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.

In the Penny Press!

Sometimes, the penny press will turn in a banner week on almost no issues, and this is one of those weeks. Sometimes, we here at Stevereads will take the cullings of our interns, hole up in our office, and read through the most wretched pile of doo-doo imaginable, all of it coming from a dozen periodicals (and before you ask, yes, sometimes the problem is the interns - hence our policy of random mass-firings, to keep herd-turnover at a steady simmer). But every so often, a mere handful of titles will yield a bounty of great stuff.

In this case, a mere two periodicals, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Both were jam-packed with interesting, irritating, and noteworthy things, but even amidst such a cornucopia, one piece stands out: of course we're referring to Nick Paumgarten's lamentably titled New Yorker piece "Up and Then Down," all about elevators. It's a joyful tour de force, one of the best pieces of periodical literature we've read in years. Everything you'd ever want to know about elevators is here set down in pithy, compelling prose, starting with all the juicy stuff:

Still, elevator lore has its share of horrors: strandings, manglings, fires, drownings, decapitations. An estimated two hundred people were killed in elevators at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 - some probably in free-fall plunges, but many by fire, smoke, or entrapment and subsequent structural collapse.

But our favorite quote - in a piece full of great quotes - has to be from Rick Pulling, spokesman for Otis elevators:

To the age-old half-serious question of whether a passenger barrelling earthward in a runaway elevator should jump in the air just before impact, Pulling responded, as vertical-transportation professionals ceaselessly must, that you can't jump up fast enough to counteract the rate of descent. "And how are you supposed to know when to jump?" he said. As for the alternate strategy - lie flat on the floor? - he shrugged: "Dead's dead."

Cheery guy - just what you'd expect from an elevator specialist.

The piece isn't perfect only because it isn't comprehensive. Speed is duly mentioned, but not the great elevator sequence in Poseidon; elevator shaft deaths are mentioned, but the out-of-the-blue shaft-demise of scheming, evil Roz on L.A. Law isn't evoked - and most glaringly, the turbo-lifts of Star Trek don't come up at all: elevators that are voice-activated and can go horizontal as well as vertical? The world had never seen the concept before Star Trek debuted it.

We here at Stevereads remember vividly the first time we rode on an elevator. It was a deeply unpleasant feeling of helplessness, and we have not often repeated it since (we take the stairs, and now we require all our wretched interns to do likewise). If you are somebody who routinely trusts these infernal machines, Paumgarten's piece will give you grave doubts about ever doing so again. But in a good way - in the best way, as all great essays do.

The issue has other high points - Lynne Cox's piece on swimming the Northwest Passage is wonderfully constructed, and Caroline Alexander's piece on the few remaining tigers in the wild will both inform and infuriate. In any other New Yorker issue, either of these pieces would have carried the day with top honors. But nothing really beats a good elevator piece, as we all know.

The latest New York Review of Books had fewer clear-cut winners. The great Frank Kermode tries to do something with Ezra Pound, which we here at Stevereads can tell you is an utterly hopeless endeavor; Pound was a spineless Nazi collaborator whose works should be studiously ignored by everyone for that reason. Trying to say anything more about him or his work, trying to make it anything more than the work of such a person, is both pointless and vaguely traitorous. Certainly Michael Chabon has more luck examining Richard Price's latest book Lush Life, largely to useful issue. Chabon is a very bright writer who really ought to be doing book reviews for a living, instead of writing hithertofore slightly disposable novels, and his review of Price - an author who, decades ago, broke out the exact same case of tricks Chabon currently uses (Chabon should view Price as the ultimate cautionary tale, and yet in his piece he persistently refuses to do so ... perhaps in private, we can only hope).

His piece on Price is good. He regularly delivers good stuff:

It ought not to strike us as amazing that a novelist as gifted as Price can write black characters (nor, God knows, that he simply dares to write black characters). Price succeeded with Strike - as he would go on to do, turning the tables, with the black detectives in Freedomland and Samaritan - by writing him not as a black character but as a Richard Price character, half-assed, sharp-witted, a dreamer of vague and unremarkable dreams, filled with shame and remorse toward his mother and his straight-arrow brother, cursed with into his own useless superiority t0 those around him, too smart for his own good, and too hampered by conscience and scruple to succeed at any of the things his world offered him as means to success. Things are tough for a Price protagonist, it turns out, on either side of the color line, on both sides of the Hudson.

We have all taken a communal vow to like Chabon, so it behooves us not to point out the considerable number of problems with that paragraph (and lots of paragraphs like it), choked as it is with tautologies ("shame and remorse," or "useless superiorty" and "too smart for his own good"), red herrings (that nonsense about white writers not daring to write black characters), and pueriley circular argumenting (Price writes black characters by not writing black characters?). No, the important thing to remember is the undeniable enthusiasm with which Chabon sets about his task - and that enthusiasm is abundant, although it must be said that the piece as a whole lacks the verve (not to mention the impeccable gravitas) that Open Letters' presiding genius Sam Sacks brings to the same subject. Merely avail yourselves of the link to the right, and you'll see what we mean. The comparative proses speak for themselves.

The always-reliable Tim Flannery turns in a piece on two books about insects that's largely very enjoyable. He offers the drolly understated line "I have known a few spider curators in my time, and they can on occasion be troublesome" - which alone is worth the price of the piece. Flannery speculates most enjoyably on the seemingly cellular hatred humans have for spiders:

Hillyard believes that arachnophobia commences in childhood. Infants are not usually afraid of spiders, but as they get older their fears increase. Paradoxically, as adults, many recover from their fears. One could deduce from this that at some time in our evolutionary history considerable mortality was inflicted on children, as they played in the sand and mud, by a venomous spider. That spider, of course, would have to have lived in Africa, where we evolved. Is there any evidence for the existence of such a creature? Extraordinarily, there is.

Of course, there are low points too - one of them predictably provided by high-profile hack Joyce Carol Oates, reviewing - in that's the word - Keith Gessen's All the Sad Young Literary Men, the current crown jewel of the literary-masturbatory circle. Oates fruitlessly kicks the thing around for a while (wretched and disastrous comparisons to F. Scott Fitzgerald hover around the piece's peripheries) , unintentionally damns it in all the direct quotations she chooses, and finishes with the fatuous and mendacious assertion that if the book is faulty, it's the AGE that must be at fault:

In this debut novel there is much that is charming and beguiling, and much promise; if there is not, in these candid and unpretentious pages, the old Fitzgeraldian magic, one must concede that this is not an era hospitable to literary magic.

How to even categorize all that's wrong with those two slim lines, all the corner-cutting, all the prevarications, all the shim-shammery at which Oates so specializes? Let's leave aside the redundancy (we guess old dogs are as susceptible to it as young ones) of 'charming' and 'beguiling,' and passing over in gentlemanly silence the cowardly writerly manuever of fake substitution: are there passages of charm and beguilement, or aren't there? There cant be both, no matter how much you'd like there to be in order to get you off the hook - indeed, that hook is supposed to be the defining discomfort of all real reviewers: if you're blogging about something, that's one thing, but if you're actually reviewing it, you have to say things. Oates is clearly enamored of Gessen's admittedly impressive young literary journal n + 1, but that doesn't diminish her responsibility to call bad or weak writing bad, or weak.

Still, the week in the Penny Press fully validates itself in terms of quality. We'll see what next week brings around.

In the Penny Press!

Quite a bit that's noteworthy in the penny press this time around, which is a bit surprising! Take the 31 March issue of the New Yorker, for instance: instead of having one article that's mildly interesting and fourteen that are instantly forgettable, this issue lots of great stuff in it. Great and by turns both fascinating and infuriating.

The infuriating comes hung on the same point here as everywhere else in the Penny Press this week: Senator Barack Obama's epic speech on race in America, the one he made in response to the furor kicked up by his association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright but which so quickly and overwhelmingly surpassed the occasion of its origin as to render that occasion irrelevant. Obama's speech, made by the first serious black presidential candidate in American history - a deeply intelligent, deeply personal speech as frank as it was remarkable - was instantly a milestone, but that hardly matters in this present tawdry age. The noxious new verb is 'swift-boating': the quick, conspiratorial, clamorous and only hazily accurate. This week in the penny press, the swift-boating of Obama's speech, and the New Yorker is, alas, no exception, with George Packer writing the astonishing line: "It isn't clear that Obama's elevated dialogue last week is in the long-term interest of his campaign."

In Packer's defense, he does also write this: "The speech seemed to have been composed in intense solitude, and it has the personal drama, the encompassing structure, the moral and intellectual intricacy, of a great essay."

Still, we'll come back to annoyance on this particular point. In the meantime, there's plenty in this issue of the New Yorker that carries no annoyance at all, that only pleases. Like, for instance, David Owen's wonderful piece on the persistence of the penny, a familiar subject for devotees of The West Wing, in one episode of which Sam Seaborn has to deal with the whole issue of why something as useless as the penny continues to exist. Owen has an abundance of fun facts to pass along, like this:

More than a few people, upon finding pennies in their pockets at the end of the day, simply throw them away, and many don't bother to pick them up anymore when they see them lying on the ground (Breaking stride to pick up a penny, if it takes more than 6.15 seconds, pays less than the federal minimum wage).

Pennies, it turns out, cost more than a penny apiece to manufacture, and nickels cost nearly twice their worth to turn out - a state of affairs the mint and the treasury know perfectly well, but what's to be done? The problem is the million or so vending machines all throughout the country - they sort and value the coins they're fed by weight, and altering the composition of the nickel to make it more cost-effective would almost certainly change its weight. Americans cannot live without their vending machines, so the problem of the nickel might well be intractable. This doesn't stop Owen from having his fun with the subject:

Consider, after all, the opportunity cost of stroring billions of dollars' worth of small coins in dresser drawers, often for decades, and then losing track of them entirely. This taxlike penalty is self-imposed, since no law prevents anyone from filling his pockets with pennies before leaving the house, but even people who do use small change bear the burden of lugging it around and sifting through it - the old-lady-with-a-coin-purse problem, which has doubtless been slowing checkout lines since the Lydians invented coinage, in 500 B.C. or so.

Hell, even one of the issue's poems appealed to us this time around, which will no doubt grieve our young poet friends, who deplore our taste in the art. This is by Stanley Moss, and it's called "Anonymous Poet":

Sometimes I would see her with her lovers
walking through the Village, the wind
strapped about her ankles.
Simply being, she fought
against the enemies of love and poetry
like Achilles in wrath.
Her tongue was not a lake,
but it lifted her lovers
with the gentle strength of a lake
that lifts a cove of waterlilies -
her blue eyes, the sky above them -
till night fell and the mysteries began.
My friend I love, poet I love,
if you are not reading or writing tonight
on your Underwood typewriter,
if no one is kissing you, death is real.

But the most surprising thing of all - the most surprising thing in any given issue of the New Yorker, is to find that the short story is good, and that's the case this time around as well: Jeffrey Eugenides turns in "Great Experiment," a fast-paced and utterly winning short story involving greed, graft, and Democracy in America. This short story alone is worth the price of the magazine, and we here at Stevereads recommend it.

The issue ends with a Hilton Als piece on current theatre in New York, one that deals with Carol Churchill's latest work, "Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?" Als generally likes the new play (the British press held a dim view of it), calling it "wildly beautiful" (a glance at the text of the thing itself is sufficient to show anybody that), and he of course approves of Churchill's body of work, although it's a little puzzling to see him call "Top Girls" "malodorous" - the work is an assured masterpiece, nothing 'malodorous' about it.

But then, we suppose Churchill should be happy to escape with her scalp, since "Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?" doesn't fare so well in the same week's issue of New York magazine, where Jeremy McCarter maintains the play a "cartoonish" failure and then lards it with faint praise:

Even when she's not at her incisive best, Churchill delivers a sly theatrical punch. When [main characters] Sam and Guy coo about the endlessness of space, she makes the giddiness of megalomania sound like the giddiness of love. Yet much like the scattered laughs in David Mamet's presidential comedy November, moments like this serve mainly to remind you how small the play looks next to the writer's other, tougher work, and how much better our murky times ask great writers to be.

Yeesh. And as if that weren't bad enough, the same issue also includes an infuriating squib referring to a hatted and hoodied Tom Brady as "a New York Patriot" ...


And the irks just keep on coming, because this issue, like the New Yorker, feels the need to oh-so-cynically swiftboat Barack Obama's race-speech, saying it contains factually arguable misstatements and the like, inconsistencies that will get major air-play when the footsie-playing preliminaries of the primary season are over and the heavyweight savagings of the general election begin. The article, by John Heilemann, doesn't stint the candidate's intelligence, but even so, the put-upon world wearniness of the thing is grating on its face:

Obama knows that this is coming. He has his answer ready: that a lot has changed in twenty years, that voters want to move past the kind of politics that "uses patriotism as a cudgel"; that they are burning, yearning, to declare, as he put it in his speech last week, "Not this time." One hears him say these sorts of things and hopes, audaciously, that he is right. Then one sees the Republicans licking their chops and fears that he is not.

To which we here at Stevereads feel like responding, simply: will you all please just shut the Hell up? If these nefarious Republicans are indeed licking their chops for the bloodsport to come, isn't there at least a chance that Senator Obama will have changed the zeitgeist even minimally, even to the point where the tactics Republicans are drooling to employ will explode in their faces? That's the magic of espousing a campaign of vague-enough 'change': if your opponents to anything they've done before, they make themselves your target.

Barack Obama has so far run a cleaner, more upright presidential campaign than virtually any other aspirant in American history. It's possible, just possible, that such a campaign has strengths of its own, unique to it, that need not tremble in such abject John Kerry vulnerability to the tactics it may face in a general election. Swift-boating appeals to the tabloid mentality, the least-common-denominator baseline of the American psyche; there are other, better aspects of the collective American mind - there always have been. Ironic indeed - and intensely historical - if Barack Obama were to be the one to tap into them, even to save his chances.

Luckily, the issue ends on a wonderful one-two punch, both blows falling in the magazine's regular 'Party Lines' feature. First, and most wistfully, Martin Sheen, who is and will always be President Jed Bartlett (as one TV ad campaign put it years ago, "the president we can all agree on"), telling his interviewer that he considers former president Bill Clinton a friend and likes Obama 'a lot.' And second, at the premiere of the second season of Showtime's The Tudors, Peter O'Toole (who turns in a wickedly nonchalant performance in that season as Pope Paul III) is asked his opinion of Pope Benedict XVI. His response is priceless:

[Places finger under nose and raises hand in a Hitler salute] He's winding the clock back nicely, isn't he? He might go back to 1530 if he keeps on going. He doesn't like women, but then again, very few popes do.

In the Penny Press!

Surprises aplenty in this week’s Penny Press, and almost all of them the good kind!

For instance, it’s always nice when a writer you like, while writing about something else entirely, makes an aside you enthusiastically agree with; Stephen Jay Gould used to do it with comforting regularity, and in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books Edmund White does the same thing. While writing about that prize-winning 19^th century Boston nelly Howard Sturgis (writing specifically about his novel Belchamber, although Sturgis’ novel Tim is a genuinely touching evocation of what it is to have a schoolboy crush), he invokes Sturgis’ expat milieu and makes a winning digression:

Through his parents little Howard met such American luminaries as Charles Francis Adams and Edward Boit (a Boston artist who’d settled in Paris and whose daughters were painted by John Singer Sargent in one of the most technically astonishing canvasses of all time).

We here at Stevereads can’t help but cheer a little cheer: Sargent’s painting The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, is indeed one of the greatest paintings of all time. On many occasions, we here at Stevereads have lost ourselves staring at it, plumbing the depths of its mystery and beauty, and it’s gratifying to hear somebody else so casually give it the credit it deserves.

And that’s not a patch on the carpet of wonders to be found in the latest New Yorker, starting with Adrian Tomine’s sublime cover illustration ‘Shelf Life,’ showing the pitiless life-cycle of a book, from creation to publication to purchase to discard and oblivion.

But the cover’s not the only thing, not by a longshot! Ordinarily, your average issue of the New Yorker has only one or at most two things to recommend it, but this one is full of good and interesting things, starting with Hendrik Hertzberg’s short piece beginning the issue, writing about the imbecilities of the United States’ drug policies, specifically those involving marijuana:

Nearly a hundred million of us – forty percent of the adult population, including pillars of the nation’s political, financial, academic, and media elites – have smoked (and therefore possessed) marijuana at some point, thereby committing an offense that, with a bit of bad luck, could have resulted in humiliation, the loss of benefits such as college loans and scholarships, or worse. More than forty thousand people are in jail for marijuana offenses, and some seven hundred thousand are arrested annually merely for possession.

On this Hertzberg is entirely right: though we here at Stevereads are partial to a stiff shot of whiskey (preferably before the fire at our estate at Montauk, with Leni and Blondi sitting alertly at our feet), we agree whole-heartedly with our young friend Mister Allison and many, many others that marijuana use should of course be legalized in America – the drug is far less socially destructive than alcohol (as is every other drug known to man), and although it’s equally physically destructive as its close cousin tobacco (though its most fervid adherents will strenuously deny this – well, as strenuously as they do anything, the poor things – it’s nonetheless true: you take heavy, corrosive particulate matter into your lungs, and you try your hardest to keep it there as long as possible), it doesn’t have any of that drug’s devastating effects on people nearby. Oh, it’s every bit as tenaciously addictive (another assertion that would stir its addicts, if they could be stirred) as any of the other substances, but when the sun sets on the issue, it’s a minor stimulant, like coffee – it isn’t in any way near the same weight-class as either tobacco or alcohol in terms of being a danger to the public, and yet both those substances are perfectly legal (indeed, im-perfectly so: we personally know nine individuals under the legal buying age of 21 who regularly smoke and drink – and hence, who regularly buy beer and cigarettes from vendors who are legally forbidden to sell them to minors). It should be legal – the sheer silliness of it being otherwise is, we suppose, some sort of moral issue, as sad and weird as that sort of thing always strikes us. What else could it be, so long after the ‘60s? Unless there’s some truth to the paranoid rumors that the government actually wants to hopelessly target the peddlers and users of marijuana, as a sop to the much-touted ‘war on drugs’ that its enemies say can never be won. If so, and even if no, it’s a colossal waste of taxpayer money.

But good as Hertzberg’s little squib is, it’s the least thing in the issue. Take for instance Larissa MacFarquhar’s long and very good profile/obituary of serial novelist Louis Auchincloss.

The piece is noteworthy not only because nobody’s bothered to do one in a few decades (and why would they, Auchincloss being the single most boring novelist in the history of the world?) but because MacFarquhar manages to unearth a couple of really good quotes, as when Auchincloss (with unintentional irony) ruminates about his time during the war: “I had all my life a curious sense of immunity, that nothing would happen to me. And nothing ever did.”

Or his response to Norman Mailer when Mailer said the two of them had nothing in common, a response that’s so witty and lively that it was actually made by Gore Vidal:

Nothing in common! We live in the same silly island, publish our wet dreams, and go to the same silly parties – and have for years! It would take a mother’s eye to tell the difference between us. Of course, it is true I don’t marry quite so much.

And MacFarquhar does more than find great quotes; she makes some too, in writing so good it begs to be quoted:

A novelist of manners must balance satire with nostalgia. If he is too indulgent, his story will collapse into sentiment; if too contemptuous, it dries up and becomes sociology. Auchincloss is the least gushy of writers: in his fiction he has virtually no interest in romantic love (though he is fascinated by male friendship), and of the human race as a whole he has a very low opinion. He can’t abide writers like Whitman, who slosh about and ‘yearn,’ as he puts it. He is never maudlin about the nonsense of the past … and yet The Rector of Justin is his best novel, because it is one of the few times he permits his elegaic moralism to dominate a book. He loves his mad Puritans, and believes they are no more.

That’s better critical analysis than Auchincloss deserves, since MacFarquhar is right: The Rector of Justin is his best novel – and it was written during the Crimean War. That an author who’s written so dully and indifferently for so many decades should still be alive when so many better, sharper voices are silenced is a kind of sustained mockery on the world of letters. We can take some small consolation from the fact that Gore Vidal, thought leeched of most of his talent, is still alive as well.

Comfort also comes in the middle of the Auchincloss piece, in the form of an inserted poem, a lovely thing by J. D. McClatchy called “Chinese Poem”:

Whatever change you were considering,

Do not plant another tree in the garden.

One tree means four seasons of sadness:

What is going,

What is coming,

What will not come,

What cannot go.

Here in bed, through the south window

I can see the moon watching us both,

Someone’s hand around its clump of light.

Yours? I know you are sitting out there,

Looking at silver bloom against black.

That drop from your cup in the night sky’s

Lacquer you wipe away with your sleeve

As if its pleated thickets were the wide space

Between us, though you know as well as I do

This autumn is no different from the last.

We here at Stevereads have been accused of having a tin ear when it comes to poetry, but we find that charming. We think we like this J.D. McClatchy person.

And then there’s the issue’s shocker: not only did we like the short story (this virtually never happens), but we liked it even though it was written by … Salman Rushdie. Salman Rushdie! An author for whom we’ve had so far nothing but contempt! An author who has shown hardly a spark of genuine talent in his entire career! But his latest story, “The Shelter of the World,” represents something – an elevation of tone, a maturing of humor – we’ve never seen from him before. The story revolves around the Emperor Akbar the Great in the city of Sikri, and it’s threaded throughout with this wonderful new tone:

‘Your time has come,’ the Emperor assented [to a fallen foe]. ‘So tell us truthfully before you go, what sort of paradise do you expect to discover when you have passed through the veil?’ The Rana raised his mutilated face and looked the Emperor in the eye. ‘In Paradise, the words ‘worship’ and ‘argument’ mean the same thing,’ he declared. ‘The Almighty is not a tyrant. In the house of God, all voices are free to speak as they chose, and that is the form of their devotion.’ He was an irritating, holier-than-thou type of youth, that was beyond question, but in spite of his arrogance Akbar was moved. ‘We promise you that we will build that house of adoration here on earth,’ the Emperor said. Then, with a cry – Allah Akbar, ‘God is great,’ or, just possibly, ‘Akbar is God’ – he chopped off the pompous little twerp’s cheeky, didactic, and therefore suddenly unnecessary head.

The puckish humor and light touch on display here are worlds away from the crass and idiotically self-serving stuff with which he gained his fame as a writer. We here at Stevereads can’t help but hope it lasts. We’ve always wanted to like this author; it would be nice to finally be able to.

Speaking of authors we want to like (but aren’t always able to), the latest issue of the Atlantic features a piece by Christopher Hitchens that reminds us of why we liked him in the first place. It’s a review of the New York Review of Books’ recent re-issue of Gregor von Rezzori’s novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, and it’s not blowsy or arrogant or sloppy or ignorant – instead, it bristles with learning and clear prose, not to mention great insights, as when he mentions the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion:

Incidentally, it is entirely wrong to refer to this document of the Czarist secret police as a ‘forgery.’ A forgery is counterfeit of a true bill. The Protocols are a straightforward fabrication, based on medieval Christian fantasies about Judaism.

And there are trademark Hitchens flashes of humor, too, here happily presented without rant:

It was once said that Austria’s two achievements were to have persuaded the world that Hitler was German and that Beethoven was Viennese.

Again, here’s hoping this Christopher Hitchens sticks around – we’ve missed him.

But the issue’s main attraction is a consciously provocative article called "Marry Him" by Lori Gottlieb, which makes a heretical argument in favor of Settling, of marrying Mister (or Miss) Good Enough instead of waiting for Mister (or Miss) Right.

It’s a punchy little subject, amply served by Gottlieb’s lively prose style:

Whenever I make the case for settling, people look at me with creased brows of disapproval or frowns of disappointment, the way a child might look at an older sibling who just informed her that Jerry’s Kids aren’t going to walk, even if you send them money. It’s not only politically incorrect to get behind settling, it’s downright un-American.

Her article is forthright and funny but also serious, centering on the folly of expecting to meet a sex partner who’s also a personal equal. We here at Stevereads have done battle with this particular folly for long centuries, so we were grateful for every word of Gottlieb’s piece, whose only flaw is that it’s too much aimed at women, when we can assure you, men need the same advice in the same measure:

Unless you meet the man of your dreams (who, by the way, doesn’t exist, precisely because you dreamed him up), there’s going to be a downside to getting married, but a possibly more profound downside to holding out for someone better.

To which we here at Stevereads would add a further note: Pay for sex, for Pete’s sake. Take it out of the equation of personal interaction entirely. That way, you’ll use one yardstick, one set of standards, in forming all your personal relationships. Sex will no longer be a factor, prompting you to lavish your personal time on a simpleton, or a monster – instead, since you’re satisfying your needs the old-fashioned American way, by paying, you’ll be able to shape your personal attachments with your brain and your heart, instead of your naughty bits. Just a thought.

And there you have it! An uncommonly fruitful foray into the Penny Press! Glad to have you all along for the ride, and don’t forget to tune in a little later, when Stevereads will take its second – and definitive – look at the Oscars!

In the Penny Press!

As some celebrity chef or other is fond of saying: BAM!

Right out of the starting-gate, before the first month of the year has run its course, the Penny Press has thrown up an article so arresting, so remarkable, that it demands notice here at Stevereads.

Such a piece appears in the February issue of GQ (the one with the, er, stimulating cover photo of Rachel Bilson): it's by John Jeremiah Sullivan, and it's called "Violence of the Lambs."

Sullivan is a born storyteller and a marvellously confessional one, and he sidles up very gradually to his odd, unique subject matter. In fact, he introduces us to his expert on that subject, the Virgil who will be his guide, a quirky young man named Marc Livengood, before he's really told us what that subject is. This is because his subject genuinely unnerves him, and he knows it will unnerve his readers, and we must believe him when he says he doesn't want to do that. His subject extends ominously into the future, and he's recently had his belief in the domesticated nature of the future badly rattled:

My surprise at this pretty obvious-seeming realization [that nobody knows the future] showed me the extent to which, thanks to Hollywood or my own paranoia or whatever, I'd unconsciously internalized a belief in the existence of some guy, some prematurely middle-aged guy, either Jewish or Asian (or, in the comedy version I sometimes screen internally, Irish) who sits in a room in the bowels of some governmental building and actually knows what's going to happen in the future...

The future is uncertain, yes, and Sullivan creeps up to it by chronicling all the various ... oddities his research and Livengood's obsession have uncovered. Sea lions chasing swimmers. Chimpanzees using sharpened sticks to spear small monkeys hiding in tree hollows. Male elephants on the African savanna raping rhinos.

Once he broaches the subject, it veritably gushes from him, and the reader gradually gets the impression of what he's getting at:

One example: In Bombay earlier this year, a pack of leopards entered the town - just sauntered out of the forest at the heart of the city - and murdered a total of twenty-two people. J. C. Daniel, an environmentalist who has monitored the wildlife in that forest for forty years, said, 'We have to study why the animal is coming out. It never came out before.'
Because that's his subject: the recently-escalating level of aberrant animal behavior, both animals attacking other animals and, more to the point, animals attacking humans in unprecedented numbers.

(here is the only place where Sullivan's excellent piece goes astray - he lets the oddities of the events he's describing sometimes carry him away. For instance, at one point he suggests something frankly unbelievable:

A pack of 200 dogs descended out of the mountains - this was in Albania - ran straight into the town of Mamurras, and just started going after people - old people, young people, 'dragging them to the ground and inflicting serious wounds.' One witness spoke of a 'clearly identifiable leader.' (Lest we assume this to be a seasonal occurence in Albania, the town's mayor, Anton Frroku, stated that 'even in the movies, I have never seen a horde of 200 stray dogs from the mountains attacking people in the middle of a town.' 'Clearly identifiable leader': Elsewhere, too, there are suggestions of organization, cooperation.'

Obviously this part of his piece is fiction - normally solitary animals like male leopards or adult male elephants accept no hierarchical leader and will only seem to be acting in unison when they each come to the same conclusion about what they want to do. To insinuate otherwise is to hint that such disparate animals as elephants or tigers or dogs or cephalopods might have some kind of separate sovereigns who can override their genetic predispositions and organize them, which is obviously the stuff of fantasy. It's here and only here that Sullivan attributes a growing malevolence to the phenomenon he's describing).

That phenomenon only comes to him gradually, as he does more and more reading in wilder and wilder regions of the Internet. And a similar note keeps sounding in all his reading:

What stuck out above all else, as I clicked through Livengood's dots, was the same tendency that had presented itself when I was still just idly following news items on the Internet, namely, the extraordinary number of 'first time' attacks. That is, not simply unprecedented types of attack, such as leopard packs going forth and killing in a crowded city, but rather, pure cases of: animals that have never shown a desire to kill human beings before, killing them.

For every account that seemed a little far-fetched and made me think a few qualifying facts must have been left out, there'd be another that, while admittedly bizarre, had the instant ring of stuff you wouldn't make up, like the jogger in southeastern North Carolina who witnesses saw get surrounded on the boardwalk by a squadron of oversize male hermit crabs, which approached him, kung fu style, with that one bulging claw forward, and appeared to attempt to drive him off the pier. And as always with cases like these, the quote from the zoologist comes around like a mantra: first recorded ... not known to have occurred previously ... relevant literature was searched but no prior instances retrieved ... experts shocked ... abnormal ... unheard of ...

One of these unheard-of incidents happened in Kenya in 2000, during the worst of a drought, when newly arrived water tankers were welcomed by thirsty villagers - and a well-organized troop of equally-thirsty monkeys, who fought a pitched battle for days over who would drink and live. The human villagers eventually won that battle by resorting to axes, but it was a near-run thing, and several of its smaller corollaries went the other way:

In late February of that year, a herder named Ali Adam Hussein slid down to that puddle, probably not to slake his own thirst but to gather a little water for his cows. He looked up and saw several monkeys looking down at him. Presumably, he went to go for his weapon. The monkeys responded by lifting several stones and hurling them directly at his head. He died hours later of what a nurse back in Mandera, where we'd just come from, described simply as "severe head injuries."

His guide Livengood puts it plainly, as plainly as the case is made in this remarkable piece:

Think about it like this, he said, In the early eighteenth century, there were massive combined populations of enslaved blacks, embattled Indians, and poor-white servants living in North America. If at any moment they had truly woken up to the nature of their plight, which is to say the commonality of their plight, and identified its cause as the agenda of the Colonial ruling class, ours would not now be a mainly European continent, genetically speaking. The animals are making the same discovery. And I don't think they'll squander it.

That's pure Marc Livengood, as Sullivan has presented him to us, and it's only at the piece's very end that we learn the jarring truth, or rather untruth: there is no Livengood - there never was. The article ends on a one-two punch of unsettling notes, delivered like this:

Big parts of this piece I made up. I didn't want to say that, but the editors are making me, because of certain scandals in the past with made-up stories and because they want to distance themselves from me. Fine. I made up Marc Livengood. I made up the trip to Nairobi. But I didn't make up the two incidents in Kenya, the battles of the monkeys and men and the murder [this is Sullivan's word]. I did not fabricate a single one of the animal-related facts or stories, the incidents. There's even a real-life guy on the Internet whom I could have used in place of the made-up one, but that go messy, because he wanted money, and anyway, he was insane.

And then this, from GQ's apparently craven editors:

Editor's note: Gay Bradshaw, Christina Holzapfel, and everyone at the Institute for the Future and the at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University are serious scholars and researchers who had nothing to do with this story and have never discussed animal violence with the author, much less endorsed any of his assertions, nor would they, presumably.

This weird and outstanding declaration comes at the end of a piece that is weird and outstanding enough as it is. So what are we supposed to take from it? That there really is such a topic as is euphemistically called 'animal violence' but we aren't to talk about it in the hallowed pages of GQ? Or maybe that the mention of 'serious scholars and researchers' is meant to denigrate Sullivan's character and work habits, when he himself has been at great pains throughout his piece to stress his own doubts and his own fallible humanity?

The magazine is obviously haunted by the ghost of Stephen Glass, who famously fabricated stories while working at the New Republic. Many magazines are, and we here at Stevereads will admit to feeling a little leaden sensation upon first reading that Marc Livengood is a fictional character. Part of the reason is because Sullivan doesn't just use him as conduit for exposition: he invests Livengood with a wide range of totally believable character quirks.

And ultimately, it doesn't matter. When Glass wrote about the Wild West nature of the brand-new Internet, or the odd stress of being a telephone psychic, or the crazy excesses political conventions, he was telling truths, regardless of the lies he clothed them in - and he was turning out some fantastic prose in the process. Sullivan hasn't transgressed quite so far - he immediately admits to his fabrications, and he's right (we had an intern check): every instance he cites of increased or unprecedented animal violence is concretely documentable. And he's crafted a fantastic piece of prose in the process.

The men among our readers will already own a copy of this issue, for, er, other reasons. But for the sake of "Violence of the Lambs," we urge all the rest of you - men, women, manatees, Elmo - to give it a look.