Full and Proper Credit in the Penny Press!

It's a bit unnerving, getting royally hacked off at Christopher Hitchens these days. The man's health is fragile, after all, and it hardly feels sporting to get riled up at somebody in such a position. So I read his latest piece of Kennedy-bashing in the new Vanity Fair with my fist knotted around a napkin, trying to maintain a caring, indulgent silence while he yet one more time slanders the dead. Nothing new in the slanders, either - while purporting to write about the newly-released (and hugely best-selling) book of interviews Jackie Kennedy did with Arthur Schlesinger fifty years ago, Hitchens bloatedly mentions that JFK, while maintaining a "stupefying consumption of uppers and downers," took credit for Profiles in Courage even though it's an "often exploded falsehood" that he wrote it, took credit for his inaugural address even though "it has been well established" that John Kenneth Galbraith and, God help us, Adlai Stevenson wrote it, and took credit for While England Slept even though "full and proper credit may not have been given to the book's chief author, the biddable journalist Arthur Krock." At first, reading all this envious garbage, I felt the blood boil ... but then, as I scrutinized the paragraphs, I realized the truth: Hitchens, no doubt maintaining a stupefying consumption of cancer medications, was clearly in no shape to write even two slanderous pages for Vanity Fair. Once I'd exploded this falsehood, it became pretty well established that the piece's chief author was obviously that biddable journalist, James Wolcott. I hope someday when Hitchens is no longer around to defend himself, Wolcott gets full and proper credit.

That issue of Vanity Fair had other irritants as well, including a half-page notice about the new Broadway revival of Godspell starring the douchebag Hunter Parrish as Jesus Christ. The only way I could be pleased with such casting would be if opening night concluded with an actual crucifixion.

Fortunately, it's Vanity Fair, and that means it's not possible the an entire issue will disappoint. This one has a wonderful, nostalgic look at "The Invincible Mrs. Thatcher" by Charles Moore, a perfect in-depth prep for the upcoming "Iron Lady" movie.

And over at The New Yorker, Louis Menand turns in a long, excellent review of John Lewis Gaddis' new biography of that arch architect of Soviet containment, George Kennan - by far the most comprehensive, readable, and intelligent review that book has so far received. And in the same issue, David Remnick is also in top form in a scathing "Talk of the Town" piece about the idiot Herman Cain that also manages to get in some good whacks at the frankly terrifying Mitten Romney:

The knowing people who know things in Washington generally believe that, once the electoral process begins in January, Romney will shed Cain, Perry, Bachmann, and the rest in rapid fashion. Perhaps. To look at Romney is to see plausibility. But a large portion of the Republican electorate seems determined to hop from one fantastically flawed alternative to the next rather than settle on him. A few may be loath to vote for a Mormon; others have ideological difference that make it hard to embrace him. It is Romney's spooky elasticity, his capacity to reverse himself utterly on one issue after another - health care, climate change, abortion, gun control, immigration, the 2009 stimulus, capital-gains taxes, stem-cell research, gay rights - that seems to bother voters most. They might rightly ask if there is even one thing that Mitt Romney believe in with greater conviction than his inevitability.

But it's New York that takes the prize this time around, not only for David Edelstein's masterful review of the new movie "J. Edgar" -

You might wonder: "Who is the gay, pinko, subversive director behind this Tommy-gun assault on our national security and masculinity?" Clint Eastwood, of course. J. Edgar is the latest chapter in Eastwood's never-ending project to deconstruct the macho, jingoist, homophobic, right-win archetype he once embodied - and prove himself an artist whose simplicity of style belies the most sophisticated understanding of the dual nature of the American character of any living filmmaker.

But pride of place rightly goes to this issue's cover story by Jesse Green, "What Do a Bunch of Old Jews Know About Living Forever?" The idea of the piece is interesting enough - studying extremely long-lived Ashkenazi Jews and what, if any, secrets of longevity their genes might hold - but the true reward here is Green's sheer, glowing writing. Even on a conceptual level, he hits nothing but home runs - including his decision to insert as many Jewish jokes as the piece will support:

"Oy," says Sophie.

"Oy vey," says Esther.

"Oy veyizmir," says Sadie.

"I thought we weren't going to talk about our children," says Mildred.

Or:

Klein brags to Cohen about his new hearing aid: "It's the best one made - I now understand everything!"

"What kind is it?" Cohen asks.

"3:15."

And the single best thing in this issue of New York? In the "Party Lines" page, Princess Charlene of Monaco is asked, "What do you think about how the royal family of Monaco is portrayed on 'Gossip Girl'?"

To which she responds, "What's 'Gossip Girl'?"

Hee. A little of that goes a long way toward easing my disappointment at learning that John F. Kennedy was a functionally illiterate gibbering pill-popper.

 

 

Super-Exposure in the Penny Press!

Readers who might once have been irritated by the sight of a topless Rob Lowe on the cover of Vanity Fair (the top item in a strong Penny Press week) will, like all right-thinking individuals in the world, instantly recall his fantastic stint as Sam Seaborn on the still-intensely-missed The West Wing and crack a grudging smile instead. Lowe, it appears, has written some kind of book about his various adventures in Hollywood. I haven't checked yet to see if it includes any wistful anecdotes about his tenure on one of the best TV shows of all time; the excerpt in this month's VF is about his much younger days, when he starred in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Outsiders" with a whole team of fellow Hollywood he-boys, all under the watchful gaze of their passionate (and self-evidently insane) director. While it's fun to watch Lowe contort himself to be nice-guy diplomatic rather than outright calling the young Tom Cruise a robotic authority-douche, neither the grossly overpraised book nor the soppy, ham-handed movie has ever interested me, so I quickly roamed away in search of greener pastures.

Luckily, this month's issue had plenty. There was a bitterly, sinus-clearingly angry shout-piece by Joseph Stiglitz about the gigantic gap between the top wealthiest 1 percent of Americans and everybody else. This is by a wide margin the angriest piece I've read in Vanity Fair in many, many years. Stiglitz rehearses the starkest inequities in America's financial landscape:

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century - inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called "marginal-productivity theory." In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years - whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative - went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards "performance bonuses" that they felt compelled to change the name to "retention bonuses" (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared to those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.

He ends up sounding a warning to the super-rich that their days might end in a public uprising of a kind not seen in America since Shays' Rebellion - the warning is the only major flaw in the piece. It forgets that sage line from "1776": Most people with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor." Comparatively few Libyans or Egyptians want to be military despots (I hope, anyway), so they have no ideological restraint in rising up against military despots. But virtually everybody in America - especially every young person - wants to be a plutocratic bastard who can buy a jet but can't quickly recall his kids' names. As long as that's true, the super-rich in the United States have nothing to fear from the common folk they're disinheriting.

After the fire and brimstone of Stiglitz, it was curiously peaceful to wade into Christopher Hitchens' piece on the debt Western society owes to the stately cadences of the King James Bible. It's a piece without surprises (we've read many similar things done on this, the anniversary of the publication of that epochal work), unless its own existence counts - these new long pieces from Hitchens can't help but be viewed as extremely literary progress reports on the state of Hitchens' illness. Encouraging progress reports, since for a while there last year it looked as if he wouldn't be doing much of this kind of work again. I hadn't realized until I saw this piece and his last one just how much I'd miss them if they were gone forever. And it's interesting that he's keeping up with his reading, although I imagine that would be the last thing to go in any case:

The rack and the rope were not stinted for dissenters, and eventually Tyndale himself was tracked down, strangled, and publicly burned. (Hilary Mantel's masterpiece historical novel, Wolf Hall, tells this exciting and gruesome store in such a way as to revise the shining image of "Saint" Thomas More, the "man for all seasons," almost out of existence. High time, in my view. The martyrdoms he inflicted on others were more cruel and irrational than the one he sought and found for himself).

Much less satisfying was James Wolcott's tired screed against superhero movies, which consists of him whining about how loud and confusing they all are, for all the world as if he were a crotchety 90-year-old who just wants the grandkids to settle down:

For all of the tremendous talent involved and the technical ingenuity deployed, superhero movies go at us like death metal: loud, anthemic, convoluted, technocratic, agonistic, fireball-blossoming, scenery-crushing workloads that waterboard the audience with digital effects, World War IV weaponry, rampant destruction, and electrical-flash editing.

This quintessential complaint of the elderly - wanting things to be different from the dictates of their own natures - is unlikely to yield a Bergman superhero movie any time soon; I'll just have to hope that instead Wolcott regains his sense of fun in time for the onslaught he's so correct in predicting.

The New York Review of Books, as always, provides a corrective to that kind of complaining. There's nothing quite as restorative as literary journalism done really, really well, and since I myself gravitate toward all things historical, The NYRB can often get my tail wagging - as in this latest issue, where the indomitable Gordon Wood reviews two books on John and Abigail Adams and Sean Wilentz reviews Edmund Morris' Colonel Roosevelt. Both pieces are thoughtful, detailed, and wonderfully assured, which is tough enough to do when reviewing a contemporary novel that any schmoe off the street might pick up and enjoy ("what's it about" will usually cover 99 % of their readerly needs) and is bloody murder to pull off when writing about history, about which the average reader neither knows nor knows to care. Reviewing works of history is doubly tricky: you've not only got to give your review-readers enough background on the book so they'll appreciate your observations about it, you've also got to give them enough background on all of human history so they'll know what the Hell you're going on about. Both Wood and Wilentz do a great job at this every time they turn out a review - it's an inspiration.

Of course, since nobody reads history it's those fiction-reviews that keep the show on the road, and they, too, very often elicit inspiring performances. Over in the London Review of Books, for instance, Adam Mars-Jones (easily the coolest reviewer-name we'll see today) out-does every other writer in the issue by turning in a fantastic piece on Philip Hensher's new novel King of the Badgers. This is a classic case of the review being every bit as interesting, fun, and well-written as the book it's reviewing, a contemporary novel about a crime that might have been committed in a benighted seaside town. Mars-Jones concentrates a chunk of his review on the novel's gay characters, a discussion he opens in the most inviting way, by highly literary rambling:

For a straight writer to have a gay hero is highly unusual ...The most famous and successful venture in homosexual ventriloquism by a novelist is still Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers. I had doubts about the book when it came out in 1980, disliking the easy equation of homosexuality with cowardliness, even though this was an equation accepted by many homosexuals of the generation of Burgess's octogenarian narrator, Kenneth Toomey. Terrence Rattigan was surprised to find during the war that he was brave in an ordinary way. Out of this realisation came his interest in such non-cowardly homosexuals as T. E. Lawrence and Alexander the Great.

Mars-Jones returns to this subject of 'writing gay' all through his long and fantastic review, including a great little bit on the imagined popular reception of the 1950s novels of Angus Wilson:

Wilson was running the risk of having his novels labelled sordid and unwholesome. Awkward breakfast-table conversations were on the cards, with the brigadier's wife saying brightly, 'Doesn't he do all those spivs and pouffs well?' and her husband muttering: 'Damn sight too well, if you ask me.' If he had put more homosexual reality into the book [Anglo-Saxon Attitudes], it would either have been rejected by publishers or else approached by reviewers with gas masks, pomanders and tongs.

And it's entirely fitting that right there in the midst of the best review in this issue of the LRB there's a big, beautiful ad for ... none other than Open Letters Monthly! Where readers will find many excellent reviews every single month! The ad was superbly designed by Greg Waldmann and features a generous quote from the always-discerning Scott Esposito ... and best of all, it's sitting right there, in the middle of another great review journal. The air of confraternity is salubrious, to say the least - and if the appearance of such an ad should move writers like Adam Mars-Jones and his most talented peers to peruse Open Letters, well, so much the better.

Bloodsuckers in the Penny Press!

The latest issue of Vanity Fair, in addition to featuring the great Kate Winslet (who used to be quite pretty, until she stopped eating) on the cover, has a funny, playful article by culture maven James Wolcott on the publishing phenomenon that is Twilight and the Twilight movie that will open soon in theaters nationwide and become, by spring, the highest-grossing movie of all time, outstripping even Winslet's own Titanic.

Wolcott's the perfect choice on the magazine's part: he's rotund and orotund, laser-smart and reliably funny, and obviously, unapologetically adult - hence, in all respects the opposite of this book (and movie)'s target demographic.

And he doesn't disappoint: his take on both is wonderful and thought-provoking and wry. In the October 2008 issue of Open Letters, Sharon Fulton also has some funny and wry things to say about the Twilight books (among many other vampire-themed novels ... you should click on over and read it!), but Wolcott is only concerned with the first book, and with the movie it spawned.

I finally got around to reading that book (after having been urged to ceaselessly by all my tween girlfriends, who told me it was "like, soooo good"), and my feelings weren't as mixed as I thought they'd be. Of course the writing is no Turgenev - but it's not technically bad either. And quite apart from prose style, the book has another, far more prominent quality: it's monstrously, hypnotically, yes even vampirically irresistible. The pages are addictively readable. High brow literary critics (as impossible as it is to believe on circumstantial evidence, neither I nor Wolcott is one - we're steadfast literary omnivores who'll try anything in search of something good, but since I've just recently posted entries about Charles Lamb and the Earl of Clarendon, I'm not expecting a lot of you to believe me here ... perhaps those of you who've known me the longest, but nobody else) might scoff at this, to which I have my usual response: try doing it yourself. It's fiendishly difficult to pull off. In my youth, I could do it only when writing action sequences, and none of the five young people I know who are currently writing novels can do it at all - as good or interesting as you may find their books, you could set them aside to walk your dogs or watch an episode of Deadwood without a moment's hesitation.

Not so Twilight: once you're in, you're hooked. The book's author, Stephenie Meyer, tells the story of young Bella (who's clumsy but beautiful, thus an appealing fictional stand-in for every girl in high school)(except, ironically enough, the die-hard readers, who will spot the device in an instant), who moves to the rainy Pacific Northwest to live with her father. Her father is the Chief of Police of a small town where the sun hardly ever shines, and in Bella's new high school, there's a clique of drop-dead gorgeous adoptive siblings - the Cullens - who very much like the gloomy weather, because they're vampires (in Meyer's conception of vampires, they don't burst into flames in direct sunlight - but they do glisten, which is just as bad from the whole wanting-to-be-inconspicuous standpoint).

In the movie, Bella is played by gorgeous tobacco addict Kristen Stewart, and the young actress must be happy about that, because Bella, as a part, has some genuinely interesting potential. Much less so her vampire crush and then boyfriend, Edward Cullen - throughout the first book, he's written for one purpose only: to make young readers (female and, as Wolcott is the first to my knowledge to point out, male) swoon. Meyer literally never mentions him without reminding her readers that he's physically gorgeous - "godlike" and even "beyond godlike," and with a body as perfect as his face (all the Cullens - including their ageless vampire 'dad,' played in the movie by tobacco addict Peter Facinelli, who once had a great career ahead of him - are described as perfect, although Meyer doesn't explicitly link this to their bloodsucking status). And he broods quite a bit - mainly because a) although he's a telepath, he can't read Bella's thoughts (this isn't explained, at least in the first book), and b) he'd very much like to drink Bella's blood, but he doesn't want to be responsible for turning her into a vampire (even when she explicitly asks him to). In the movie, Edward is played by six-pack-a-day tobacco addict Robert Pattinson, who's a strange choice for movie executives who are obviously dreaming of spinning this movie into a Harry Potteresque line of sequels because a) he's only 4 foot 9, which is kind of a handicap for a romantic lead (although Zac Efron's only one inch taller, and it hasn't stopped him), b) he's almost certainly not going to be around for many sequels, since he literally smokes nonstop except when he's ordered, by someone who's paying him, to stop momentarily (for photo shoots and the like), and c) he's woefully ugly, which might not age well in any case.




Wolcott feels the addictive vibe of the book right off, and according to him, it's fully conveyed to the big screen:

Twilight is engulfed in sidelong looks and tentative touches, leaving the rough sex and parody of identity politics to True Blood (where vampires "come out of the coffin" to demand citizenship rights) and going for the full unabashed primal romanticism of first love. Watching the footage made me feel like a 14-year-old girl again. Let me rephrase that. Oh, forget it.

And he's equally acute, naturally enough, on the conflicted nature of the book's sexism:

Here it is not a haughty man with a secret hurt that makes him vulnerable and attainable, but a beautiful boy at the peak of his slender translucence, which gives "The Twilight Saga" a gay crossover appeal. Everything a girl could want in one dreamy envelope, Edward is the answer to a princess's prayers - doting, fiercely protective, carrying his beloved great distances in his arms like a groom forever crossing the honeymoon threshold.

In this sense, Twilight is nothing new - teen-fiction readers (of which I proudly admit I am one) have seen this exact same formula before (probably most closely in Tuck, Everlasting, especially in the sense of the heroine being accepted not only by her gorgeous, immortal boyfriend but his dynamic, welcoming, immortal family as well). It's Meyer's conviction in telling her story - and her ability to keep those pages turning - that sets her work apart.

There's only one nagging problem, and Wolcott puts his finger on it immediately: these are the bad guys we're talking about:

It's as if Buffy the Vampire Slayer's valiant after-school activities went for naught. For seven seasons (1997-2003), Sarah Michelle Gellar's girl-power prodidgy "Buffy Summers" stalked and staked nearly every bulbous head with bared incisors menacing the graveyard mists and nightclub shadows of Sunnydale, a mission climaxing in the series finale with an Armageddon showdown where the outnumbered forces of light faced off against the pale legions of darkness and emerged torn and scraped, but victorious. Yet here we are, only a few years after Buffy retired her pointy stick, up to our glazed eyeballs with the children of Dracula.




Naturally, I get a little misty-eyed at the mere mention of Buffy the Vampire-Slayer (especially that series finale, which was pound-for-pound just about as good as series finales get), and Wolcott has a point here: vampires have traditionally been monsters. Anne Rice figured out a way around this by having her 'good' vampires only drink the blood of 'bad' people (child molesters, drug addicts, the obese), but it felt like an ethical dodge - murder is still murder. likewise Buffy figured out a way to accommodate the presence of not one but two 'good' vampires by having them sustain themselves mainly on supplies from blood-bank donations (this has its own ethical limitations, as anybody who's ever had a loved one in need of massive transfusions can attest). Meyer's way of excusing the Cullens is much less excusable - they feast on large animals, which they hunt and kill in the wild (Edward is partial to mountain lion - a fact that's offered in Twilight without the slightest awareness of how horrible it is - Bella accepts it about Edward without a peep of outrage). The point is, they don't treat humans as prey.

Naturally, in Twilight not all vampires feel this way. The Cullens are the exception, and the drama of the first book comes from the introduction of a small clan of outsider-vampires who view humans as dining a la carte (the leader of this clan, in a nice touch, is genuinely puzzled that the Cullens would think any other way). Although the movie looks to be very different, readers should be warned about that word 'drama' when applied to Twilight the book: this is very much the first chapter in a long, multi-volume drama - this particular book, read in isolation, is a technical, plotting disaster ... it practically ends in mid-sentence, and the bad guys are not confronted until later in the series.

But Wolcott's point about Buffy is well taken, and it raises a larger point about animals in general. Meyer has one of her virtuous vampires point out to Bella how over-equipped they are as predators: not only are they much stronger and faster than their prey, not only do they have sharp fangs (and their bites are poisonous), but they're also alluring ... all of which is very interesting, but it raises a gigantic question Meyer (at least in her first book) doesn't address: why, then, aren't her vampires running the world?

In the Buffy-verse (as in virtually all vampire-verses since Bram Stoker started all this nonsense), it's because vampires have one crippling weakness: sunlight destroys them. Without a weakness just that profound and all-encompassing, a totally superior species (super-strong and immortal, no less) would rule the world. Take away that weakness (and substitute ... what? Glistening? What difference does it make to the dairy farmer if his cattle see him glitter?), and you take away any plausible reason why your vampires are secretive nomads. Meyer even takes Buffy out of the equation: in her universe, there's no way for humans to kill vampires - they have to be physically torn apart by other vampires to be killed.

The only mitigating factor Meyer offers is still and all pretty clever: apparently, in the world of Twilight, the act of making somebody a vampire is so close to the act of killing them outright that almost no vampires can manage it - and so there are very few in the world.

I'll settle for that, for now. But I suspect Wolcott would much, much prefer it if instead we were all enjoying Season Thirteen of Buffy. So would I, dammit.