Inauguration Storms in the Penny Press!

It's naturally a bit daunting to open the legendary Open Letters PO box and find the waxy, inhuman features of talentless android/congenital idiot Justin Bieber emptily smirking back at me.

But Vanity Fair, which sports a cover photo of this most noxious Canadian import of them all, is too good a magazine to fling away in horror, so I braved not only the photo but the accompanying article (lack of talent? Confirmed. Android status? Confirmed. Congenital Idiocy? Screams from the rooftops) - pitying the poor slob of an interviewer who had to try to make something out of this soap bubble for 2000 words (she tries her level best to make things interesting to anybody but a hyperventilating 12-year-old girl, but although I pride myself on being hyperventilating 12-year-old girl, my interest flagged). It was worth it, I told myself, to get to the good stuff.

The issue had a great deal of good stuff, as it always does, but how could I not give top honors to Todd Purdum's luminously happy account of the "tidal wave of glamour, promise, and high spirits that descended on the capital for the 1961 inauguration of the youngest president ever elected, John F. Kennedy"? I'd most likely have enjoyed this piece more than anything in the issue even if it had been poorly done - but that's thankfully not the case here: Purdum keeps a very nice narrative flow going, and he has a great eye for anecdotes.

There are anecdotes in endless supply, about those heady two days in Washington (wags among you will ask if I was there, despite my oft-repeated assertion that I am, in fact, a 28-year-old stone-cold super-hottie, but in point of fact I wasn't present for the occasion), about everything from the cavalcade of stars who showed up to ham in the spotlight (Harry Belafonte, Jimmy Durante, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Milton Berle, Gene Kelly, Ella Fitzgerald, Ethel Merman, the mighty Mahalia Jackson, and many more) to the unexpected and almost-crippling snowstorm that hit the capital at the exact same time.

Washington very famously paralyzes in inclement weather, and this storm ended up stranding entertainers, dignitaries, and well-wishers in all kinds of awkward combinations. Comedian Bill Dana remembered being stuck in a station wagon with a royally ticked off Ethel Merman: "I learned a lot of swearwords I didn't know existed from the lovely mouth of Ethel Merman." And the new White House social secretary, Letitia Baldridge, was stuck for two hours in a car with a Secret Service agent and a reporter, until they finally convinced a shop owner to open up and sell them some scotch. "We had our own little gala," she remembered, "We got out of the car at one point and danced in the snow."

It couldn't help but strike a chord in me, of course, especially since Purdum interviews Russell Baker, who was covering the event for the New York Times and shared an anecdote about Times columnist Arthur Krock, who was also caught in the storm that night. Krock started off his career 52 years earlier, covering the Taft administration, and that set the bells ringing right there - since of course President Kennedy wasn't the first 20th century president to have Mother Nature attend his inauguration.

The same thing happened to President Taft on March 4th, 1909, when a stinging, sleety, bitterly cold snowstorm struck Washington just in time to make a mess of all the preparations for the big day - most of which had featured outdoor events. Suddenly, seats under hastily-improvised canopies were selling for the moon, and spectators who'd counted on hearing a bit of that rolling, adenoidal Taft oratory were stuck with hearing about it from the relatively small crowd who could fit into the Senate chamber. The new president's wife accompanied him from the ceremony in an open-topped horse-drawn buggy, and that was just one more thing that made Taft's security detail nervous. His detail was larger than any previous president, not only because of President McKinley's recent assassination but also because candidate Taft had received some nasty letters from lunatics who, believe it or not, disliked the fact that he was a Unitarian (the president-elect was never shown the worst of these letters - a sound procedure that remains in effect today).

Even in the black-and-white photos of the day, you can see the tension in those men, walking at even intervals alongside the presidential carriage, many of them with coats draped over their arms despite the cold - in order to conceal the pistols they had at the ready. The poor sap who insisted on being closest to the new President (you can partially make out his less-than-fashionable beaten-up brown derby at Taft's right elbow if you try, and there are probably closer-up photos out there somewhere - and he was one sufferer among many that day in any case) got his shoes full of ice-cold slush for his troubles, but the day went off without a nefarious turn of any kind.

Ditto JFK's - all motorized, thank God - and Purdum does a wonderful job of capturing the excitement and fun of the time. Here's hoping he's working on a book about it all, before many more of the eyewitnesses die off.

In the Penny Press! Laugher and Loss in Vanity Fair!

We go from the ridiculous to the sublime in the October issue of Vanity Fair, and if the word 'ridiculous' has appeared, surely the words 'Sarah Palin' can't be far behind?

In this issue we're told that Levi Johnston, the meh-looking aspiring model former boyfriend of the former John McCain vice presidential Hail Mary pass, really wants to "tell his story" and so has consented to have his first-hand gossip of life with the Palins in Wasilla ghost-written by VF. Poor preoccupied Levi has no doubt forgotten that he's already told his story a few times (we've covered the, um, highlights here), but no matter: good gossip is good gossip, and besides, anything, no matter how silly or ambiguous, that helps to keep Sarah Palin away from national politics is worth reading.

So Levi tells the story of what it was like to be called by his then-girlfriend, the daughter of the Alaska governor, and told to be ready: her mom's gone national, and she's taking them with her! One can only feel sympathy for the image-masters and meat-handlers on the McCain staff when they first confronted the, shall we say unrefined piece of Alaskan manhood that Levi represented and (charmingly?) continues to represent: unshaven, unapologetically mulletted, cheek bulging with chaw, posture better suited for blasting black bears with automatic weapons from miles away than for walking on stage with America's most certifiably insane former POW. Those handlers did the best they could, with the boy and the governor, and the nation teetered as close as it's come to a full-blown Oval Office nightmare since a certain admiral forgot to turn on his hearing aid during a nationally televised debate.




The piece is full of backstairs gossip about what Sarah Palin was like at home in Wasilla, and none of it comes as a real surprise - she was narcissistic, whining, and phony (Levi's outrage when he comments that her stance as a huntswoman was purely for the cameras is palpable - he tells us in disgust that as far as he knows, she's never killed an innocent animal with automatic weapons fire from miles away). That she could also be crass (you'll have to read the piece yourselves to learn the exact context of the line "No, I don't want the retarded baby - give me the normal baby!" - but honestly, can such a line ever be saved by context?) also comes as no surprise, and the greed isn't a shocker either (Levi isn't 100% sure the Palins gave back all the neat stuff the McCain campaign gave them to spruce up their image).

(No, once again all the surprises are about Levi himself, who despite what could only be called a broad array of personal shortcomings, still comes across as a decent, likable young man - a devoted father and fairly unassuming guy. If he had an ounce of sense, he'd parlay his brush with near-fame into the very modest, low-key kind of dividends that can pay off handsomely for a lifetime - find a sports magazine and write a 'Hunting Life' column every month for the next forty years, or do the video equivalent for the Hunting Network - but alas, according to this and every other article about him, it appears Levi has delivered himself into the hands of handlers, and such creatures always dream of world conquest ... a hardcover memoir, a 'reality' TV show, followed almost immediately by the burnout of the public's always-minimal interest, after which a hapless and overweight Levi finds himself on the fifth season of Celebrity Organ Donations - Live! wondering what happened).



No, the saddest thing about the sordid revelations in this piece is that they probably won't make any difference to the large number of voting Americans who've embraced the whole concept of Sarah Palin. They swallowed the package presented to them by the unmitigatedly evil McCain campaign - of a 'hockey mom,' and average-jane who's sicka them professional slicker politicians in Washington an' wants to show 'em how normal, honest, hard-working people do things. Ten years ago, I would have looked at the shallowness of that package and said there's no way the American voting public could put that package in the Oval Office. But then again, ten years ago I was reading a Barbara Bush interview in which she looked out at her gathered family and said, "That boy has got himself a shit-covered view of the world," and I chuckled, because a mother always knows. Guess who she was talking about?

The primacy of the public image carries over to the other article of interest in this Vanity Fair, Sam Kashner's piece on the ordeal William Manchester went through writing The Death of a President and then vetting it past various ranks of Kennedy family members and retainers. Kashner does a fantastic job, and the piece is gripping reading (a little too VF-ish at times, true, but you can't expect him to take their money without goosing up the prose at least a little! Still, you can take it from me: the familiar Hollywood scene in which Jackie the impeccable hostess, in the middle of hugging one guest, leans close to another and coldly whispers, "I'm going to ruin you"? That never happened, thank goodness).

The main impression it conveys isn't of an author fighting valiantly against the black forces of censorship, though - it's the impression of a whole bunch of stunned, shocked, grieving people reacting in the weird, intense, often prolonged spasm-patterns that unexpected grief often imposes. So Bobby Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy only grant Manchester permission to write his book if they get final say as to what it says; so Manchester works on it for fifteen hours a day, day after day, until his fingers literally bleed; so Jackie and her defenders reflexively fight the finished product, even though virtually everybody in the publishing world who saw the manuscript reacted the same way, calling it a monumental masterpiece, something that would only do the dead president credit - indeed, though nobody said it, exactly the kind of detail-heavy work of history the JFK himself liked to read.

The whole story sputters sadly to a kind of odd non-finish: Death of a President is out of print, and the manuscript sits in the Kennedy Library. Bobby is gone, Manchester is gone, Jackie is gone, now even Ted Kennedy is gone, and the pages and pages of written objections Kashner faithfully documents - and Manchester's sometimes deferential, sometimes contentious responses - all seem like so much minor quibbling now.

I can attest to those of you who might be curious that Death of a President is a huge, incredible book, one of the greatest and saddest of the massive works that were born in the first massive convulsion of Kennedy-grief. My copy has many, many underlined passages of really quite lovely prose (and of course I'd be happy to obtain copies of it for any of you who might want to read it - Penguin did a very sturdy trade paperback decades ago), and my hope is that this article will reach the right people, open the right minds, and get that volume brought back into print.

In the Penny Press!

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Frederick goes on:

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

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

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

Melbourne

Our book today is Melbourne by Lord David Cecil, who is of a branch of the Cecils and is a direct descendant of the illustrious title character - all of which is apropos of nothing, other than that far-ranging sources (material and alive) that might otherwise have been reticent or recondite might have been flung open to somebody with those kinds of biological credentials, whereas a biographer from a row-house behind Euston Station might have had to make do with what was available in the branch library.

Or maybe not, and in either case, as in all cases, the ultimate measure will be the quality of the writing, the sharpness of the historical insight. Pedigree is meaningless to either one of those things, as one of Melbourne's greatest admirers, President Kennedy, would have been the first to affirm. And as luck would have it, Lord Cecil (the fourth son of the Marquis of Salisbury) wrote a damn fine book.

We here at Stevereads no doubt drifted onto this book through contemplating the checkered fates of Ireland over the last 150 years or so, fates in which Melbourne as Prime Minister played a large part. But regardless of the momentary predispositions with which one comes to this splendid book, one is almost immediately subsumed into the story Cecil is intending to tell, and all the old reasons for finding these pages fall away - the pages themselves give you ample reason to keep turning them. Hell, the book's prologue, titled "The World" and describing at length the wealthy Whiggish society into which Melbourne was born, is more informed, more allusive, and more beautifully written than many entire books on the subject:

Still, as unseemly as some of its manifestations were, one must admit that there is something extremely attractive in this earthy exuberance. And, as a matter of fact, it was the inevitable corollary of their virtues. English society had the merits of its defects. Its wide scope, its strong root in the earth, gave it and astounding, and irresistible vitality. For all their dissipation there was nothing decadent about these eighteenth-century aristocrats. Their excesses came from too much life, not too little. And it was the same vitality that gave them their predominance in public life. They took on the task of directing England's destinies with the same self-confident vigor that they danced and diced. .... For they were not unmoral. Their lapses came from passion, not from principle; and they are liable at any time to break out into contrite acknowledgments of guilt and artless resolutions for future improvement. Indeed, it was one of the paradoxes created by their mixed composition that, though they were worldly, they were not sophisticated.

Who can resist a book that spins a spell like that before it's 30 pages old? And the glittering, cheerful prose just keeps burbling along, through Melbourne's birth and upbringing, through his apprenticeship in government and his Prime Ministerships under Queen Victoria (whom he genuinely liked, and who genuinely liked him) - the parliamentary battles, the great questions of the day, the ceaseless drama and tension of a high statesman's life ... it's all here, told in vigorous, thrilling prose.

And of course that other thing is here too, that business that will forever spring to mind as long as anybody who knows anything about Lord Melbourne hears his name. And it's in Cecil's book too, as it would have to be: the torrid affair his wife, Caroline Lamb, undertook with Lord Byron. Being made a fool of by your wife's behavior with another man is quite humiliating enough; if the other man is Byron, well, the whole business gets into the history books.

Unlike the multitude of biographers who've touched on this affair in the last century, Cecil is restrained in his romanticism and strict in his personal assessments. "Society was presented," he writes, "with the extraordinary spectacle of a love drama, performed in the most flamboyant, romantic manner by two raging egotists, each of whom was in fact wholly absorbed in self."

They did not do it very well. Caroline over-acted her part, and Byron could not keep his up. Under the glaring spotlight of public attention, they postured about the stage, getting in each other's way, tripping each other up, turning on each other in childish abuse, pausing to explain to the audience how abominably the other was behaving. Indeed, it would have been an ignominious exhibition enough but for the personalities of the performers. But both in their varying degrees were people of genius, and in the most ludicrous postures, the most farcical contretemps, they managed somehow to remain magnetic and picturesque.

They managed this by both of them happening to be physically beautiful (if Caroline Lamb was a genius, every chicken in China is up for the title), but no matter: Cecil doesn't let the famous affair take over his narrative. Readers get the full details of it, yes, but then the story moves on - at least as much as Melbourne himself was ever able to move on completely from his wife's betrayal and desertion. And thronging 'round this affair, and so much more deserving of our attention, are all the other fascinating figures and issues of the Melbourne's day, here brought to life by a book no biography-reader should miss. This is the genre written just about as energetically and winningly as it gets.

It's out of print, of course. We're working on a brightly-colored link with Alibris, so we don't have to feel quite so apologetic every time we end a glowing review with words to that effect. Or rather, we should say our slope-shouldered, chicken-chested, pocket-protected feckless interns are working on it. As soon as they've come up with something to our liking, we'll proudly unveil it (after first sacking the lot of them for taking so fecking long, that is).

In the meantime, there's always the Brattle, the Strand, and Powell's!

brothers

Our book today is "Brothers - The Untold History of the Kennedy Years" by David Talbot, and it must be said up front that this is a disturbingly silly work of psuedo-history. The disturbing part and the silly part both merit their own discussions, naturally.

The king of a sunlit country appoints his younger brother to be his justiciary. The king is then killed, and the justiciary swears a vow of inhuman intensity to avenge his brother's death. It's the stuff that Greek tragedies, medieval morality plays, and Stan Lee comic books are based on.

Talbot has such a scenario in mind when he asks the animating question of his book about the relationship between John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy before and especially after the former's assassination in Dallas: what steps, if any, did Robert Kennedy take to avenge - or even investigate - is brother's murder?

Robert Kennedy didn't become Doctor Doom; the answer to the above question is, damningly and unhelpfully, nothing.
The truth of the matter is simple, though equally unhelpful: Bobby Kennedy, despite the depth of his fierce intellect (a personality trait pumped up by his various biographers as a way to differentiate him from his more famous brother, although in reality JFK was all along the smarter of the two; the 'fierce intellect' of RFK was ever and always overcompensation), partook in full measure of his family's ingrained Irish fatalism. In that medium, the violent death of his brother melded into the violent deaths of so many of the rest of his family before him, most especially his eldest brother young Joe and his older sister Kathleen.

This is where the problem seeps in, for Talbot and anybody else who hasn't grown up in an Irish Catholic family: the concept of a family's DOOM pursuing it, regardless of anything anybody can do. Regardless, that is, of anything anybody can commission or investigate. Bobby Kennedy publically endorsed the Warren Commission and refused to talk about the subject beyond that.

David Talbot comes smack up against that wall, and he seems to know that the book he wants to write is on the other side of it. Not ANY book on the relationship between the Kennedy brothers - far from it, several very good books have been written in part or in whole on that subject (although since Talbot refers to their relationship as a 'life partnership' and that they were 'best friends,' both concepts laughably wide of the mark, he himself was never in any danger of writing such a book). No, HIS book - the one about Doctor Doom clenching his mailed fist to the sky and vowing to hunt down his brother's killers.

'Killers' because Talbot dismisses out of hand what he calls the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald acted alone (it bears pointing out here that Vincent Bugliosi, in his crushingly long book 'Reclaiming History,' is correct when he says this wasn't, in fact, the conclusion of the commission - what they really said was that there was no conclusive evidence that Oswald DIDN'T act alone, i.e. no evidence of anybody else acting WITH him). Talbot starts there, which, as Bones McCoy would say, is a Hell of a time-saver.

He has Bobby Kennedy start there too, though he has not a scrap of evidence to do so. Talbot, it turns out, isn't really big on evidence - he prefers innuendo and badgering octogenarians with leading questions, and when he's adjusted the truth's rabbit-ears long enough, he gets just the picture he wants:

"[Robert] Kennedy was trapped in an impossible position. Privately, he contemptuously dismissed the Warren Report as nothing more than a public relations exercise designed to reassure the public. But unwilling at this point to publically challenge it, he was stuck with supporting it. Perfunctorily giving the report his stamp of approval was his way of deflecting any further press inquiries about the assassination. You know my position, let's move on. In 1964, he was in no political - or emotional - condition to do anything more. 'He always stood by the Warren Commission in public - he thought that was the right political thing to do,' said RFK aide Frank Mankiewicz, who knew that Kennedy privately harbored very different views about Dallas. 'He didn't want to talk about it. I think he was physically unable to talk about it.'"

We're still counting - anybody have a quick tally of all he separate suppositions going on in that one paragraph? Not one syllable of it rests on any documentation, except for the quote from Mankiewicz (the requisite badgered octogenarian), and that quote a) is a recollection made fifty years after the fact, and b) speaks only to public behavior. For the rest of it - that RFK 'contemptuously dimissed' the Warren Report in private, that he thought it was a 'public relations exercise,' that he ever thought or implied anything like 'you know my position, let's move on,' that anything is knowable about his emotional state in 1964, etc., etc. - there is no actual historical evidence at all. Talbot's just making it up.

In the end, he offers no 'hidden history,' nor does he offer any insights into the relationship between these two complicated men (readers wanting that had best go to Arthur Schlesinger's 'Robert Kennedy and His Times'), nor does he offer any kind of intelligent assassination conspiracy theory, or any kind of helpful gloss on existing theories.

What he does offer is an excitedly written pile of bootless speculation, third-hand gossip, and sentimental fantasy. And surely, no matter what we think of the Kennedys, we can agree that there's been far too much of all three of those things already?

In the Penny Press! ME ME ME

Obviously, INCREDIBLY obviously, the most interesting thing in the latest Atlantic is ME. Specifically, my letter in the letters page:

In his reply to Alecia Flores, who chided him for taking a gratuitous potshot at President Kennedy, Christopher Hitchens - apparently riding is one-trick pony into the ground - takes yet more potshots at a man who can't fire back!

For instance, he refers to JFK as 'the boy president' - a potshot that also has the virtue of being incomprehensible, since Kennedy was forty-three when he was elected president and had already been a congressman, a father, and a combat veteran. How much, one wonders, had Mr. Hitchens done by that age? How would he have liked being called a boy?

And then there's the old favorite: the smirking insinuation that Ted Sorensen, not JFK, wrote 'Profiles in Courage.' We have mountains of sworn statements; we have eyewitness testimony to the actual act of writing (JFK was in the hospital during part of the book's composition, and, predictably, he was a great favorite of the nurses); we have handwritten and annotated drafts of every single page of the book. But does any of that matter? No! Not when a nod and a wink can pass for knowledge of a subject.

And how many witnesses, how many long-suffering dinner guests trapped in mini-lectures by the commander in chief, how many subsequent references and remarks made by JFK himself, does Mr. Hitchens need before he can refrain from implying that Kennedy wouldn't have read such books as Cecil's 'Melbourne' or Agar's 'Price of Union'?

Finally, Mr. Hitchens gets his dramatis personae wrong. JFK wouldn't have been 'the Galahad of Camelot' - of course, he'd have been the king. One wonders how much patience he'd have had with bargain-basement Mordreds.

Of course Hitchens offers no reply - honestly, how could he? Nevertheless, his silence bespeaks a maturity I thought he'd all but lost! That, plus the superb piece in this selfsame issue on Jessica Mitford - at once fervently enthusiastic and coolly appraising - prompts me to declare an end to our nascent blood-feud!

Also in this issue was yet another wonderful, funny article by Sandra Tsing Loh, this one about uber-parents and the grotesque lengths they go to in order to get their little kids into the right grade schools, high schools, and colleges. The whole thing is a delight, but one tasty quote should suffice:

On the one hand, I worry that unless they join some sort of MTV-sponsored witness-protection program, such children have no hope of ever getting laid. (One imagines [the kids and their parents] years down the road, sharing a lone Zima at a vast granite kitchen island as the pair of them nostaligically go through old torts). On the other hand, I have to admit to a grudging admiration for the sheer professionalism, the smoothly oiled Bonnie-and-Clyde teamwork of these academic parent-child hit squads. I too had insanely pushy parents, but in retrospect they seem like pikers. Yes, my Danzig-born mom wrote all my sister's school papers (which my sister then dutifully copied and presented as her own). However, the result was not Ivy League entry but instead, as my sister will joke, 'my strange German syntax, to shake, I have never been able.' When I was a senior at Caltech, my Shanghai-born scientist dad kept calling my dorm room to shout, over the thumping ZZ Top, 'Sandra! Apply to any grad school in any engineering major!' Sadly, thanks to the freedom of the EZ student loan the great cheapskate himself had helped me secure, I was already off dating a rock-bagpipe player and spectacularly bombing my physics GRE. (Out of a possible 99, my percentile was 7 - that's right, one digit - a number so low it inspires almost Talmudic awe in those who hear it uttered).

Hee.

The oddest thing in the issue was Virginia Postrel's piece on Superhero movies called "Superhero Worship" which, despite those two facts, seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with superheroes or superhero movies. Great topic idea, though...

Over in Esquire (the same issue in which Brad Pitt says he and Angelina Jolie will get married once everyone in the country can legally marry), there's a brief interview with a 21-year-old creature named "David Lehre" (apperently, he's a filmmaker who's 'exploding' ... but there's a picture, and he doesn't look old enough to NOCTURNALLY explode, if you catch my meaning) who at one point affirms that he, like all other right-thinking individuals, is a fan of "High School Musical."

There's also a page-long pan of Cesar Milan, the so-called "Dog Whisperer" during which several ACTUAL dog-experts speak up about what a fraud the guy is. I've read his book, but far more importantly I've now seen his show, and I can tell you one thing beyond any doubt: most of the dogs he 'fixes' are only badly surprised, not rethinking their lives.

Domesticated dogs aren't exactly the smartest species in the world, but they know perfectly well that a human isn't a dog. Milan's whole approach - establishing himself as 'alpha dog' and then claiming he gets results when a 'pack' structure then forms with him at the top - well, it just isn't happening on his show. Instead, time after time, you see a dog go blank-eyed and immobile when confronted with this human acting so weird.

Almost all domestic dogs WANT to please humans - they've been genetically engineered over thousands of years to do so. Importing this pack-leader crap is literally turning back the clock 8,000 years.

So if you're having problems with your dog, kindly DON'T bare your teeth and kneel on their chest. Patient conversation will do just fine (except in your case, Beepy ... sorry about that).

Elsewhere in the issue, Tom Junod writes a book review of the Koran that's just a few good sentences shy of being utterly imbecilic. If any of you should happen to read it (i.e. if any of you can teach me how to link directly to it), please disregard it entirely. Even a 'Dummies' book will give you a better introduction to what is, beyond doubt, the most important book in the world today.

But by far the weirdest thing in this issue was Chuck Klosterman's article on 'Survivor' and 'Lost.' Heck, not even the whole article, just one sentence:

" 'Lost' is probably the best network drama in the history of television (The only other candidate might be 'Twin Peaks')."

Even in this day and age of 24-hour inane commentary, that's got to be the single DUMBEST fucking sentence I've read in the month of September.

So we'll close out this edition of In the Penny Press on that note and hope for better sense next time.

'Lost' the best network drama in the history of television? Jesus Christ on a fucking cross.

In the Penny Press! Poems and Nukes!

Here we are again, huddled together as I prepare to bombard you with the very latest in printed trivia!

So let's start with a BANG! In the latest New Republic (how on Earth did I get along all these years without including it in my regular reading? Just LOOK at how many times it's featured here, which is, after all, the Academy Awards of magazine-recognition!). The odious Alice Quinn has published a collection of previously-unpublished Elizabeth Bishop poems, and the New Republic gave it to the mighty Helen Vendler to review. I consider Vendler to be the greatest poetry-reviewer ever to put pen to paper, and never is she more terrifying than in her anger:

This book should not have been issued with its present subtitle of "Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments." It should have been called "Repudiated Poems." For Elizabeth Bishop had years to publish the poems included here, had she wanted to publish them. They remained unpublished (not "uncollected") because, for the most part, they did not meet her fastidious standards (although a few, such as the completed love poem "It is marvellous to wake up together" may have been withheld out of prudence). Students eagerly wanting to buy "the new book by Elizabeth Bishop" should be told to go back and buy the old one, where the poet represents herself as she wished to be known. The eighty-odd poems that this famous perfectionist allowed to be printed over the years are "Elizabeth Bishop" as a poet. This book is not.

It will be argued that Bishop could have burned all these pieces of paper if she did not wish them to see publication (I am told that poets now, fearing an Alice Quinn in their future, are incinerating their drafts). But burning one's writing is painful, and Bishop kept her papers, as any of us might, because the past was precious to her. Had Bishop been asked whether her repudiated poems and some drafts and fragments should be published after her death, she would have replied, I believe, with a horrified 'No.'

It seems to me a betrayal of Elizabeth Bishop as a poet to print items from the archive in magazines and journals as if they were 'real poems' and not attempts that were withheld by the poet from just such public appearances.

And in conclusion: "In the long run, these newly published materials will be relegated to what Robert Lowell called 'the back stacks,' and this imperfect volume will be forgotten, except by scholars. The real poems will outlast these, their maimed and stunted siblings."

Hee.

This review has already sparked a storm of controversy - two articles in the New York Times, a spate of planned debates in Poetry magazine ... and of course a REPLY from the odious Alice Quinn, which will no doubt show up soon in the New Republic. Plus, I guarantee you, the TLS will get wind of this and write something - this is just exactly the kind of bandwagon they can't resist. It's not just that Vendler is entirely right - I've been reading her for years, and I've never once known her to be otherwise - it's that she's the proverbial 500-pound gorilla, not some hack from the back benches.

And speaking of the TLS, this week Edward Luttwak reviews two new books on the Cold War and gets off to what I think is a very interesting start:

There is no justification for Cold War nostalgia. The sanguinary threats of truculent preachers, pious murderers and elected fanatics and the variegated violence du jour of fanatical Islam are all small potatoes compared to the peril of nuclear obliteration that attended entire decades of the Cold War. And to think of the unthinkable, even if Islam's true believers were to acquire one or two nuclear weapons and use them, there would still remain a world of difference between the detonation of a bomb or even two by wild-eyed fanatics and of 20,000, 25,000 and 30,000 megaton-yield weapons systematically delivered on target by disciplined military professionals dutifully obeying verified release orders. It was a credibly contrived implacability, along with the undoubted lethality of nuclear weapons, that gave us a Cold War of devastating reciprocal threats instead of the bloody battles of real, non-nuclear wars between the greatest powers.

"Nuclear weapons prohibited the optimism without which few wars have ever been started. If they were used, outcomes only remained unpredictable at the margins, while it was entirely certain that there would be catastrophic consequence. That unprecedented certainty induced unprecendented caution on the part of everyone concerned, even Stalin and Mao, monsters in human form who calmly encompassed the deaths of millions and tens of millions of their fellow citizens, but who behaved as cautiously as ordinary political leaders when it came to nuclear weapons.

That's all probably boring stuff to you, but it was a little revelation to me, since Luttwak's never written that well about anything (I suspect he has a book in the works on the subject). My only quibble is one you can probably see coming a mile away: nowhere in this very long review does President Kennedy get even a brief mention. Which irks me because the one time a "monster in human form" maybe WAS willing to go beyond threats, it was JFK who stared him back away from the precipice. The world came within flimsy hours of nuclear annihilation, and I think it's worth mentioning that it was a Kennedy who saved it. But that's just me...



And there you have it! An oddly SHORT installment, from an oddly light week of periodical reading! Of course, the week hasn't been light at on the book-reading front, but that's an entirely different tedious entry!