Down in the dumps in the penny press!

An article in the latest issue of Harper's couldn't help but attract our attention here at Stevereads. It's by Gary Greenberg, and it's called 'Manufacturing Depression.'

Greenberg is a practicing psychotherapist, and for the purposes of preparing his article, he gets himself qualified for Massachusetts General Hospital's Depression Clinical and Research Program. The qualification is based on his showing at least two out of the nine symptoms for Minor Depression listed in the latest DSM of the American Psychiatric Association.

Just so we're all completely clear on what we're talking about here, let's list the symptoms that qualify you for this disease:

1. Sadness
2. Diminished Pleasure
3. Weight loss or gain
4. Trouble sleeping
5. Fatigue
6. Malaise
6. Guilt
7. Diminished concentration
8. Recurrent thoughts of death

A minimum of two of these symptoms will get you well on your way to being diagnosed with Minor Depression, a 'condition' which the DSM currently considers 'provisional' - meaning it lacks "the five-digit code that allows doctors to bill insurance companies for treatment." Greenberg's fairly obvious implication is that this approval is only a matter of time. In fact, the implication of Greenberg's entire article is that the gigantic amount of money involved in the medical and pharmacuetical world not only influences but dictates what constitutes medicable mental illness.

Here's Greenberg on the whole subject:

"In this nondescript office building beside the towers and pavilions of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, these dedicated people do research that determines whether drugs work - which is to say, whether drugs will come to market as government-sanctioned cures. In the process, they turn complaint into illness, and illness into diagnosis, the secret knowledge of what ails us, what we must do to cure it, and who we will be when we get better. This is the heart of the magic factory, the place where medicine is infused with the miracles of science, and I've come to see how it's done."

Once he's described his symptoms to the doctors involved in the study, they classify him not with Minor Depression but with minor Major Depression, which qualifies him for all kinds of drugs - or placebos, depending on which he's given (which is something even the doctors involved don't seem to inside info on).

And that's the crux of the whole article: placebos. Here's Greenberg again:

"In fact, in more than half the clinical trials used to approve the six leading antidepressants, the drugs failed to outperform the placebos, and when it came time to decide on Celexa, an FDA bureaucrat wondered on paper whether the results were too weak to be clinically significant, only to be reminded that all the other antidepressants had been approved on equally weak evidence."

Greenberg adds a footnote to this that deserves quotation too:

"The advantage of antidepressants over placebos in those trials was an average of two points on the HAM-D, a result that could have been achieved if the patient ate and slept better. The average improvement in antidepressant clinical trials is just over ten points, which means, according to Irving Kirsch, a University of Connecticut psychologist, that nearly 80 percent of the drug effect is actually a placebo effect."

That's pause-inducing stuff. Assuming Greenberg doesn't have any hidden agenda, assuming that unnamed FDA bureaucrat in his private communique doesn't have any hidden agenda, that's pause-inducing stuff.

We here at Stevereads have a long personal history with Clinical Depression ('major' or 'minor' it doesn't matter - if Greenberg's article says anything, it says that) - not personally, but through many, many friends. They span the spectrum of all humanity, these friends and friends of friends: from teenaged girls whose hormonal hurricanes ought to disqualify them from any drugs whatsoever, right up to the father of a former friend, whose basso profundo backporch wisdom was, his son averred, from time to time utterly halted by clouds of black depression.

We've seen co-workers simply stop showing up for work, thereby sacrificing their position. We've seen grown adults squander entire days, entire days, spooning themselves ice cream and watching old reruns on TV in the dark. We've seen fully functioning adults with good jobs and good families break down in uncontrollable tears with no visible provocation.

In all this time, that former friend's sagacious father has been our single and only cautionary tale, and even in that case, there's some cause for concern. And with everybody else we've ever known who claimed to be suffering from 'clinical depression,' the problem runs unsolvably deeper.

The problem is those placebo results. If placebos are out-performing drugs on a regular basis, there's one conclusion that becomes utterly inescapable: something's going on that ISN'T MEDICAL. If all those patients taking placebos were being treated for neck tumors, the placebos would have their normally-negligible effect on the final data. Again, if the placebos are regularly out-performing the medicine, the patients involved AREN'T SUFFERING FROM A MEDICAL CONDITION.

In 2007, saying something like that is equivalent to insisting that the sun revolves around the Earth, but nevertheless. Nevertheless, sugar pills don't reduce tumor growth.

The very hint of this suggestion causes hackles to rise ferociously everywhere, we've found. People are fierce in what they've seen in friends in loved ones - or what they've felt themselves. Time and time again, we've heard of the 'miraculous' effect antidepressants seem to have on those who need them: panic attacks finally controlled, chaotic thoughts finally subdued, wandering listlessness finally banished.

Normalcy, but not exactly. The crabgrass is eliminated from the lawn, yes, but so too are the grasses and flowers. The desperate lows are eliminated (or at least ameliorated) by drugs, but so too are the personal reservoirs of nerve and clutched-at optimism that allow the vast numbers of non-medicated to deal with life's setbacks and disappointments and unfairnesses.

There's a horrible-feeling moment that comes to everybody eventually. Most people slam into it directly after they graduate from college and realize they are now expected to deal with every single one of life's cold demands entirely on their own, outside the umbrella of their parents. But of course the moment can occur at any time in young adulthood; the point is, there comes a moment when every person in the West (needless to say, 'clinical depression' is, in terminology and manifestation, almost entirely absent from the East or Middle East) realizes on some level that they CAN'T GO BACK. They can never return to the time in their lives before they stood bare before bill-collectors, landlords, angry employers. Anybody who's ever stared at a bill they can't possibly pay has yearned to return to that carefree time (even, it should be pointed out, if they've never in fact experienced it before).

And it's more than that. Look at that list of so-called symptoms again: who HASN'T felt at least two of those conditions every day of their lives?
Or three? Even persistently? We've been told, by those personally involved, that 'clinical depression' feels different from this, feels different from simply feeling these things: that sufferers feel these feelings have utterly taken control of their lives - that such feelings aren't just temporary weather but seem permanent and unopposable. We have nothing but sympathy for the afflicted and their friends and loved ones, but we humbly suggest that the bathos of their plight has been buttressed over the past thirty years by the medical, psychiatric, and especially pharmacuetical concerns operative in this country and abroad - concerns that have learned, to the cynical health of their bottom lines, that offering people pricey medical RELIEF from the fact that life doesn't always leave its denizens feeling absolutely, resolutely and at all times happy and content is an extremely lucrative endeavor. But we reserve the right to at least CONSIDER the possibility that people so inclined will grasp at the so-called history, the so-called medical credibility of having a name and documentation and the appearance of clinical viability to make what they feel less ... debatable? blameful? shameful? ... to others and to themselves. We reserve the right at least to WONDER if those afflicted might, just might, feel slightly better saying 'I have clinical depression and don't feel like getting out of bed' than simply 'I don't feel like getting out of bed.'

It's a sad subject either way, but we can't help but wonder what doctors a century from now will make of so-called clinical depression. We can't help but wonder what you, our loyal readers, have to say on the subject. But we'll give the last word to Greenberg, since he opened this particular can of worms:

"I am already deflated when I arrive for my last interview. Of course, there's no place in the HAM-D to express this, to talk about the immeasurable loss that I think we all suffer as science turns to scientism, as bright and ambitious people devote their lives to erasing selfhood in order to cure it of its discontents."

Comics! 52, Wonder Woman, and screwing up!

Well, it was only a matter of time before we here at Stevereads were disappointed by more than one DC comic at a time. The company has lately been on an unprecedented roll, and such things always come to an end, or at least falter and fumble. Such is the case with the latest batch of comics purloined by Elmo from Pepito while he was sleeping.

It's not all bad news, of course. The Judd Winick/Scott McDaniel run on Green Arrow is still unflaggingly fantastic, for instance. Winick is so good at dialogue that the requisite action sequences - though wonderfully rendered, of course - feel positively redundant. Oh, make no mistake, there's a plot going on here - but even so, the prospect of Winick writing the chemistry between Green Arrow and Black Canary, who guest-stars next month, is mouth-watering in and of itself.

Same thing with the latest Green Lantern Corps, written by Dave Gibbons and drawn by Patrick Gleason - this title is as epic as it gets, convincingly so, driven by gigantic cosmic plotlines and delightfully rendered personalities. Gibbons has crafted an enormous plotline that fits the cosmic nature of his title perfectly.

But it's slim pickings elsewhere. The ongoing 'Trials of Shazam' title continues to be incomprehensible; Captain Marvel is the wizard Shazam? Captain Marvel Junior is a newer, skinnier Captain Marvel? No, no, no .... these old Fawcett characters aren't meant for any kind of radical change. And even if you DO subject them to radical change, you have to plan it better than our present writer - none other than the very same Judd Winick - has bothered to do. It CAN be done (just look at the huge improvements made to other Fawcett characters! The renovation of the Question over in '52' has been nothing but sure-footed, and what better improvement to the character of Blue Beetle could be conceived than a bullet through the head?), but it's not being done here.

Likewise the affairs over in Geoff Johns' Teen Titans, where Al Barrionuevo's pencils are so violently incoherent that Johns' writing can't do much more than offer a guided tour through a Kandinsky print.

So too the concluding chapter of Brad Meltzer's first arc on 'Justice League of America,' a decided epilogue of a thing in which we see our team first fully assembled, amidst much conversation, virtually none of stands in character (same goes for the artwork, in which every single person is of the exact same build and height, despite any sensible person's awareness that, of course, Wonder Woman is taller than, say, Green Lantern ... or that Superman is taller than, say, Speedy - now called Red Arrow).

Still, these things are comparatively minor compared to the grave missteps happening elsewhere in the DC lineup.

For instance, the latest '52.' The ball it dropped a couple of issues ago is here spiked, deflated, and ripped to leathery shreds.

The problem is Black Adam, of course. A couple of issue's ago he was captured by the mad scientists on Oolong Island, including the Marvel family arch-villain Dr. Sivana, who's been busy torturing Black Adam ever since. In this issue we see him clamped to a table being electro-shocked while Sivana gathers up his various devices, saying he's 'bored' with torturing Black Adam.

Sivana is exercising the better part of valor, because Oolong Island is being taken by the Justice Society. Just as he's leaving, he's snatched into the air by Atom-Smasher (or whatever he's called this week), who forces him to divulge Black Adam's location.

Which might not seem like a problem, but oh! It is! Not only is it completely illogical that Atom-Smasher wouldn't, you know, HOLD ON to Sivana one he caught him. No, the real problem runs much deeper: nothing should have happened to Black Adam in the first place.

DC has a limited roster of class-A powerhouses, after all. There are all sorts of characters in the upper echelon - Power Girl, Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel Junior, Grace over in Outsiders, Supergirl, Martian Manhunter, etc. But the class-A's have always been fairly limited; these are the characters whose sheer amount of physical power obliges the writer to re-work the normal storylines. Normal storylines like 'character gets captured by bad guys and has to be rescued by his friend.'

The list isn't long. Superman sits at the top of it, of course. Wonder Woman (when she's portrayed well, which we'll get to - hoo-hoooooooo, will we get to it). Captain Marvel. Darkseid. Alan Scott (for those of you holding out for one of the leotardy Green Lanterns, we here at Stevereads have only one word: oh please). Bizarro. Solomon Grundy (PRIOR to his idiotically wasted recent turn in Justice League). And, for better or worse, Black Adam.

Black Adam, who's therefore immeasurably strong, fast, and invulnerable. Meaning, you're going to have to do better than ordinary-looking metal shackles to hold him while you TORTURE him for DAYS. Meaning, it isn't possible for such a plotline to happen in the first place. Power Girl, yes. Martian Manhunter, yes. But not Black Adam, who's not only invulnerable (and therefore, you know, invulnerable) but also strong enough to make any kind of simple metal shackle a little silly.

What happened was the writers of '52' lost their nerve. They created a perfectly compelling scenario: what would happen if a class-A character were driven over the edge (note: NOT driven insane)? What would happen, in other words, if somebody killed Lois Lane?

If such a thing DID happen, it's a lock-solid certainty that Superman WOULDN'T a) be captured, b) be tortured for DAYS OFF CAMERA, and c) need to be helplessly rescued by other people. Not because he's Superman, but because he's class A - he represents simply too much power for such plotlines to make any sense. The writers of '52' had a chance to explore what would happen to the DC continuity if a class-A character went off the rails - they came close, but then they drew back.

Black Adam's sworn mission is to kill the 'people responsible' for the death of his wife and family. OK, fine - but the people responsible are the mad scientists who created the creatures who did those dastardly deeds. That is, the scientists on Oolong Island. Nobody else. And yet, at the end of this current issue of '52,' there Black Adam is, portentiously intoning 'They wanted a war - I'm going to give it to them.'

Given the events of this particular issue, the only allowable 'them' here would be the Chinese government, which covertly sponsored one of those evil scientists. That's tenuous - the scientists worked together, after all - but even if we accept it, why would Black Adam? He was being helplessly tortured while the JSA was discovering the link between China and Oolong Island - his only legitimate target would still be the scientists themselves, presumably starting with the one Atom-Smasher let go.

So: the next issue of '52' had better feature Black Adam squaring off against the Justice Society as they try to stop him from killing all the evil scientists they've captured.

Eddy Barrows' artwork, however, remains superb.

But hoo-boy, if this issue stumbled on the problem of handling an A-list character, the latest issue of Wonder Woman doesn't just stumble - it falls flat on its face and slides all the way down the hillside on its boobs.

You'll have seen the little news blurbs - Wonder Woman is currently being written by bestselling author Jodi Picoult. We here at Stevereads don't wish to generalize, but nevertheless: every single time a bestselling author takes over the writing chores on a comic book, they suck at it with an ironclad, forge-bellows level of suckery.

The reason is probably easy to figure: they think they're slumming, so they bring the middlingest of their game to the task, confident that it won't show. As any long-time comics fan could tell them if they bothered to ask, it shows. Oh, how it shows.

Not that Wonder Woman has ever been an easy job. Only comparatively recently has DC editorial policy seemed to give her the credit that's been due her for so long; only comparatively recently has she been consistently portrayed as entirely A-list, Superman's equal in sheer power (we here at Stevereads have a pet theory on the subject: we think the process was sped up by the overwhelmingly favorable response garnered by the 'Justice League' animated series, which gave its viewers a gloriously badass version of Wonder Woman - culminating in eight shiningly magnificent minutes in the second season of 'Justice League Unlimited' - eight minutes every fan of the character should waste no time in Youtubing).

Alas, what DC editorial policy giveth, Jodi Picoult taketh away. Her Wonder Woman simpers with chickchat, brims with bromides, and worst of all, is a weak-ass little girlscout who allows herself to be taken captive by the US government and callously tortured whenever she opens her uppity mouth to her male captors. Again, the easiest way to reveal the utter poverty of the storyline is to picture any writer writing anything even remotely similar about Superman.

Superman who, as a character, has been around the longest (with all due respect to the Shadow and Doc Savage), the one who started it all. For seventy years, Superman writers have had to test their inventiveness AGAINST the granite cliffside of his level of power. Ditto, come to think of it, for Captain Marvel writers down through the decades.

Not so Wonder Woman's writers, who, when faced with a thorny plot-challenge, have overwhelmingly chosen to simply dial down her power-level (or worse, dumb her down intellectually). A present-day comics reader would like to think such days were long gone, but it turns out that in Jodi Picoult, the '40s live on.

Fortunately, slumming, showboating bestselling authors never hang around for long. We can only hope that in the two or three issues remaining to her, Picoult doesn't a) contrive to permanently remove Wonder Woman's powers (so that she can for the eight hundredth time learn 'proportion,' 'balance,' or 'humanity') b) contrive an entirely new origin story for the character (aliens? mole people? clandestine MEN?) or c) KILL the character, probably at the hands of a gun-wielding lowlife.

Then she'll be gone, and some professional comic-writer will step in and take over, and with any luck, we'll all get back to a Wonder Woman who's as powerful as Superman or Captain Marvel, a character who's grappling with her role in Man's World, her diplomatic duties, her status as an ambassador of peace versus her status as a costumed crime-fighter.

Until then, it's this stupid, ineffectual little debutante in a tiara. In the meantime, at least Brad Meltzer's (gasp - another bestselling author) Wonder Woman over in Justice League isn't (yet) embarrassing herself all over every issue. Yeesh, but a sister deserves better.

The End of Civilization in the Penny Press

Ominous rumblings and portents all across the range of the Penny Press last week, with only your humble (Ok, alright, maybe not so much) scribe to connect the dots.

The harbinger appeared first in the TLS, a brief article by Nicholas Clee concerning electronic copyright issues and Google's quest to make all the books in the world (at least, the ten percent to which they have access) available to all the people in the world (at least, the ten percent who have the Internet).

Clee examines the pros and cons of the cases currently pending and comes to temperately melancholy conclusion:

"Piracy will certainly be widespread on the internet. Protecting texts against it is a huge problem, not only because of the skills of the hackers, but also because digital rights management (DRM) systems are unpopular with consumers. However, it remains likely that most people will continue to buy texts from official sources. Let us hope simply that the dominant official source for books is not Google. Or else we shall all have to find another way of earning a living."

This is grim enough - after all, Google won't be the only avenue for acquiring books as long as, well, books are still kicking around - but it gets its pictorial equivalent over in the New Yorker, where the always-reliable Bruce McCall depicts a futuristic library reading room almost completely devoid of books (the little old lady trying to read is being forcibly ejected while we watch). The marble overhead is engraved with names, but they aren't Socrates and Plato and Erasmus - they're O'Donnell, O'Reilly, Winfrey. And the aisles are still marked History (American Idol, Anna Nicole), Autobiography (Myspace.com), Nonfiction (Youtube), but the designations are hardly comforting. In the bottom corner there's a rumpled bin of actual books, with a sign that says 'Bums Only.'

Those of us who adore not only reading but books themselves, the darling, adorable physical objects they are - repositories for our handwritten marginalia over all the times we return to them, repositories where our bookmarks, our expired train tickets, even our food stains, from meals long forgotten, end up - well, we might find such a future alarming. For all of technology's incredible advances, we would hate to lose our old friends. Their loss would be, in fact, immeasurable.

We here at Stevereads would heartily like to believe McCall's picture is completely dystopian. But over in New York magazine, there's an article by Clive Thompson about the battle between Viacom and Google over Google's parenthood of Youtube, the revolutionary video-sharing website from which we here at Stevereads have derived so much pleasure (live tornado footage! Live lightning strike! Live shark attacks on live victims!).

Thompson approaches the issue not as clash between legal entities but as one between anthropological ones - nerd logic versus Big Media logic - and he's very good, very glib about his taxonimonies:

"Nerd logic holds that smart ideas deserve to trump dumb ones. Indeed, nerds are fierce believers in meritocracy. This is self-serving, of course: nerds love the idea of intellectual Darwinism because they think they're smarter than everyone around them, thus fated to win every contest."

Thompson believes that even though the two anthropological cultures - nerd and Big Media - will never understand each other, they will eventually reach a modus vivendi. That's at least a hopeful prognosis, although we here at Stevereads fail to see how such a thing could ever come to be - after all, those keypoint clips Youtube broadcasts from countless users? The keypoints to last night's 'Lost' or 'Battlestar Galactica'? Not to mention the literally countless other show clips (and there are sites much worse than Youtube, sites where whole SEASONS of shows are available at the touch of a button)? That's all copyrighted material - meaning some creative person (or a group of them) worked hard to make it, and with any luck they were well-paid for doing so. Well-paid or not, they were certainly PAID. If you record, if you download, hell if you even LOOK at that content, you're stealing from those people. The size and legal clout of Google doesn't change that, although judging from this article, Google seems to think it should.

However this tangle works itself out - whether all parties settle amicably on some kind of compromise arrangement or whether the whole concept of copyright transforms into some entirely new form (the latter is our bet here at Stevereads), it tempts you to get all nostalgic for the good old days (not TOO old though! You'd still want to in the comparatively recent era when American works were legally protected from copyright piracy in the UK, for instance). Joan Acocella does that kind of pining in a piece in last week's New Yorker in which she laments the demise of the mechanical typewriter. The points she makes will be all but unintelligible to most of our readers, who are younger than the Internet:

"Consider, for example, our physical involvement with the typewriter, which stands in relation to our connection with the P.C. as a fistfight does to a handshake. On the P.C., we use the same typing skills that we used on the typewriter, but the contact is not the same. We run our fingers lightly over the keys, making a gentle, pitter-patter sound. On the typewriter, by contrast, we had to stab, and the machine recorded our actions with a great big clack. We liked that. The noise told us that we had achieved something. So, in large measure, did the carriage return - another line done! - and the job of changing the paper - another page done!
"Which brings us to the white page. Mallarme spoke of the uncertainty with which we face a clean sheet of paper and try, in vain, to record our thoughts on it with some precision. As long as we were feeding paper into a typewriter, this anxiety was still present to our minds, and was relieved in the pointillism of Wite-Out, or even in the dapple of letters that were darker, pressed in confidence, as opposed to the lighter ones, pressed more hesitantly. A page produced on a manual typewriter was like a record of the torture of thought."

We here at Stevereads are, to put it mildly, familiar with that torture. Nobody currently reading this blog will recognize the term 'nul-time,' but once upon a time, to a small group of readers, that term described a series of science fiction potboiler novels. Those novels were fraught with action and cheesy dialogue and fairly addictive cliffhangers, and each and every one of them was composed on the same old manual typewriter - and their author, not the most mechanically adept person on Earth, could take that typewriter apart and put it back together, knew every piece and part of it blindfolded. There was NOBODY ELSE directly involved in the running of the machine; paper, ribbons, and replacement parts had to be bought, yes, but the actual production of text, the slow accretion of those 'nul-time' novels, was entirely located between author and typewriter. Unlike the P.C., where texts are hackable, deletable, and in any case completely reliant other people and other technologies in order to be TRANSMITTED anywhere.

Don't mistake: it would be foolish to go back. In the typing of this blog entry alone, an astounding, wopping, eye-popping THIRTEEN THOUSAND typos were made (TWENTY-ONE in this sentence alone)(FIVE in the word 'sentence' alone). In the era of manual typewriters, each one of those errors would have required at least a solid 45 seconds to fix. That adds a couple of HOURS to the composition-time of a medium-length piece. In the Internet era, those typos achieved only a Platonic level of existence in the first place and were instantly corrected.

That alone would be reason never to go back and never to WANT to. But even if that weren't enough (if, for instance, you made fewer frickin typos), there's still the fact that typewritten material GOES nowhere. It's no good stubbornly continuing to send telegrams when everybody around you is using cell phones. There's a point where nostalgia becomes weirdly fetishistic, and people still using manual typewriters for active prose have long since passed that point.

Still, Acocella is right: there was a purely tactile satisfaction in using a mechanical typewriter that's now gone forever from the act of writing. Somebody should hold a wake for it, because it was a good and steady friend to writers for a hundred years.

Comics! the kingdom of frustration!

Frustration was the key to the last batch of comics young Elmo swiped from my archnemesis Pepito. Not frustration over the SOURCE of said comics - I make sure to shake the Pepito-germs off them before reading - but rather with the CONTENT. Let's take a brief survey, shall we?

Take, for instance, the week's best comic: the first issue of the 'new' Fantastic Four, with wonderful, Whedonesque dialogue by Dwayne McDuffie and very good Alan Davis-esque artwork by Paul Pelletier. For those of you not keeping score, the 'new' part here is this: Reed and Sue Richards have decided to leave the team temporarily, and their spots have been taken by the Black Panther and Storm. So far, so good: always interesting to see Storm outside of the X-Men, and of course the presence of the Black Panther (especially the character as he's been portrayed for the last few years at Marvel - intelligent, capable, regal) is always in this title.

And the issue itself is great - full of shot and incident, with a final panel that alone is worth the price of admission (plus, the cool little detail of having the team adopt black uniforms as a tip of hat to the Panther was neat). So where does the frustration come in, you ask?

It comes from the fact that such a roster-change would never really happen. Not only is it unrealistic to think the ruler of another nation would have the spare time to lead a super-team, but it's impossible to believe the Black Panther would simply put aside the differences between himself and Reed Richards and just move into the spare bedroom. The Panther is opposed to the whole idea of government registration for super-beings; Reed was one of the idea's main architects. The way the whole issue seems to have been swept under the rug all across the Marvel lineup is very frustrating, even in so good a comic as this one.

But the frustration was by no means limited to Marvel Comics, oh no. DC had a strong lineup last week, and the strongest books were also the most frustrating.

Take '52' for instance. Last time around, the title lost its nerve at the last minute when it came to the whole Black Adam plotline. He drove toward Oolong Island, tossing aside every defense the evil scientists gathered there could throw at him. His cause was righteous - avenging his wife - and for once his Superman-level powers weren't being soft-pedalled. But then when he finally reached the men who created the monsters that killed his wife, the DC writers lost their nerve. The bad guys zap him with what looked like a remote control for the VCR, and down he went - something that never would have happened to Captain Marvel or Superman in the same situation. And this current issue was even worse - in it, Black Adam is being tortured OFF PANEL. All we learn about it is that his screams can be heard all over the island. In other words, bad guys win completely. Very annoying, to turn from that travesty to anything else in the issue, although in all fairness it should be pointed out that there's a wonderful sequence centering on Bruce Wayne getting his Batman mojo back.

And speaking of Batman! Over in his own title, frustration reigns supreme. And again, it doesn't have anything to do with how well-executed the issue itself is: Grant Morrison's scripting is just dandy (he writes a convincing Bruce Wayne, which isn't, apparently, as easy as it sounds), and Andy Kubert's pencils are breathtaking (this is the wrong book for him, of course - he does a great job because he ALWAYS does a great job, but a Batman book isn't a good fit). No, the frustration comes from a couple of egregious missteps in the plot-sequence, the kind of missteps you just can't overlook.

Like the part where Batman is examining a squalid potential criminal hideout when he's snuck up on and SURPRISED by a gigantic thug in a Bane getup ... a gigantic, steroid-crazed thug who couldn't realistically sneak up on my 210-year-old mother. And as if that weren't bad enough, during he ensuing fight, the thug gets the upper hand by ... wait for it ... yanking on Batman's cape. Not yanking on it with a special phase-inducer, or yanking on it at super-speed, or anything like that. Nope. Just plain old yanking on it. To say the least, that's pretty frustrating.

But most frustrating of all is last week's issue of venerable old Action Comics, written by Dwayne McDuffie (there's that name again) and drawn by Renato Guedes. It's a story called 'Intermezzo,' in which Pa Kent tells Ma Kent about an adventure he had with their son Clark some years ago. The REASON it's called 'intermezzo' is because it's a little interlude set against the backdrop of the title's main story. And that's the source of the frustration: that main story should be the biggest cross-over event in the DC universe, not the province of any one title, even DC's oldest. Not one nor two but DOZENS of Kryptonian criminals break free of the Phantom Zone and come to Earth intent on conquest? Surely that is the ultimate nightmare scenario, the ultimate reason why groups like the Justice League exist in the first place? And yet here it's presented as just another storyline, locally contained in Action Comics.

The problem with such a storyline, great as it is, is that if it's done realistically it can have only one ending.

Dozens of psychotic Kryptonians intent on conquering Earth. Conjure with that for a moment, those of you who are so inclined (that's you, Kevin ....). Each one with the powers of Superman, so who's up as Earth's first and only line of defense? Wonder Woman and Batman, yes (anybody discounting the latter would be pretty damn dumb), perhaps Captain Marvel and maybe, just maybe the other Marvels. Alan Scott definitely, Hal Jordan possibly. Doctor Fate, if we still had a Doctor Fate. Black Adam, Solomon Grundy, and Lex Luthor (see above) if we include bad guys. And that's it. Conventional human forces would count as nothing, and apart from that, have I missed anybody? Supergirl, perhaps? Certainly Raven would be effective against Kryptonians gone amok. But no more. Nightwing, Robin, Starfire, Metamorpho, Green Arrow, Red Arrow, Black Canary, the Question, Doctor Midnight, Red Tornado, Wildcat, the Martian Manhunter, the Flash, the Atom, Aquaman, Wonder Girl, Steel, Catwoman ... you name it, it's no contest. And that means it's about ten against dozens. It SHOULD be the DC storyline to end all storylines, so it's frustrating to see it being done in such a piecemeal stoner fashion instead.

Better luck next week, I'm certainly hoping.

In the Penny Press! Three Coins in a Fountain!

Three points of interest in last week's New Yorker, each more disturbing than the last.

The first up is David Denby, the reliably schoolmarmish maiden aunt of movie-reviewing. In the issue in question, he reviews 'Shooter' and '300' - and oh, he isn't happy about either. Like every other reviewer in the country, he mysteriously, inexplicably, unaccountably refuses to call Mark Wahlberg a BAD ACTOR. Denby goes only so far as to say "Wahlberg has an unpretentious air about him," which is similar to all the other softpedalled evasions various critics have been using. The origin of this is not far to seek: Wahlberg got an Oscar nomination for 'The Departed.' It wasn't in any way conceivable on the face of the planet a SENSIBLE nomination - the so-called performance was cussing only - but it instills FEAR in the trembling hearts of professional movie reviewers, an inherently cowardly lot (with one or two notable exceptions, as the readers of this blog well know). That nomination means the utterly talentless Wahlberg will be treated to nonsense phrases like 'has an unpretentious air about him' for at least a few more crappy movies, instead of anybody just saying he can't act worth a crap.

But as bad as that-all is, Denby's ultimate reaction to 'Shooter' and '300' is even worse. He lowers his granny glasses down to the tip of his nose and pronounces that these two movies together "feel like the products of a culture slowly and painfully going mad."

Geez. Go to bed, Aunt Bea. They're only movies.

More disturbing was Jane Kramer's piece about the relationship between the forces of radical Islam and those of the Vatican, in the person of the current Pope, the Nazi Benedict XVI. Kramer tries her level best to portray things in a calm, reasonable light, but it completely doesn't work.

Try as she might to paint a veneer of civility over everything, Kramer can't really disguise from her readers the plain fact that the great religion of Islam is currently being spearheaded - and gaining its characterization in the West - by a narrow cadre of reactionary fanatics intent on violence and radicalism ... and that the great religion of Roman Catholicism is currently being spearheaded - and gaining its characterization in the Middle East - by a narrow cadre of reactionary fanatics intent on wealth and insularity. Not since the Battle of Lepanto have the two religions been in a worse position to talk to each other.

The blame is about equal, but it need not have been, if another man sat on the throne of St. Peter. The former Cardinal Ratzinger, in his brief time in charge at the Vatican, has proven even less interested in the daily lives of ordinary Catholics than his predecessor - which, during his predecessor's long and oblivious life hardly seemed possible.

But the problem is deeper than the fact that Ratzinger clearly prefers the palaces-and-parades style of Catholicism of earlier centuries. Nazis share a particular mindset that's disasterous in the present crisis: they not only aren't willing to entertain the viewpoints of others, they regard the EXISTENCE of viewpoints different from their own with a loudly snickering contempt. The Nazi Pope Benedict XVI is no different in this regard - at the exact moment when all men of influence on both sides of the question should be striving to develope some kind of dialogue, both side are afflicted with leaders constitutionally incapable of doing so.

In a perfect world, Ratzinger would be sitting in a Swiss jail for his orchestration of the murder of Pope John Paul I. Alas, this isn't a perfect world. One almost envies the Buddhists.

But the most disturbing thing in this issue of the New Yorker wasn't an article at all but a picture accompanying an article. The piece is a profile of British chef and all around lout Gordon Ramsay, about what an ogre he is to his loyal staff, how gratuitously vicious he is to his loyal staff, etc.

You're supposed to come away hating Ramsay, a petty tyrant made possible only in the ridiculous micro-culture of haute cuisine. He's a blip (that is almost certainly the ultimate source of his much-vaunted all-purpose rage) and of no consequence whatsoever, so that's not the disturbing part.

No, the disturbing part is the accompanying photo of Ramsay. He's standing against the grey steel backdrop of a restaurant's kitchen, and he's holding a little lamb up to his chest. The lamb is alive and looking in the direction of the camera, and the composition of the piece is so elegant and strong (it's by the always-reliable Jillian Edelstein) that you're a minute before you realize that you're not looking at a cuddly picture - Ramsay is holding up a MENU ITEM.

It's a quietly staggering image, not least because of the horrible portrait of the human in the frame. Most of you will never have spent any quality time with a lamb, so you'll be unaware of their nature. If so, allow us to confirm what your own eyes can tell you: they're open-hearted and goofy and entirely GOOD. They lose some of the goofiness when they grow up into sheep, but they still stay entirely good.

In that photo, Gordon Ramsay is holding up the best invitation to vegetarianism imaginable. Because it's not just the ogre Ramsay - it's every three-star restaurant, it's every no-star restaurant, it's every snack-shack and kiosk and McFranchise from one end of the world to the other. That lamb's innocent, goofy face - the face of a PERSON, someone markedly different from the other lambs with whom she was born -(and, needless to say, someone very different from Ramsay) represents the right way, and Gordon Ramsay with his puffy carnivore's face represents the wrong way.

Here in America, at least on the two coasts, the choice is always there and always easy: don't be Gordon Ramsay. Eat no meat harvested from innocent, loving beings, eat no bloodkill. You can go the whole length on your own if you so desire - you can disavow everything that isn't strictly vegetable and leave it at that - but at the very least, you can - we all can, no matter how enamored we've been in time of bacon, that sacred provender of the gods themselves - skip all bloodkill, regardless of how we might once have loved such things. Let that poor doomed lamb, not the Gordon Ramsay inside, have the final say.

Books! The GOOD book!

We hear at Stevereads hope someday to write as rattling good a yarn as the Bible. It really is the trump, as Bertie Wooster (or Sebastian, if you want to bring in fictional characters) might say: it's got romance (though doomed and too often fraught with leprosy), action (including feats of espionage, derring-do, and high adventury, a disproportionate number of which deal with leprosy), a healthy bracing of moral precepts (including how badly you have to screw up to get leprosy), and a helpful smattering of hygiene tips (leprosy again). Considering its perennial spot atop the international bestseller lists, anybody could be forgiven for wishing they'd written it themselves. Even J.K. Rowling, it may be somewhat doubtingly proposed, must envy God.

Still, He gets the credit: the Earth, the Heavens, Sudoku, and ... the greatest book of 'em all.

Of course Biblical scholars (including my esteemed colleague Bathsheba) will say the Bible isn't, in fact, a book - that it's a compendium of books, a library between two covers. As such, it would seem to call for a brace of entirely different, entirely separate translators, each slaving away on their separate works. Alas, this wonderfully various Bible (a spectacular IDEA, in case any of the publishing hotshots who routinely monitor this site are wondering whom to credit with it) has yet to be made, so we're left with all the other efforts out there - from the almost unbelievable, heroically solitary efforts of errant individuals (William Tyndale and Desiderius Erasmus, take a bow!) to the austere corporate board-members throughout the ages who've come together, sometimes under uncomfortably intense scrutiny, to do the job together. The original texts are an almost unbelievable mish-mash, especially if you're trying to be philologically trustworthy to them all, and even moreso if some of them are linguistically impenetrable to you personally. Erasmus, for instance, tried very hard to wrap his mind around Hebrew (well, tried as hard as he was inclined to, which, after three ages of Latin and, gawd help us, ancient Greek, might not have been all that much), but he ended up relying more than was perhaps seemly on previous dog-eared Latin translations of the Old Testament.

There are about six humans alive on the planet today who can read up on the Bible in all its original texts and incarnations. Everybody else - including, we suspect, all you loyal ewoks out there reading this entry - have to rely on the artificial products of other brains.

And such an array of artificial products! Bibles are a growth industry like no other in publishing, with shelf upon shelf of different choices before the wary potential reader.

Most of these choices aren't really choices at all, just infinite permutations on the current fad of boneheaded niche-penetration: the black woman's Bible, the teen Bible, the lesbian Bible, the diabetic's Bible, ad nauseum. Also, a vast number of Bibles in bookstores today - especially those spawned and embraced by American evangelism - can scarcely be called Bibles at all, they've been so bowdlerized and contemporized and simplified (all with the goal in mind of making the Bible a COMFORTABLE book, something it never has been and never could be).

No, what we're really talking about here is SCHOLARLY EDITIONS of the Bible, for readers who want to take it seriously as a work (or many works) of literature. Some of you will know that we here at Stevereads have an abiding preference for the venerable King James version, its rolling cadences of gorgeous prose and verse still as thunderously good as when they were first assembled.

But we realize that some of those rolling cadences will sound a trifle archaic to the modern ear, and so we recommend the Jerusalem Bible, our candidate for the best of all 'modern' Bibles.

La Bible de Jerusalem was first published in French and given a definitive accompanying English translation in 1966, long before any of us were born. It has generous notes and maps and introductions and critical apparati, all of which will be a boon to modern readers. But the main thing we here at Stevereads like about it, naturally enough, is the clean, dignified sweep of its freshened prose. Modern readers have enough obstacles to enjoying the Bible as a work (or many works) of literature - surely grappling with Jacobean syntax should be left to the real enthusiasts.

Here are a few examples, to give you all a better idea of what kind of differences we're talking about. Take this helpful injunction, from that laff-riot of a book, Deuteronomy:

"When two men are fighting together, if the wife of one of them intervenes to protect her husband from the other's blows by putting out her hand and seizing the other by the private parts, you shall cut her hand off and show no pity."

Here's the corresponding passage in the good old King James:

"When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one putteth forth her hand and taketh him by the secrets, then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her."

Or take another example, this one from a New Testament assurance made by Jesus:

"Come to me, all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light."

Here's the King James:

"Come unto me, all ye who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

Of course, no amount of modernizing can 'improve' on perfection, and sometimes the King James is simply perfect. So although we here at Stevereads heartily recommend the Jerusalem Bible the next time it crosses your path in a used bookstore, we'll end this long-delayed entry with a comparison in which it's conspicuously the loser. We're fickle that way.

From the Jerusalem Bible:

Yahweh is my shepherd,
I lack nothing.

In meadows of green grass he lets me lie.
To waters of repose he leads me;
There he revives my soul.

He guides me by paths of virtue
for the sake of his name.

Though I pass through a gloomy valley,
I fear no harm;
beside me your rod and staff
are there, the hearten me.

You prepare a table before me
under the eyes of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil,
my cup brims over.

Ah, how goodness and kindness pursue me,
every day of my life;
my home, the house of Yahweh,
as long as I live!

And the King James:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.
Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies
Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

Comics! Immortal Combat in the JSA!

It wasn't peppery young Elmo nor yet our archnemesis Pepito who provided us with the fourth issue of Geoff Johns' relaunch of Justice Society of America - it was instead our smart, laid-back (and, not incidentally, pretty damn funny) young friend Mr. Allison, who seemed impressed by the issue (Elmo had already warned us that the issue was a 'feast').

And feast it certainly is - Johns again demonstrates a beautiful sense of pacing and character. He's completely wrong for a big, sprawling team book, but watching him try so hard to prove otherwise is worth the price of admission every issue.

And he's not afraid of the epic, either - he shares that with Brad Meltzer over in Justice League. There, a newly-intelligent Solomon Grundy uses a sooped up Amazo to attack the Justice League; here, Vandal Savage uses crews of super-powered Nazis to attack the descendents of the original Justice Society. Both are great big ambitious plots, and both writers fail them miserably.

Hard, without an abacus handy, to even count all that's wrong with this Justice Society issue. Dale Eaglesham's artwork is wonderful as always, but it's hampered by a choreography that sucks like a sump-pump.

Take the opening combat between Vandal Savage and Wildcat's kitty-cat young son (can we have a moratorium, please, on cat-based superheroes? Every single last one of them - most certainly including this new one, ripped from four panels of 'Kingdom Come' - are unbearably lame-ass): in one panel, the two of them are squared off face to face. In the next panel, Kitty-cat is leaping over Savage's left shoulder from behind. And so on and so forth (there isn't a panel of the Wildcats/Savage fight that makes a lick of sense).

Or take the Blue Valley scene, in which a detachment of the JSA rescues a bunch of civilians from a bunch of the Nazi super-villains dispatched by Vandal Savage. Has a lamer sooper-battle ever been contrived in a modern comic? There's a super-speed battle between the Flash and 'Baroness' Blitzkrieg that's more boring to look at than two pensioners playing chess in Central Park, but there's not much else.

And that doesn't hold a candle to the other set-piece of the issue, the confrontation in Philadelphia between another squad of the JSA and an even bigger batch of super-powered Nazis (one of whom is a super-powered version of a TOPLESS BISMARCK ... an idea that could ONLY have made sense while the Johns was deeply, philosophically stoned). Yeesh, what a disaster. Here the artwork is at its most static, and with its most crippling lack of credibility. Captain Nazi opens the sequence by hurling the Liberty Bell at a hapless group of civilians. He's duly chastised for this by our very own useless heroine Liberty Belle, right before Hawkman and Green Lantern engage with this Captain Nazi in close-on combat. That fight should by rights last an entire issue (and end only one way), but here it's over after a page, and it happens OFF PANEL. In the meantime, Damage blows up the fat Bismarck-guy and accidentally catches useless little Liberty Belle in the concussion. She very melodramatically falls down, but she's back on her feet, apparently unharmed, in four panels. The new useless Hourman helps her up, and he and she and Damage have a nice cozy little chat right there in the heat of battle, just as we see a trim and healthy Captain Nazi tossing aside an unconscious Hawkman and Green Lantern. This patent piece of silliness is done only to set up a face-to-face confrontation between Damage and Captain Nazi. Just as the evil Nazi is taunting Damage about his disfigured appearance, he's finally struck down - not by Hawkman, the seven-thousand-year-old warrior-hero, and not by Green Lantern, one of the most powerful beings in the DC universe ... nope, by useless little Liberty Belle THROWING THE LIBERTY BELL at him. So remember that, the next time you're facing a super-powered Nazi: when battle-maces and energy-rings fail, just hit him with a cracked, 260-year-old BELL.

But the biggest problem with this issue is also its biggest strength: Vandal Savage.

Mr. Allison isn't the only comic-reader we've known who puts his finger right on it: Vandal Savage is a seriously kick-ass villain. It's odd that DC, with its long and rich history, doesn't have more of these, but in this as in so many things, much depends on the execution. There's Lex Luthor, of course, but the whole gimmick of villain-as-respected-businessman only works for limited time (although the current run of DC continuity - most certainly including the latest twists and turns over in '52' - has milked it a wonderfully long time). And there's Darkseid for the epic dimension, although even thirty years ago, Keith Giffen in 'Ambush Bug' was keen to how easily the character can be tipped into parody. And there's the Joker, easily DC's most complex and compelling villain (the only one the other villains should be afraid of ... in other words, the villain-equivalent of Batman), although the number of DC writers over the years who've been able to convey that can be counted on the fingers of one hand (and that number certainly won't be increased by the next Batman movie, Heath Ledger being a literally incomprehensible casting choice).

But Vandal Savage? He's the serpent in DC's garden of Eden - an immortal who's been around since the birth of mankind, EVIL the whole time (the corresponding good guy, Immortal Man, was always a wuss by comparison and proved it by DYING in the first Crisis, the tool). No superpowers to speak of, although tough as nails, and most of all, embodying every time the intangible quality of COOL. Meltzer over in Justice League chose brute force - Grundy and Amazo - over that element (ironically enough, one of the prime candidates for that category in the DC universe is Doctor Destiny, who makes a surprise appearance at the end of this very JSA issue), but Johns clearly had the peculiar generational nature of the JSA in mind when he picked a villain who's seen the team in all its incarnations (this could also be said for Per Degaton and the Ultra-Humanite, but to say the least, they both lack the aforementioned cool factor).

The problem is, Vandal Savage should be unbeatable. The only way to make him NOT unbeatable is to indadvertently make him ridiculous, which is what happens in this issue. He boasts of starting world wars, of being the power behind Hitler, of discovering fire - but what's he DOING while he's boasting of all this? Breaking crockery in a tiny kitchen fighting Wildcat's gay kitty-cat bastard son. Cue the ridiculous.

Vandal Savage should be unbeatable because ANY immortal would be. If you want to eliminate the next generation of the Justice Society, you don't send stupid-ass Nazi death-squads to ambush them at family reunions; you pay a drug addict $20 to plow a car through an intersection and flatten them when they're five. You pay an orderly $2000 to pinch an IV when the next generation is in its cradle. Against an enemy who implaccably hates you and who has forever to do it, mortals - no matter how brave or powerful they might be in the maturity between their helpless infancy and their defenseless old age - cannot possibly win. If you make Vandal Savage that implaccable, undying enemy, you create a story with only one plausible ending.

Needless to say, pinched IV's are not the stuff of four-color comics, so this issue has dorkus-malorkus Nazi death-squads and Vandal Savage fighting a kitty-cat in a kitchen and eventually getting hit by a truck (guess the one thing he didn't learn in 100,000 years was to LOOK BOTH WAYS). So a carefully-laid and meticulously-crafted plan to eliminate the Justice Society fails because some guy gets hit by a bell and some other guy gets hit by a truck. And for this Johns gets to call himself a writer.

And yet, and yet ... the issue, the whole storyline, has been FUN, something that's certainly missing over in Justice League. And with the promise of Legion activity right around the corner (Dream Girl AND Lightning Lord on the last page!), it looks fair to KEEP being fun. We here at Stevereads will certainly be there to see.

The Penny Press! Atlantic and the TLS!

The prestigious old Atlantic Monthly (of late cravenly decamped from its home ancestral home of Boston) recently acquired our very own semi-feral super-genius Elmo as a subscriber, so their editorial board will no doubt have to look a little sharper in the months to come (we here at Stevereads are except from such precautions, since we were the ones to tempt the entirely-feral Elmo from the fens with a few sugar cubes earning his primitive gratitude ala Androcles and the Lion). The current issue is Elmo's first, so we couldn't help but read it with eyes ever-so-slightly vicariously refreshed.

Not all that an auspicious start, all things considered. The cover article - on who stands to gain financially from global warming climate changes - was no doubt meant to be frolicsomely cynical and on that ground (and all other grounds) falls spectacularly flat. Considering the fact that a) all those land-grabbing opportunities come hand-in-hand with unsurvivable winters all across northern Europe and unsurvivable summers all across the rest of the planet, and b) our own weekend getaway at Montauk Point - not to mention the homes and workplaces of our hapless friends at Boston, Waimea, Venice, San Diego, and Big Pine Key will be uninhabitable - considering these things, one is hard-pressed to divine the laff-quotient in an article that monetarily divvies up the sea-girt, sun-baked remains of a once-gorgeous world.

The piece's companion article on the crisis in Darfur was, unfortunately, similarly unconvincing - seeking as it did to shift the blame for that crisis off the shoulders of men and onto the vagaries of climate change. When you add to all this the fact that the title's most reliable standby, the mighty book-critic Ben Schwartz, chose this time around to utterly waste his precious column inches writing about some idiotic fashion book, well, you don't get a very favorable debut issue for Elmo.

Fortunately, for good or ill, Christopher Hitchens can almost always be counted on to generate interest of some kind, and this time around is no exception. This issue he reviews 'Cultural Amnesia,' a collection of literary essays by Clive James, and a thoroughly condescending job he does of it, too. James, an entirely better and more comprehensive literary critic than Hitchens has been in a good many years, is generously tolerated throughout the length of the review. Hitchens is very patient in pointing out all the ways James could have done a better job, and he ladles on the faint praise:

"In attempting to do this anthology justice, I am running the risk of making it sound more eclectic than it really is."

And how about this little gem, grubbed over by Hitchens:

"But in order to appear ungrudging, he [James] is sometimes hyperbolic, and therefore unconvincing: Is it really apt to write of Camus that 'the Gods poured success on him but it could only darken his trench coat: it never soaked him to the skin.'?"

Well, yes, actually: apt and considerably neater than any formulation Hitchens has coughed up in his last four or five dozen literary pieces.

Having Christopher Hitchens review Clive James isn't exactly like setting a fox to guard the hen-house; it's more like setting a fox to guard a less drunken, more talented fox. Sour grapes on Hitchens' part are understandable, and this review is rank with the fumes.

But worse than that is Hitchens' sniveling, hypocritical cowardice. At one point he writes:

"It is men like Peter Altenberg and Karl Kraus whom he [James] envies, while of course never ceasing to wonder (as we all must) how he himself would have shaped up when the Nazis came."

That parenthetical is SO sweet. Considering Hitchens' stance on any number of political issues in the past six years, we here at Stevereads don't consider the question of how he'd have reacted to the Nazis one of life's enduring mysteries. When Hitchens, at another point in the review, makes disparaging reference to 'high-sounding justifications for violence,' the irony was almost too thick to read through.

Irony carries over to the TLS too, and it reaches its sharpest point in the letters page. Recently, James Fergusson wrote a piece about the second-hand book trade, and it garnered this very straightforward, very sad response:

"James Fergusson may well know a lot about the second-hand book trade of yore, but where has he been for the last decade or so? As a bookseller myself, I wouldn't have thought it possible to write at such length on the subject over the last century and include just one cosily dismissive paragraph about the effect of the internet; in the mid-and late 1990s, you heard a lot of that sort of complacent plus ca change from booksellers, but I never thought I'd come across it again. The fact is that, in the half-decade before the millennium, modernity finally caught up with the second-hand book trade, and it took internet technology no longer than five years to liquidate the old order Fergusson lovingly describes. What has emerged is soulless but wonderfully effecient, a golden age for book buyers: instant access to virtually everything you want, a trade composed overwhelmingly of small-time amateurs who don't really need the money, prices in free fall and fewer than half-a-dozen points of sale that really matter, all on the Net. One hopes Fergusson's world of musty shops personal relationships, catalogues and bookfairs will manage to hang on in a few civilized outposts, but personally I wouldn't bet on it."

That's from Peter Lloyd, who writes from - follow along now - Little Bushant, Glascwm, Llandrindod Wells - and if anything he understates the matter, since he confines his remarks to the world of second hand bookselling. When the grim truth of the matter is that ALL bookselling is staring at its doom, in the form of the Internet. Customers in their uncounted thousands discover every day the convenience of simply ordering the books they want online - wait three days, and there they are, boxed up on your doorstep.

There are two factors missing from this new world, Peter Lloyd or no Peter Lloyd.

The first is the odd chemistry of your odd, ungainly, soon to be extinct book clerk. The Internet has no analog to having an obviously knowledgeable clerk gently scoff at your pretentions (be honest now, all you out there: how many of you have felt this particular goad and had it STAY with you long after, maybe even had it change what you read, although of course such scoffing is entirely wrong for the book clerk to do), or the enthusiastic recommendation that cuts through the cant of a dozen bad high school teachers. Really good book clerks (a phrase that sounds strange these days in and of itself) can change the way you read, and that's an entirely magical thing no 'customers who bought this also bought' can even hope to duplicate.

The second thing is serendipity. Plain old serendipity! You're prowling the bargain-carts at the Strand or the Brattle, you're crawling along the indoor shelves of ANY bookstore, second hand or otherwise, when you find something you had no idea even existed, something you then pull down and pour over and decide you want very much, in fact can't live without.

Serendipity. All of us here at this website have felt it: the chance finding of one book while looking for another, the gems discovered when you had no idea you were looking for them, and all the other permutations we're all so familiar with. Take away physical bookstores, and you take away that all-important element.

No doubt the idiosyncratic love of book-buying will survive the removal even of that element; perhaps some simula-program will come along that will digitally reproduce the alcoholic free associations of serendipity. We here at Stevereads are inclined to doubt it, but we stand, as ever, ready for posterity to prove us wrong.

Stevesees! '300'!

We here at Stevereads are fully aware of the awesome power we hold over the hearts and minds of the blogosphere. We won't say the knowledge humbles us (that wouldn't be very believable, now would it?), but it does keep us mindful lest our slightest offhand endorsement send the multitudes scurrying out to buy, watch, or snort something that may end up disappointing them.

In a perfect world, we would simply refer you all to Locke's website (which, I agree with him, would really have to be called something a little less creepy than 'lockewatches'), where he would hold forth regularly on all the movies and TV that catches his fancy. You've all seen a glimpse of what that would be like; say what you want about either one of us, but one thing we certainly share in common: we both know how to entertain the troops.

Unfortunately, unlike the rest of us here at Stevereads, Locke's got stuff to do the live-long day. We'll get what he gives us, but a long, rambling website is only in the cards if Santa is very, very good to us.


In the meantime, we here at Stevereads shall shoulder on with our adjunct corollary, Stevesees! True, our impeccable taste in judging movies and performances took a little bit of a pecking at Oscar time, but the memory of the blogosphere is notoriously short, so we can forge ahead with our head held high!

Especially when this installment of Stevesees deals with a sure-fire winning bet. That doesn't happen often, so it's an easy joy to do the reporting when it does.

Of course we're referring to Zach Snyder's film version of Frank Miller's sparse, visionary graphic novel '300.'

Over at the great new literary website Open Letters, the talented young poet/novelist/literary critic John Cotter inaugurates a regular feature called 'Peer Review,' in which the critical reactions to a given thing are put under the microscope and assessed for their various woolly tendencies and drifts. If we did that here for '300,' this entire entry would degenerate into a spittle-flecked rage-fest such as the Interweb has never seen.

The Boston Herald talked about the movie's 'homoeroticism' and gave it two thumbs up 'from the Third Reich.' The Boston Globe talked about the movie's 'homoeroticism' and went on about how its subtext was the straights versus the gays. The New York Times talked about the movie's 'homoeroticism' and went on about the analogies to the Iraq War and American xenophobia.

All of which makes you want to lock all professional reviewers in a small room and then lose the key.

'300' is the story of King Leonidas and his loyal band of Spartans who held the Hot Gates pass against probably no more than 50,000 Pesians and Persian allies (in Herodotus' original account, it's about 100,000; in Frank Miller's graphic novel, it's rounded up to a million - gawd only knows how many it is in the movie). They knew they would die (according to Herodotus, that is - it should be borne in mind throughout ALL discussions of the movie that in all likelihood the events it depicts never in fact happened at all), and just as in Miller's 'Ronin,' that knowledge gives the Spartan almost superhuman abilities.

Almost superhuman. They all still die. But in the process, a movie is delivered the likes of which the waiting world has never seen. There were glimpses, yes - in 'Sin City,' and in Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil' - but absolutely nothing in all of cinematic history prepares the customer for the experience of watching '300.'

It isn't at all like watching a video game. It certainly isn't, as one critic maintained, like watching your buddy get a lap-dance. It isn't a grey wash of CGI with no heft or meat on its bones.

Instead, '300' (not 'Sin City,' in which the black-and-white only served to make the seams show - in addition to the known fact that no movie featuring Josh Hartnett in any capacity can possibly be good - nor yet again the 'Lord of the Rings' movies, in which the effects were seamlessly enslaved to the live action) is the very first example of a completely equal marriage of men and machines, of effort and effect.

This movie, this thing, is like nothing ever created before. Time and again, while watching it, the viewer is struck by that one fact: I've never seen anything like this before.

It's not just the exotic imagery and broad vistas - although no imagery has ever been more exotic, and no vistas have ever been broader (except maybe in Akira Kurosawa's 'Dreams,' but even that was circumscribed by non-CGI boundaries). Every single frame of this magnificent movie looks better than it could ever have looked with entirely live actors on an expensively-purchased soundstage in Lower Belgravia. This movie is the moviemaking of the future, at least if movies care about spectacle in the future. In recent memory, only 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' even comes close to it for sheer self-confident otherworldliness.

Here is the sheer eye-popping wonder of the Siege of Gondor, but entirely without the sense of scrimping for cost. Here is the baby-archangel sequence from 'Brazil,' but entirely without the virtually visible strings attached.

It isn't all spectacle - contrary to what every single reviewer has maintained, there's quite a bit of good acting in this movie. Butler himself is quite good as King Leonidas, and his supporting cast turn in uniformly strong performances, especially considering the fact that they were emoting and responding in many cases to empty sceens and blank backgrounds.

There are, then, human elements a-plenty to this movie. But there's no doubt about it: they aren't its point. Its point - its challenge - is to up the visual ante for all future 'epic' movies. In fact, watching this movie - being subsumed into it, really - made me yearn for this same amazing technique to be applied to EVERY epic storyline out there. In the hands of a director as game and capable as Zach Snyder, just imagine how many eye-feasts like '300' could be enfleshed in gorgeous, reality-warping, unprecedented visuals. The technique of '300' would at last make possible a living rendition of Ariosto's 'Orlando Furioso' (you all snicker, but only because you haven't read it ... if there is anywhere in literature a precursor to comic books, Ariosto is it) (and yes, I'm aware that a very fragmentary, very partial two-hour 'adaptation' of the 'Orlando Furioso' was already filmed, a weird, utterly unsatisfying movie starring a very young Ron Moss ... but geez! It's SUCH a small fraction of the whole it doesn't warrant serious consideration), or the full panoply of the Mahabarata (once again, yes, I'm aware of the BBC adaptation from a decade or more ago ... in this case a much, much worthier version, but still cripplingly limited when compared to the original), and most of all, most achingly of all, Homer's Iliad - not the latest effort by Wolfgang Peterson, worthy though I alone seem to find it, but the real thing - gods romping everywhere at their will, action in outsized portions - that has never been captured and has never been ABLE to be captured, before now.

Notice I'm not punch-drunk on this new technology ... I'm not, for instance, saying it could be used on a work such as 'War and Peace' (which is, nevertheless, badly in need of SOMETHING ... great works of literature shouldn't languish as long as this one has in between viual adaptations) or even 'Life and Fate.' No, I'm only talking here about works that beg for a gigantic canvas, shot through in unbelievable colors and shapes.

The 'Lord of the Rings' movies are pretty nearly perfect, it's true; but 'The Lord of the Rings' as a novel veers constantly between the high epic and the wee folk boiling potatoes - it couldn't have made use of the techniques of '300,' at least not in the way I'm suggesting. Peter Jackson handled his material with confident genius, but there are no boiled potatoes in '300.' as everyone who's seen it would readily acknowledge. It's grand-scale entertainment, and as such it's beyond comparison with anything that's come before.

One thing above all others: there isn't even a hint of homoeroticism in this movie. Unless all these critics are saying so merely because our Spartan heroes where no shirts and have buff bodies - which, if true, would be pretty damn dumb. The Spartans are topless to denote an easy, offhand fearlessness; the Persians are decadent and effeminate not for petty sexual reasons but to display the enervating effects of unlimited wealth and power. This movie is above all a daring thing, and daring things are always vulnerable to cheap jibes

We here at Stevereads urge you all to ignore such cheap jibes, even the jibes you yourself might already have thought up. Go and see '300.' Go and be amazed.

In response to some recent snipey comments...

Word.

Comics Quiz!

An unpardonable omission from that last comics-entry: it had no QUIZ! So here we go: in honor of the fact that the LATE Captain America (....) had no superpowers, and in honor of the upcoming soon-to-be-fantastic Spider-Man movie, we combine the two to ask the following -

Despite the fact that he can lift a family sedan over his head, Spider-Man has a history of fighting villains who don't themselves possess superpowers at all. Name five of these baddies! Extra points if you can specify which ones actually engaged in fisticuffs with the web-slinger, despite the fact that in the REAL world, they wouldn't last more than five seconds or so.

Comics! The King is dead, and all that!

The thing you have to understand about today's comics, the thing that trumps everything else, is how goddam GOOD they are, almost universally across the board. And by 'good' we here at Stevereads mean 'written for adults' - in the very best way that can be meant. Not 'adult fanboys,' but actual card-carrying adults. Dramatic storytelling. Expert pacing. On-spot characterization. And artwork that's better than it ever has been.

The latest batch of comics Elmo stole from my archnemesis Pepito illustrates this fact handily enough. Every title in the pile, each individual one, is pound for pound better than most of the issues in each title's history.

Even devil's advocate - Brad Meltzer's current incarnation of the Justice League is undoubtedly a failure; the pacing is all wrong, the narrative flow is an unmitigated disaster; you'd need an abacus to count all the missed chances, dramatically speaking.

This should be everything, keep in mind: a newly-intelligent Solomon Grundy manipulating Amazo to destroy a fledgling Justice League - that's grade-A stuff, mythic stuff. And even in devil's advocate, even on a title that's a failure, there's a degree of intelligence and energy in the storytelling that if nothing else give hope of better days ahead.

(Even so, we had to laugh at the scene where an enraged Vixen dive-bombs Amazo from high overhead, accelerating to 217 miles per hour; right before impact, she whispers 'triceratops,' so I guess we're supposed to think she's manifesting the weight and power of a triceratops in order to hit Amazo that much harder ... and she does, oh-so-coolly ripping him in two. Somebody should get a memo to Meltzer right away on what would REALLY happen if she hit a solid target at 217 mph with 9000 pounds of mass behind her. We won't spoil the surprise here at Stevereads, but you should all be thinking not of lame-ass third-tier superheroes but of Seaworld ... where the first three rows WILL GET WET!)

But devil's advocate isn't necessary for most of this batch. Jeff Smith, for instance, is always a delight, and the second issue of his Shazam! mini-series is full of good stuff - from a Doctor Sivana unabashedly modelled on Dick Cheney to a version of talking-tiger Mr. Tawny that actually manages to be cool (of course, if anybody can make a talking cat cool, it's Jeff Smith). The only qualm-causing aspect of the issue is Smith's revamp of Mary Marvel - getting her powers as per usual, but staying a little five-year-old girl. To say the least, the effect is creepy - so we're earnestly hoping the powers that be at DC don't take it into their heads to make Smith's mini-series in any way part of normal continuity.

Still, Smith's artwork and writing are so clean, so much fun - we earnestly wish he'd consider doing a comic book version of Lil' Abner. He'd be perfect for it.

Then there's the latest issue of Detective Comics, featuring quick, intelligent writing by Stuart Moore and highly detailed artwork by Andy Clarke, artwork that takes a little while to catch up to you. There's nothing remotely earth-shaking in the issue - standard Batman-and-Robin-vs-bad guy stuff, but considering how many titles at Marvel and DC are in the midst of reality-redefining catastrophies, that's something of a blessing.

Did somebody mention reality-redefining catastrophies? Well of course that's the heart and soul of DC's '52,' and after a sucky issue last week, this week rebounds incredibly, packing all the pathos, drama, and ass-kicking of an old-fashioned Lee/Kirby multi-issue epic into a mere 25 pages. We here at Stevereads have in previous entries praised the creation of heavy-hitting new characters like Isis and Osiris - well, we should have spared ourselves the trouble, since they both get offed in this issue (she's napalmed and he's EATEN ... hee). But we're not complaining, because in the process the powers that be at DC are transforming Black Adam into something remarkable. We thank whatever gods may be that he (and Renee Montoya) are turning out to be the real stars of '52,' not the much-hyped and thoroughly ridiculous lesbian Batwoman (and where's the press attention for the latest issue of Outsiders, which featured lesbian action so graphically depicted I wanted to shield Elmo's eyes?).

Discerning eyes will have noticed that all the successes so far are from DC, and there's a good reason for that: Marvel is currently experiencing a downward-spiral of suckitude unseen since the launch of the New Universe, many moons ago, and nothing seems to be able to stop the tailspin.

Not even something as well-done and sweet at the 45th anniversary issue of the Fantastic Four, which did have its moments (like the charming tone of Ben Grimm's dealings with little Franklin and Val, or Sue matter-of-factly referring to Ben as the heart and soul of the team, or Doctor Doom - of all people - pointing out the evils Reed Richards committed during the Civil War). But nothing write Dwayne McDuffie can do gets around the fact that the FF split up and fought AGAINST each other in Civil War (a point worth repeating, no? During the climactic battle of Civil War #7, Reed Richards is there to beat and LOCK UP his wife and her brother). The issue's main story ends with Reed and Sue leaving the team to 'work on their marriage,' but it can only turn a blind eye toward all the open cans of worms left over from Civil War.

The main one of these is the fact that Civil War tore Marvel's community of superheroes in half, and it LEFT things that way - sign up or get locked up in the Phantom Zone, period. Not a dream. Not a hoax. Not an imaginary story. The basic state of affairs now in Marvel Comcics is a fascist dictatorship - that kinda makes it hard to go back to telling ordinary superhero stories about Mole Man attacking Manhattan.

Which makes the first issue of Brian Michael Bendis' 'the Initiative' launch of the Avengers all the more ironic, since in it, Mole Man DOES attack Manhattan, and a newly-minted team of Avengers spring into action to fight the menace.

You can't help but trip over problems, right from the first page, when the Wasp asks 'Am I to assume a training exercise to see how we work together is completely out of the question?'

She gets a smug response, and a very large amount of property damage ensues - exactly the kind of thing the Registration Act was designed to prevent.

The battle itself isn't all that interesting, except for the fantastic artwork of Frank Cho. No, the issue's only real point of interest is the sequence of scenes in which Tony Stark and Carol Danvers, standing before a cool wall-display of every 'right-thinking' superhero currently in play. Like a couple of mouth-breathing virginal fanboys (pause here while Hippolyta deadpans 'is there any other kind?'), they set out to assemble 'the greatest roster ever.'

Cue the irony here, since the roster arrived at is the single worst one since the dark days of the Forgotten One and Doctor Druid.

Iron Man, of course, and the Wasp, and the always-pleasing presence of the Black Widow (the Steve Epting-pencilled stretch where she led the team stands as one of the best runs on the title). But after that, things start to fall apart - Ms. Marvel is OK, but the perennially-boring Wonder Man is here straight out of the 80s, right down to the inability to fly and the Reagan-era tracksuit. Add to that the only superhero in the Marvel lineup MORE boring than Wonder Man - the Sentry, as dumb and derivative a character as anybody's dreamt up in quite some time. Super-strength, vague energy-powers ... whatever! Yech. And that pales beside the final member, the Greek god Ares, who for the last 30 years has been one of Thor's super-villains. He cares nothing for mortal life, and he carries an enormous axe - but hey, at least he registered.

Still, the discussions are interesting. Carol Danvers asks the question Avengers (indeed, super-team) fans have always asked: why not just assemble a team of powerhouses? At one point Carol declares that the Wasp was the best Avenger, and at another point Stark says the same of Thor. Neither nominates Captain America, and the reader can't help but notice the reason why: because Carol and Stark are both victorious Nazis, and Cap is off in a gulag somewhere. It couldn't matter less whether or not our team stops Mole Man: it's bad guy v.s. bad guy.

The whole thing is made all the more depressing by Bendis' comments in the letters page (you almost expect disagreeable parts of each letter in the future to be blacked out). He promises a big surge of super-villains in upcoming weeks, and he writes "Now that we know who the heroes are, we will set up for the villains."

Some of us - especially those of us who maintain that there's no second, subversive meaning behind all this Civil War nonsense - aren't quite so certain we now 'know' who the heroes are, but it's instructive to know that Bendis doesn't have that problem.

But then, none of this touches on the week's comic that everybody's most likely to have heard about, right? Talk about press attention: in the latest issue of Captain America, a handcuffed Steve Rogers is heart-shot by a hypnotized Sharon Carter. See the news on your local evening broadcast.

There are at least eight different ways this could be reversed, but we here at Stevereads think not. Given the current fascistic atmosphere at Marvel, we think the Steve Rogers Captain America might very well be dead, the identity to be replaced by ... well, what the Hell difference does it make WHAT replaces him? The whole foundation of the Marvel universe is now rotten beyond recall, except by some kind of total rewrite. Which would be - will be - boring and time-consuming and utterly manipulative.

It's a sad state of affairs, but at least we still have DC, surfing an almost unprecedented high.

in memoriam: arthur schlesinger

We raise a glass, then, to Arthur Schlesinger.

He died last week. One minute sitting at a restaurant, telling stories and enjoying himself, and practically the next minute, he was gone. This was tragic but entirely fitting, the kind of end he'd have certainly wanted, if he'd paused long enough to contemplate something so silly.

All of you are too young to remember anything of this, much less the man himself, so to recap: Schlesinger was the son of historian Elizabeth Bancroft; he was a freakishly intelligent early-admin to Harvard; he (like everybody else with a heart and a brain at the time) fell in with the doomed campaigns of Adlai Stevenson; and he, for services rendered, was taken into the fold of the Kennedy administration as a 'special assistant' to the president.

He came to that administration fully-vetted as a serious historian. He'd written an semi-immortal work, after all, 'The Age of Jackson,' and he'd written it as a young man, fiercely intelligent and deeply inquiring.

As hardly ever before or since, the Kennedy administration was the perfect fit for such a creature. He basked in the particular aura of Camelot - the cocktail parties that lasted until dawn, the gorgeous secretaries, and most of all the all-pervasive feeling that a vital new age was dawning, an age that could divest itself of all the dead trappings of previous generations.

That's what they did, those two Kennedys and the brace of greyhounds they assembled around themselves: they activated HOPE ... they accessed nothing less than that tired old chestnut, the American Dream. They sucked in everybody - from Negro porters to Dupont society matrons - and created a feeling of fresh beginning, a feeling that it was no longer the world of your parents but yours, to make of what you could.

Schlesinger drank it all in; he revelled not only in the genteel debauchery of the Kennedy social scene but also the thrill any historian would feel if they had their hands on the live wire of history being made. And he was always explicitly clear in maintaining that the two worlds didn't detract from each other.

He insisted on it, in fact: that historians owe it to their readers to live in the real world, not cloistered academic towers. He walked the corridors of power carrying the notebook of the historian, so it was only natural he incurred the suspicion and dislike of both the historians and the powerful.

The only ones who mattered to him at the time always evinced a wry affection for him. Robert Kennedy bridled at the watching presence of so obvious a memoirist, but he allowed that Schlesinger had a first-rate mind (a rare compliment, given the source). JFK himself, naturally, took a deeper view. 'I don't currently have time for posterity,' he used to quip. 'I leave that to Arthur, God help us.'

Perhaps the best assessment of the man came earliest, however. As a freakishly young kid (although certainly not unprecedentedly so ... a small cadre of such early admins have paraded through the halls of Harvard over the centuries), he was classmate with Young Joe Kennedy, the broad-smiled, wide-shouldered, stogie-chomping, gin-swilling, debutante-deflowering older brother of the future president. Young Joe was the chosen one in that vast family; he was the one who old Ambassador Kennedy had naturally chosen to push for political office (nobody then dreamt of the Oval Office, regardless of what their memoirs might say), and he took the very earliest Kennedy shine to this provincial Midwestern kid. There were rumors that said Midwestern kid helped said Kennedy crown prince write more than one academic work that led to the graduation of both. In any case, Young Joe had this to say about bow-tied young Arthur: 'He suits me down to the ground: he knows everything, and he puts it all at my disposal.'

It's doubtful a more thoroughly Kennedyesque appraisal could be found, and it played out in the decades to come. Schlesinger worked for JFK until the awful day in Dallas, and then he worked for RFK, with an even more open, fervent heart, until THAT awful day.

The combination broke the working parts of him, as it did the working parts of so many. He pretty much retired to scholastic work - and to a certain degree of prescience, writing 'The Imperial Presidency' in 1973, a book that looks darkly at the tendency of the executive branch, when in the hands of unscrupulous men, to gobble up as much power as it can get its hands on.

Schlesinger lived long enough to see just how exaggerated that tendency could get, and in his last years he took great delight in skewering the evil midgets currently encamped where once he saw giants walk.

He left us when we needed him most, but that's always the way of such men, and such times. The only consolation - and it's a big one, in fact the only one - is that he transformed his White House access into two magnificent works of history, 'Robert Kennedy and His Times' and 'A Thousand Days.' These are permanent works, as full of intelligence and gossip and pitch-perfect pacing as was their author.

So we raise a glass to Arthur Schlesinger. and we offer a humble nunc dimittis to the great historian of the Kennedy era.