality mental stimulation when sat down and read in unison.

The highlight of the New York Review this time around, at least for me, was Joan Didion's forensic examination of Dick Cheney. She strikes an absolutely priceless tone (unintentionally, I assume), mandarin befuddlement threaded all the way through with deep distaste ... like a society doyenne hearing a loud, wet crunching sound and finding an unknown creature on the bottom of her shoe, half-crushed but still attempting to squirt venom.

She can't riddle him out into the light, of course. Morgoth is gone, but even his lieutenant Suaron is still largely incomprehensible to the minds of Men.

But in the process of her bafflement, she runs through the usual story with a wonderful, icey precision that's a joy to read.

The London Review of Books likewise had a highlight for me: Jerry Fodor's review of Michael Frayn's "The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe." It's a pan, but the peculiar combination of steep intellect and po-faced humor Fodor uses are more reminiscent of the TLS than the LRB:

As the blurb on the front of Frayn's book puts it:

'What would [the] universe be like if we were not here to say something about it? Would there still be numbers, if there were no one to count them? Or scientific laws, if there were no words or numbers in which to express them? Would the universe even be vast, without the very fact of our tininess and insignificance to give it scale?'

Why, yes, it would. (Frayne often treats rhetorical questions as though they were philosophical arguments; it's a bad tactic.) The universe would still be just the size it is even if there weren't astronomers to measure it. And water would still be H2O even if there weren't chemists to analyse it. And water would still run downhill, and there would still be hills for it to run down, even if none of us were here to take note of its doing so. You can't pin the natural order on me, Frayn; I'm not guilty. I didn't make the universe; I wasn't even there at the time.

But it's the TLS that really comes through, as always. For instance, Oliver Taplin reviews two new books on ancient Greece, and in the course of doing so, he lets his favorite editorial hobbyhorse out into its paddock:

My philhellenism outweighs my admiration for the BM (great though that is), so I shall make up for these omissions. The ultimate legal claim of the Museum, which bought the goods from Lord Elgin, sheltering behind an Act of Parliament, is a fortiori even dodgier than his claim to legality in dismantling large stretches of ancient masonry to get at the frieze and other sculptures. It is a tasty irony that the piranhas of the press cluster round the Getty and other newer Museums who are being hounded to return antiquities that were taken after a certain legalistic date, while the great museums of Europe complacently give pride of place to all the booty that was expropriated before the barrier came down. But there is a crucial and underappreciated point about the Parthenon Marbles, regardless of legal questions. Elgin hacked them off less than twenty years before the beginning of the War of Independence which would liberate the core of Greece from centuries of Ottoman rule. Even as the swell of Hellenism was rising throughout Europe, he took advantage of a declining regime that cared nothing for the heritage of Greece; he snatched them from the outstretching hand of freedom.

Sorry - no sale. The 'outstretching hand of freedom' in this case cared no more about Hellenistic treasures than the lazy old Ottomans did. Lord Elgin almost certainly SPARED the Parthenon friezes from destruction. And even if he hadn't, he still did the right thing.

The British Museum has nothing to apologize for. It spends millions every year on expert restoration, meticulous upkeep, and state of the art climate control for all of its archeological treasures. England's breathtaking cathedrals are guarded and upkept by a veritable army of caretakers. The same thing is true even moreso in the United States.

As far as I'm concerned, ANY country that can't say the same should cough up its art treasures. Those treasures, cultural or otherwise, belong to the whole world. Young children yet unborn deserve to experience root wonder-shock of looking up at the Great Pyramids. Hungrily sensitive artists who're only babies now deserve to stand in silence before every Vermeer there is.

Been to the Hermitage lately? Seen what the rampant smog and pollution (not to mention teenagers with spray-cans) have done to the Acropolis? Anybody know until how recently docents were allowed to smoke in the Sistine Chapel?

Send the big, Atlas-class medivac platform-helicopters to every corner of the globe, as far as I'm concerned. Pluck up every great building and work of art currently being dripped on or cluttered with McDonalds wrappers and deposit them in carefully manicured grounds in Japan, Switzerland, England, and the United States. If Egypt objects to the resulting big parking lot at Gizah, tell them they should have thought of that when they were looking the other way while kids on mopeds took runs half-way up the sides of the pyramids, or while drunken wedding parties were allowed to cavort deep inside them. Then tell them to shaddup. Tell you what - when you go to canopied, climate-controlled Sphinx Pavillion in the gorgeous country of Kent, you can have free admission with proof of your Egyptian citizenship.

Elsewhere in the issue, Eric Griffiths turns in a wonderful review of the new Royal Shakespeare production of 'Troilus and Cressida' - which, as many of you may know, is one of Stevereads favorite Shakespeare plays. At some point, every halfway creative type who's been heavily influenced by Homer feels the urge to take a whack at the master's material, and this is Shakespeare's (serving double duty as a reference to Chaucer as well, although it's best not to explicitly compare the two; great as Shakespeare is, he's no match for Chaucer when they're both working the same material at the height of their respective powers)(arguers feel free to Comment ... and of course any of you who feel like piping up in defense of the artistic merits of Troy War are welcome to do so)

Griffiths largely dislikes the new RSC production, but he has marvellous things to say about the play itself and its dynamics - all good stuff, like this:

Of all Shakespeare's works, 'Troilus and Cressida' is set furthest back in time, while it simultaneously bristles with idioms jazzy in their day.

Of course, with all this brilliance comes some trepidation as well. It turns out that virtually all of this edition's fiction reviews were devoted to historical fiction. This is where the ice water came into the afternoon's reading, because, as some of you know, I myself am that most improbable of beings, a historical novelist. And I can tell you this: we live in terror of two things: 1) some closeted, micro-obsessive expert calling us on some fact in our books ('it wasn't sunny on the 14th of May 1202'), and 2) the TLS (let's be honest: the only review organ that realistically could) taking us out behind the woodshed. Even seeing this happen to others produces not the faintest hint of schadenfruede.

One of the novels in question, C. J. Sansom's Sovereign, just barely gets a pass. It's a Tudor novel (again, a close call - I myself have written a Tudor novel), and although the reviewer, Michael Caines, calls it 'less demanding' than such Tudor-fiction classics as The Man on a Donkey or The Blanket of the Dark, he largely absolves it of blame, albeit grudgingly:

Sovereign is sore afflicted with outbreaks of humourless, barking laughter, sighs, frowns, raised eyebrows, and the setting of lips. It has a bad case of 'Jesu!' - the expletive for all occasions - and at least one impassioned cry of 'Fie!'. These are things to make the reader smile and read on.

Two of the other specimens under review are of particular interest to stevereads: Michael Cox's The Meaning of Night because we largely kinda-sorta liked it, and Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale because, as some of you may have noticed, Barnes & Noble has decided, for reasons known best to themselves, to strip down to its skivvies and hop into bed with this book - huge, eye-catching displays at the front of every B&N in the whole country, huge amounts of money spent to make this author the next Dan Brown (all based, one likes to believe, on one buyer's joyful reaction to the book, somewhere way back along the chain of evidence). Sheer human nature prompts a body to want the TLS to savage the book.

Sadly, the dice fall otherwise. Judith Flanders (a psuedonymn) doesn't exactly savage The Meaning of Night but she doesn't leave you any reason to go out and buy it either:

The Victorian elements are intensively researched - there are references to Evan's Supper Rooms, the Toxophilite Society in Regent's Park, mudlarks scavenging in the Thames - but throughout there is a sense of a list grimly being got through, each item ticked off and out of the way. Glyver does nothing at Evans's; he visits it simply so that it can be described.

On the other hand, Setterfield's book gets a sanctioned pass: "Setterfield is singularly successful in her aims." So those of us wanting to hate The Thirteenth Tale must hold our breath until we've actually read the book (I have, and I largely share the verdict of my esteemed colleague The Mama Chan: it's hyperventilated boilerplate, not entirely without literary merit but two fat fingers' worth away from actually being good).

Our final item? Druin Burch's good-cop/bad-cop review of David Wooton's Bad Medicine and Katrina Firik's Brain Matters.

Burch loves the first, and it quickly becomes apparent that he's going to USE that love to jump up and down on Firlik's book, in absolutely delightful fashion:

Katrina Firlik's Brain Matters makes a stimulating change from all this compelling originality and provocative thoughtfulness. If you have ever suspected that pushing a finger into the soft goo of another person's brain leads to fresh and startling conclusions about human life, this is the book to disillusion you. Firlik is full of breathless enthusiasm; so full of it, unfortunately, that other qualities are kept at bay. She wants to tell you about her life as a neurosurgeon, and her best point is her infectious eagerness. The style is reminiscent of a teenage essay on 'what I did during my neurosurgical training', and the insights are at roughly the same level. She reveals that sick patients are people too, 'not just a collection of clinical data'; she lets us into the fact that 'life is not a dress rehearsal', and that 'you can't judge a person's intelligence by his outward appearance'.

Initially, it's hard to pin down exactly why her thoughtless and cliched anecdotes are so insufferable. Blind adoration is appealing in its way, but Frilik seems to worship even the most stupid and destructive aspects of the American hospital system. Teaching by humiliation, pointlessly long hours and the infliction of needless operations on damaged patients are all held up for praise. But the source of the real chill gradually becomes apparent. It is Frilik's conviction of her own superiority, and her misguided overestimation of her own dull, workplace thoughts. At the end of 'Brain Matters' she invites us to marvel with her at the superlative intelligence of a group of her colleagues. 'What might be accomplished,' she asked, awed at the qualities of people like herself, 'if the same group lent their collective brain power to, say, improving public health education or homeland security?' Both books demonstrate the dangers of doctors who think too much of themselves.

Hee.

And that's all we have for you at this moment in the penny press ... sure, there's news tonight of a marauding bobcat out in Grafton - and the consequent bobbling-newshead paundering about the THREAT TO OUR SUBURBS, but nevertheless: reading-wise, that's all you need to worry about.