The Folds of Irony in the Penny Press!

Oh, the multiplicitous ironies in the latest batch of the Penny Press I consumed at my little hole-in-the-wall periodical-reading restaurant! Everywhere I turned, it was inescapable!

Take last week's TLS for example. Nicholas Thomas reviews the new biography of Captain Cook by Frank McLynn and finds it wanting. That verdict itself might not be so surprising - McLynn can often run hot and cold even with the same reviewer - but the context in which it's delivered is positively riddled with irony, because in pillorying McLynn, Thomas (a specialist in South Pacific art and history and a very amiable guy) raises the spectre of that greatest of all Captain Cook biographers, John Beaglehole - only to pillory him too! We're told Beaglehole's book is "marred by an opinionated style" and actually has the temerity to draw conclusions about its illustrious subject:

Beaglehole's Cook is almost narrow-minded, an indefatigable, practical rationalist, remarkable for his clear grasp of geographic, navigational, or nautical problems, and his single-minded approach to solving them. He is great, in Beaglehole's mind, in part because he has none of the sentimental or philosophical frippery of the eighteenth century around him.

The irony here of course being that if Thomas finds a book like Beaglehole's - vast, authoritative, utterly absorbing, beautifully written - wanting, he undercuts any credibility he'd otherwise have in finding any other book about Cook wanting. We might listen to a critic who called the latest Boris Akunin novel a disgrace to the great Russian literary tradition, but we instantly stop listening if that same critic says War and Peace is also a disgrace to the great Russian literary tradition, and we don't just disbelieve him about Tolstoy - we associatedly disbelieve him about Akunin even if we haven't read him.

A similar piercing irony crops up in the latest Harper's. That issue features a long and leapingly enthusiastic review of Christopher Hitchens' Arguably by Terry Eagleton, and the piece contains ironies of its own, mainly deriving from the fact that like every other 'review' of this big fat essay collection, it's really a boisterous stiff-upper-lip encomium - for a guy who isn't even dead yet. "He could tell you just who to talk to about Kurdish nationalism in the southeastern Turkish city of Batman, as well as what to order in the only decent restaurant there. He can give you the lowdown on everyone from Isaac Newton to Gore Vidal, Oscar Wilde to Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab..." Etc.... in every case, those 'can's are just itching to be 'could's - and it gets in the way of reviewers assessing the ample weak spots of this collection.

But the piece is part of a larger irony too. Hitchens has achieved most of his current notoriety for his brattish nose-tweaking to the concept of religion (particularly all the young people I know who adore him adore him for that reason), the sort of 'you adults are just DUMB to believe this stuff!' braying most of us got out of our systems in high school. But another essay in the same issue of Harper's could serve as good ammo for Hitchens' numerous droned-over debate opponents: Alan Lightman writes a piece about modern cosmology that contains a digression worth quoting in full:

... according to various calculations, if the values of some of the fundamental parameters of our universe were a little larger or a little smaller, life could not have arisen. For example, if the nuclear force were a few percentage points stronger than it actually is, then all the hydrogen atoms in the infant universe would have fused with other hydrogen atoms to make helium, and there would be no hydrogen left. No hydrogen means no water. Although we are far from certain about what conditions are necessary for life, most biologists believe that water is necessary. On the other hand, if the nuclear force were substantially weaker than what it actually is, then the complex atoms needed for biology could not hold together. As another example, if the relationship between the strengths of the gravitational force and the electromagnetic force were not close to what it is, then the cosmos would not harbor any stars that explode and spew out life-supporting chemical elements into space or any other stars that form planets. Both kinds of stars are require for the emergence of life. The strengths of the basic forces an certain other fundamental parameters in our universe appear to be "fine-tuned" to allow the existence of life. The recognition of this fine-tuning led British physicist Brandon Carter to articulate what he called the anthropic principle, which states that the universe must have the parameters it does because we are here to observe it.

Carter's principle forms the basis for a 1988 book called The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John Barrow and Frank Tipler, one of the most persistently thought-provoking books of the 20th century, and it's ironic to fin that principle being elaborated cheek-by-jowl with more regurgitated Hitchens Got-baiting.

And there's irony to be found over in the latest Atlantic, in which Benjamin Schwarz reviews Higher Gossip, the new posthumous collection of literary journalism from the pen of John Updike. I'm no fan of Updike's book reviews - too bland, too timid, too falsely everyman - but as he always does, Schwarz actually makes me think about perhaps revisiting the guy's work. Certainly Schwarz ranks that work - a vast collection - highly:

This huge body of work, 4,314 pages in all, secured Updike a place among America's few great men of letters (since Edmund Wilson's death, only Gore Vidal and Updike can be added to the pantheon).

The irony of that outrageous parenthetical should be abundantly clear already, but just in case it isn't, here's a bit from the second half of Schwarz' book-column this month, on the fourth volume of the official history of the Bank of England:

Nevertheless, this book contains probably the most revealing record of a central bank's struggles in the modern era. (Others might bestow that crown on Allen H. Meltzer's magisterial an plainly written multivolume A History of the Federal Reserve, but that great work is more strictly a monetary history, and Meltzer doesn't treat the Fed's other duties, such as bank regulation, in the same rich detail as Capie does the actions of the Old Lady.)

Hee. So: the choicest irony of all - Schwarz is certainly leaving at least one name off his list of great 20th century men of letters. It could just be an old-fashioned modesty, but I'm guessing otherwise. I bet the idea never occurred to him.

 

Desolation (and small consolation) in the Penny Press!

I made my faithful way through the main attractions of the latest Harper's in order to reach the end. I read about evil Mormons, and I read some bombastic editorializing, and I read an entertaining little squib of a story by Justin Torres (clearly a young author to watch - still prone to gimmicks, still not quite seeing that they are gimmicks, but with a very alluring confidence in his own prose), but the whole time I was holding my mental breath, waiting to get to Zadie Smith's "New Books" column.

As I've mentioned here before, I consider (somewhat to my surprise, having been underwhelmed by her fiction) Smith one of the best fiction reviewers working today (my Open Letters Monthly colleague Sam Sacks would also be on that short list), and it was an amazing, unlooked-for little gift when she suddenly started writing her detailed, lively pieces regularly for Harper's. She's one of the only literary journalists who can so naturally meld the personal with the professional that her pieces always feel like sparkling, invigorating talk about books, rather than the considered and reworked essays they are. She differs from Sacks in this way; his own reviews are almost awe-inspiringly removed from the purely personal - they read like scripture: "And Jereboam begat Gath, and Gath begat Askelon, and Askelon thought the metaphorical underpinning of the latest Julian Barnes was splenetic at best," etc. Smith will sometimes swoop in mid-review from a stunning textual survey to a childhood vignette on her mother's porch, then back again, whereas watching Sacks attempt such a thing would be as painful as watching William James try out his signature fox-trot on "America's Got Talent!" ... each to their own strengths: neither can Smith match Sacks' gravitas. An author reading a pan of his work by Smith can put the magazine down and say, "Well, that's just your opinion." The same author reading a pan of his work by Sacks (at a surgical 200 words, in the Wall Street Journal) is likely to say, "Well, I think they're still hiring down at the sawmill."

I celebrate all these first-rate critics for their differences (except when they differ from ME, as each and every one of the scamps has been known to do at one time or another), and I eagerly look forward to reading their latest thoughts in the venues lucky enough to have them. Sometimes, this can be distressing - in the latest Harper's, Smith begins by singing the praises of the great science fiction author Ursula Le Guin, and that immediately set off alarm bells. First-rate critics of science fiction are extremely rare, and Smith certainly doesn't qualify (nor does Sacks - "Due to the number of moons in the night sky, the reader must surmise that Equinox of the Lobster-Men does not, in fact, take place on Earth at all ..."). But all begins well enough - she heaps much-deserved superlatives on Le Guin's two masterpieces, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, and only occasionally does she inadvertently reveal her underlying discomfort with the genre. Whenever her snobbish instincts begin to bubble too near the surface, she taps them off by tossing in a term in German - we get Verfremdungseffekt and Jus for no conceivable reason other than Smith wanting to avoid having her fellow Po-Mo lit-snobs pull her hair in the hallway after class. What remains is a solid, inviting appreciation of Le Guin's work and attitude, which is always welcome.

Smith follows the Le Guin foray up with something in many ways even less comfortable: the latest book by the fantastic Magnus Mills. An author (and, one suspects, a reader) like Smith has absolutely zero chance of ever fully getting an author like Mills, but she's game to try. It isn't a pretty attempt - at one point she starts just jerkily reciting the names of Shakespeare plays in order to regain her balance (call it the book-nerd's "Serenity Now!"), and it's clear the whole encounter has shaken her a bit. She finishes up by wholesale retreating - she runs to the comforting arms of Rimbaud.

And then she drops her bombshell!

I have to fess up to my own irrational fantasy - the one where it's possible to write a novel, teach class, bring up a kid, and produce a regular column: at the moment a speculative fiction for me. With regret I must say good-bye to New Books - at least for a while - and welcome my brilliant successor, Larry McMurtry.

I moaned aloud over my zuurkoolstamppot: No! Perhaps the most important thing Smith shares in common with Sacks - and Clive James, and Ferdinand Mount, and Michael Dirda, and Sam Anderson, and Anthony Lane, and even Christopher Hitchens - is perhaps the one essential trait all first-rate literary journalists must have: humility in the presence of the written word. The author under review might screw up, he might misfire, he might be an idiot - but he's engaged in a holy task, and it trails a holy solemnity behind it. The author might make the biggest mess since God created basset hounds, but the best literary critics take that mess seriously because the act of creation is holy to them (which is why they can get so all-fired angry when a thing is done poorly, or lazily, or insultingly).

Larry McMurtry is 80 years old. He's the author of two very, very good novels (The Last Picture Show and Buffalo Girls) and two great ones (Lonesome Dove and Moving On) - think about that for a minute: two very, very good novels, and two great ones - that's more than almost all authors can do, or even approach. This is not a man who can be humble in the presence of the written word, and with good reason: this is a man in whose presence the written word is humble. Which makes him a great choice to write book-commentary for Harper's or anybody else on Earth - wherever it happens, I'll buy it. But it makes him a lousy choice to write a regular column dutifully reviewing new books. What's he supposed to say, about any of them? Larry McMurtry is supposed to set aside time to make notes on a jaggedly-written coming-of-age story set in contemporary Iceland? Larry McMurtry is supposed to patiently deconstruct the way a precocious author's circus-metaphor goes astray? Larry McMurtry is supposed to be doing this? What's next, making Herman Melville clerk in a customs house?

It won't work. McMurtry will stay on-target for one paragraph, perhaps two, and then the book will be forgotten and the rest of the column will be "and then Renny Price and Wally Stegner and I - all three of us drunk as newts - snuck into Katy Anne Porter's kitchen late at night and commenced a grand attempt to bake her a cake. She flicked the light on and covered us all with a sawed-off shotgun, and it was only a call from Bunny Wilson that saved our hides ..." And that will be undeniable fun to read, but the world of serious fiction-criticism will lose a very high-profile venue until such time as McMurtry sees fit to vacate it.

Don't mistake me: it'll be great to have more McMurtry prose in the world, in any venue, at any time. But I'm nevertheless wondering if Zadie Smith might respond to a good old-fashioned letter-writing campaign ...

Agreeing to Disagree in the Penny Press!

The linear procession that is my weekly plow through the latest furrow of the Penny Press couldn't have started off worse this time around - not even with a 'short' story by Alice Munro: The New Yorker featured a long piece by Jonathan Franzen that was just about as appalling an exercise in narcissism as anything I've seen from somebody who doesn't run a book-blog. Franzen, of course, is the author of Freedom, the big gaseous novel that's going to win the Nobel, Pulitzer, and Zee-Magnee Prizes for Greatest Thing Ever Created By Anybody, Including When God Created the Universe. He's also one of the ground-zero survivors of the suicide of his friend and fellow author David Foster Wallace, and I understand and accept where that confluence leads. It's probably inevitable that some writing would result from it - after all, in such circumstances, even the least literary person in the world might be moved to put pen to paper. Franzen is not the least literary person in the world - he himself has commented many times on his apparently uncontrollable urge to, as he puts it, "narratize" himself - so something like this essay was probably going to happen at some point.

But I find myself asking the same question about this piece - a clumsy half-cloning of a literary appreciation of Robinson Crusoe (for which an expedition to Selkirk Island was enacted, of course - nobody reads at home anymore, silly!) and a reminiscence of a lost and troubled friend - that I ask about so much of Franzen's work: did it have to be so bad? Did it have to show so little thought, or rather, so much completely misdirected thought? I know Franzen would probably say it's his arch and awkward impulses that make him worth our time as a writer, but there's a difference between adopting an arch and awkward kitten and working full-time at the animal shelter.

Franzen's been writing things - fiction, nonfiction, and the pure self-absorption he and Wallace perfected for a whole new generation - for years; how could he not have seen how maladroit this piece would end up being, if he insisted on keeping the mechanical framework of the Defoe device? It's maddening to watch him churn out the requisite travel-essay paragraphs (it's so windy there!), the requisite lies (tobacco addicts always, always, always claim their vacations from the busy world were also vacations from tobacco, when if that's how addiction worked, nobody would be addicted), and the requisite posturing (litt'rary authorities are startled awake and hauled on stage, as though Franzen felt compelled to say, "hey, don't forget - I'm an incredible intellectual heavyweight, in addition to being this shy and sensitive guy") - especially maddening because behind all that stuff, he's actually got something to write about this time. I would have read a Daniel Defoe essay from him with interest, but yoking it so stubbornly like this to a very, very different kind of essay - more interesting, yes, but also more shameful to actually publish - is a beginner's mistake, or else the mistake of somebody who no longer has those 'first readers' every writer needs so badly.

So our author goes to Selkirk Island to read Robinson Crusoe - but also because he has to do something in the wake of his friend's suicide. As a result, neither the trivia nor the trauma is well-served, but the trauma is at least arresting ... and interestingly conflicted. I was surprised - and I shouldn't have been - by the sharpness of the anger in Franzen's writing about what Wallace did. And of course I was fascinated, who wouldn't be, by the new personal details Franzen reveals about Wallace's final year and downward spiral, the idea Franzen has that Wallace considered his suicide to be, in drug addict terms, "one last score" and an act of vengeance against both himself and his closest friends. But just because such details are fascinating doesn't mean I should have been reading them - the personal, wounded parts of this weird piece are the best writing Franzen's ever done, but they should have remained in his journal where they belong. I wish I could get this point through the Yaddo-addled brains of all our most lionized young writers: the reading public doesn't, in fact, need you to "narratize" every aspect of your lives - exercising more restraint and more narrative control would actually make you better writers.

Fortunately, that first course didn't ruin the meal. I moved on to the new Harper's, and once there I did what I now happily always do: I turned straight to the "New Books" column and settled in to read Zadie Smith. I don't know Smith, and I have no idea what she thinks of her new gig as Harper's fiction critic, but sometimes even Irish Catholics know when not to question a good thing, so I just sit back and enjoy the show. I've rhapsodized here before about Smith as a literary critic, and here that rhapsody is put to the worst test the love of any book critic can face: what do you do when a great critic writes about a book you just don't care about?

In this case, Smith writes about Edouard Levy's Suicide and Peter Stamm's Seven Years, and I couldn't care less about either book, which made the going tough. But even so, the wonderful, winning tone, the voice Smith is creating in these columns won me over (finding the right voice being, of course, essential to the long-term business of writing anything) - won me over to her column, that is, not to the pretentious pieces of poop she reviews in it this time around. Here's hoping next month she gorges herself on murder mysteries, or else takes in Black Lamb and Gray Falcon and tells us all about it. And in the meantime, this particular issue of Harper's has one other thing that's enormously worth your attention - no, not that laughably hideous cover illustration, which struck me as a bizarre practical joke until I remembered what century I live in ... no, Nicholson Baker's scintillating essay "Why I'm a Pacifist" is the non-Smith highlight of this issue, a refreshingly meaty essay where I'd expected to find yet more Franzen-style narcissism. It was so good it almost convinced me that some of its daffiest contentions just might be true.

But, much to my surprise, the real saving grace of my Penny Press trawling this time around came from a source I'd almost completely discounted: the good old Atlantic, whose slide into just another Beltway glossy has been decried here and elsewhere. Much to my dismay, I've come to associate the Atlantic with reading disappointment, and certainly a glance at this issue seemed to confirm that: a 'genius' issue without one true genius on display, a 'culture' issue as though that were a special, distant place (Selkirk Island, perhaps?) for which we should designate an isolated visit once in a while ... and that Editor's Note! Has 2011 yet seen so vertiginous a combination of arrogance and cringing? The Editors intend, I think, to offer some kind of justification for their decision to include to short stories in their 'culture' issue even though they've long since banished fiction from their ordinary (non-culture?) issues. Airy words are aired about the special qualities shared by the two stories in question, one by Stephen King, the other by Mary Morris, but I knew better than to get my hopes up, and I was right: the stories have a lot in common, beginning with the proudly-declared triviality of their origins and ending, I suppose, in how boring and awful they both are, but when the Editors describe them as "entertaining, interesting, and gloriously open," they're adding a whole lot of sawdust to the bread.

No, it wasn't the special 'cultural' offerings on hand that made the issue for me: it was the workhorse rear-end (...) of the thing that did the trick, as always. Once all the 'geniuses' are done being interviewed about how incredible they are, the real power-hitters come out, and we get three fantastic essays in a row. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes the impossible: an essay about Malcolm X that I actually found interesting. Christopher Hitchens reassures me that his medical treatments must be going well, because he turns in a long and utterly beguiling essay on yet another subject that doesn't usually interest me at all: the poet Larkin and his various smutty doings. And best of all, towering over this week's Penny Press offerings, there's the mighty Benjamin Schwarz, writing about James M. Cain's novel Mildred Pierce - and in the process writing about yet another subject that doesn't interest me at all: Los Angeles. Only a whole lot of money could ever possibly induce me to visit Los Angeles again, and nothing on Earth could make me re-read Mildred Pierce - and yet there I was, eagerly lapping up every word Schwarz wrote about both, solely on the basis of how wonderful those words are:

Moreover, in Mildred Pierce, Cain wrote the greatest work of American fiction about small business. He made compelling the intricacies of real-estate deals and cash flow, of business planning and bank loans, and of relations with suppliers and customers ("She had a talent for quiet flirtation," as Cain explained of Mildred's technique, "but found that it didn't pay. Serving a man food, apparently, was in itself an ancient intimacy; going beyond it made him uncomfortable, and sounded a trivial note in what was essentially a solemn relationship.") He rendered the plodding method and the fundamental gamble of small-time commerce - the foundation of Los Angeles's service-oriented economy - not just absorbing but romantic.

As usual with this critic, I could go on quoting (Hitchens on Larkin is equally quotable), and reading this piece by him and that piece by Zadie Smith (and knowing that Sam Sacks is there, every week, over in the Wall Street Journal) reminded me yet again that the current state of heavyweight American book-criticism is in good hands. Even if they all occasionally write about books I wouldn't cross the street to read.

Silence and Violence in the Penny Press!

 

Our regularly scheduled installments of In the Penny Press have been drastically thrown off by the catastrophic technical problems that have beset Stevereads all through this horrible, horrible spring and summer, and the main problem with such an imbalance is that it can only grow greater with every passing day. As the great Seinfeld character Newman said when asked why the U.S. Postal Service spawns so many psychos, “The mail Never Stops ...”

An full and accurate catching-up therefore won't be possible, but I thought I'd re-establish things with a couple of quick notes about some more or less current issues.

 

Like the latest Vanity Fair, for instance, which boasts not only a creepy photo of Angelina Jolie on the cover but also a creepy photo of Bradley Cooper on the inside (Cooper has got to be the creepiest-looking extremely handsome Hollywood star since Tony Perkins, and probably for the same reason: he never blinks). In other thought-provoking photos, this issue features a curious little juxtaposition: there's a very expensive two-page spread for the new Pillars of the Earth mini-series on cable TV, which bespeaks a flush and active publicity department. But then a few pages later, there's one of those little sidebar-interviews the magazine uses to spotlight up-and-coming young stars; this one features Eddie Redmayne, the pouty-mouthed British starling who's the only thing Pillars of the Earth has in the way of male cutie-patooties (now that Rufus Sewell has ripened into respectability) and who's lately been the toast of New York for his performance in “Red,” in which he manages to hold his own against the full-gale force of Alfred Molina in scenery-chewing mode. So what does young Eddie have to say for himself? Nothing. The space is given over to the usual hyperventilating prose, but no interview – not even a single quote. Young Eddie agreed to do the photo shoot in Brooklyn, showed up dressed in his best Bohemian casual, and then said not one word worth James Wolcott's taking down. Which bespeaks a publicity department of an entirely different description.

 



Much deeper contradictions lurk in the centerpiece of the latest Harper's, in which Dan Baum writes a gripping, very engaging piece on the gamut of his feelings about buying, registering, training for, and carrying a loaded handgun. This is Harper's, and its demographic slant is fairly predictable, so Baum's piece is window-dressed with quite a bit of moral ambivalence. Moral ambivalence on the subject of so-called 'gun control' always irks me, I'll admit, since the very idea of an armed populace is insane and entirely unsanctioned by the U.S. Constitution, but it bothers me even more when the writer doing the hand-wringing is such a bald-faced hypocrite as Baum is. He spends a great deal of his article agonizing over just how he feels about carrying a loaded weapon bought and designed to kill human beings, but one of his concluding paragraphs gives the game away for anybody who still needed a clue:

I will draw my gun from its holster if I reasonably believe myself or another person to be in imminent danger of death or grievous bodily injury. I will fire two bullets into the center of the attacker's chest. My 125-grain hollowpoints will not only carve permanent cavities through his body, they'll also send out pressure waves that might rupture his solid organs – his liver, spleen, and kidneys. If he's going to die, he'll likely die on the spot or within a day. I will be sure to have my hands empty and raised by the time the police show up, because they'll be scared and liable to shoot anyone holding a gun. The only way to win a gunfight, goes the saying, is not to be there when it happens. I can expect the police to arrest, handcuff, and jail me. I'm I'm not charged, or I'm acquitted, the attacker or his family will probably sue me. I used hollowpoints, I will say on the stand, because they deliver more energy to the target and are therefore more likely to stop the attack – and the shooting – quickly. Also, being more likely to stay in the attacker's body or embed themselves in walls without passing through, hollowpoints are less dangerous to bystanders, which is why police use them. I didn't cock the revolver, yell “Freeze,” or shoot to wound, because if I'd had the time to think about doing any of that I'd have had time to run away. But the poor guy only had a knife, the plaintiff's lawyer might say, to which I'll respond that a man with a knife can close twenty-one feet in a second and a half – less time than it takes to draw and fire. Then it will up to a jury to decide my fate. The gun carrier's ethic holds that it's better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.

 

As usual when dealing with gun nuts, there's so much wrong with this paragraph, this seedy little justification, that you hardly know where to start picking it apart. With the jailhouse-lawyerese of 'grievous bodily harm,' when Baum neither knows what that means in a courtroom nor is qualified in any way to determine it in the field? How the 'The situation left me no choice' tone is utterly contradicted by the 8-year-old's relish in those 'permanent' cavities? The patronization of excusing the panic of the police on grounds that they'll be scared, whereas the narrator certainly isn't at all (“I will fire two bullets into the center of the attacker's chest ...”)? The smarmy two-faced concern of using hollowpoints because they'll stop the shooting quickly, when the fastest way to do that would be not to start shooting in the first place? Or that unbelievable business of pleading to the jury that if he'd had time to warn – or wound – his attacker, he'd have had time to run … painting for us a scenario in which the poor SOB had time for one and only one course of action: to shoot his 'target' dead (two shots, mind you – there simply isn't time for only one)? We're told that a man with a knife can close the distance of twenty-one feet in less time than it takes to draw and fire – which means the poor SOB has no choice but to open fire while the 'attacker' is still fifty, sixty, maybe even a hundred feet away. Maybe even across the street, but looking really menacing .. painting for us a scenario in which a jumpy citizen unempowered by law enforcement is carrying a lethal weapon that he admits he will only ever use Entirely without thinking. Lovely.

But it's that final line that bugs me the most, because it so stinks of gun-nut sloganeering. Yeah, man: better to be tried by twelve than carried by six. Yeah. Totally. Probably what the guy you shot and killed was thinking, while he was approaching you, yelling because you side-swiped his car, taking out a pen with which to jot down your insurance information. Bet he didn't like being carried by six at all, but hey, you're the victim here.

Flecks of Gold in the Penny Press!

Since I’m the argumentative sort (this will be no news-flash to most of you), it’s easy for me to get so caught up in yelling at the Penny Press that I overlook one of the biggest reasons to read it – and the biggest single reason why you should all be reading Open Letters every month: it’s only in the admittedly amorphous field of ‘literary journalism’ that you’ll find really smart, really articulate authors cutting loose with wit, acid, accumulated experience, and a certain free-floating brilliance you often won’t see in their more considered (i.e. less deadline-driven) prose. We all revere Edmund Wilson, after all, but who wouldn’t honestly prefer reading him dishing up his thoughts on John Dos Passos than slog through To the Finland Station again? The same thing with Virginia Woolf: the difference between reading one of her novels and reading her glorious, chatty, discursive book-essays is the difference between listening to your parish priest give a sermon during Mass on Sunday morning and listening to him freely discoursing after supper and supper’s cordial glass of wine – the former is no doubt good for your soul, but the latter is good for your mind, for your mercurial heart.

It’s only in literary journalism (a bugboo of a title, I know, by which I essentially mean short essays about somebody else’s art-production: a theater review, an author career-overview, one of Locke Peterseim’s brilliant movie reviews, somebody writing intelligibly about dance, etc) that an author will ask questions for which he doesn’t already have a whole seminar’s worth of answers prepared; it’s only in literary journalism that you’ll find lifelong serious readers actually talking about books, as opposed to lecturing about them. This difference is facilitated – almost necessitated – by the nature of the genre: a book-critic is forcibly reminded that his subject exists on a continuum: the author is still alive (usually – or not usually, in my own case), the work is still ongoing, so not all the answers are in. Great theater reviews can’t avoid this provisional humbling: they’re seeing one, at most two performances of a show before deadline comes calling. Literary journalism – especially the online variety – is more plastic than literature … corrections can be made, debates can flourish in letter columns, and everybody’s still filling all their spare time with reading. It’s thrilling.

Well, it can be, when it’s done well. Which, admittedly, is not all that often. We’ve all read countless book reviews, movie reviews, TV reviews, etc. that were ‘phoned in’ (a rhetorical holdover from when it was literally true, when distant reporters would commandeer a phone line and call in their stories to waiting typists back at the newsroom – the implication of haste has largely scrubbed off the term, but the implication that the resulting prose wasn’t considered at all by its writer is still with us, and still accurate) – a writer will pick up a couple of obvious points off the surface of a work, roll them around for a few paragraphs, then toss off a semi-witty exit-line and call it a day. The goal of any editorial team worth its salt is to use such pieces as seldom as possible, to hunt continuously for better, more lively prose to publish. It can’t always be found in time for deadline, but when it is – oh! Then you can have some great reading experiences!



Take the latest Harper’s – not the place I tend to go for such pith and merit, and my trepidation only increases when the subject of one such potential experience is Arthur Koestler, a boring, overrated author who’s nevertheless managed to snare and hold a certain amount of critical attention for the last fifty years. Literature periodically turns up such people, like rocks in a plowed field, and then you just have to wait patiently for the vogue to die down (which it sometimes doesn’t do – I’m still waiting for the world to wake up to the fact that 90 % of Hemingway is garbage and 100% of Gertrude Stein is too, but thanks to the heedless engines of academia, it isn’t likely to happen).

I was encouraged this time around by the fact that the article in Harper’s was written by Nicholas Fraser, one of the best book-essayists working today. And he didn’t disappoint: his review of Michael Scammell’s mammoth new biography of Koestler is infinitely better reading than the 200 pages of that book I managed to wade through before feeding it to my dogs – hell, it’s infinitely better than almost everything Koestler himself wrote. And the joy here, as I opened so many windy paragraphs ago, is that of great prose finely honed against the ticking clock:

… he repaired to the English countryside and played chess, preferring the company of his dogs to that of humans. In his later years, he wrote many books in which he alternately proffered science as a solution to the ills of mankind and attacked scientific pretensions on the grounds that science had become an orthodoxy as powerful and misleading as the Communism of his youth. Some of these books sold well, but without exception they have aged badly. Koestler attained brief moments of notoriety in the late 1960s when he said that man’s violence might be tamed by the development of a drug that diminished aggression. He became famous for encouraging and even attending unsuccessful spoon-bending sessions. Koestler insisted that his later work was important; he was wrong, of course, but one must appreciate in the aging, cranky Koestler the true skeptic’s disposition to overthrow any orthodoxy in sight.

That ought to stand as the final word on the author – at least until some equally talented writer comes along and offers a spirited challenge to that ‘he was wrong, of course’ – I hope it happens in Harper’s: the symmetry would be appealing.

Still, it’s not usually Harper’s where I go to find such great stuff; usually, I start with those twin titans of the literary-criticism world: the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books.



In the latter, Tim Dee writes a very lively “Diary” essay about bird-watching (with a tip of the hat to Jeremy Mynott’s Birdscapes, which also got a favorable review at Open Letters) – or rather, bird-watching versus birders:

It’s easy to distinguish between the two types. Birders are the green-clad, kit-festooned action men of blasted headlands, sewage farms and reservoir causeways. They take pelagic trips and dribble a bucket of rancid bouillabaisse behind a boat to entice rare petrels: this is called ‘chumming’. What is crucial for them is the moment between sighting a bird and identifying it. There is a potent second or two (this can extend to hours if a tricky rarity is glimpsed) when the bird is wrested from a backdrop of wind or sea or marsh, or singled out from a cloud of lookalikes, and then named. In their itch to tag the wild, birders travel through the world as if they were closing it down.

But the prettiest gem this time around comes from the TLS, where Juliet Fleming turns in one of the most delightful, insightful theater reviews I’ve read so far this year. She’s writing about Peter Hall’s new production of "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" for the Rose Theatre, and practically every line of her review is ebulliently quotable, starting with the very first, which made me laugh out loud:

Could it be that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not a very good play?

She’s talking about what a poorly-constructed, scatterbrained, ultimately silly play it is, but she’s mindful of the fact that a play – especially one by Shakespeare – can be all of those things and still work incredibly well, and she’s absolutely right that this is a defining characteristic of the play in question:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in particular, celebrates the power of theatre to move audiences in ways for which there is no accounting.

This is wonderful stuff (as is her throwaway quip while narrating the performance’s action: “So far, so adequate”), and yet it will likely never be anthologized anywhere or reprinted in any venue – it enjoys its only brief lifespan right here, in this evanescent staging where so much fine, fun writing happens. Like I said: thrilling.

The Little Old Lady from Connecticut in the Penny Press!

I should state up front that I readily admit to the regular high quality of Harper’s. I’ve been a subscriber for years on and off, and I’ve been a front-to-back reader of every issue longer than most of you have been alive. It must be doing something right, to keep me coming back so long after I’ve abandoned so many other periodicals (and once I leave ‘em, they tend to fold – sorry Omni, nothing personal). They do many things right.

My problem with Harper’s is a certain little old lady from Connecticut. I’m sure you know her: she’s outlived her war hero husband and still lives in their dignified home; she always dresses properly and always counts her change. She utterly dominates the rest of her family, and if she were to admit this uncomfortable fact, she’d chalk it up to wisdom and life experience rather than money and the careful way she doles it out and withholds it.

She doesn’t have to be from Connecticut, of course – I’ve met her in dozens of cities in virtually every state in the Union. But wherever she calls home, she exercises an enormous sway over the editorial policy and content of Harper’s, and it gets wearisome.

You know what this lady likes to read. She watches Fox New religiously, not because it reflects her own beliefs but because it forms her own beliefs – Fox tells her not only what to care about but how to care about it, and as some of you will already know, that particular world-view is as rigid, as reflexive, and as hate-filled as the worst fanatical religious sect in the world. In fact, given that the Fox News ideology has spawned two enormous ongoing wars with hundreds of thousands of casualties, it has a fair claim to being the worst fanatical religious sect in the world.

The tenets of that sect are easy to learn. Just think of the schoolyard, and you’ll have it. Conformity is mandated, bullies rule, and the only form of speech is the taunt.

That lady from Connecticut believes in America, but at the same time she believes America is feckless, stupid, and helplessly at the mercy of ‘them.’ ‘They’ want to cut our military funding and fill the ranks with gays (who will be allowed to marry)(base commanders and ship captains will be forced to perform the ceremonies). ‘They’ want to raise our taxes and spend the money on frilly programs designed to help illegal immigrants. ‘They’ want to outlaw guns and mollycoddle criminals. ‘They’ have all sorts of far-out ideas about the world (and about respecting other cultures, for Heaven’s sake), ideas that just aren’t sensible. If America could just get rid of ‘them,’ it could go back to being the great country it was in 1955.

The lady from Connecticut won’t ever tell you who ‘they’ are – she’s never heard it explicitly from Fox News, and besides, she doesn’t need to tell you - you know. We all know. The gays. The Hispanics. The blacks. The intellectuals. The liberals. The J-e-w-s. She just wishes they’d all go back where they came from, instead of ruining everything for everybody else.

For reasons that surpass my understanding, Harper’s tailors a large percentage of its contents toward pleasing that lady from Connecticut, and it bugs the hell out of me every issue.

Take the latest issue, February 2010.

It goes without saying that the lady from Connecticut hates President Obama. After all, he’s black, liberal, and intellectual (and he might be gay – it’s a mess). And Harper’s chose to open this issue with a screed whose only purpose is to fan that hatred.

I don’t know Roger Hodge, but his ‘Notebook’ piece here, “The Mendacity of Hope,” is the most vile piece of I.Q.-lowering crapola I’ve read in a long time. The opening salvo is all I have the stomach to quote, but it gives you all the tone-setting you need:

A year has passed, and yet we have not been delivered. Some believed that Barack Obama had come to restore the Republic, to return our nation to the righteous path. A new, glorious era in American politics was at hand.
If only that were true. We all can taste the bitterness now.

Obama promised to end the war in Iraq, end torture, close Guantanamo, restore the constitution, heal our wounds, wash our feet. None of these things has come to pass.

This is pure Fox News. This is yelling. And it has the same weird, sick effect all schoolyard taunting does: it makes you want to yell back. No matter how earnest or intelligent you are, it makes you want to yell at Roger Hodge “Shut up! Shut up!” But you know such a response is no more helpful than the original incitement, so you end up saying nothing – but that’s frustrating too, since it gives taunting the field.

As those of you who are old enough to remember Spy magazine will recall, the famous Harper’s Index has always specialized in taunting innuendo. ‘They’ rule here entirely – Harper’s Index is pretty much exclusively an ongoing rap-sheet for ‘them.’ Under the guise of bare-bones factual graphing (which Spy used to gleefully expose as one cooked quasi-statistic after another), the Index pushes the Fox mentality more strongly than any other part of the magazine. And the dark genius of it is that it prompts the reader to join in the math:

Chance that a would-be enlistee in the U.S. military aged 17 to 24 is rejected because of a criminal record: 1 in 20.

Chance that he or she is rejected because of physical unfitness: 1 in 3.

Conclusion: They’re filling our army with criminals! And repeat.

But as maddening as such tactics are, they aren’t as bad as the magazine’s ‘Readings’ feature, because that feature can often contain gems, short pieces that really are worth your attention. But those gems are invariably lodged cheek-to-cheek with xenophobic race-baiting out-of-context snippets designed to make the lady’s Connecticut beach house seem to her like the only sane place left on Earth.

This issue’s ‘Readings’ starts off with an excerpt from Jaron Lanier’s fantastic, heartfelt book You Are Not A Gadget, and that’s good. But such things are always counterbalanced by excerpts that reinforce the lady’s belief that the rest of the world is populated by silly little foreigners.

The piece titled "POTUS Blossom" is a perfect example. It’s setup is allegedly this:

From 3,290 questions submitted last fall by readers of the Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua for President Barack Obama in advance of his November 16 town-hall meeting in Shanghai. Translated from the Chinese by Colin Jones.

Of those 3,290 questions, the Harper’s editors chose the ones most likely to please the lady’s preconceptions, with predictable results:

Tell me, how do you like Eastern beauties?

Can you tell us if UFOs exist? What is really going on at Area 51? I think Americans need to explain this to the rest of the world.

Can I discuss with you China’s purchasing Hawaii with U.S. dollars?

If you had to choose three flowers to describe your wife and daughters, what would they be?

Nowhere does Harper’s come out and say ‘See how funny and odd those little Chinese are?’ But what other purpose can there possibly be in translating one ‘clueless foreign’ question after another, especially if you know your readers will have no access to the remaining 3,240 questions? The purpose couldn’t be clearer: it’s to reassure that lady in Connecticut that she’s right to think foreigners are weird, childlike, and none too bright.

Constantly issuing those coded reassurances is demeaning to Harper’s reputation as one of the greatest magazines in history, and reading them every single month – knowing exactly what they’re for and seeing exactly how effectively they’re made – is demeaning for any reader who’s ever had an honest, non-fearful thought about the world.

The rest of these ‘Readings’ are no better. A long excerpt in which poet Derek Walcott windily muses back and forth over his word-choice in one of his poems isn’t designed to give that lady from Connecticut a glimpse inside the creative process: it’s designed to reinforce her belief that all modern poetry is bunk. The excerpt relaying a Denver ballot-initiative calling for an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission is designed to reinforce her worry that there are loonies out there who not only believe in UFOs but want to force her to believe in them too (the fact that it’s a ballot initiative and not just a pamphlet is crucial here). The deconstructed radical-form short story by Aura Estrada is meant to reinforce her belief that all ‘modern’ fiction makes no sense. This stuff is assembled here to give wry, knowing documentation to that lady’s belief that the world is one crazy, incomprehensible place.

The main meat of the issue starts on page 31, and things immediately improve. For all its shameful pandering, Harper’s has a core of actual literary excellence – there is a reason why readers like me keep coming back. Mark Schapiro’s report on ‘the carbon-trading shell game’ exposes some corporate ‘green’ practices that deserve exposing and only dances to the line of calling all ‘green’ procedures a fraud but doesn’t actually cross that line. Shahan Mufti’s account of an unlikely real estate boom in Pakistan is wonderfully written:

Baluchistan, like the rest of Pakistan, was slowly being chewed away by wars, big and small, internal and international. I had flown to this town on the Persian Gulf with a dream of making my home. There, on top of Koh-e-Batil, it dawned on me that, like Major –General MacGregor before me, I had become tangled in a Great Game. Nothing will induce me to come again.

Rivka Galchen’s short story “Once an Empire” is dumb but not offensively so, and Darryl Pinckney’s piece on becoming addicted to As the World Turns, though cowardly (you have to read the piece to find out that it’s a gay love story plot line that primarily intrigues Pinckney; that fact isn’t mentioned in the table of contents or the piece’s teaser-line), is entertaining. The photo portfolio on the Afghani sport of quail-fighting is beautiful and only mildly fraudulent (it flatly states “the birds do not fight to the death” and this is flatly untrue – it’s only there to calm the nerves of the lady from Connecticut), and there is the oddly comforting presence of that same old two-tone box ad for Walter Karp’s The Politics of War. The ad has been right there, advertising the same book, in every issue of Harper’s for the last ten years. The sheer inexplicable strangeness of that fact has long since passed the point of no return.

There are book reviews in the back, some of them good, some very frustrating – and one that’s both.

You get this dual reaction – thrilled and frustrated at once – when a really talented book reviewer trashes something you liked (this happens to me on an almost monthly basis over at Open Letters). I got that this time around with Wyatt Mason’s fantastic hatchet-job of Joshua Ferris’ new novel The Unnamed, which I thought was terrific. Mason clearly disagrees:

Whatever the underlying cause, the routine inconsistency and incompetence of the novel’s most basic feature – its prose – undermines the reader’s ability to take the book seriously, as seriously as it must be for its premise to take imaginative hold.

It’s brutal, honest, entirely misguided brilliance from start to finish – it made me want to call Josh and make sure he’s holding up OK under the barrage, and it simultaneously made me want to call Wyatt and get him to write something for Open Letters. It’s a thrilling little demonstration that probing, non-cheerleading literary criticism still has its place in the sun.


And every issue of Harper’s can be relied upon to do this one better, to serve up something truly magnificent. In this issue it’s the short essay called “The Company of Drawings” by John Berger. At first it reads like a pompous makeweight phoned in by a giant:

We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.

But gradually, in layered vignettes, always returning to that ‘we who draw’ koan, Berger shapes a piece about the valiant indeterminacy of art that is deeply, richly rewarding.

The regularity of that euphoric little moment in Harper’s keeps me coming back – and every time I do, my patience is tested that much further by the magazine’s idiotic final goodbye-wave to that lady in Connecticut.

Of course I refer to the moronic 'Findings' feature on every issue’s last page. Unlike the Harper’s Index, these allegedly scientific little summaries are offered without any verification, even fraudulent verification. Instead, we get one lie after another stacked like cordwood:

NFL quarterbacks play better if they are better looking

In China (them again!)’s Hubei province, a gang of macaques trained in kung fu turned on their human master.

Studies of birds and mammals showed that males have more consistent personalities.

Researchers discovered four new species of king crab, concluded that female leatherback turtles are right-flippered, and revealed that the pitch of blue whale songs was getting lower.

Gerbils in Israel are more cautious than those in Jordan.

Needless to say, all these things are plucked so far out of their original context as to constitute simple falsehoods, as are the rest of this and every issue’s 'Findings' – not only are they designed to make that lady in Connecticut giggle a little (not an unworthy goal in itself – lord knows, it’s good for her), they’re designed to make her distrust not just fringe science but all science. It’s the George W. Bush years, caught in amber, on display every issue.

It’s hard to feel unmixed delight about a magazine that leaves such a rancid taste in your mouth at the end of every issue. No doubt it makes the lady from Connecticut smile her little self-satisfied smile, content for one more month in knowing that as crazy and deplorable as the world might be, at least the right kind of people are taunting the right targets, that there’s nothing so “smart” it can’t be reduced to an excerpt or a statistic.

But I, for one, wish Harper’s would cancel her damn subscription and give the rest of us more attention. Some of the greatest poetry and prose in the world was written by those funny little Chinese, after all, and we already know that only crackpots believe in UFOs. The editorial voices that routinely find brilliance like that John Berger piece should be given free rein over every issue. She’ll find something else to read.

The state of letters in the Penny Press!

When you read Gideon Lewis-Kraus' mordant, damning dispatch from the Frankfurt Book Fair in the latest issue of Harper's, it's hard not to come away with the impression that the lunatics are running the asylum. Lewis-Kraus wanders around the Fair as a kind of cynical note-taking ghost, showing up at the tables of all the major publishers, managing to have conversations with most of the major figures in the publishing world. Through him, we're able to eavesdrop on the relatively tiny handful of people whose decisions determine the shape of book-publishing in the world today.

Lewis-Kraus depicts such a world in the midst of unprecedented crisis - and boy, the chattering idiots at the helms of the various publishing houses and literary agencies aren't helping things any. It's not that a publishing industry rapidly growing dumber and dumber has had increasing need for dumber and dumber executives ... it's that dumber and dumber executives have succeeded in making the industry dumber and dumber.

The problem here is the same one that plagues most corporate structures: the delusion held by the religious believers in such structures that all qualities rise to the top. According to this viewpoint, if you're, say, a senior group manager, you'll be better in every way than a senior manager (and incalculably better, it only follows, than a rank-and-file employee) - you'll be smarter, sharper, funnier, more worldly-wise, more empathetic, more insightful, more creative, etc. The articulation of this religious belief goes something like this: if you weren't superior in all those ways, you wouldn't be senior group manager.

In reality, as everyone who sojourns in reality already knows, the fact that somebody is senior group manager only guarantees a few traits they've got to have in greater degree than their subordinates - and all of those traits are negative, ghastly, horrible things. That senior group manager will be more brittle, more willing to sacrifice the basic aspects of humanity (compassion, free time, family or familiarity with family) that no normal person would even consider sacrificing, and most of all more of an asshole - meaning, more able to live with themselves while routinely treating everyone they safely can like dirt. Hardly creamy, what rises to the top.

But that's never how any corporate authority-chain sees things - delusion always obtains. And the publishing industry, especially according to Lewis-Kraus' picture here, is no different: its senior executives not only believe themselves better capable of reading the whims of the buying public (which, after all, might actually be true), better able to negotiate the often cutthroat world of author acquisition, but also better at all the other things connected with the world of books. Time and again in Lewis-Kraus' article, we come across powerful agents or heads of publishing houses who believe themselves to be the best, most dedicated book-readers in the world, by virtue of their position at the top of their fields, regardless of the glaringly obvious fact that most of them have the intellectual probity of a glass of ice water. The anecdotes come fast and furious, managing to be both Facebook-breathless and faux-jaded at the same time:

The previous evening, when I first met Jamie [Byng, publisher of Canongate], I told him that the only galley I wanted to take away from the Fair was Geoff Dyer's forthcoming novel, which Canongate will publish this spring, and Jamie took one out of his distressed satchel and gave it to me, along with a CD of his favorite Nick Cave songs. He said that he and Dyer play tennis together, and that he read the first sixty pages of the acetate-wrapped, gold-and-black FSG hardcover of Out of Sheer Rage while half-drunk one late night in his library, standing up by the shelves, then sat down on the couch and finished the whole book in a "one-er."

Only very occasionally in the piece (which makes great, if disturbing, reading and is well worth the price of the issue) are random notes of sanity struck, usually in passing:

As Ira [Silverberg, an agent] says, maybe the best thing for books would be wholesale corporate divestment. There wouldn't be nearly the same amount of money paid out, but neither would there be the same inequalities and neuroses. Literary careers would be more modest, but they would almost certainly be more sustainable.

(Some of you will recall that the great Ursula LeGuin, in an essay a couple of years ago about the state of the book industry, called for just this kind of corporate divestment ... she was right then, and she's even more right, as it were, now)

But most of the time, reading the piece reminds you again and again that the people at the very apex of the publishing world are by a wide majority idiots who never actually read anything, morons who are entirely caught up in talking and acting like their entire lives are ruled by their love of the printed word, but who haven't sat down and done any reading since they were forced to in high school. The combination of stupidity and blitheness is especially galling when it's connected with something as important and life-changing as books can be:

I leave and make my way alone past the banks, along the dingy pedestrian thoroughfare of central Frankfurt to the Frankfurter Hof, which, due to its proximity to the villainous scalene fortress of the Commerzbank, whose yellow and red spires flash like the eye of Sauron, is easy to find. Right outside the door is Jamie again, and we're in medias torrentes as usual: "I'm at a stag party in Reykjavik thrown by DBC Pierre and it's been a few days and I'm really just totally torched, and on the flight home I'm reading the manuscript Ali Smith had sent us and I'm just weeping uncontrollable tears - I love that book!"

Lewis-Kraus winds up his article on a guardedly hopeful note, saying that the book industry seems, at least for now and at least on the strength of the Fair, to be surviving, but there's one absolutely vital part of the book industry he neglects to mention at all: book reviews.

Most of the publishers he meets are still going forward with the making of many books, and those titles join a great teeming mass of books already crowding bookstore shelves. Lewis-Kraus makes glancing mention of the fact that mean, evil chain bookstores sell the crucial real display space at the front of their stores to publishers eager to snag that all-important first fifteen seconds of the shopper's attention, and he briefly sketches the many modern distractions from reading anything at all - but he doesn't seem to want to make the connection between all of those books, all of those distractions, and the great-than-ever need the book-buying public has for guidance.

They're desperate for this guidance - much more desperate than either publishers or most bookstores have fully realized (hell, they'll not only look at but actually base purchases on that 'customers who bought this also bought this' tab on most commercial bookselling websites - even though such correlates are purely computer-generated and more often than not don't reflect any similarity at all between the titles listed (because the previous buyers were shopping for both little Timmy and grandma, for instance). Books are expensive and profuse - your average book-reader, even your smarter-than-average book-reader, is often at a loss as to what direction to take. They love to read (and unlike nitwit publishers, they do it well and energetically), but they don't spend their entire waking lives reading book-reviews and tracking titles, nor should they. What they need is advice they can trust.

Naturally, Lewis-Kraus' article got me thinking about Open Letters Monthly, which as of March has been dispensing such advice for two years now. You know that painfully thin college undergraduate you see absorbedly reading in the coffee house, making you wonder when the last time was you read anything with that particular combination of scrutiny and abandonment? That's the Open Letters Fiction Editor. You know that honey-voiced guy at the party who seems to have all the poetry in the room's books at his mental fingertips, the one who not only knows all the poetry but wants to find just the right poems for you, personally? That's the Open Letters Poetry Editor. You know that vaguely subterranean grind who knows all about the politics of the day, all about their immediate antecedents, and can quickly and vividly draw the connections for you, with a maximum of enthusiasm and a minimum of partisan mania? That's the Open Letters Political Editor. And some of you know me: I read a lot, I have lots of strong opinions about the things I read, but above all that, I really do personally want to connect you with good books you'll genuinely love.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus needs to read Open Letters, but more importantly, so do all those dedicated book-readers out there who want knowing, spirited guidance. It's too late for the publishers and agents who are so in love with the sound of their own passion for the watery crap they produce - but their more down-to-earth counterparts, the small company of knowledgeable, hard-working book-people out there in all areas of the field - they need to read Open Letters too, so they know they're that much less alone.

Until that happy day dawns, however, I guess we'll always have Frankfurt.

In the Penny Press!

Lots and lots of indignation in the Penny Press this time around - indignation, outrage, and at least one article intended to produce those reactions.

Nothing more effectively produces bitterness in 2008 America - at least, the tiny parts of America that bother to read anything, let alone magazine articles - than the subject of President George W. Bush and the religious-nutjob core base that still believe in him. This uniter-not-divider has, as has been commented on many times by many voices, succeeded in dividing this country along virtually all of its faultlines, more deeply than any single individual - President or otherwise - has ever done in the country's history, and although his job-approval ratings (those fickle things - we know all about them here at Stevereads) are abysmal, that dividing will go on long after John McCain has taken over his job. The gap between the haves and the have-nots in America has never been wider or more invidious; the distrust the average citizen feels toward the government has never been greater or more richly deserved; the faith Americans feel in the future of their country - both its safety and its morality - is shattered almost beyond recall. And there are two open-ended wars going on, each of them relentlessly chewing up a whole generation of undereducated, prospectless young American hillbillies (the dead dying for absolutely no purpose, the living inflicted with a vast category of mental problems, the fallout of which will be decades in the sorting out). There is, in short, plenty to be bitter about.

In this week's Rolling Stone, the always-reliable Matt Taibbi journeys to the heart of one of those divides, going undercover to the 'evangelical front lines' - in this case the evangelical empire of John Hagee (whose presidential endorsement John McCain so gratefully absorbed). Taibbi dons a dim disguise and boards a bus to a revivalist camp outside San Antonio. Amidst much good prose (and some lamentably excessive sexist phrasings), Taibbi comes to the nub of such evangelical outreaches:

In these Southern churches there are few wizened old sages such as one might find among Catholic bishops or Russian startsi. Here your church leader is an athlete, a business dynamo, a champion eater with a bull's belly, outwardly a tireless heterosexual - and if you want to know what a church beginner is supposed to look like, just make it the opposite of that. Show weakness, financial trouble, frustration with the opposite sex, and if you're overweight, be so unhealthily, and in a way that you're ashamed of. The fundamentalist formula is much less a journey from folly to wisdom than it is from weakness to strength. They don't want a near-complete personality that needs fine-tuning - they want a human jellyfish, raw clay that they can transform into a vigorous instrument of God.

Taibbi enters into their day-long confessionals, takes part in all their revelations, and in the end has nothing but dire divulgements about the big-tent religious emergencists who currently hold sway in our government. He's stark about it:

By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to 'be rational' or 'set aside your religion' about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you've made a journey like this - once you've gone this far - you are beyond suggestible. It's not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that's the issue. It's that once you've left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same bit grisly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you're thinking with muscles, not neurons.

We'll come back to neurons in just a bit, but first we move to the current issue of GQ, which interviews former G.W. Bush political mastermind (and thoroughly indictable unnamed co-conspirator) Karl Rove. In the interview, we learn a redacted version of Rove's opinions on the ongoing presidential election (he's delighted with the Democrats' prolonged infighting and picks them apart in what we must allow is the 'classic' Rovean style), but the most arresting moment happens early in the piece, when interviewer Lisa DePaulo says: "But when people say you've created this climate of fear ..." To which Rove instantly replies, "I laugh."

Even the obligatory indifference of the professional freelancer is rocked by this - DePaulo blankly repeats, "You laugh?" It isn't enough, of course. It could never be enough. No length of months at the Hague in full view of the world could ever make it enough. When asked about the climate of fear he alone orchestrated in modern America - a climate in which every single person with dusky skin is considered a terrorist, a climate in which such strident xenophobia is considered basic patriotism, a climate in which municipal buses now play repeating loops, warning loops urging everybody on board to actively suspect everybody else on board - Karl Rove laughs.

Of course, in addition to the outwardly provocative there's that which provokes through its very sincerity. An example of such must surely be the Gossip Girl homage in last week's issue of New York magazine, and we suppose it's just faintly possible its sincerity is in question. The article, "The Genius of Gossip Girl," boldly proclaims that show to be the greatest teen drama in the history of television - and a harbinger of a whole new kind of TV, one freed from nightly schedules and the usual idea of ratings ... TV gone viral, as it were.


The piece is a hoot to read. It's underlying premise is that the dark Sith Lords of the CW network are intentionally spotlighting their batch of hot young stars, giving them money, assuring them clothes and party invitations, in an effort to conflate them with the characters they play on the show - in other words, product-placement done with live human beings. By all accounts the strategy is a success; certainly it's not hard to get the actors to come up with quotes their characters on the show could easily say, such as when Penn Badgley is asked about their newfound level of celebrity and comes out with this:

I think the last time people treated anybody like this was demigods like in the time of ancient Greece.

And the article goes on about one of demigod Badgley's co-stars:

But he [Badgley] doesn't have it nearly so bad as Chace Crawford, whom Penn (self-deprecatingly, adorably) calls the show's 'designated hot guy.' After some haggling involving mentions of well-lit public places, Chace agreed to meet us for a chaste lunch at Chelsea's Empire Diner. When he walked in, wearing black Levi's skinny jeans and a Diesel hoodie that hit his slender wrists just so, the restaurant's flamboyant waiters shrieked and hugged him. They later said it was because he was a regular; but shrieks and hugs are a natural reaction to someone who looks like him. (We should know: by the end of our own conversation, our voices had gone up at least two octaves. Only Mariah Carey's dog could hear us.)

Of course, the article at least has to mention the ongoing Internet drama surrounding Crawford's sexuality - both his co-star roommate and former 'N Sync member JC Chasez have felt called upon to issue public protestations that Crawford is straight, but the rumors continue to fly (including, just last week, the eruption of a 'Missed Connections' posting on Craigslist that would only be from the actor if he's as dumb as he looks, which seems impossible). This shouldn't be so: Crawford showed up wearing skinny jeans ... Crawford is, therefore, gay. But however the issue gets settled, he certainly can't be known to be gay, not with scadloads of money riding on Gossip Girl - the whole point of this human product-placement is that the actors seem to be just like their characters, and vice versa. If the 'designated hot guy' is revealed as seeking other hot guys, he'll be out of a job about a nanosecond before the CW is out of a hit.

Of course, not everything in the Penny Press this time around was gossip and glamor - although the underlying theme of indignation manages to stay true. In the TLS, for instance, Michael Bentley can't help but utter an aside about the book he's reviewing - an aside that will be ruefully familiar to editors everywhere:

... the reader, deprived of colons and semicolons, enters a world waist-deep in present participles, and has to cut some of them down from their rope before the subject of the sentence becomes clear. An old-school subeditor could and should have served the author better, and at least helped get the quotation marks to face the right way.

And in the same issue, but on a considerably higher temperature of indignation, Raymond Tallis offers a long and feisty essay refuting A.S. Byatt's earlier TLS piece in which she tried to use contemporary neurophysiology to frame the fascination she feels for the poetry of John Donne. Tallis is having none of this and roundly takes both Byatt and the entire cross-discipline fad in literary criticism to task, asserting that there is more to both humans and reading than this cross-discipline approach dreams of:

...neuroscience groupies reduce the reading and writing of literature to brain events that are common to every action in human life, and, in some cases, in ordinary non-human animal life. For this reason - and also because it is wrong about literature, overstates the understanding that comes from neuroscience and represents a grotesquely reductionist attitude to humanity - neuroaesthetics must be challenged.

This is a valiant defense of a doomed viewpoint - of course the totality of the reading experience is neural - what else could it be? The only reason neuroscience (and by extension neuroaesthetics) looks reductionist in 2008 is because it's still in its infancy, but that's hardly the discipline's fault. What Tallis is doing here, probably without knowing it, is bringing God into the picture, retreating to the tired, familiar old redoubt that has served humanity so well since Darwin and Freud undertook to dethrone it: there is more to me than physiology. When I read, this line of thinking says, I'm doing more than just firing neurons.

But the only reason anybody wants to assert this is because when you're reading (especially if you love reading), it feels like you're doing so much more than firing neurons. Tallis' faith is to be commended, but accompanying his article there's a picture of an MRI scan taken of a person's brain in the act of reading, and you'd be amazed at the sight of it: hardly any part of the great dark enfolded mass is lit up ... just a little bit of orange around the edges, that's all that signifies the whole-body transport to Middle Earth or Lonesome Dove or Vanity Fair. Four times that area is lighted up while, for instance, a lunkhead UMass frat brother is charging down a soccer field, ball in play. That doesn't feel right - it feels somehow unjust, and Tallis is reacting to that as much as anything else. Byatt will no doubt respond; this could be the beginning of a protracted back-and-forth hootenanny of the kind the TLS was once famous for - we shall see.

And we shall see, when we take up the Penny Press again! In the meantime, the tardy among you might take this opportunity to go back and review our review of Gossip Girl - the book, that is. You know you want to.

Down in the dumps in the penny press!

An article in the latest issue of Harper's couldn't help but attract our attention here at Stevereads. It's by Gary Greenberg, and it's called 'Manufacturing Depression.'

Greenberg is a practicing psychotherapist, and for the purposes of preparing his article, he gets himself qualified for Massachusetts General Hospital's Depression Clinical and Research Program. The qualification is based on his showing at least two out of the nine symptoms for Minor Depression listed in the latest DSM of the American Psychiatric Association.

Just so we're all completely clear on what we're talking about here, let's list the symptoms that qualify you for this disease:

1. Sadness
2. Diminished Pleasure
3. Weight loss or gain
4. Trouble sleeping
5. Fatigue
6. Malaise
6. Guilt
7. Diminished concentration
8. Recurrent thoughts of death

A minimum of two of these symptoms will get you well on your way to being diagnosed with Minor Depression, a 'condition' which the DSM currently considers 'provisional' - meaning it lacks "the five-digit code that allows doctors to bill insurance companies for treatment." Greenberg's fairly obvious implication is that this approval is only a matter of time. In fact, the implication of Greenberg's entire article is that the gigantic amount of money involved in the medical and pharmacuetical world not only influences but dictates what constitutes medicable mental illness.

Here's Greenberg on the whole subject:

"In this nondescript office building beside the towers and pavilions of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, these dedicated people do research that determines whether drugs work - which is to say, whether drugs will come to market as government-sanctioned cures. In the process, they turn complaint into illness, and illness into diagnosis, the secret knowledge of what ails us, what we must do to cure it, and who we will be when we get better. This is the heart of the magic factory, the place where medicine is infused with the miracles of science, and I've come to see how it's done."

Once he's described his symptoms to the doctors involved in the study, they classify him not with Minor Depression but with minor Major Depression, which qualifies him for all kinds of drugs - or placebos, depending on which he's given (which is something even the doctors involved don't seem to inside info on).

And that's the crux of the whole article: placebos. Here's Greenberg again:

"In fact, in more than half the clinical trials used to approve the six leading antidepressants, the drugs failed to outperform the placebos, and when it came time to decide on Celexa, an FDA bureaucrat wondered on paper whether the results were too weak to be clinically significant, only to be reminded that all the other antidepressants had been approved on equally weak evidence."

Greenberg adds a footnote to this that deserves quotation too:

"The advantage of antidepressants over placebos in those trials was an average of two points on the HAM-D, a result that could have been achieved if the patient ate and slept better. The average improvement in antidepressant clinical trials is just over ten points, which means, according to Irving Kirsch, a University of Connecticut psychologist, that nearly 80 percent of the drug effect is actually a placebo effect."

That's pause-inducing stuff. Assuming Greenberg doesn't have any hidden agenda, assuming that unnamed FDA bureaucrat in his private communique doesn't have any hidden agenda, that's pause-inducing stuff.

We here at Stevereads have a long personal history with Clinical Depression ('major' or 'minor' it doesn't matter - if Greenberg's article says anything, it says that) - not personally, but through many, many friends. They span the spectrum of all humanity, these friends and friends of friends: from teenaged girls whose hormonal hurricanes ought to disqualify them from any drugs whatsoever, right up to the father of a former friend, whose basso profundo backporch wisdom was, his son averred, from time to time utterly halted by clouds of black depression.

We've seen co-workers simply stop showing up for work, thereby sacrificing their position. We've seen grown adults squander entire days, entire days, spooning themselves ice cream and watching old reruns on TV in the dark. We've seen fully functioning adults with good jobs and good families break down in uncontrollable tears with no visible provocation.

In all this time, that former friend's sagacious father has been our single and only cautionary tale, and even in that case, there's some cause for concern. And with everybody else we've ever known who claimed to be suffering from 'clinical depression,' the problem runs unsolvably deeper.

The problem is those placebo results. If placebos are out-performing drugs on a regular basis, there's one conclusion that becomes utterly inescapable: something's going on that ISN'T MEDICAL. If all those patients taking placebos were being treated for neck tumors, the placebos would have their normally-negligible effect on the final data. Again, if the placebos are regularly out-performing the medicine, the patients involved AREN'T SUFFERING FROM A MEDICAL CONDITION.

In 2007, saying something like that is equivalent to insisting that the sun revolves around the Earth, but nevertheless. Nevertheless, sugar pills don't reduce tumor growth.

The very hint of this suggestion causes hackles to rise ferociously everywhere, we've found. People are fierce in what they've seen in friends in loved ones - or what they've felt themselves. Time and time again, we've heard of the 'miraculous' effect antidepressants seem to have on those who need them: panic attacks finally controlled, chaotic thoughts finally subdued, wandering listlessness finally banished.

Normalcy, but not exactly. The crabgrass is eliminated from the lawn, yes, but so too are the grasses and flowers. The desperate lows are eliminated (or at least ameliorated) by drugs, but so too are the personal reservoirs of nerve and clutched-at optimism that allow the vast numbers of non-medicated to deal with life's setbacks and disappointments and unfairnesses.

There's a horrible-feeling moment that comes to everybody eventually. Most people slam into it directly after they graduate from college and realize they are now expected to deal with every single one of life's cold demands entirely on their own, outside the umbrella of their parents. But of course the moment can occur at any time in young adulthood; the point is, there comes a moment when every person in the West (needless to say, 'clinical depression' is, in terminology and manifestation, almost entirely absent from the East or Middle East) realizes on some level that they CAN'T GO BACK. They can never return to the time in their lives before they stood bare before bill-collectors, landlords, angry employers. Anybody who's ever stared at a bill they can't possibly pay has yearned to return to that carefree time (even, it should be pointed out, if they've never in fact experienced it before).

And it's more than that. Look at that list of so-called symptoms again: who HASN'T felt at least two of those conditions every day of their lives?
Or three? Even persistently? We've been told, by those personally involved, that 'clinical depression' feels different from this, feels different from simply feeling these things: that sufferers feel these feelings have utterly taken control of their lives - that such feelings aren't just temporary weather but seem permanent and unopposable. We have nothing but sympathy for the afflicted and their friends and loved ones, but we humbly suggest that the bathos of their plight has been buttressed over the past thirty years by the medical, psychiatric, and especially pharmacuetical concerns operative in this country and abroad - concerns that have learned, to the cynical health of their bottom lines, that offering people pricey medical RELIEF from the fact that life doesn't always leave its denizens feeling absolutely, resolutely and at all times happy and content is an extremely lucrative endeavor. But we reserve the right to at least CONSIDER the possibility that people so inclined will grasp at the so-called history, the so-called medical credibility of having a name and documentation and the appearance of clinical viability to make what they feel less ... debatable? blameful? shameful? ... to others and to themselves. We reserve the right at least to WONDER if those afflicted might, just might, feel slightly better saying 'I have clinical depression and don't feel like getting out of bed' than simply 'I don't feel like getting out of bed.'

It's a sad subject either way, but we can't help but wonder what doctors a century from now will make of so-called clinical depression. We can't help but wonder what you, our loyal readers, have to say on the subject. But we'll give the last word to Greenberg, since he opened this particular can of worms:

"I am already deflated when I arrive for my last interview. Of course, there's no place in the HAM-D to express this, to talk about the immeasurable loss that I think we all suffer as science turns to scientism, as bright and ambitious people devote their lives to erasing selfhood in order to cure it of its discontents."

In the Penny Press!

Lately I feel a little twinge of self-consciousness whenever I pick up a Weekly Dig. This stems from some disparaging comments my young friend Sebastian recently made about the rag.

He admitted up front that his interest in the Dig grew tepid once he'd slept with all its female employees and done coke with (and then, what the hell, slept with) all its male employees.

But Sebastian is currently out of town (the reason? Belated egalitarianism. The other day at lunch, he grew pensive and then said, "Do you realize that most of the people in this country have never done this, had lunch with me? Why, most of the people in this country have never even MET me!" He put down his wafer-thin slice of brie, and a tremor of something like determination rippled through his louche, lanky frame. "This shall not stand," he said. and preparations began immediately for an extended trip out of town. "Boulder, hmmmm. Sounds rocky. I'd best buy a pair of sturdy boots," he'd say to Fulke, the hastily-renamed elderly Iranian exile Sebastian's parents pay to do his parking, tidy up his apartment, and, um, disappear his more importunate dealers. "What are they wearing in Cleveland this season?"), so I felt psychically free to enjoy this week's Dig.

What can I say? Its intellectual merits notwithstanding, the Weekly Dig is virtually guaranteed to make me laugh out loud every week. I don't count such a service lightly.

This week's issue featured a very sharp, very snarky city-guide to the hordes of incoming college students who afflict so many of Boston's neighborhoods (here in Southie we're mercifully spared this phenomenon - nobody around here is uppity enough to send their kids to college - but I sympathize nonetheless ... I've done my time in lower Allston).

The guide lists the the pros and cons of every neighborhood, things to do there, and, helpfully, how to get killed there. So naturally I looked up South Boston!

Things to do: Drink your brains out on Broadway on St. Patrick's Day. Drink your brains out at Murphy's Law every day. While it's still nice out, head down to Sullivan's on Castle Island for hot dogs, ice cream, and humping in the grass under Fort Independence. Then drink your brains out.

How to get killed in Southie: Duck into one of those quaint little no-name dive bars that make you feel you're Really Experiencing Old Bawstin, get completely shattered, and start quoting lines from 'Good Will Hunting' at the patrons. Move the garbage can/lawn chair/baby stroller that's blocking the only open parking spot on the street - in Southie, self-defense with a two-by-four is a sane, rational response to having your parking spot taken. Be the yuppie who believes the neighborhood didn't exist before you moved in.

To which I might add one item apiece: under things to do, you might consider visiting Dorchester Heights - it's a very pretty little place to spend an hour or two. And under how to get killed, one must add 'cross the Irish mob' ... despite what the FBI would have you believe, they're still out there, and they can be mean as hell.

The Boston student experience is neatly summed up in the 'things to do' section of Allston/Brighton:

Join the other 56,389 people with the exact same idea and set off for Landsdowne Street on a Friday night in search of trouble. Find some noisy local band and attach yourself to it like a remora. Get a venereal disease. Share it with your roommates. Battle the annual bedbug epidemic. Fall off your balcony.

Hee.

The guide also has a fairly funny assessment of the T:

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority - the T - is the nation's oldest subway system. It may also be the nation's worst. The trains never run on time, the stations are decrepit, the escalators are always broken, and the system shuts down at 12:30 am - way before any normal person's night should end. For generations, the state's political elite have been giving their surly, alcoholic, half-retarded cousins great-paying government jobs with the T; the result is a system that's wholly inept, and one that resents you for a) being alive, and b) expecting a mass transit system to, um, work.

The Charlie Card system comes in for this comment:

In many ways, Charlie is the T's answer to its staggering inability to keep its own employees from robbing it blind. After years of trouble, the MBTA said to itself, 'Fuck it, if we can't stop you guys from stealing money, we just won't use money anymore.' Problem solved.

Of course, this edition of In the Penny Press isn't all shits and giggles. Over in the New Yorker, for instance, the bulk of the current issue is turned over to a very long, very absorbing article by David Remnick on Bill Clinton.

The article fully justifies the unusual length given to it: it's unfailingly interesting reading. The further the nation slips into a bellicose, torture-sanctioning, fascistic mirror-universe version of itself, the more intriguing Bill Clinton and his tenure in office seem to me. The man bald-facedly lied to the nation ("I did not have sexual relations with that woman") and then tried to wriggle out of admitting it in the most weasley way imaginable ("It depends on what your definition of 'is' is"). But even his enemies credit him with being hugely intelligent and thoroughly engaged. Which is a far cry from a stupid, bigoted, vacation-taking asshole.

The difference is so salutory that I found myself all throughout Remnick's piece LIKING Clinton, even though it's pretty clear he can still lie like a marble flagstone when he wants to (he tells Remnick he has no idea whether or not his wife is planning on running for President ... says it with a straight face ... the mind boggles).

The piece makes for fascinating reading nonetheless, which made shifting from it to the issue's NEXT piece all the more jolting. Finish the Clinton article, turn the page, and WHAM! You're reading "Something That Needs Nothing," a mind-numbingly boring short story by someone who wants us to believe her name is Miranda July.

The story starts with a monolithic block of exposition. Then it moves its handful of baking-pan shallow cardboard characters through a meaningless, inconsequential semi-plot. There's a great deal of wooden dialogue. And the the thing just sort of STOPS, with no ending worth noting and no dramatic payoff. All of which raises one question:

Why on Earth would John Updike pick a dipshit pen-name like Miranda July?

Luckily, there's plenty of good stuff in this week's New York magazine, foremost of which is John Homan's sensitive review of Bruce Wagner's new book Memorial.

Wagner is one of the best writers currently working, and it's alway been a source of frustration for me that more people don't know about him. Here's a bit of Homans, to help things along:

... if the obscene is Memorial's yin, beauty is its yang. The book, with epigraphs from Walt Whitman and Gerard Manley Hopkins, is filled with stunning sentences, a kind of wild pop-culture nusic, though Wagner seems to pipe them in a mock-poetic voice, as if he doesn't want to fully possess them. There's an underlying question, in this book more than any of his others, as to whether poetry is appropriate in such a world, and whether the sublime can transcend the conflicted circumstances of its birth.

Also in this issue, John Leonard reviews a few of the season's new TV shows, commenting on how quite a few of them hark back to the old serials, where the entire season tells one long story.

I don't know if Leonard is just being contrary or if he forgot to take his cranky-medication, but he actually seems AGAINST such shows on principle:

More often, the compications necessary to keep a serial going are so finger-in-the-eye baroque that if we miss a week, we are confused, and if we miss two, we are so embarrassed we may give up. And don't tell me about TiVo. I watch more television than you do. If, because I was out trying to have a half-life, I missed something the first time around, when am I likely to catch up? The portal heads among us, with their DVDs, TiVos, and video streams, need reminding that most people work for a living and, when we come home, actually turn on and tune in to whatever, hoping between dinner and bed for an hour of coherent, disposable narrative, like apple pie at the Automat.

I hardly know where to start with this little bit of spleen. What's the point of that snotty little 'I watch more TV than you do' bleat if you're calling for MORE 'disposable' programs? Who the hell cares how much TV you watch if you're actually calling for the medium to be DUMBER?

If poor widdle Leonard can't manage to, you know, FOLLOW a show or two, maybe he ought to re-think his job as a fucking TV CRITIC.

"24" has never for a moment been anything but insanely enthralling TV, whether Leonard could find the wherewithal to keep up or not. The new show "Vanished" has been consistently gripping. The serial format is tried and true, based on the most fundamental underpinning of all fiction, 'what happens next?' ...

So: on the one hand, Leonard still has plenty of disposable TV - "House," for instance, or the new show "Justice." And on the other hand, a serial done well delivers better than anything else on TV (while we're on the subject, I whole-heartedly recommend you buy or rent "Murder One," a fantastic early example of how TV can do this format right).

Over in Harper's, a strong issue with many points of interest. First, Daniel Ellsberg writes a piece in the 'Notebook' section for which he's uniquely qualified.

Ellsberg released classified information about the Vietnam War to the press - the so-called Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg did what he did in the hopes of even slightly shortening the war, and in this article he urges a lot more of the same on the part of current and recent government employees.

He singles out Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism expert whose opinions about, among other things, Iraq weren't in line with the Bush administration. Clarke tells Larry King that if he'd have publicly criticized the president before the invasion of Iraq - much less gone public with internal evidence that the public justifications for the war were bogus - he'd have been 'fired within an hour.'

Ellsberg agrees with him:

His unperceived alternative, I wish to suggest, was precisely to court being fired for telling the truth to the public, with documentary evidence, in the summer of 2002. For doing that, Clarke would not only have lost his job, his clearance, and his career as an executive official; he would almost surely have been prosecuted, and he might have gone to prison. But the controversy that ensued would not have been about hindsight and blame. It would have been about whether war on Iraq would make the United States safer, and whether it was otherwise justified.

That debate did not occur in 2002 - just as a real debate about war in Vietnam did not occur in 1964 - thanks to the disciplined reticence of Clarke and many others. Whatever his personal fate, which might have been severe, his disclosures would have come before the war. Perhaps, instead of it.

Ellsberg calls for 'the Pentagon Papers of the Middle East.' He pre-supposes that the Bush administration is gearing up for a presumptive nuclear strike on Iran, and he urges everyone involved in the administration with any documented knowledge of that gearing-up to come forward, publish, speak out - even at risk of their personal lives.

This is stern stuff, with which I entirely agree. Our current administration is composed almost entirely of small, brutal creatures who completely RELY on the fact that most people like to act in crowds, looking out for their own interests.

The only way to deal with such creatures is to confront them directly, over and over, all the time, on every single point. 'Security' people order you to open your bag for inspection? Don't do it. Tell your friends not to do it. If EVERYBODY refuses, the basic machinery of fascism breaks down.

Certainly Ellsberg's advice is a Helluva lot better than that found elsewhere in this issue, specifically an essay by George McGovern and William Polk called "The Way out of War."

McGovern is an old nutjob who once ran for president, and for all I know, Polk is descended from the nutjob of the same name who actually WAS president. But I started their article with an open mind, I swear.

Until I got to this:

We should of course withdraw from the Green Zone, our vast, sprawling complex in the center of Baghdad... The Green Zone should be turned over to the Iraqi government no later than December 31, 2007. By this time, the U.S. should have bought, or rented, or built a 'normal' embassy for a considerably reduced complement of personnel. Symbolically, it would be beneficial for the new building not to be in the Green Zone. Assuming that a reasonable part of the Green Zone's cost can be saved, there should be no additional cost to create a new American embassy for an appropriate number of not more than 500 American officials, as opposed to the 1000 or so Americans who today staff the Green Zone.

I confess, I read this with my jaw agape. And it's about here my forebearing open mind slammed shut - this kind of daffy utopianism is only possible if the people involved NEVER WATCH TV NEWS OR READ A FUCKIN NEWSPAPER. If you're worried about the cost, why not sententiously 'advise' that when people eat, they poop money? THAT should pay for things quite nicely.

But I haven't even shared the true whammy of the piece, the perfect sign to back away slowly from these two looney tunes:

Insofar as is practical, the new building should not be designed as though it were a beleagured fortress in enemy territory.

Hell no! Why on Earth WOULD it look that way?

Sometimes, the penny press can be so damn exasperating ...