Sick-bed comforts!

Sometimes, when you're not feeling all that good, only a certain type of old friend will serve. When you're walking around town or waiting at an airport or trying to pretend you're not at a poetry reading, your best old book-friends are just who you want to help you out - for me, these are my big guns, the unchanging voices I listen to over and over (I'll spare you all the list, especially since its names are fairly obvious by this point).

But when you're feeling sick, when you're laying on the couch swaddled in blankets and basset hounds, those very best book-friends feel wrong. You worry that in your present condition, you'd be wasting their time (yes, I know that makes no sense - book-people aren't very sensible). No, in such miserable circumstances, you reach for a different kind of friend entirely. Voices at once more casual and more comforting.

My list of such second-tier book-friends is very, very long, but this weekend I reached for five that will serve very well as a thumbnail for all the rest:

The Code of the Woosters - P.G. Wodehouse is, I suspect, on many and many such a list as this one, and deservedly so: absolutely nobody writes more cheering-up books than he does, and this 1938 classic is, in my opinion, his single best. I have the paperback with the J. C. Leyendecker cover, and this weekend I smiled again to read the adventures of hapless, good-hearted Bertie Wooster and his all-knowing valet Jeeves. The Code of the Woosters involves a vicious little dog, a disastrous flirtation with the M-word, a touchy French cook, and a ghastly little cow-creamer, but no matter how dire the circumstances seem to be, nothing serious is of course ever at stake, as you can tell from the caliber of curses Bertie's feisty Aunt Dahlia calls down upon her foe:

May green flies attack his roses. May his cook get tight on the night of the big dinner party. May all his hens get the staggers. May his cistern start leaking, and may white ants, if there are any in England, gnaw away the foundations of Totleigh Towers.

Strong stuff, as Bertie comments, and I trust I may not be misconstrued when I say the book is full of it.

The Daughter of Time - Naturally, when bedridden, there's nothing that answers quite so well as a murder mystery (I once had an old friend who used to contrive being bedridden, solely to stimulate this feeling); they feel so neat and controlled right when we ourselves are feeling anything but. And this 1951 staple of the genre is quite possibly the best murder mystery ever written, despite being so preposterous it ought to provoke appreciation only for giggles, not craft. It's the story of Inspector Grant, who's laid up in the hospital with a broken leg but can't stop investigating - so he turns his deductive powers to one of the greatest mysteries of British history: what happened to the Princes in the Tower? Did Richard III have his nephews killed so that he could seize the throne? Grant spends a great deal of time reading books of history, and it's a testament to Tey's narrative ability that she makes it all as exciting as a Glasgow car-chase:

He [Grant, of course - the book is very nearly a one-man show] reached for More's History of Richard III. It had as preface a short life of More which he had not bothered to read. Now he turned to it to find out how More could have been both Richard III's historian and Henry VIII's Chancellor. How old was More when Richard succeeded?

He was five.

When that dramatic council scene had taken place at the Tower, Thomas More had been five years old. He had been only eight when Richard died at Bosworth.

Everything in that history had been hearsay.

And if there was one word that a policeman loathed more than any other it was hearsay. Especially when applied to evidence.

Well, OK - that does prompt some giggling, but still - it never fails.

Probably understandably, most nonfiction won't work in circumstances like the ones we're talking about here, but the books of Stephen Jay Gould are happy exceptions - probably because they're largely composed of short columns he wrote for a smart popular audience during the heyday of Natural History magazine, so they're primed to entertain. The first of these volumes, 1977's Ever Since Darwin, has been one of my go-to sick-books for thirty years now, mostly for bright-eyed segments like this one on the growth of the human brain:

But what about our preoccupation with ourselves; does anything about the history of vertebrates indicate why one peculiar species should be so brainy? Here's a closing item for thought. The most ancient brain cast of a primate belongs to a 55-million-year-old creature named Tetonius homonculus. Jerison has calculated its encephalization quotient as 0.68. This is, to be sure, only two-thirds the size of an average living mammal of the same body weight, but it is by far the largest brain of its time (making the usual correction for body weight); in fact, it is more than three times as large as an average mammal of its period. Primates have been ahead right from the start; our large brain is only an exaggeration of a pattern set at the beginning of the age of mammals. But why did such a large brain evolve in a group of small, primitive tree-dwelling mammals, more similar to rats and shrews that to mammals conventionally judged as more advanced? And with this provocative query, I end, for we simply do not know the answer to one of the most important questions we can ask.

The King Must Die - This brawny 1958 historical novel by Mary Renault is now a staple of school reading assignments, so who knows but that it might not become immortal, but my affection for it dates to well before it achieved such deification - although really, like with Wodehouse, I'll reach for any Renault when I'm feeling under the weather. This novel tells the story of wily young teenager Theseus, recasting all his mythological adventures from Edith Hamilton into a authentic-feeling evocation of pre-historical Greece. Renault is a pleasingly subtle writer, and that subtlety is stamped on every page of this great book, including the end of a riveting scene where young Theseus hosts the slightly older king Pylas at an outdoor feast and incites the curiosity of his followers as the night winds down:

The fire crumbled; the ashes grew red and gray with a few sparks of gold; the dogs mumbled their bones full-bellied. As it grew quiet, we leaned and fell to whispering; I could seem more than one of my Minyans lying awake to watch if he would make love to me. We agreed together to press for war that autumn rather than wait for spring ... He laughed and promised. Then we slept; I on my face, because my back was sore. Next morning when we all set off home, he gave me his gold-rimmed cup as a guest gift. The Companions stared, and wondered if they had stayed awake long enough.

See the joy of the intellect at play there? See the winking hints, so entirely adult in a genre that produces so much pap for children? We're told a practical reason why Theseus sleeps face-down, but no other reasons are excluded; we're told his Companions wondered if they'd stayed awake long enough not to miss some lovemaking, but we're not told they didn't miss something - Renault assumes there are some things her readers might like to decide for themselves. It's entirely refreshing, especially when you're curled on a couch lost in effluvia.

Collected Sonnets - that state of being lost in effluvia is conducive to a bit of self-pity, and when you're feeling so inclined, nothing quite caps things off like somebody else's self-pity. And nobody strikes that old lachrymose note quite as beautifully as the great second-rate poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her performances of these sonnets had to be seen to be believed, but even the unaided works drape down upon the reader like a fine shroud:

Not that it matters, not that my heart's cry

Is potent to deflect our common doom,

Or bind to truce in this ambiguous room

The planets of the atom as they ply;

But only to record that you and I,

Like thieves that scratch the jewels from a tomb,

Have gathered delicate love in hardy bloom

Close under Chaos, - I rise to testify.

This is my testament: that we are taken;

Our colours are as clouds before the wind;

Yet for a moment stood the foe forsaken,

Eyeing Love's favour to our helmets pinned;

Death is our master, - but his seat is shaken;

He rides victorious, - but his ranks are thinned.

See? "Our common doom"? I feel better already.

The Panda's Thumb

Our book today is The Panda's Thumb, the 1980 collection of natural history essays by Stephen Jay Gould, who published them all originally in his "This View of Life" column for Natural History magazine, back when that publication was (largely due to his presence month after month) still worth reading.

Gould was an evolutionary biologist, an entomologist, an anthropological theorist, and, more than any of those things (and the half-dozen or so other interdisciplinary hats he wore from time to time), a natural-born teacher, able to summarize and jazzercise virtually any subject, no matter how abstruse, into eight or ten jaunty, inviting pages anybody on Earth would enjoy reading. This is not a trait often found in scientists, and it is not to be scorned (the ones who do scorn it, both inside and outside the scientific world, are invariably the ones who can't do it, or who are too lily-livered to try). Given a small lead-time and no more reference-works than could be found in his overstuffed personal library, Gould could write an essay on, say, neotony, that you could not only hand to your fundamentalist grandmother but that would leave her wanting more. And he did it all amiably, without ever striking a strident note.

This last is all the more remarkable when viewed alongside his peers, some of whom could be very strident indeed. The mind naturally turns to Richard Dawkins, who shared an intellectually heated - and temporarily famous - exchange of letters with Gould in the pages of The New York Review of Books years ago - letters in which Gould comes off the better. Dawkins' 'selfish gene' idea of gene-dominated evolutionary drives never met with much enthusiasm from Gould, as he writes at one point in The Panda's Thumb:

Still, I find a fatal flaw in Dakwins's attack from below. No matter how much power Dawkins wishes to assign to genes, there is one thing that he cannot give them - direct visibility to natural selection. Selection simply cannot see genes and pick among them directly. It must use bodies as an intermediary. A gene is a bit of DNA hidden within a cell. Selection views bodies. It favors some bodies because they are stronger, better insulated, earlier in their sexual maturation, fiercer in combat, or more beautiful to behold.

If, in favoring a stronger body, selection acted directly upon a gene for strength, then Dawkins might be vindicated. If bodies were unambiguous maps of their genes, then battling bits of DNA would display their color externally and selection might act upon them directly. But bodies are no such thing.

Gould will be known in the science-history books mainly as the co-creator (along with Niles Eldredge)(who, with a colleague like Gould, ought to legally change his first name to "along with") of the idea of punctuated equilibrium: the concept that the process of evolution by natural selection is far from the stately, Lyellian progression tradition had made it out to be:

A new species can arise when a small segment of the ancestral population is isolated at the periphery of the ancestral range. Large, stable central populations exert a strong homogenizing influence. New and favorable mutations are diluted by the sheer bulk of the population through which they must spread. They must build slowly in frequency, but changing environments usually cancel their selective value long before they reach fixation. Thus, phyletic transformation in large populations should be very rare - as the fossil record proclaims.

Gradualism, the belief that all change must be smooth, slow, and steady, was never read from the rocks. It represented a common cultural bias, in part a response of nineteenth-century liberalism to a world in revolution. But it continues to color our supposedly objective reading of life's history.

But the history of life, as I read it, is a series of stable states, punctuated at rare intervals by major events that occur with great rapidity and help to establish the next stable era. Prokaryotes ruled the earth for three billion years until the Cambrian explosion, when most major designs of multicellular life appeared within ten million years. Some 375 million years later, about half the families of invertebrates became extinct within a few million years. The earth's history may be modelled as a series of occasional pulses, driving recalcitrant systems from one stable state to the next.



Gould's essays (The Panda's Thumb contains such classics as "Piltdown Revisited," "Were Dinosaurs dumb?" and the glowingly inimitable "A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse") dance happily from one subject to the next, as Gould's own interests did (baseball and Gilbert & Sullivan get equal - and equally loving - attention). And always he returns to the big picture, the broader canvas on which the forces of evolution work and one which he tried to think (and succeeded more often than most mortals ever come close):

The best illustration of dinosaurian capability may well be the fact most often cited against them - their demise. Extinction, for most people, carries many of the connotations attributed to sex not so long ago - a rather disreputable business, frequent in occurence, but not to anyone's credit, and certainly not to be discussed in proper circles. But, like sex, extinction is an ineluctable part of life. It is the ultimate fate of all species, not the lot of unfortunate and ill-designed creatures. It is no sign of failure.

The remarkable thing about dinosaurs is not that they became extinct but that they dominated the earth for so long. Dinosaurs held sway for 100 million years while mammals, all the while, lived as small animals in the interstices of their world. After 70 millions years on top, we mammals have an excellent track record and good prospects for the future, but we have yet to display the staying power of dinosaurs.

It's not given to science-writers like Gould to have much staying power at all, and slowly, one by one, his many delightful titles will proceed out of print. But the books themselves will always lurk in the interstices, available for your curious mind. The man himself died in 2002, far too early, but echo of his many enthusiasms can be found in books like The Panda's Thumb, from Marathon to Waterloo in order categorical.

In the Penny Press! Darwin and others!

The latest New Yorker has two pieces of interest - and one that most decidedly AIN'T.

The AIN'T piece is a little thing called 'What is a Novelist?' by Milan Kundera, and it's broken up into many nonsensical parts which, taken all together, go a long way toward proving that Kundera is a few transepts short of a cathedral. Calling these confused ramblings fragments would insult every jigsaw puzzle in Christendom. If only the piece had been called 'What is a Good Novelist?' - that way, Kundera would have been disqualified and we might have heard from somebody who DOESN'T have a bunch of little burrowing worms in his head.

Fortunately, the other two pieces of note were compensurately good. The first was a short story called 'Landfill' that was one of the best stories I've read in the New Yorker in quite a while. Which is noteworthy, but not half so noteworthy as the author - hold onto your hats, boys and girls:

JOYCE CAROL OATES.

Yes, it's true, and nobody's more amazed than yours truly: I actually LIKED a short story by the odious, self-referential, theatrically mandarin Joyce Carol Oates. And only a little while ago in the New Yorker, I actually liked a short story by Martin Amis. What's the world coming to?

The second piece was a nonfiction article about repeat prison-escapee Richard McNair by Mark Singer, and it's a picture-perfect example of the way reporting that's really well done makes you interested in things you'd otherwise ignore. I love that quality in the best journalism, and this piece is steeped in it.

Singer's main source of joy in the piece is the fact that at one point a police officer actually stopped McNair to question him about the fact that he very nearly matched the description of this wanted fugitive everybody was looking for - and the entire encounter is caught on the video camera operating in the cop's car, so the whole world can marvel at the cop's stupidity:

McNair is a convicted murderer. The bulletins in the wake of his most recent escape - his third - noted that he should be considered 'exremely dangerous.' His encounter with the police officer in Louisiana, however, which lasted about ten minutes and happened to be recorded by a video camera mounted on the dashboard of the officer's cruiser, hardly suggested this. Within two hours of receiving instructions to be on the lookout for a freshly escaped prisoner, the cop spotted a man jogging along a railroad track who turned out to be carrying no identification and who roughly matched a description of the fugitive. Yet, somehow, the men's conversation ended with the jogger saying, 'You have a good day now,' and the cop replying, 'Be careful, buddy,' and sending him on his way. Only by wrestling the officer to the ground and seizing his weapon could McNair have demonstrated more literally what it means to be disarming. By the time his new friend had grasped whom he'd been talking to, McNair was miles away.

'The general drift is that Barney Fife would have made the collar. It's easy to imagine the recording being appropriated as police-training instructional material, a concise depiction of how to be bamboozled by a sociopath: cop stumbles upon fugitive, has good reason to take him into custody, yet, astonishingly, lets him go. Having watched it now more than twenty times, I find myself at moments talking back to the screen ('Hey! Carl! Eye on the ball!')'

A charitable interpretation of this episode is that Bordelon [the cop] inadvertently saved his own life. Had he been more aggressive or skeptical, McNair might well have reacted violently; one man wore a gun, but the other was plainly in a superior state of readiness. 'I think he was really lucky,' Lieutenant Clay Brister, of the Rapides Parish Sheriff's Department, said of Bordelon. 'Knowing what I know now about McNair, I think he would've killed him. He's just a cool, calm guy. He used everything to his advantage.' ... Within twenty minutes of assuring McNair that he'd be on duty 'till we find this son of a gun,' Bordelon, back in his patrol car, happened upon a pair of B.O.P. employees, told them about his conversation, showed them the tape, and - dang.

Hee.

The sarcastic laughs keep on coming over in the latest TLS, where the ever-reliable J.C. weighs in on syrupy America:

Over the past year or two, many American novelists have felt obliged to hitch their narratives to the events of 9/11 (cf Paul Auster, Jay McInerney, Richard Ford, John Updike, Claire Messud), with mixed results. So here we make a plea to poets not to follow. If a demonstration of what lies that way is required (and it's not, really), read Babylon Burning: 9/11 five years on, edited by Todd Swift. after doing so, let us know if Joe Ross has eased your pain:

I wake up too early
and want to tell my too young son
that the world is fucking up
again.

Hee. The thing I love most about really bad poetry is how unreasonably it haunts the minds of poets who are actually good. My young friends Tyron and Sebastian are both very good poets, and they're both secretly terrified of turning out something like the above, even though there's no chance whatsoever they actually would. I guess that's the service ALL bad art provides to good art.

Alas, the bell-note of this TLS, its most memorable piece, is not only negative but personally, alarmingly so.

John Turner takes the opportunity of reviewing The Richness of Life, a new collection of the writings of the late Stephen Jay Gould, to take a hacksaw to Gould's very existence.

Turner's piece starts off with some carefully measured praise of Gould - so carefully measured that even while I was appreciating it, I was tensing up at what I increasingly felt was coming. But Gould was such an amiable figure, I couldn't guess how bad it would be.

Turner deplores Gould, and once he's done with his perfunctory bit of praise, his blows land fast and hard all over the man's life and work and psychology.

During the years when I worked at the late great Cambridge bookstore Wordsworth, I had occasion to traverse Harvard Yard twice every day, and I often ran across Gould. The first time I did so, I did the stereotypical thing: I thanked him, for all the hours of reading pleasure he'd given me over the years. I routinely do this with authors I meet face to face, and their reactions span the spectrum; Evangeline Walton visibly flinched, Eudora Welty patted my hand and said (with dubious prophetic ability) 'you'll do it too,' Julia Child grabbed me into a truly all-enveloping bearhug and said 'I simply NEVER tire of hearing that!', and the less-and-less immortal Dot Parker wonderfully quipped, 'well! You'll never get into a lady's panties with fresh talk like THAT'

Gould's reaction was intensely typical: utter, arrested seriousness. He stopped in his tracks, pushed back the shock of hair that always seemed to need pushing back, looked me straight in the face, and said, 'well thank you. I know what that's like, so thank you.'


After that, whenever we'd meet in the Yard, I'd ask him questions about whatever topic was the lead in the Globe that morning, or he'd ask me what was 'hot' at the bookstore. It wasn't in much of a way personal - if you dug up Gould and asked him, I'm sure he'd say he doesn't remember me. But it was enough of a connection for me to wince when Turner brought the sledgehammers out:

Gould generally 'knows the man his neighbor knows'. His literary quotations are familiar to the point of being patronizing. Like every successful popular writer, he has judged his readership perfectly, and most of the time tells them only a little more than they want to hear. His conclusions, though beautifully packaged, are too often trite. Hence he tackles big moral questions - the roots of evil, the responsibility of science - without offering more than platitude and reassurance; and he never frightens the horses.

Turner is a proponent of a recent pseudo-scientific wrinkle called 'evolutionary psychology,' and the fact that Gould was not apparently rates him fair game.

Of course it doesn't hurt that Turner, like SO many other people (most certainly NOT including Gould), deeply misunderstands the very nature of evolution by natural selection. Just listen to this vindictive windbag:

Gould agonizes about his career-long struggle of conscience over the theory of natural selection. Like Alfred Russel Wallace and George Bernard Shaw, he perceived its cruelty: nature might well be red in tooth and claw, but if we ourselves have evolved by natural selection, the claws are ours. Any evolutionary biologist who can think has at some time had to confront the applications of natural selection in, successively, social Darwinism, eugenics, and the Holocaust.

Well, no ... not so much. It is, in fact, entirely possible to think about evolution by natural selection without thinking about eugenics or the Holocaust - it certainly isn't necessary to think of them all at the same time. Eugenics and the Holocaust were intentional creations, ideological creations with long-term goals in mind. 'Any evolutionary biologist who can think' should be able to see a difference between an intellectual construct of man and a natural phenomenon.

Natural selection, it apparently bears repeating, isn't cruel. Breeding creatures seize on mutations and specific attributes that have immediate, practical applications to their day-to-day lives. They see a potential mate who's found a unique food source, or who leaps higher, or whose fur is pale enough to blend in against a snowy backdrop, and they compete and mate accordingly - and all of it done in complete blindness, as to the long-term future. No plan, no grand design - which is, in my opinion, the REAL problem control-freak Christians have with evolution.

The end result is not a master-race. The end result is the wild, beautiful, endless diversity of the living world. That living world includes both opportunistic omnivores like the coyote and extremely vulnerable specialists like the tree sloth. There is no cruelty - only age-old choioces that have wither worked out or not. No right or wrong, no good or evil ... just happenstance. Happenstance and time - no wonder evolution strikes so many people as unpalatable or incomprehensible.

Turner keeps slapping away, always around the edges:

...in fighting monsters he had run the risk of himself becoming a monster. He could be a lot more radical when addressing excited students in the 1970s than he ever was in his essays. The editor's introduction reports with no hint of shame that E. O. Wilson, the founder of evolutionary psychology, was sufficiently distressed about getting in the lift to go past Gould's floor (they shared a building in Harvard) that Wilson was nicknamed - in print - 'the ghost in the elevator'. Around the launch of evolutionary psychology, things got fairly nasty: analogous to the kind of religious persecution that Gould excoriates in his essay on the Defenestration of Prague. And while Gould himself did not, I think, behave badly, he failed to distance himself from those who did.

You reach a point, in reviews like this, when you realize that the fix is in, that the SUBJECT of the review is never, in fact, going to get a fair shake. It's ultimately distracting:

Gould the historian evaluates Gould the scientist; Gould the scientist muddies the historical record. In The Mismeasure of Man, his history of the I.Q. controversy, he was so keen to show that male and female brains might be the same size that he applied the same statistical correction (age and its encroaching pathology) twice to obtain the result - exactly the sort of bias for which he shames the nineteenth-century pioneers. His overall conclusion about male and female intelligence is probably correct, but in science 'right for the wrong reason' still counts as wrong.

The affronted schoolmarm tone of all this (that is NOT the way we do things here at the Prentiss Institute, Master Gould) is all but unbearable, and the simple truth is, Stephen Jay Gould is not only not well-served by this huffery but not well-represented by it either. It's shameful that the TLS gave this space to Turner's vituperation - we'll have to hope that the volume's eventual stateside publication elicits more appreciative evaluations of the man and his work.

Nevertheless, the capstone to this edition of In the Penny Press isn't this graceless hack-job done on a man so many wish still alive (something that can't, one suspects, be said about Turner himself).

No, we must give the capstone to Jason
Epstein himself, over in the New York Review of Books. He writes a wandering, stuffshirt review of a handful of new books about Google and the rise of electronic library media (this is the very dictionary definition of the EVILS of omnibus reviews ...if it's not about ALL of the books, individually, it's really about none of them).

In the process of this weird, unedited rambling, he uncorks a sentence that needs to be enshrined forever in the Bulwer-Lytton archive of truly horrendous writing, a single sentence that is SO BAD it actually manages to blight an entire review of some 15,000 words. Here it is, boys and girls, from the pen of man who ought to know better:


Spurred by Google's initiative and by lower costs, higher profits, and immense reach of unmeditated digital distribution, book publishers and other copyright holders must at last overcome their historic inertia and agree, like music publishers, to market their proprietary titles in digital form either to be read on line or, more likely, to be printed on demand at point of sale, in either case for a fee equal to the publishers' normal costs and profit and the authors' contractual royalty, thus for the first time in human history creating the theoretical possibility that every book ever printed in whatever language will be available to everyone on earth with access to the Internet.


There you have it, boys and girls - the single worst single sentence in the written record of the last calendar year! Written by a man who's simply too old and too busy to THINK much about what he's writing (except that any well-educated person, Jew or Gentile, should know that Adam was not expelled from a 'prelapsarian' Eden ... by necessity, in fact). It's no great pleasure to report it in this tawdry place, but it serves as a cogent reminder: everybody, all of us, need an editor or two - friends, confidants, beloved wives .. otherwise, sentence-things like this escape us.