Full and Proper Credit in the Penny Press!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oy," says Sophie.

"Oy vey," says Esther.

"Oy veyizmir," says Sadie.

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

Or:

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

"What kind is it?" Cohen asks.

"3:15."

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

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

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

 

 

Right and Wrong (and a little comfort) in the Penny Press!

Ordinarily, the running disagreements I have with the Penny Press are matters of degree, of shading, and they're conducted sotto voce over a heaping plate of food in the little hole-in-the-wall restaurant I frequent solely for the purpose of keeping up with all my periodicals. It's rare that these disagreements aren't essentially pleasant things, the rewarding tingling of stimulating disagreement; it's rare that I'm confronted with things that are flat-out wrong.

But I was cursing over my kimchi bokkeumbap this time around, and of course things started to go wrong at the mention of the ten-year 9-11 anniversary. Every periodical in the Western world has latched onto that anniversary and used it as an occasion to unleash some threat-matrix-level amounts of pretentious bloviation onto an innocent reading public, and The New Yorker is at the front of the pack (in defense of the concept, New York magazine's dedicated issue last week was superb). The heart of the problem is the seeming inability of pretentious people to understand the difference between a momentous event happening and a momentous event happening to them. Unless you were one of the survivors or one of the victims, the 9-11 attacks didn't happen to you - as impossible as it may be for you to believe, considering your SAT scores, you were only a bystander to the events that tragic morning.

As these commemorative editions continue to flow off the newsstands, the pretentious young writers providing the copy are reacting to that bystander status in two ways: by ignoring it ("I was on my stoop in Dumbo playing educational games with my two kids, Castorp and Always Question, when we were hit") or exalting it ("I was in a tiny village 200 miles upland from Puerto Mayo, just about to file the story that would take down a local drug kingpin, when I happened to glance at the bar's little TV and saw grainy footage that would very nearly make me miss my deadline ..."). Neither of these two approaches is exactly preferable to respectful silence, but then, editors don't a dollar a word for respectful silence.

If anything, though, the commentaries are worse than the commemorations, and that brings me to George Packer writing in the 12 September issue of The New Yorker. Specifically, to this paragraph (although the piece he writes contains many like it):

A great many counterfactual histories could be written about those [George W. Bush] years. If Al Gore had been allowed to take office, if bin Laden had been captured at Tora Bora, if the focus had stayed on Al Qaeda, if real nation-building had been tried in Afghanistan, if America hadn't gone to war in Iraq. All these alternative paths would have been helpful, but none of them would have been decisive, because the deeper problem lay in an ongoing decline that was greater than any single event or policy.

This isn't a question of shading - this is just plain wrong. That extremely even-handed 'we-musn't-be-seen-to-judge' non-committal might be de rigeur in the Whole Foods aisles in Cambridge, but it smacks of craven equivocation out in the rest of the world. In reality, every single one of those 'alternative paths' Packer writes about would indeed have been utterly 'decisive,' and it's borderline delusional to say otherwise. Not decisive, if George W. Bush hadn't stolen the election? Not decisive, if we'd had a thinking individual (with extensive experience of both government and foreign policy) in the White House instead of a biddable idiot? Not decisive, if the leader of Al-Qaeda had been caught and Al-Qaeda itself destroyed in the immediate aftermath of 9-11? This is serene historical contextualization run absolutely amok, and it chaffed me to read it. The real way to desecrate the memory of 9-11 isn't to forget the anniversary - it's to affect to being blithe about the moral imperatives at play on that day.

Naturally, I turned to the mighty TLS for some relief, but alas - none was forthcoming. Not only was the provocation on the cover in pretty poor taste (in case you're wondering - and you're not, because you were never meant to - the 'them' refers to 'canonical authors' not gays), and not only was the rotting fraud Michel Houellebecq given serious attention by a writer who ought to know better, but even in the issue's hindquarters, in the little 'In Brief' reviews that are usually such a joy, there were nettles. Specifically, somebody named Jacques Testard reviews Alan Jacobs' well-intentioned but soporific book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, plays with it a bit like a bored kitten, and then finishes up his 200 words with this little doozy:

Readers of this review, however, will be well connected to the world of books, if not to a Kindle. The Pleasures of Reading in the [sic] Age of Distraction is an informed piece of democratic didacticism, but those confirmed readers of literature have no need to look here. Just remember that it's OK to read anything, anything at all, so long as it gives you pleasure.

Well, yes, I muttered over my zeeuwse bolus, but that kind of dictum is also mindlessly blithe. Granted, in a free country without censorship, it's OK to read anything, anything at all, that gives you pleasure - but if you stop there, your reading life will be pretty damn cramped. 'OK' here is clearly meant to shield serial readers of romances or Star Trek novels from the criticism of their betters, but it gets a little too definitive for its own good. I often premise my own book-recommendations to strangers along the same initial lines - what sorts of things do you like? - but my end goal is to move them a bit beyond their comfort zones, not to keep them happily penned in their back yards forever. After all, pleasure is a complex thing, and (especially when it comes to reading) parts of it have to be learned. Yes, you should feel OK reading anything, anything at all, that gives you pleasure - condescending readers are missing the big picture - but if you blithely stop there, as this Testard person implies you should, you'll miss the big picture too.

Turning from the TLS, I had scant hope of finding relief anywhere else, especially in the customarily-infuriating pages of Graydon Carter's Vanity Fair. This is the venue where I often find the very best long-form freelance writing anywhere on the newsstand, but it's also the place to find some of the most arrogant, shoddy workmen in the business, and my nerves were already frayed.  And at first, this current issue boded poorly. True, it was a relief that the editors decided to forego a 9-11 cover-theme, favoring us instead with what I presume is a CGI close-up of some forthcoming Hollywood space alien (or is it abstract art? Could it be a rendition of the scar-pits of lower Manhattan on 9-12?). But once you're done being frightened by whatever that is on the cover, you're forced to wade through the first 100 pages before you get to any actual content. Those initial pages are wholly given over to fashion ads, which in and of themselves are invitations to incomprehension. True to form, this current batch has some high points



... and very, very low points



But miraculously, relief did indeed arrive, and from the place I least expected it. Right in the middle of a long, almost physically excruciating piece recounting debut novelist Chad Harbach's rise to glory, there's a simple and utterly restorative little paragraph about the much-maligned publishing industry:

And yet every single person I met while writing this article - the publishers, the editors, the marketing and sales people - genuinely loved books. That's why they were working in a business that, in the end, wasn't particularly lucrative. They liked reading books and cared enough about them to devote their lives to making them. For every company or editor or agent who no longer cared, there were a number of younger people who did.

I've been connected with that industry in one way or another for many, many years, and I can attest to the truth of every word of that paragraph - well, except for the one four words from the end. In the publishing world as everywhere else, 'younger' is still mostly a well-deserved pejorative term: it's the older reps and publicists and editors and publishers and even novelists who tend to have long-cultivated enthusiasm for the written word (I know of roughly 150 young novelists currently working in the field, and if you handed each of them a check for $1,000,000 and told them it was valid only on condition they never write another word of fiction, 147 of them would instantly agree). A one-word quibble is hardly significant, on such a grim Penny Press day as this.

I'll have to hope for better luck with the London Review of Books, in due time.

 

Super-Exposure in the Penny Press!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kings, Princes, and Emperors in the Penny Press!

The mighty Colin Burrow could hardly fail to grab my attention in the latest London Review of Books, since the scamp chose to start his review of the new Yale edition of Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets with this choice little gem: "Most literary criticism is ephemeral, too good for wrapping up the chips but not worth binding, keeping, annotating or editing."

I tried to resist the urge to race over to Open Letters Monthly and reassure myself that it hasn't been quite as bad as all that for the last four years - instead, I plunged forward with Burrow's own exercise in the journalistic version of lit crit, his wonderful article, which has precisely one paragraph on that poor Yale volume and two glorious pages on Johnson's glorious book (which I'll get around to here on Stevereads one of these fine days, and which I urge all of you to take down from your shelves and re-read). Burrow is a mere stripling in years, but his prose uniformly sparkles with great, knowing lines like this one:

When Johnson has nothing to say in the literary-critical section of a life he will accuse and author of overusing triplets or Alexandrines, or of being merely pretty. He sometimes delivers the squelch complete, as when he says of the unfortunate George Granville: 'His little pieces are seldom either spritely or elegant, either keen or weighty. They are trifles written by idleness and published by vanity.'

I hooted with laughter and had to resist by sheer will-power the urge to rename this blog "The Squelch Complete."

A fairly good example of "The Squelch Complete" is delivered by the redoubtable Mary Beard over in the TLS (it's been a very good fortnight for Burrow's chips-wrappings), where she sinks her teeth into a new biography of the Roman emperor Elagabalus, a Cambridge University Press volume by Leonardo de Arrizabalaga y Prado (names that beautiful just aren't fair, says a Donoghue of 100 generations of boring old Donoghue). It's always a joy to watch Beard at work, although perhaps Arrizabalaga y Prado isn't doing any jigs after this rather public spanking. An entire little universe of mythology has sprung up about Elagabalus in the seventeen or so centuries since he briefly rule the Empire - so much so that he seems far more comfortably the province of fiction than fact (Beard doesn't mention the entertaining 1966 novel about him called Child of the Sun, although I cheered when she alluded to Alfred Duggan's 1963 novel Family Favourites). Arrizabalaga y Prado attempts to cut away all that mythology and get at the boy himself, but apparently his methodology leaves something to be desired ('apparently' because Cambridge has been a bit laggardly in sending me a copy of the book, the caitiffs), since Beard ultimately concludes "... a sceptical historian who cannot sustain his scepticism is even worse than one who was gullible all along."

Scepticism might be the order of the day over in the new issue of Vanity Fair, although it's a corker of an issue just the same. Readers might be forgiven for being sceptical when cover-boy and rancid tobacco addict Robert Pattinson bemoans his fame to interviewer Nancy Jo Sales - except that he seems every bit as aware of the inanity as anybody else would be. "Yeah," he says, "but every time you read about someone famous talking about being famous, you're like, 'Shut the fuck up.'" Sales is a really good writer, but nevertheless, her piece provokes scepticism on many levels. She asserts more than once that Pattinson is a "thinking man," a 'thoughtful' person - but he comes across as just another pretty moron in a ridiculous hat; she portrays him as a sensitive fellow, but the whole time he's being interviewed, his dog is apparently fighting for his life just outside the door; and scepticism is just one of the many unsavoury responses provoked by that weird Annie Leibovitz cover.

Fortunately, the issue wasn't relying solely on this smelly kid's celebrity. There's a spirited, chatty look at the Middletons, who are soon to be the in-laws of the heir presumptive to the British monarchy, and there's a moving little excerpt from Christina Haag's surprisingly heartfelt new book about her time dating John F. Kennedy Jr. - the book, Come to the Edge, is a beautiful little testament to the weird draw the Kennedys could always exert on those they allowed to get close to them; it's pretty much exactly the kind of thing the family patriarchs - Jackie Onassis and Senator Ted Kennedy - would have privately frowned upon, but I'm glad for it just the same; and it certainly helps that Haag has such a vivid, entirely honest prose voice.

And quite apart from all these kinds of royalty - British, American, critical, literary, and vampiritic - VF also had a two-page ad I've seen in other magazines and like immensely .... an about magazines.  In this one, there's a picture of a wide-eyed tree-frog (who bears more than a passing resemblance to Pattison, now that I think about it) and a block of text that's as defiant as it is cheering:

Media continue to proliferate. Attention spans continue to shrink. And free content is available everywhere, from the Internet to the insides of elevators. Why then are 93% of American adults still so attached to magazines? Why do so many people, young and old, spend so much time with a medium that's paper and ink, a medium you actually have to pay for in order to read? In a word, engagement. Reading a magazine remains a uniquely intimate and immersive experience. Not only is magazine readership up, readers spend an average of 43 minutes per issue.

Any lover of books will take issue with that 'uniquely,' but still: I like reading such a battle-cry, because I'd hate to live in a world without magazines - and what would our too-infrequent In the Penny Press do without them?

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.

The End of Hitchens in the Penny Press?

Reading last week's TLS, it's possible, just barely, to pretend things are perfectly normal. Professor Sudhir Hazareesingh's review of Christopher Hitchens' memoir Hitch-22 garnered a short, absolutely withering response from Gunde Green of scenic Glenview, Illinois:

Perhaps Professor Hazareesingh, in his review of Hitch-22, can clarify his comment that:

Hitchens also shows no sense of nuance or measure when it comes to Islam: he has no conceptual apparatus to make sense of Islam's complexity and diversity, as well as the very real potential of its democratic incarnation …

Is this in reference to Islamic beheadings, stonings, or hand amputations?

A kidney-punch, certainly, but effective nonetheless. And the review drew another response, equally pointed and not quite so disinterested:

Perhaps thinking it trenchant, Sudhir Hazareesingh recycles the jibe made by George Galloway against me, that I am “the first-ever metamorphosis of a butterfly into a slug.” Leaving to one side Mr. Galloway's own mutation from Sovietophile to Baathist to jihadist, the worst that can be said of gorgeous butterflies is that they pupate from rather charming caterpillars. Slugs, however, are condemned to remain slugs. Sad to see a Balliol man so oblivious of such distinctions.

The wit here is perfectly tuned (including that neat little knight-fork in the last line), and like I said, it's almost possible to read such raillery and pretend that it's 2008, or 2009. But a glance at the latest Vanity Fair (the October issue, with somebody named “Lindsay Lohan” posing on the cover) removes that possibility completely and puts in its place a single photo: Christopher Hitchens leaning against a desk in the jam-packed library of his Washington, D.C home (so easy to tell the difference between a living personal library and a dead one – somehow, even the book-spines look different), looking askance at the camera, quarter-smiling, book propped on one leg, fingers serving as impromptu bookmark. Photographer Jonas Fredwall Karlsson has managed to in this unassuming shot to create the single best likeness of Hitchens ever caught on film (miles and miles more authentic than the idiotic young man holding a rifle in the Middle East): here is the mind we've all been reading so avidly for two decades; here in that slightly hooked mouth is the wicked humor we've loved seeing doled out at the expense of monsters like Mother Teresa or Henry Kissinger; here in the comfort of those book-piles is the voracious autodidact who's thrilled us even when we hated what he was writing, because the writing itself was thrilling.

Then we take in all the details: the thin wisps of hair on a bald head, the unmistakable stiffness in the posture, and most of all the dark shadows in the eyes themselves. Those eyes have never previously looked very penetrating – they've seemed more like attack-periscopes than windows to any soul – but now they're entirely transformed. They've seen black, stone realities that are indifferent to all degrees of cleverness. They're a little sunken, a little creased, and the mind looking out through them is not the same. Until I saw that picture, I didn't really believe Christopher Hitchens was dying. Now that I've seen it, I'll be amazed if he's still with us at Thanksgiving. I know those eyes well: they never look long on the sunlit world.

If you can make yourself look away from Karlsson's photo, Hitchens himself will do his best, in the accompanying article, to convince you all over again that it is, in fact, 2008, or 2009. The article finds him still railing against organized religion, still lowercasing 'God' as if anything in the world ever got settled through orthography, still baiting his hooks with misspelled missives from the dumbest of the faithful, still having the gall to use the spirituality of more intelligent believers as a blunt object with which to bludgeon them for the crime of disagreeing with him. To say this little piece, “Unanswerable Prayers,” is vintage late-Hitchens is to both characterize it and stigmatize it: this is the unproductive quagmire into which the last years of his life wandered. This is Hitchens continuing to say There Is No God – as profitless an endeavor as anybody could ever waste intellectual wattage upon. And there's the characteristic Hitchens bravura:

As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.

We're past pointing out how needlessly insulting this kind of stuff is (far stronger men than Hitchens have reached that precipice, felt the cold wind coming up from it, the unmistakable draught of complete cancellation, and decided on one last lunge of hope, however irrational – they might have been mistaken to do that, but they weren't humiliating themselves, and they were plenty lucid) – all I want now is for Hitchens to turn away from the whole subject and stayed turned away from it. OK, OK – we all know where you stand on the point of grace everlasting and deity-sponsored eternal life. OK, we get it. If you're determined to keep writing for your public (take it from me: when you're on his kind of medication, it's the last thing you feel like doing; we have no right to expect it, and God bless him if he decides to give it to us anyway), could you return to the registers that first won us over? Do everybody a favor and stop trawling the Internet for rednecks praying for your damnation. Instead, illuminate this horrible thing that's happening, as you've illuminated so many subjects throughout your career. In the last two years, you've made the one mistake that's unforgivable in a writer: you've allowed yourself to become boring. You – and we – could indulge it when there were decades left in which to read you. It's pretty clear now we're not going to get those decades: so let's have Christopher Hitchens back, for a little while, before the end.

Silence and Violence in the Penny Press!

 

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

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

 

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

 



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

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

 

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

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

The Lord Giveth and the Lord Taketh Away in the Penny Press!

I confess, I was curious to know what kind of response Vanity Fair readers would make to that bad-tempered little snipery by Christopher Hitchens that I mentioned here, the piece in which he takes shots at Gore Vidal for ever daring to disagree with him. I was worried that Vidal himself would respond and perhaps embarrass himself. That appears not to have happened (I find it impossible to believe VF would refrain from telling us all about it), but the magazine did see fit to print one letter objecting to the whole thing. It’s from Ben Farrington, and it reads:

I cannot allow Christopher Hitchens’s latest piece in V.F. to pass without comment. This was an extraordinarily nasty and cowardly attack on an elderly man, Gore Vidal, who, judging from recent appearances, may not be in a position to defend himself.

I have been a great fan of Mr. Hitchens’s writing and have been entertained by his numerous outings and pithy quotes, but this sort of ad hominem attack is poor form.

To which Hitchens replies from high atop his high horse:

I don’t write articles in order that they ‘pass without comment.’ But Gore Vidal is much more gravely insulted by his defender Ben Farrington than he was by my words. I attacked Gore Vidal for what he had said and written (as far back as 2001), and praised him for many things he had written earlier. I made no reference at all to his mental or physical condition. That unhappy job has been taken on by Mr. Farrington, who convicts only himself of the charge he falsely levels. Even at his lowest, Vidal merits a more dignified defense than that.

The disparity between the tone of the letter (“I’ve been a fan, but this is poor form”) with the tone of the response (“gravely insulted”) is the first tip-off to the kind of dirty pool Hitchens is playing here: that Vidal is in mental decline is so heavily implied in Hitchens’ original piece that his “I’m shocked, shocked to hear someone say it” pose in his response here can only be the most disingenuous kind of carnival-barking. And it’s made that much worse, that much more cowardly, by the fact that Farrington’s letter wasn’t the only one VF received defending Vidal – it was just the easiest one for Hitchens to tee up and swat onto the fairway.



Which is extra frustrating this time around, since this issue of Vanity Fair also features a new piece by Hitchens that’s actually playful, immensely readable, and even instructive (on the debit side, it’s only 140 characters long, as the Tweeterization of great American magazines continues apace). It’s called “The New Commandments,” and the bulk of it is Hitchens taking a snide but smart tour of the Ten Commandments and their attendant cloud of Scriptural addendums and clarifications. True, he’s willfully obtuse on some points (especially “Thou Shalt Not Kill”), but overall the piece is amusing (hence my reluctance to pass over it without comment!).

By far the biggest laugh in the piece comes when Hitchens actually writes “I am trying my best not to view things through a smug later prism” when the article is 100 percent entirely based on doing exactly that. And by far the most interesting part is when Hitchens indulges himself in creating the “new commandments” of the title. The tone sometimes veers way too close to the nauseating Upper West Side pan-validation so endemic to moral discourse today (“Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child” … “Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature …” etc.), but it’s always fun to see what other people’s Ten would look like, and some of these – “Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions” – remind us (and these days we desperately need the reminder) that Hitchens is, in fact, one of the foremost humanists of our time. Say what you want about the man (and I’ve said plenty), he’s not only actively thinking his way through life, he abhors mindlessness in all its forms. We need to hear from that Hitchens as often as possible.

One puzzling note: at one point Hitchens writes “It’s difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words ‘Thou shalt not.’” As long-time readers of Stevereads will know, I have no difficulty taking myself seriously enough to mimic the Almighty! This naturally got me thinking about my own Ten, done up ala Vanity Fair (not to be confused with my ongoing list of Steve’s Pet Peeves, which is currently at 117 and healthily growing! The latest was added just yesterday: When people fifty yards in front of you stop and hold a door open for you, then get irritated when you don’t effing run in response). Let’s give it a whirl, shall we?

1. Thou Shalt Not Be Pretentious
2. Thou Shalt Not Be Lazy
3. Thou Shalt Not Postpone Necessary Work
4. Thou Shalt Not Smoke
5. Thou Shalt Not Eat Meat
6. Thou Shalt Not Summarize Last Night’s “Lost”
7. Thou Shalt Not Talk to Children as though They were Sugarplum Fairies
8. Thou Shalt Not Ignore Thy Dogs
9. Thou Shalt Not Talk on Thy Phone in Public
10. Thou Shalt Not Say “Going Forward” or use “Impact” as a Verb

See? That wasn’t so hard! Believe me, the ‘Thou Shalt Not’s get easier as you go along! Perhaps Hitchens should give it a try. He could start with “Thou Shalt Not Take Cheap Shots” and go from there.

[caption id="attachment_813" align="aligncenter" width="202" caption="gratuitous shot of rancid tobacco addict Kellan Lutz, from this issue"][/caption]

Penny Press Addendum: The Lying in Winter

[caption id="attachment_629" align="aligncenter" width="180" caption="gore vidal by piotr lesniak"][/caption]

I knew something like this was coming, and I thought I was prepared to control my outrage. A friend alerted me to a one-page squib in the latest Vanity Fair (I intended to wholesale ignore the issue, since it was boring enough to feature a philandering famous athlete the cover) in which Christopher Hitchens – him again! – takes a public potshot at Gore Vidal. I acquired the page in question (a single page! I’m starting to wonder if the brevication bug I spotted over at the Atlantic isn’t as widespread as termites throughout the printed world), and boy, it sure packs a lot of sly vilification and sloppy vituperation into only a few paragraphs.

The tiff – such as it is – arises from the fact that over a decade ago, Vidal apparently began referring to Hitchens as his heir apparent in the realm of literary gadfly-hacks, then 9/11 happened and the Iraq war began, and not only did two writers find themselves on different sides of the issue (Hitchens famously supporting the war, Vidal applying the same ‘Washington must have known’ gambit to 9/11 as he’s done for years to Pearl Harbor), but Vidal began publicly scoffing at the very idea that he ever nominated Hitchens as his successor.

The little squib in Vanity Fair is a decidedly odd production. Hitchens starts off with some tepid praise of the Vidal That Was (I honestly think Hitchens has grown so enamored of his linguistic virtuosity that he thinks he’s the only person who can see when his praise is tepid … like he’s having a good little laugh behind his hand as he fools us all into thinking this is the face of his enthusiasm – it seems impossible, but if it’s true, somebody really needs to remind this guy that you can’t have private little jokes if you’ve published every thought you’ve ever had for the last twenty years) – he’s our Wilde! – then immediately starts in with the pussy-footed knocks:

I was fortunate enough to know Gore a bit in those days. The price of knowing him was exposure to some of his less adorable traits, which included his pachydermatous memory for the least slight or grudge and a very, very minor tendency to bring up the Jewish question in contexts where it didn’t quite belong.

This is only the first whiff of the scurrilous cowardice that animates this little jingle (“very, very minor tendency,” in truth? But not so minor you don’t bring it up, right?)(and if any of you imagine for a second that Hitchens himself has ever forgotten even the smallest slight, real or imagined, I’ve got a lovely bridge in Brooklyn to sell you). Things get worse when Hitchens starts talking about a lengthy interview Vidal recently granted to the London Independent, in which Vidal goes into Full Crank mode, gnawing on about the downfall of America, the dominance of China, and whatever other favorite sawhorses he felt like talking about with the interviewer. Hitchens affects to deplore such rhetoric – “What business does this patrician have in gutter markets, where paranoids jabber and the coinage is debased by every sort of vulgarity?” he plaintively asks, a rather ironic inquiry coming from the in-house apologist for The Nation.

It’s only toward the end of the piece (that is, immediately after its beginning) that Hitchens veers close to what is probably his true motivation. He’s talking about Vidal issuing that repudiation of the very idea that he would call Hitchens his successor:

Many years ago he wrote to me unprompted – I have the correspondence – and freely offered to nominate me as his living successor, dauphin, or, as the Italians put it, delfino. He very kindly inscribed a number of his own books to me in this way, and I asked him for permission to use his original letter on the jacket of one of mine. I stopped making use of the endorsement after 9/11, as he well knows. I have no wish to commit literary patricide, or to assassinate Vidal’s character – a character which appears, in any case, to have committed suicide.

How about if we call it assisted suicide? Does that make base betrayal a bit easier to swallow?

The sordidness of this business is very efficiently encapsulated in that horrifying line “I have the correspondence” (the equally loud and only barely unspoken second part, “…and I’m happy to publish it” certainly goes a long way toward explaining Vidal’s towering, disillusioned bitterness with the world in general). Hitchens trots out as much of the Independent interview (I'm not sure they’ll appreciate the gesture, gutter market that they apparently are) as he thinks will serve his purpose of charting a mental decline, including this knee-jerk summary Vidal gives of some of his famous writing coevals:

Updike was nothing. Buckley was nothing with a flair for publicity. Mailer was a flawed publicist too, but at least there were signs every now and then of a working brain.

Hitchens laments: “One sadly notices, as with the foregoing barking and effusions, the utter want of any grace or generosity, as well as the entire absence of any wit or profundity. Sarcastic, tired flippancy has stolen the place of the first, and lugubrious resentment has deposed the second.” But long-time readers of Vidal will instantly point out that he’s never shown all that much grace or generosity to those of his contemporaries he considers fools (indeed, several of the top-form enshrined quotes Hitchens alludes to are savage – and savagely funny – toward other writers). And there’s also the fact – apparently weightless to Hitchens but perhaps not to everybody – that those three literary assessments, in addition to being flippant, are entirely accurate.

But Hitchens criticisms miss two bigger points by a mile, and a reader looking to understand this little squib will be hard-pressed to understand how this could be. First, sarcastic flippancy hasn’t replaced wit or profundity on the subject of, say, Vidal’s literary peers – we in fact have the wit and profundity, on all three of those writers and hundreds more, fully preserved in Vidal’s essays. What’s the man supposed to do at age 85? Endless parrot his best lines, or endlessly coin new ones? He’s old and intermittently sick and running out of time – perhaps he’s entitled to a little sarcasm, especially if he’s feeling like his interviewer could come up with better questions.

But the second big point is the more important of the two, and it’s one every other eager young(er) literary gun out there should heed before they launch their own little broadsides against the old lion: Vidal is in what we used to call his dotage. This isn’t to say he’s demented, not at all (or at least not necessarily) – but he is, though it seem impossible for such an erstwhile paragon of youth, granddad. Granddad gets cranky (being old is, as is commonly attested by the old and universally disbelieved by the not-old, no picnic); granddad has pet theories that aren’t always sensible; granddad can be abrupt, and his abruptness can hurt feelings. A year from now, two at the most, and granddad won’t be here anymore – and he knows it, and he hates it. The lesson of the story? Once granddad is in his dotage, you suffer him in silence. Period. You don’t justify yourself. You don’t try to win old arguments. You don’t produce his correspondence. You suffer him in silence, and you thereby hope to be treated so well when it’s your turn.

The vital thing to remember when you finish this little squib of Hitchens’ is the relative scale of what we’re seeing here. Yes, the Vidal That Is continually says unworthy things in unworthy ways. But Hitchens has been writing professionally for what? Thirty years? More? And for that he has what to show the year 2210? So far: nothing. Ephemera, often bashed out hung over ten minutes before deadline. Thirty years ago, Vidal had produced a body of work almost unequalled by any 20th century practitioner of English – and that was before he collected United States or wrote Palimpsest. It entitles him to forbearing silence whenever the tawdriness of his dotage makes an appearance. It obliges Hitchens and his ilk to shut their disrespectful yaps about inscriptions on frontispieces.

And that doesn’t even touch on the obligation shat upon by Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter, whose typically sanctimonious issue preface revs the readers’ appetite for the squib to come, sarcastically saying, “As you well know, our columnist has never used his soapbox for anything less than a well-turned intellectual inquiry. In this issue, the topic happens to be somewhat personal, but no less intelligent: Gore Vidal. Vidal has written for and appeared in this magazine going back to the first Bush administration …”

Yes he has, and what thanks does he get for it from his editor? The respectful silence I mentioned? No, he gets a squib by an attack-dog greenlighted against him. On the chance that it’ll interest ten people, or better still, draw a response from Vidal himself.

Such a response might come, and no doubt Carter is hoping it’ll be salacious and Hitchens is hoping it’ll be conciliatory (or, lacking that, looney). Me, I’m hoping – though I know it’s impossible – that it’s somehow magically from the Gore Vidal of twenty or so years ago (you know, around Hitchens’ age). Imagining that riposte – and the party-colored carpet-smears that would be all that remained of Hitchens afterwards – is pretty much the only thing that put a smile on my face about this wretched little piece.

We’ll talk about books next time, to cleanse the mental palate.

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.

Miracle on the Hudson in the Penny Press!

My dim and distant understanding is that disgraced avatar of evil Bernie Madoff committed the heinous crime of bilking lots of stupid, greedy people out of negligible portions of their disposable incomes - a swindler, and old-fashioned card-sharp assuring his victims that the pea was, indeed, under the third cup.

If this is the case, then his crimes continue in the latest issue of Vanity Fair, where Mark Seal's headline-grabbing article about the downfall of this Lil' Satan will be the only reason most people buy the issue in the first place and the only thing they read in it. That's a first-class swindle right there, because the Seals article, though impeccably researched, is a snoozer (since Madoff's crimes almost by definition hurt only the willing, they lack any semblance of pathos and therefore any semblance of interest). Likewise the cover article about Jessica Simpson, which did more to shake my faith in that actress' native canniness than anything I've ever read. No, the real treat of the issue comes from an extremely reliable source: William Langewiesche writing about all things concerning aviation. This is an absolutely scintillating body of specialized work Lang is amassing, and in this issue he looks at the latest piece of aviation history to splash, quite literally, across the headlines: the "Miracle on the Hudson" water-landing of US Airways Flight 1549 last January.

The "Miracle on the Hudson" had everything a picture-perfect drama needs, except a villain (would it have killed one of the passengers to take a swing at one of the crew?) - it sure as Hell had a hero: Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, who took control of the plane immediately after it swallowed some fat Canadian geese the wrong way and lost its engines.

In an instant, Sullenberger had no power - and almost no options, since the two airports that might have been within range of his craft were also deeply embedded in cities, thereby giving no margin for error whatsoever. Since the entire length of this drama extends only a few minutes, mighty fast thinking was in order, and as usual, Lang is superb at riveting his readers' attention:

Sullenberger could see La Guardia to the left side. Like all pilots he was experienced at visually projecting flight paths, even around corners, and particularly in descents. It was not obvious that if he turned directly toward the airport he would undershoot the runway.

But the point here isn't technical range, it's possible consequences, as Lang makes clear:

Even if it had been shown in simulation that Sullenberger could in theory have glided to La Guardia, in practice the approach would have been a very close thing, a crapshoot in a place were undershooting the runway by 20 feet would be like undershooting it by a mile. Once you committed toward La Guardia, you either had luck on your side or you died.

Lang has a broad range of excellent writer talents, but his best is the ability to step back a bit from the story he's narrating and comment on the bigger picture. He does this regularly in every piece, and it has the odd double effect of both allowing the reader a chance to breathe and of ratcheting up the tension of the narrative. At this point he pauses to remind his readers of the stark realities of flying planes, and I can just picture pilots all across the country nodding quietly as they read:

At some point as you climb down from the most desirable destinations, you stop thinking about hotels, stop thinking much even about the airplane, and shift your focus to survival. At that point life becomes very simple. The first rule is to avoid losing control. The second is to avoid hitting brick walls. The third and final rule is to keep "flying" the airplane even as it is sliding and disintegrating around you in the water or on the ground. You fly it until it stops, and then you evacuate.

And in addition to providing us with a gripping narrative of what happened that day in January, Lang also fills in the background on the incident's unsung hero: the Airbus A320 Captain Sullenberger was piloting that day. In an intentionally-chosen discordant note to the symphony of praise being played for Sullenberger (whom he nevertheless praises), Lang comments that in this case as in so many cases, the worker is only as good as his tools:

Suffice it to say that if Sullenberger had done nothing after the loss of thrust the airplane would have smoothly slowed down until reaching a certain angle with the airflow, at which point it would have lowered its nose to keep the wings from stalling, and would have done this even if for some reason Sullenberger had resisted. Of course, Sullenberger did no such thing.

It's a splendid article, as all Langewiesche's are - I eagerly look forward to the next collection he publishes of these superb aviation pieces (his first one, Inside the Sky, is very much worth hunting down). I think it's obvious that air travel will no longer be possible in at most a hundred years, after which its whole era will at least have its Melville in this great writer.

Hilarity in the Penny Press!

The single funniest sentence-opening of 2009 so far (and easy odds-on favorite for the whole year), from Leslie Bennetts' profile of brainless trophy-fuck Gisele Bundchen-Brady, from the latest issue of Vanity Fair:

"An avid reader, Gisele ..."

Hee. Too precious.

Righteous Hitchens in the Penny Press!

In the February issue of Vanity Fair readers are again treated to the good Christopher Hitchens, the one writing powerful, fast-paced prose on worthy subjects, with hardly a slurry sneer in sight (and only a couple of lapses into weird crack-pottery). The piece is called "Assassins of the Mind," and its focal point is the fatwa issued on Salman Rushdie in 1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini for The Satanic Verses. Rushdie is a friend of Hitchens' - and the act of reflecting on the whole nightmarish episode in the author's life (and, as Hitchens would have it, in the lives of every literate person, whether they knew or acknowledged it, at the time or since) brings out the best in Hitchens' own writing.

This is an angry little essay, a caustic look at what Hitchens calls the editorial cowardice that has taken root at publishing venues the world over as a result of the Ayatollah declaring war on one author twenty years ago, specifically:

We now live in a world where every publisher and editor and politician has to weigh in advance the possibility of violent Muslim reprisal.

As Hitchens puts it:

Just to re-state the situation before I go any farther: two decades ago the theocratic head of a foreign state offered a large sum of money, in his own name, in public, to suborn the murder of a writer of fiction who was not himself an Iranian. In the event that some would-be assassin died in the attempt and failed to pick up the dough, an immediate passage to paradise was assured. (Again, this was the first time that many in the West found out about this now notorious Koranic promise.) I thought then, and I think now, that this was not just a warning of what was to come. It was the warning. The civil war in the Muslim world, between those who believed in jihad and Shari'a and those who did not, was coming to our streets and cities.

If Hitchens really did think such a thing back in 1989 (it would be neat to think so, and he's nothing if not neat), he's certainly been proven right. Islamic extremists have become a free-floating Hollywood movie-style evil in the modern world, lurking in the back of everybody's mind preciously because they represent not protests but bombs going off in your pizzeria, not argument but bullets in your back on your way home. Hitchens does a good job summoning the image of such an evil:

So there is now a hidden partner in our cultural and academic and publishing and broadcasting world: a shadowy figure that has, uninvited, drawn up a chair to the table. He never speaks. He doesn't have to. But he is very well understood.

Let's hope Hitchens himself doesn't get into any trouble for the writing of this piece. That, too, would be neat - but not at all desirable.

The Devil in the Penny Press!

In the latest issue of Vanity Fair, there's another fantastic aviation article by the great freelancer Bill Lang (William Langewiesche, for those of you - like him - with no sense of the mellifluous pen-name), this one concerning the Boeing 737 and the Legacy private jet that collided mid-air over the Brazilian rain forest in 2006, killing all 154 people on board the passenger jet.

Lang, as I've noted here before, is one of the most compelling writers-for-hire working today, and his weird specialty area is aviation - and aviation disasters (his book Inside the Sky is well worth hunting down). You must never miss an essay of his on this subject; for whatever reason, it speaks to him and informs his most compelling pieces.

This one for Vanity Fair, "The Devil at 37,000 Feet," is a sterling example. Lang interviewed everybody involved, from the pilots and passengers on board the Legacy 600 (all of whom survived) to the Brazilian air force authorities to the Caiapo natives on the ground at the time of the crash, and he's done the melancholy task of listening carefully to the Boeing's cockpit recordings. The picture he composes from all this is likely the definitive one, and one of the best things about reading Lang's work is that he knows this, and the knowledge frees him to widen his perspective periodically throughout the piece, like this aria he indulges in while writing about the crash site deep in the jungle:

The scene was grim. One hundred and fifty-four people had died. They were innocent men, women, and children. People are insignificant blips on the scale of history, but these had not died peacefully, as one might wish. They had endured a period of absolute terror, and had been torn apart by the force of the impact.

About the natives he writes:

The Caiapos wanted to help. Their shaman was with them. The heavens had rained ruin onto their trees. They did not believe that people are insignificant blips in history. They believed that in a parallel world in the forest 154 tortured souls were crying out for tending.

Lang can only barely manage to control his scorn for stupidity whenever he encounters it (this quality informs many of his tartest, most memorable moments from his reporting on America's various Wars on Terror), but his singular grace as a writer is that he doesn't set out in any story intent of finding stupidity; he cares about his subjects right up until the moment when they convince him not to.

He's quick to note the showy benefits of the Legacy 600 (which, he writes, "by political, ethical, and environmental measures are abhorrent creations"): "a cockpit with the latest in electronics and instrumentation, including a Flight Management System computer, ultra-accurate G.P.S. receivers, strong radios, a superb autopilot, and the ultimate in on-board collision avoidance devices." In other words, this small private plane was better-equipped, in terms of technology, than any of those massive commercial airliners we read about last time.

This particular Legacy 600 also came with two pilots - Joseph Lepore and Jan Paul Paladino - about whom Lang is always scrupulously fair, despite the fact that the 2006 press almost immediately fixed the blame for the crash on them. The Devil is "lurking just out of sight," but as Lang sets the stage, it's the machinery as much as the men that might be at fault:

The cockpit was a cocoon. Lepore and Paladino were operating an inherently simple jet that had been stuffed with electronic capabilities - most of them nested, and therefore hidden from immediate view. The nest of flight information, much of it non-essential, is a development now several decades old and somewhat out of control. It is driven on the one hand by market pressures to create clean cockpit displays, and on the other hand by the technological possibilities offered to overly enthusiastic designers and engineers. The problem for pilots is the idiosyncratic architecture of the systems that are created, the need to fathom the logic that has been applied, and the reliance on manuals laced with invented terminology to which practitioners are expected to submit their minds. In principle a pilot with sufficient time and patience can figure it all out in advance, but such pilots are rare, and Lepore and Paladino were not among them.


What emerges as the central cause of the tragedy that followed is a heartrending combination of preventables: Lepore and Paladino didn't fully understand the technology of the jet they were flying but they thought they did, and Brazilian air traffic control didn't fully understand the limits of that jet's technology but they thought they did. When the Legacy's computer re-aligned its flight altitude, when the Legacy's transponder stopped transmitting, when Lepore and Paladino failed to see crucial indicators in their own cockpit, when Brazilian official Sergeant dos Santos misunderstood ... all these little might-haves begin to pile up, and it's Lang's sad task to sift through them all. He lays a large degree of blame on dos Santos, but he's searching further anyway:

... when the Legacy crossed overhead Brasilia and turned left to track the airway, the second altitude display automatically switched to 36,000 feet, the original flight plan's proposal and a conventional level for the new direction of flight. Apparently, dos Santos took this to mean that the legacy had been instructed to descend, though he was the controller in charge and had made no such request. Mysteriously, he then ignored the indicator of the Legacy's actual altitude - the transponder return, which showed the airplane still level at 37,000 feet. Against solid indications to the contrary, he believed the Legacy had descended to 36,000 feet.

Lepore and Paladino might have informed him otherwise, if they'd noticed the change or understood what it meant or perceived that it was their job to tell somebody about it, but none of that happened, and the result was the two planes whose onboard computers had them flying the same airway at the same altitude came together in the vastness of the open sky. For dramatic effect (of which he's a master), Lang draws near to that collision a couple of times and pulls away, and when he finally details it, you stop breathing while you read:

The Legacy came streaking at the Boeing about 30 to the left of the fuselage and 2 feet lower. The displacement was infinitesimal on the scale of the sky, and a measure of impressive navigational precision. The Legacy's winglet acted like a vertically held knife, slicing through the Boeing's left wing about half-way out and severing the wing's internal spar. The outboard section of the wing whipped upward, stripping skin as it went, then separated entirely, spiraling over the fuselage and demolishing much of the Boeing's tail. In the Boeing's cockpit, the sequence sounded like a car crash. Instantly the Boeing twisted out of control, corkscrewing violently to the left and pitching straight down into a rotating vertical dive. The cockpit filled with alarms - an urgent klaxon and a robotic voice insistently warning, Bank angle! Bank angle! Bank angle! as if the crew might need the advice. Back in the cabin the passengers screamed and shouted. The pilots reacted as one might expect, fighting desperately to regain control. They probably did not know what had gone wrong. They certainly never mentioned it. What is unusual is that they also did not swear. Ten seconds into the dive, one of them did cry, "Aye!," but the other urged him to stay calm. "Calma!" he said, and seconds later he said it again. If pilots must die in an airplane, all would choose to finish so well.

The technological heart of the tragedy here was in its infancy back in 1977, when a National Geographic writer could confidently call "more gadgets" the best, safest path of the future. Because it was gadgets - and the average pilot's over-reliance on them - that made this 2006 mid-air collision possible:

Until recently, head-on airplanes mistakenly assigned the same altitude and route by Air Traffic Control would almost certainly have passed some distance apart, due to the navigation slop inherent in their systems. But this is no longer true. The problem for the Legacy was that the Boeing coming at them on the same assigned flight path had equipment that was every bit as precise.

This brings Lang to the conclusion of his stirring piece, and I'll let him have the last word here after urging all of you never to miss a magazine article by this man. He's one of the best in the business:

I asked the Caiapos to consider that in all the sky above the forest only these two airplanes had been in flight. It was as if in a space the size of the Caiapo village - no, all the way out to the road - you had shot two arrows in opposing directions, and they had collided. What were the odds? In the past it never would have happened. Even if you had assigned them identical flight paths, the arrows would have passed some distance apart because of the inherent inaccuracies of flight. But now better feathers have been invented, and have become required equipment for the high-speed designs. As a result, the new arrows are extraordinarily accurate, which allows more of them to be shot around, but with increasing reliance on tightly-coupled systems of control. The sky is just as big as it ever was, but the margin for error has shrunk. And when the systems fail? That is what happened over the Caiapos' land. The paradox was precision. Mistakes were made, and the Devil played, and two arrows touched nose to nose.