comics in july!

Five different comics this time around, and the thrilling breath of rejuvenation running through each one of them! And the incredible thing is, four out of five of those comics were published by Marvel, a company whose recent creative decisions have been, shall we say, questionable (fascism rules? check! Spider-Man off in la-la land? check! Captain America effing dead? check!). We here at Stevereads once thought that, given the state of affairs at Marvel, the only way they could field a rejuvenatingly good issue would be to very consciously set it outside the pig's breakfast that is the company's current continuity. Put Spider-Man in some sort of mystical backwater where you can turn back the clock; put the Hulk on an alien world and follow his adventures there; put Thor (and Asgard) out in the American badlands as a declared neutral, etc.



So imagine our surprise to find that two out of these four Marvel titles take place smack-dab in the middle of the current muddled continuity! One of these is Marvel's flagship title, The Fantastic Four, now under the creative control of writer Mark Millar and artist Bryan Hitch; issue #558 is the start of a new storyline (not, curiously, the one trumpeted on the cover, "Starting This Issue: The Death of the Invisible Woman" - no hint of which is present in the issue itself), one which sees the villainous Doctor Doom falling prey to a group of mercenaries called the New Defenders (who, in the tiresome Millar fashion, are made to seem bad-ass by easily defeating our heroes in the initial set-to), forcing the FF to come to his defense. Hitch's pencils still seem a little rough (Andrew Currie is not his ideal inker), but Millar's got a good grasp of the non-stop action and underlying humanity that are the hallmarks of this particular team. We predict that if Millar stays with the title, this Doctor Doom storyline will turn out to be really, really good, and the eventual Galactus storyline will be epic. We shall see.



The other of these two issues is the latest She-Hulk, written by fanboy-favorite hack Peter David and drawn with interesting linear simplicity by Val Semeiks. The plot is fairly simple stuff - a giant on a rampage in a city, She-Hulk and guest star Hercules teaming up to beat the giant and save the day, etc. The rejuvenation here is something happening in more than one place in the Marvel universe these days: the revived and fantastic use of Hercules as a character. He's got his own comic, and he's appearing everywhere else, and this is a very welcome development - in Marvel comics, Hercules has always stood in the shadow of Thor, but in many ways he's more interesting and logical character to moonlight as a super-hero: after all, he's part human, whereas Thor is not. When you think about it, it's an inherently silly idea that a god of thunder would spend time having adventures alongside the Wasp and Hawkeye. But Hercules has a history of adventuring alongside superpowered mortals, so it's refreshing to see him showing up i so many places lately.

One of which, in this issue of She-Hulk, is her bed! After their adventure together, these two heroes decide to make merry in her RV, and one thing leads to another. Oddly, when it's time for him to write the inevitable morning-after scene, David doesn't screw it up. As she looks at the sleeping Hercules, She-Hulk thinks, "When all is said and done, he was one of the few who stood beside Bruce when it all went down. That meant a lot to me. He meant a lot to me. And well ... he's immortal. For all I've got going for me, that's something I'll never be. Except ... I was, for one brief moment in time, the lover of Hercules. So maybe that's a little bit of immortality for me. There's dumber reasons to have sex with a guy. I should know: I've used them all."


Far more typical is the aforementioned manuever of setting your story outside of the current Marvel continuity, which is what our next two Marvel issues do. Matt Fraction's new issue of his ongoing Thor mini-series is firmly mythological in its setting; here there is no hint of Thor the super-hero, just high epic fantasy - for which Fraction shows a surprisingly adept hand. The dialog of his gods, demons, and monsters bears no similarity to the 'thee's and 'thou's of Stan Lee's era, but it's extremely distinctive just the same.

The issue features two parts, the first drawn by Khari Evans in a competent enough manner reminiscent of Ron Frenz, and the second drawn to bring the walls down by Patrick Zircher. The first segment is entertaining enough - again, a loose adaptation of a story out of Norse mythology - but the second story! Hoo-boy! Here is everything a real Thor story should be (except that Thor, true to Norse mythology if not to Marvel continuity, is still a bit of a jerk): it's sweeping, epic, and full of fantastic stuff. The best part of it happens when the poor mortals of Earth, beset by legions of the undead, create the husk of a "blood colossus" to combat their enemies. They pray and pray to summon Thor, hoping his lightning will bring their blood colossus to life: "Mortals prayed and prepared as best they could. Shattered by the unending cruelty of an unjust punishment, they began to look toward the miraculous. Until finally the miraculous began to look back." Thor shows up, animates the colossus, and saves the day, but this all feels much more like some alternate title Marvel would have published in the mid-'70s.

Our plea here at Stevereads: Marvel should create a new title, call it "Tales of Asgard," and make Patrick Zircher illustrate it until Ragnarok, if not longer.



The other offset Marvel issue this time around takes a much surer path: a retold origin story. In this case, it's an installment in the ongoing, spottily-executed 'Mythos' title aimed at revisiting the origins of Marvel's characters. In this case, touchingly, it's Captain America's turn, here getting a splendid, moving treatment by writer Paul Jenkins and artist/painter Paolo Rivera. This is an origin story that's been told many times - skinny WWII army reject Steve Rogers is chosen to undergo experimental procedures and become America's "super-soldier," Captain America. The one difference in this retelling (inspired, no doubt, by the "Ultimate" version of Captain America featured in "The Ultimates") is that we're specifically told that the experiments give Captain America super-human abilities. But that's beside the point of the story, which is a wonderful story of a man out of time. That, plus the issue having the greatest cover of any Marvel comic published in 2008, makes this issue a large-lunged call to bring back their signature character, for Pete's sake.


And then there's the ongoing rejuvenation of The Legion of Super-Heroes over at DC Comics, all thanks to legendary writer Jim Shooter, who has kept his new run on this, his old stomping-grounds, positively sizzling with activity on many fronts, all the while packing in a disarming amount of characterization. Bit by bit, piece by piece, he's editing out the ridiculousness of the current Legion incarnation and weaving back in his own sure-footed grounding in character and action. His Legion is beset on all sides - physically by monsters continually adapting to their powers, politically from a suspicious United Planets eager to control the Legion. Each issue happens at breakneck speed, which is great (and something not one writer in ten can manage successfully), and we here at Stevereads confidently expect that the upcoming issues will feature some of the Legion basics Shooter hasn't got to yet - a possible Brainiac 5 meltdown, for instance, or the arrival on the scene of a genuine villain or two (the monsters in these issues are a good start, since there's got to be somebody pulling their strings). In the meantime, this is great stuff, especially for Legion fans.

All of the issue this time around were great stuff - something we doubt we'd be saying if we'd allowed the clerk at the Android's Dungeon to talk us into the latest issue of Trinity, or Final Crisis, or some such. A fate narrowly avoided, and as it is, we put aside our batch of comics smiling a contented smile.

The Rise of the Roman Empire

Our book today is The Rise of the Roman Empire (for want of a better title) by the first century b.c. historian Polybius, a Greek living among the best and brightest of his Roman conquerors.

Polybius was born sometime toward the end of the third century b. c. at Megalopolis, in primitive, untamed Arcadia, which belonged to the venerable Achaean League of states. His family was prominent, and he received an excellent though old-fashioned education in the old Arcadian way: hunting and drinking and boy-chasing, with very little emphasis placed on the pallid disciplines of the library and the lamp. We don't know at what point those disciplines began to exert their own pull of young Polybius' mind; it may have been around 182 b.c., when the young man was given the singular honor of bearing the ashes of Philopoemon (one of the greatest of all Achaeans) in funeral procession. Certainly at some point, probably shortly afterwards, Polybius wrote a massive biography of Philopoemon, now lost to us but very well known to ancient writers.

Epic composition wasn't his only accomplishment in those murky early years, however; by 170 b. c. Polybius had become prominent enough in the Achaean League to achieve the rank of commander of cavalry, and this was a problematic thing to have on your resume at the time, since the Romans had been at war with Macedon for a couple of years. When Macedon was defeated, in 168, the Romans swept through the whole of the Peloponnese with political retributions, including summoning about a thousand Achaeans into custody in Italy, including Polybius.

Most of these detainees - none of whom was ever given a trial or even much of a reason for their detainment, other than their nationality and being on the losing side - were given quarters of varying degrees of comfort in southern Etruria, but Polybius was luckier: for sixteen years, he was under the most genteel of house-arrests in custody of the family of Aemilius Paulus, the commander of the forces that had finally defeated Macedon. The great man's young son was Publius Scipio, with whom Polybius developed a friendship and working relationship, a mentorship of remarkable depth and flexibility. Scipio and brother Fabius suddenly found in their midst this man of immense experience and hard-won wisdom, and perhaps it's only natural they felt a bit of rivalry for his attention. In fact, Polybius could date his friendship with young Scipio to some surprising comments Scipio made to him after dinner one day, comments dealing directly with that rivalry, all of which Polybius himself relates to us:

One day when the three of them were leaving Fabius' house, Fabius happened to turn off toward the Forum, while Polybius and Scipio walked off in a different direction. As they were walking along, Scipio, blushing a little, asked Polybius in a hesitant voice, "Sir, why is it that when you're at a meal with my brother and me, you address all your comments to him, all your questions and conversation to him, not noticing me at all? It's starting to look as though you have the same opinion of me as everybody else: that I'm withdrawn and lazy, that I'm not a proper gung-ho Roman just because I don't plead cases in the law courts. 'His family doesn't need that kind of representative, people say, and it really irritates me."

Polybius was shocked by the young man's comments, for the boy was only eighteen years old. "By Jove, young Scipio," he replied, "what are you saying? You mustn't think such things - I don't do the things you say because I have a poor opinion of you, far from it. It's just that your brother is the older, and I assumed you shared the same thoughts and reactions. I'm amazed to hear different, and I'm delighted to learn that you're bothered by the possibility people might think you unworthy of your family - it shows you have spirit. I would be very, very happy to devote myself to helping you change that impression, helping you act and think in ways worthy of your ancestors."

Scipio might have been young, but he was no fool: he accepted gladly and used Polybius as a close advisor for the rest of the man's life, although always allowing him the freedom to travel, explore, and write on his own. Though thus deeply enmeshed in Roman affairs, Polybius never stopped caring about Greece and his beloved Achaean League - although their fractiousness and frequent lack of judgement predictably exasperated him. The great ancient travel-writer Pausanius records an inscription he saw in Lycosura: "Greece would never have suffered if she' listened to Polybius, and it was only through him that her suffering was relieved."

Polybius' subject is the rise of Rome to unparalleled power in the Mediterranean and beyond, a rise he follows through the epic events of the First Punic War and the Second Punic War, with liberal and lengthy digressions along the way for a wide variety of subjects (perhaps the most famous - and certainly the most excerpted - of which is his treatise on the Roman constitution, a treatise that cast a long shadow on the events of ensuing centuries, up to and most certainly including the American Revolution). His style is less fluid than that of Roman historian Livy (whose surviving works cover a great deal of the same subject matter), but his historical method - pursued at a time when the idea was still in its comparative infancy - is much more satisfyingly rigid.

There is no popular edition currently in print of all that survives in the single manuscript of Polybius, but the Penguin Classic (as is so often the case), translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert, will serve nicely as an introduction to the man and his work. That has been the bedrock task of the Penguin Classic series for lo, these many decades, and here as always they do their work admirably. Oxford World's Classics, so far as we know, never got around to Polybius, but you should!

In the Penny Press!

Well, it goes without saying - certainly here at Stevereads - that the most interesting, arresting thing in the Penny Press this time around is our very own letter, printed in the current issue of The Atlantic. As some of you will know, we issued a slight correction to the great literary critic B.R. Myers on the subject of the parables of Jesus. Myers, to his credit, has spunk enough to attempt a rebuttal, but his resorting to Mark is a surefire sign of desperation, as is his unconvincingly narrow construction of the passage he quotes. But still, we give him marks for determination and wish him well in his future endeavors!

Coming down from that height, we have Sam Anderson's fantastic piece in New York, "Raise High the Rafters," in which he maintains that the biggest challenge facing Barack Obama in the upcoming election will be curtailing his personal elegance to conform to the more lowbrow comfort zone of the general voting public, who, according to Anderson, dislike sophistication in any form. We here at Stevereads don't quite believe this, but we love how Anderson writes, as when he says "Style tells us, in a second, what substance couldn't do in a year," or when he describes the moment when his belief in Obama overcame his natural cynicism:

The speech that finally tipped my inner scale decisively toward belief was his least decorative: no refrain, little alliteration, no audience exploding at shouted catchphrases - just the man himself, standing there solemnly, neutralizing the hysteria of a potentially career-killing scandal with the naked power of grown-up thought. With his race speech, Obama chose the riskiest path in American politics: to be conspicuously thoughtful.


Of course, with high points must come low points, and over in The New Yorker, in a short story ironically titled "Deep-Holes," our low point this week is provided by a writer guaranteed to provide nothing else: yes, the issue features yet another endless damp lump of a short story by Alice Munro. This one is about some people doing some things, and it time and again offers up paragraphs like this:

While this was going on, Kent manages to slip behind her and finish up her champagne. Peter must have seen him do this, but for some peculiar reason he does not tell on him. Sally discovers what has happened some time later and Alex never knows about it at all, because he soon forgets there was anything in her glass and packs it neatly away with his own, while telling the boys about dolostone.

So one character does something, and none of the other characters see it or care, and the something never comes up again because nobody cares about it or knows about it (although Alex should, since he "soon" forgets there was anything in her glass, not immediately does, meaning there was an interval of indeterminate length in which somebody noticed and should have cared at least enough to mention it), and the purpose of the wooden, lifeless paragraph describing it is what, exactly? Or was the paragraph really describing anything? Might it not have been simple aimless typing? Let's pick another:

On the steps of the old bank building just beyond the subway entrance, several men were sitting or lounging or sleeping. It was no longer a bank, of course, though the bank's name was cut into the stone. She looked at the name rather than at the men, whose slouching or reclining postures were such a contrast to the old purpose of the building and the rush of the crowd coming out of the subway.

So these men were sitting on the steps of the old bank building, only it wasn't a bank anymore, and they weren't sitting but lounging, only they weren't lounging but sleeping (Munro probably means that some of the men were sitting, some were lounging, and others were sleeping, but her horrid sentence doesn't say that), and they were either slouching or reclining, but it doesn't matter anyway because the main character is paying attention to the building not the men, even though the men are all she describes or talks about?

Yeesh.

Fortunately, the same issue also provides a poem we here at Stevereads kinda-sorta like. It's by Charles Wright, and it's called, for reasons we can't make out at all, "Return of the Prodigal":

Now comes the summer, water clear, clouds heavy with weeping.
Tall grasses are silver-veined.
Little puddles of sunlight collect
in low places deep in the woods.
Lupine and paintbrush stoic in ditch weed,
larch rust a smear on the mountainside.
No light on the ridge line.
Zodiac pinwheels across the heavens,
bat-feint under Gemini.

Johh Donne and the Metaphysical Gesture

Our book today is John Donne and the Metaphysical Gesture by Judah Stampfer, and we found it - and loved it - solely due to the serendipitous magic that is the bargain lot of the Brattle Bookshop in Boston, Massachusetts.

We were in Boston checking on several pending real estate deals we've got going on scenic Beacon Hill (some guy named Tom Brady? Apparently some sort of disgraced local sports figure?), and whenever we're in Boston, we make a point of going to the Brattle, Boston's best used bookstore, with a good-sized selection of used books on all subjects and, more to the point, an entire adjacent lot full of bargain-carts - books of all descriptions for $1, $3, and $5 - a great majority of them titles you'd be asked to pay $8 (and up) for at any other used bookstore. Even confining yourself to just the $1 tables (as, to amuse ourselves, we almost always do), it's easy to accumulate an armload of great books - only to go inside and pay a pittance for the whole bunch.

The Brattle is always buying books and book collections, with the result that the bargain carts are always changing - and you can never tell what you'll find (i.e. it won't always be old textbooks, outdated electrical code books, and fourth-generation tattered paperbacks, like you'll almost exclusively find on the bargain-carts of other used bookstores). It was, for instance, on one of the $1 carts recently that we found our present book, which was written by Judah Stampfer in 1970, has scarcely ever been reprinted, and is currently out of print.


And which is fantastic! Stampfer writes so fluidly, so passionately about Donne and metaphysical poetry that the reader is completely hooked from the very first paragraph:

Metaphysical poetry eludes definition; yet many a group has oddly assorted characteristics. Quick speech, a bent for politics, and large blue eyes may characterize one family, starchy desserts and a need to be self-employed another. Not every designation requires a genus and a species. So we associate the truculent learnedness of the metaphysical poets, their sinewy music, strong lines, impassioned confrontations with large issues, distant conceits, colloquial speech, and a bent for religious experience.

John Donne wrote some of the most terrifyingly complex poetry in the English language, and he has baffled many a reader over the centuries. Stampfer reads him like he's never heard of the man before, eyes totally fresh for the wonder and the challenge of the verse, and he's such a good writer that he conveys that wonder straight to his readers. This is exactly what all literary criticism should do and what so little of it actually does. Stampfer's curiosity is as infectious as his reading is wide. Just listen to how good this stuff is:

An interest in words is necessarily paradoxical. Signs, not substantial things, they signal to the mind, the memory, the will. Who arranges nonsense syllables in iambic pentameter, or serves a menu as the main course for dinner? We do not trust them. Indeed, a man dwelling on words makes us uneasy. He is playing a game; a hurt is oozing out. Yet a child's language is its playground. We like the smack of talk, its knolls and fissures. Not every prattle calls for a diagnosis.

A poet is even more of a puzzle. Do his dense verbal textures, freighted with feeling, indicate more than a maladjustment? When does his fret of dissatisfaction become a hunger for the truth? Blake and Wordsworth regarded themselves as inspired craftsmen; but Tennyson and Browning hung between social engagement and withdrawal into words. Indeed, Browning dramatized a series of verbal eccentrics. And Arnold established so firm an equilibrium, we suspect he was doing penance. But for what? For writing poetry? Wasn't that activity innocent?

Stampfer knows perfectly well the perilous task he's undertaking in trying to plumb the depths of Donne's gorgeous, twisted poetry. He's likewise both aware and doubtful of the strictly biographical approach, as he beautifully states:

The personal drama of a reticent craftsman is not easily ferreted out. A lawyer develops his cases, a doctor his world of medicine; we catch an aura of subject matter, the pace of a career. But of a creative writer, whose words crackle in our intestines, we demand more. Grasping his endless smash-ups, abandoned children, a tearing of city air - all so cool, easy, and casual - we want some control of the mysterious stranger, before we allow a laying on of hands.

John Donne and the Metaphysical Gesture goes on and on like that, page after glorious page, and serves to underscore two things dramatically: first, the pitiless caprice of chance, that an intoxicating masterpiece like this should be long out of print when things like The Last Lecture ride the bestseller list for months on end, and second, the upliftingly egalitarian wonder of the Brattle bargain carts, which serve up such gemstones daily, for a dollar apiece, to the patient bookworm.

So then: when next in Boston, by all means make time for the Brattle Bookshop. And in the meantime, and thrill to that particular crackle in your intestines!

The Floating Book

Our book today is Michelle Lovric's lush and utterly confident first novel The Floating Book, which takes its readers to the very beginnings of print culture by taking them to 1468 Venice, where Wendelin von Speyer and his assistants Bruno Uguccione and Felice Feliciano have just set up the city's first printing press - which is revolutionary enough, but their choice of printing matter only increases the tension between themselves and the city's ruling councils: they've chosen a first edition of Catullus, whose Lesbia poems, some of you may recall from school, are raw and scandalous. As the inevitable controversy erupts, so too does an intense love triangle between Bruno, Felice, and a mysterious woman named Sosia.

Lovric interweaves this story with the story of Catullus himself (printed in a different font; as befits a book about the birth of Venetian printing, The Floating Book is gorgeously and variedly assembled), and it's impossible to judge which portions of the book are better: both 15th century Venice and 1st century b.c. Rome come marvelously alive through Lovric's talent. In the case of the former, tossed-off descriptions are brought home with one or two perfectly chosen adjectives:

The clouds had parted in front of them all the way back to Venice. By the time Lussietta and Wendelin set foot in Mestre, the warm rain had evaporated, leaving the streets shining with puddles dizzy as shaken mirrors.

And in the case of the latter, Catullus' tortured love for Clodia, his 'Lesbia,' is followed through all its painful stages, as is his terror that all the poems into which he's poured his heartache, all the work he's created in his short life, might one day amount to nothing:

I know all too well the way these things go. Ignominious destinies meet some of the best books ... after languishing overlong in the storerooms of the booksellers they're sold off by weight to the grocers and bakers to wrap pastries and spices or to line barrels in which cereals are stored, or theyre sent to the butchers where they're wadded around sanguineous cuts of veal and the lolling heads of tiny songbirds impaled on sticks. There are so many ways for a poet and his poems to lose their immortality - even while he's still alive! I walk past the butchers and bakers, whistling, but in my heart I dread to see my own work embrace their wares one day. Yesterday I saw one of Caelius's poems flapping like a tunic round a fine mackerel, and smiled for the first time in weeks.

Of course, to those modern-day readers familiar with Catullus' textual history, his worry in this passage is only the more ironic, for we have him today through the survival of only one manuscript - he came that close to being fish-wrapping and only fish-wrapping.

Lovric's book has everything in it for the reader tired of thin, jaded prose and flimsy plots. The old Venice and much older Rome it evokes are each perfectly rendered, and the storylines in each are very satisfyingly intertwined and counterbalanced. And as an added little bonus, each chapter is headed by an English rendering from Catullus. Since the book nowhere attributes them, we have to assume they're Lovric's own, and some of them are quite good:

You have forgotten.
But the Gods remember
and so does the Truth.
It's the truth that will make you sorry
one day
for everything you did, and everything you do.

We here at Stevereads whole-heartedly endorse The Floating Book; it's an extravagant example of historical fiction done right.

Looking for God in the Penny Press!

The New Yorker's current double-length extravaganza is being billed as its "Summer Fiction Issue, so naturally there's barely a word in it about fiction (unless you count a "new" short story by Nabokov, but surely "dentistry" would be a better term, as far as actually reading it goes?). Instead, a large chunk of the issue seems dedicated to matters of faith and doubt (the issue's highlight is a two-page piece by George Saunders called "Hypocrites" that's worth the cost of the whole damn thing).

The piece that caught our attention was "Holiday in Hellmouth" by the redoubtable James Wood, an omnibus review of various books that deal with the iniquities of the world and the problems faith has confronting them. Wood stays in book-reviewer mode for nine-tenths of his very deep, very thoughtful essay, but near its end a more passionate, personal note starts sounding more prominently:


Heaven, one of the tenderest verses in the Bible has it, is where God will wipe away all the tears from our faces. In her novel Gilead, Marilynne Robinson adds, in a line just as tender, if a little sterner, "It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required." Robinson, herself a devout Protestant, means that the immense surge of human suffering in the world will need, and deserves, a great deal of heavenly love and repair; it is as close as her novel comes to righteous complaint. But one could also say, more skeptically, that Christianity needs the concept of Heaven simply to make sense of all the world's suffering - that, theologically speaking, Heaven is "exactly what will be required." In the end, Heaven, it seems, is the only tenable response to the problem of evil. It is where God's mysterious plan will be revealed; it is where the poor and the downtrodden, the sick and the tortured, will be healed; it is where everything we went through on earth will suddenly seem "worth it."

This personal note of doubt achieves almost anguished undertones at the close of the piece, when Wood chooses to end with a series of implored open-ended questions that will sound familiar to anybody out there who's struggled with personal religious beliefs:

If God supposedly wipes away all tears from our faces in Heaven, why does he not do it now? Why does God not now establish paradise on earth, as the Jehovah's Witnesses believe he will do? And what is the purpose of these eighty years of not having the tears wiped from our faces?

As some of you may know, we here at Stevereads detest the Church. We hate its hypocrisy, we deplore its smugness, and we've fought our whole life to pry open the whalebone corsets it puts around any of its faithful who dare to think for themselves, to create, or to question. And you all know how we'd answer Wood's questions, since they all have the same answer: there's nobody out there, no magical Neverland where phantom selves get transported at the moment of death, no mystical father-figure carefully measuring everything we do.

But we're nothing if not fair here at Stevereads, and so we showed Wood's article to Father Terry O'Brien of Boston for a different viewpoint, and we'll now turn the podium over to him. As always, your thoughts are welcome:

God is all-powerful, and for that reason alone He tends to get blamed for everything. I read the article our host showed me, and there's implied blame on every page of it. The problem with blame, I think, is that it assumes a greater degree of involvement with the world than God exercises - or rather, I should say a greater degree of interactivity, for God is very involved in our lives; He may not be "carefully measuring" as our host says, but He believes in each and every one of us, and if we clear our heart of clutter, we can feel that belief and take strength from it. I believe this is what praying is: quieting our inner chaos long enough to feel God's loving presence and maybe even lean on it a little. That presence is what awakened my own faith, it's what drew me to my service, and it's been my rock during all the very worst times of my life.

But God's support isn't interactive. He doesn't make earthquakes happen; plate tectonics do. He doesn't cause floods; tidal currents and earthquakes at sea do. He doesn't cause cancer; rogue cells do. It's true He created the superstructure of the world in which those things happen, and of the universe in which that world exists (something more and more physicists are declining to debate, I think), but He no more continues to prompt each manifestation of those things than you or I individually decide to grow our hair or toenails. He created the world and everything in it, but He hasn't directly interacted with His creation since the Flood. He saved one family (and representatives of all his wild creatures) and then destroyed all the rest of His creation; but after He did that, He decided never to do it again. In other words, He changed.

That's essential, I think: God changed, and it's in that very aspect that we all were made in His image, for in all of creation, only mankind can change. I know our host will disagree with this, but this is one case where his activist zeal has got the better of his insight (to say nothing of his theology). I shouldn't say animals can't change - obviously, they can be traumatized, they can grow stronger or faster, and they can mourn. But those experiences don't change their selves, unless to break them. If a horse develops bone cancer and goes through operations and chemotherapy for months, that horse may recover, but whether he does or not, he'll still be the same horse. His 'personality' will not have changed, nor will his emotional makeup. But if a man goes through the same experience, his self may change drastically. He may become more giving, more honest, more loving - I've seen it happen. A young child stricken with some disease or burned badly often changes in like manner: the bravery and grace that may lie dormant in most of his playmates becomes so clear as to be blinding.

Take the example of a young woman I know. Some years ago, she fell into debt and drug addiction. She did nothing to help herself, and her friends and family turned away from her. She reached rock bottom, and there she found strengths within herself she hadn't guessed she had. With a lot of hard work (and yes, with prayer, but she did the work all on her own), she reclaimed her life, and her friends and loved ones, astounded at the finding of this lost lamb, in turn examined their own hearts. That young woman is now a source of strength to others, and her friends and loved ones will never be so quick to turn away from helping someone in need.

I'm not saying God gave that man cancer to make him more loving. Rogue cells (or other factors, but you take my point) caused the cancer. I'm not saying that child was stricken by God in order to make him shine with light. Tragedies happen in the world, even to the very young. And I'm not saying God caused that young woman's drug problem or hardened the hearts of her family (although I know He has a rep for that!). People make bad choices every day, and sometimes they correct them, with or without their family's help.

What I'm saying is, none of those things could happen in Heaven. Heaven is our relief from all of that, and for all I know God really is ready to wipe the tears from our eyes when we get there. But James Wood (and Marilynne Robinson) is wrong when he implies we're all somehow owed that gesture by God. God didn't create the suffering and evil of the world - much of it is the accidental by-product of the world being the world, and much more of it is the product of mankind itself. God wants mankind to be perfect, as He is perfect. He believes in that potential, for everybody. Whether or not we achieve it is entirely up to us. And I feel one thing very strongly: when the tear-wiping is over, the questions will begin: when tragedy happened to you, did you rise to meet it? Did you make sure it changed you for the better? When tragedy struck someone you love, did you go to their aid, or count yourself lucky that it wasn't you? When you looked upon the evils of the world, did you fight them, ignore them, or worsen them? How did you let your one and only stay on this world change you, and how did you change the world while you were in it?

I've always believed the central question about Heaven is this: will God be happy to see you?

We are here in this harsh world to make it better, to make as much of it better as we can, and to make ourselves better in the process. None of that would matter if God just reached in and helped us every time it was hard, or even impossible, to do. I'm sorry James Wood seems not to see that, but he should trust me that it's true. After all, I wear the collar: it's my job to help explain God to those who are having a hard time seeing Him. If I'm ever having trouble writing a magazine article, I'll hope Wood returns the favor!

June at Open Letters Monthly!

Let the celebrations commence - June heralds yet another issue of Open Letters Monthly, and this one is just exploding with juicy content!

The issue kicks off with a long poem by Jesse Ball, author of the critically-acclaimed novel Samedi the Deafness, but that's just a sample of the wonders that await you! Greg Waldmann writes on Israel's problematic anniversary; Sam Sacks does thorough - and thoroughly absorbing - roundup of critical reactions to controversial memoirist James Frey's debut novel; John Cotter muses on the book-length werewolf novel Sharp Teeth; our talent stable of freelancers share their thoughts and insights on subject as varied as Muhammed Ali, Etgar Keret, animal cognition, Goth werewolves, scientific experiments, and the prose of Margot Livesey. I'm also on hand, nattering on in the background about one damn thing after another.

And the Open Letters Quiz goes down swinging!

All that and much more is just a mouse-click away - so pop on over to that link and have yourself a fun hour reading!

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Our book today is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, and if your first reaction is anything like ours here at Stevereads, you're headed out the door with a tightly courteous little rictus on your face. Yes, yes: the book has perhaps the most regrettable title in recent memory - it reeks of twee preciousness, that heavy-handed almost leering juxtaposition of art and quotidia that wants to intrigue you so desperately it almost immediately repulses you.

What can we say? Mistakes happen, and perhaps the monstrous title of this book wasn't strictly the idea of its two authors - publishers can be a crass lot, and publicists are even worse - gawd only knows the algorithms they use to arrive at the products they push. In any case, disregard the title! Disregard the title and read the book.

The book is just about as charming and heartfelt and utterly involving a work of fiction as any we here at Stevereads have read this year, and we, we need hardly remind you, read lots of novels in any given quarter.

This story takes place in postwar England, in a time of rationing and coupons when everybody has their own memory of the Blitz and the bombings. At least one person made out well from those horrible years: writer Juliet Ashton, whose "Izzie Bickerstaff" columns gave a war-weary populace a few grim laughs at the worst of times. She's stopped writing those columns now, but their resale in book form has made her comparatively wealthy and sought-after on the admittedly meager postwar book-tour circuit. This is an epistolary novel (gawd help us) that hauls the reader into Juliet's world so quickly and so confidently that before you know it, you're every bit as involved in the lives of all the characters as the characters are themselves.

And such characters! Juliet is the best of them, but she's given some serious competition by the members of the eponymous literary society itself, each one of whom bonded to a love of reading (and bonded to each other) under the grimly capricious rule of the Nazis. Through the letters these characters exchange, the reader is taken on a marvelous journey, one none of you should miss. The book's two authors are to be hugely congratulated - and urged to collaborate again.

Epistolary novels are the hardest of all to quote in a review, and this book is no exception. Rather than try to give you all a sample of its glories and possibly fail (unthinkable, we know, but still), we here at Stevereads will instead urge you in the strongest possible terms: when The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society comes out, read it - borrow it, buy it, however you do it, but read it. Ignore the title, and you'll be very much pleased.

In the Penny Press!

A slightly belated look at the Penny Press here at Stevereads, where we've been slightly distracted of late. For instance, we're only just now getting to last week's TLS, which had its usual bounty of great stuff and one ominous little note, in Morris Dickstein's review of Richard Cook's new Alfred Kazin biography. Dickstein's piece (oh calm yourself, Beepy) is very good, but it opens with a few declarations that bear refuting:

Literary journalism is usually as perishable as the paper it's printed on. In times past, the most commanding reviewers might see their work collected in books. Now the general audience for literary essays seems to have disappeared, along with many newspapers and magazines that once published them.
Well, yes and no, right? If Dickstein really believed what he wrote, he wouldn't be writing literary essays for the TLS, now would he? And besides, his dire predictions fail to take into account the very medium in whose warm glow you're right this moment bathing: the Internet is, of course, where the 'general audience' for literary essays has migrated, and that 'paper it's printed on' reference already feels slightly old-fashioned, doesn't it? Print had its long golden age, as did steam and whale-oil, and in another generation even the most obstinate holdouts to paper-and-ink reading will have been won over by some innovation or other that soothes their old-fashioned nerves (we here at Stevereads, for instance, got an absolutely frightening amount of use out of our old manual typewriter - indeed, it sits within easy view whenever we write, even to this day - but the homely little detail that won us over to computers was the backspace ... the ability to magically undo any and all typing mistakes without the torturous necessity of white-out or retyping, like a gift from Heaven! After that, we kept pecking away on our mechanical typewriter for a while out of misplaced sentimentality, but after a while, we saw how pointless that was and stopped). Dickstein's lament is not only premature but misplaced, as the meticulous, wonderfully written prose over at Open Letters (among many other such places, although it's the best of them) shows ever month on the 1st.

Which isn't to say there isn't an abundance of good prose still in the print world! Take the latest issue of Esquire, for instance. Not only does it have a really good, really intense short story titled "Nightstand" by Daniel Woodrell, about a man who wakes to find a stranger standing at the foot of his bed, kills the stranger, and then watches his life change as a result, in disturbing ways the reader won't see coming. It's always a pleasure when Esquire's fiction excels, and "Nightstand" is the best thing they've published so far this year.

Then there's Mark Warren's little insert (oh calm down, Beepy) "Cracking the Code," part of a longer feature on racism in America. Warren very amusingly posits there's a code for how public figures talk about racism, and of course he has one particular public figure in mind:

Of course, you've got to be careful when administering the code visually, because there's a much higher probability that it'll backfire, and you'll be the one looking like a douchebag. Case in point: Earlier this year, the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton released a picture of Barack Obama, taken a couple of years ago when the senator was visiting Kenya. In the picture, Obama, who was gamely playing along by donning local garb, is wearing a turban and wrapped in a bedsheet over his khakis and polo shirt. Senator Clinton's people just put the picture out there, for our consideration, and there it hung in the air, like a fart. They of course couldn't say "Look, he really is a Muslim, and a foreigner, and lookee, he's so black!" So they said nothing, until the Obama campaign responded, essentially, "What the hell?" Whereupon Clinton's campaign manager attacked Senator Obama for being divisive. Awkward.

Trenchant stuff, especially considering the fact that as of this writing Candidate Clinton has just won a brace of Racist State Primaries and instead of being ashamed, instead of quietly shushing up the whole thing (like the way every Presidential candidate who gets the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan - and for a hundred years, somebody's got that endorsement in every race), she's trumpeted it as a sign the system still works, as a measure of the validity of her campaign.

It won't matter in the end, obviously. Barring an assassin's bullet (something Candidate Clinton is all but visibly relying on, which will end up being the least savory detail of her 2008 run), its pretty likely Senator Obama will be the Democrat who get their ass handed to them in the general election against the madman McCain. But it speaks in eloquent counterpoint to Obama's now famous speech on race relations in this country.

Obama is also the focus of Charles Pierce's ferocious, intelligent piece "The Cynic and Senator Obama," which takes as its organizing motif the idea that there's a segment of the smarter American voting public that still refuses to believe in Obama, to believe that he's hitting a genuine nerve in a broad spectrum of people - that he is, in other words, answering a need of some kind (it's worth noting that this isn't exclusively a good thing, needs being weak, after all). Pierce strikes an unashamedly partisan note throughout:

Someone will have to measure the wreckage. Someone will have to walk through the ruins. Someone will have to count the cost. More than anything else, the presidential election ongoing is - or, as a right, ought to be - about ending an era of complicity. There is no point anymore in blaming George Bush or the men he hired or the party he represented or the conservative movement that energized that party for what has happened to this country in the past seven years. They were all merely the vehicles through whom the fear and lassitude and the neglect and the dry rot that had been afflicting the democratic structures for decades came to a dramatic and disastrous crescendo. The Bill of Rights had been rendered a nullity by degrees long before a passel of apparatchik hired lawyers found in its text enough gray space to allow a fecklessly incompetent president to command that torture be carried out in the country's name. The war powers of the Congress had been deeded wholesale to the executive long before Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz and a passel of think-tank cowboys found within them the right of a fecklessly incompetent president to make war unilaterally on anyone, anywhere, forever. The war in Iraq is the powerful bastard child of the Iran-Contra scandal, which went unpunished.
In the article, the Cynic fights hard to retain his cynicism and in the end remains unconvinced by Obama and any of his various messages, but the prose is bracing throughout.

(in an associated point, John Richardson turns in a piece titled "Is This Man a Monster?" about former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, the author of the infamous 'torture memos' that will forever guarantee President George W. Bush a place, however dark, in history. Richardson's title question, about an innocent-faced, career-minded creature who conceived the memorandum that are this country's darkest moments embodied, can be answered with a simple 'yes,' but that doesn't make his article any the less compelling)

And surely for readers everywhere, the highlight of this particular issue of Esquire was its one-page interview with legendary author Gore Vidal. Those of us who've loved Vidal's work in the past have been universally troubled in the present, where our author has seemed to lose his way a bit. His latest memoir, Point to Point Navigation, was touching but ultimately saddening, something akin to the world's longest death notice.

There's something of that tone in Mike Sager's brief interview here, but it's delivered with more fire and wit. And the quips flow like Chianti:

I've developed a total loathing for McCain, conceited little asshole. And he thinks he's wonderful. I mean, you can just tell, this little simper of self-love that he does all the time. You just want to kick him. For a writer, memory is everything. But then you have to test it; how good is it, really? Whether it's wrong or not, I'm beyond caring. It is what it is. As Norman Mailer would say, "It's existential." He went to his grave without knowing what that word meant.

But the troublingly mortuary note is still struck here as well, as in this little revelation:

There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, "Well, so-and-so will like this," which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.

Well, yes, there is a bleak side to it, but fortunately this is a problem with an easy solution, and we here at Stevereads offer it to Mr. Vidal free of charge, in complete confidence as to its efficacy because we've repeatedly tested it ourselves: make young friends! Find new so-and-so's! Not only is it invigorating, but it keeps you on your toes, stops you from thinking you have all the answers (stops you, essentially, from masturbating in public). The English Department of any handy university could provide you with such new blood, or, failing that, we're sure the boys and girls over at Open Letters would be happy to volunteer! Merely click on the link and drop them a line!

Over in the Atlantic, there are two standout pieces this month, and neither one is by Christopher Hitchens (although he does write a lovely essay about Saki)! The first is called "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower," and it's written by "Professor X" (as in anonymous, not as in mutant) - and reading the piece, you can see why its author would want to remain anonymous: the thing is a bracing wake-up call about the over-proliferation of college students in this country, and the drastic failures of the pre-college educational system - first by utterly failing to prepare them for higher learning, and second by simultaneously filling their heads with the desirability of that goal.

Professor X is the guy standing between that goal and reality, as he ruefully writes:

Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it - try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn't been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades. For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of the work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less college.

The fault here, of course, lies not in the laudable goal of sending everybody to college; it lies with the criminally substandard state into which Americans have allowed their grade schools and high schools to fall. We here at Stevereads know a dozen teachers at such levels, and all of them routinely spend their own money on supplies, offer up their own time for private tutoring, try their best to reach classes sometimes numbering in the 30s, and doing all of this with virtually no support from local communities and businesses, despite the fact that such support is certainly in their long-term best interests. The reason Professor X is dealing with so many barely literate, intellectually incurious students in college is because they were allowed to pass that way out of high school. His despair at being the guy who hands out the failing grades is a visible symptom of a much more widespread rot.

Of course, none of it might ultimately matter, if the second Atlantic article turns out to be true. Gregg Easterbrook turns in a curiously flat piece about the end of life on Earth, as a result of a catastrophic meteor-collision. His piece, "The Sky is Falling," has some fascinating details lodged in a scattershot general approach (there's a long digression on the feasibility of building a lunar base that any first-year editor should have yanked out of the piece), and the star of the show is 99942 Apophis, our darling girl:

Right now, astronomers are nervously tracking 99942 Apophis, an asteroid with a slight chance of striking Earth in April 2036. Apophis is also small by asteroid standards, perhaps 300 meters across, but it could hit with about 60,000 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb - enough to destroy an area the size of France.

That destruction would only be the beginning, as all you fans of Armageddon can attest: following it would be shockwaves, tsunamis, earthquakes, and choking dust clouds. As Easterbrook puts it:

...the combination of shock waves and extreme heating at the point of impact generates nitric and nitrous acids, producing rain as corrosive as battery acid.

Hee.

As some of you may know, we here at Stevereads aren't terribly big fans of the human race (even though some of our best friends are humans). Mankind has proven itself to be a savage and spreading cancer across the face of the planet, a species whose defining action seems to be destruction. Diseases do little to cull the murderous herd, and wars are equally small-fry. A monstrous asteroid striking the planet would, it's true, wipe out all non-human life ... but if it also wiped out humanity, well, that would be a bargain even so. So we'll be watching closely in 2036, with fingers crossed.

And in the meantime, we'll be blogging. So there's karma still in the world!

Me Comic Read Good!

A bright new star arises in the blogospheric firmament! We here at Stevereads have been neglecting all you little knowledge-thirsty marmots, we know, and we apologize - affairs of state have called us away. But in the meantime, we strongly urge you all to cast your eyes on the latest in our link-roll to the right: Me Comic Read Good, which is, as of this writing, only one posting old and is already, fantastically, the opinion-setting high bar of comics reviewing anywhere online. Not since the heady days of Amazing Heroes has prose so zippy been lavished on prose so crappy, so even those of you who never read comics will want to tune in.

And those of us who DO have a new place to go for some high-flying opinionating!

dreadnought

Our book today is Dreadnought by Robert K. Massie, and it underscores one of our preoccupations here at Stevereads: the build-up to the end of the 19th century. An entire world began to end in 1914, as we've always maintained, but an old world can start to end long before a new one is fully formed.

The important thing to remember about that transition - indeed, the important thing to remember about all history - is that the past was populated by real people. A self-evident observation, one might think, but we here at Stevereads have many times seen otherwise intelligent young people confront a work of history - even one as magnificently engaging as Dreadnought - and respond with helpless despair, or complete indifference. Neither reaction would be possible if those young people knew, really felt that history books contained living, breathing people, some of whom were as young as they are themselves.

Massie succeeds better than anybody writing on the First World War in showing us those living, breathing people, people caught up in the whirlwind of changes that precipitated a cataclysm such as the world hadn't seen in two thousand years. Just look at that great monstrous thing pictured on the front of Massie's book; it (well, close to it - a free book to the first person who can spot the problem) is a picture of that cataclysm, in miniature - arm run amok, reaching for a global scale. The people living in the world of such new things grappled with them as unsurely as people today grapple with suitcase nukes or bioweapons considerably more advanced than mustard gas. They were no different in this regard than people are today - often young, often clueless, often afraid. Approaching history with that in mind reveals it for what it's always been: the best thing in the world to read. Massie's kind of narrative zeal makes it easy to see this.

Of course, his story also contains two individuals who weren't young, two people posterity has come to think of as never having been young. The first of these is Otto von Bismarck, Prussia's "Iron Chancellor" and cold-eyed designer of the calibrated steel spring-trap that would in 1914 snap closed on all of Europe. Massie has a field day with this most congenial of villains, painting a wonderful portrait of the man who so often cowed his nominal superior, Kaiser Wilhelm - as in the contest of wills they had over Bismarck's proposed savage antisocialist measures:

William pleaded that he did not wish to begin his reign by shooting his subjects. He appealed to the ministers, but they, not daring in Bismarck's presence to challenge him, meekly supported the Chancellor. What the young Emperor might do if they failed to support him, they did not know. What Bismarck would do if they opposed him, they knew exactly: he would destroy them.

The second of these never-young individuals is Queen Victoria, whose matriarchal presence on the English throne held all the simmering forces of chaos throughout the West in check. Her death, it could be argued, did more to ensure the eventual outbreak of an unprecedented kind of war than any other single factor, but despite this, and despite the way she's become frozen in the popular mind as a "we are not amused" monument, Massie never fails to ferret out just the right anecdote to show us the actual living person who wore the crown:

At dinner one night at Osborne House, the Queen entertained a famous admiral whose hearing was impaired. Politely, Victoria had asked about his fleet and its activities; then, shifting the subject, she asked about the admiral's sister, an elderly dowager of awesome dignity. The admiral thought she was inquiring about his flagship, which was in need of overhaul. "Well, ma'am," he said, "as soon as I get back I'm going to have her hauled out, roll her on her side, and have the barnacles scraped off her bottom." Victoria stared at him for a second, and then, for minutes afterward, the dining room shook with her unstoppable peals of laughter.

There are gems like this scattered liberally throughout Dreadnought, despite its somber main subject. This book - and its equally-spellbinding sequel, Castles of Steel, are still in print and very much worth your time and attention, especially if you can't in any way picture yourself reading an 800-page history of pre-WWI Europe. Especially if that's true, peak into this book and be happily persuaded otherwise.

The Nocturnal Naturalist

Our book today is The Nocturnal Naturalist by Cathy Johnson, and it's both a gorgeous little gem in its own right and a happy reminder from a seasoned, passionate naturalist to the rest of us: all the good stuff happens at night.

Those of us who've been familiar with the quiet of late, late night know that the whole feel of the nearest big park changes completely from that of the day. Animals of sizes and varieties you'd never guess make their appearance and go about their business - if you're very still, they won't notice you, because they've got lots to do before the hated sun returns. In our own neighborhood, skunks abound; in an earlier neighborhood, the pristine quiet of 2 a.m. was disturbed once by a loud, prolonged brawl between two enormous raccoons; in the wooded areas of Boston's Olmsted Park, house cats who're pampered all day long by their unsuspecting owners viciously fish naked chipmunk babies from their tree-bowls; in Central Park, gigantic owls glide noiselessly over paths squawky tourists crowd by day. It's all unbelievably fascinating.

Johnson's book captures that fascination perfectly, and she captures also the beauty of it all. She has the naturalist's perfect ear for the nature of sounds, and her prose is almost as alive as the lush world it describes:

There is a kind of texture to the darkness, a substance, a heft. It has rained and drizzled and rained again, late afternoon into evening. At last. It has been dry too long. Now, at 10 p.m., the darkness is almost tactile. The quiet is woven with the sound of dogs. I hear them call from neighborhood to neighborhood in their varied voices. A random non-rhythm directs the sounds, a chaotic symphony of small-town Saturday night.

I hear cars out on the highway, singly or in convoys, heading for the city - heading anywhere but this backwater bedroom community, twenty-eight miles from Kansas City.

Let them go. Let them all go. When they are gone, the sound of cars and trucks will be reeled in behind them, leaving silence. Wonderful silence, woven with dog's voices and the syncopated plop and splatter of moisture that has gathered on tree limbs to roll in silver mercury drops to the ground.

Johnson's wandering observations take in all seasons, and she sprinkles them with scientific facts about the creatures she hears and sees, but such concrete information isn't really what she's meaning to convey in The Nocturnal Naturalist. Rather, the book is filled with the author's love of this other world so many people give no thought to at all. And her luminous lookings extend well past the borders of that world, encompassing much that is wonderful by day, like this note about a random dawn:

A solitary robin - the first to return to my territory, our shared domain - repeats his descending-note sequence, his spring song, as distinctive as a fingerprint. A long winter may have passed without hearing from him, but I know the voice of an old friend.

The Nocturnal Naturalist is filled with the author's quite lovely woodcuts (all the best slim volumes of natural history have copious, heartfelt illustrations), and we here at Stevereads whole-heartedly recommend it to soothe your harried souls. It was published in 1989 and is today out of print, but thanks to our new, updated links-list here on the site, you all now have instant access to Alibris.com, the single greatest book-acquiring site on the Internet. Our habit here at Stevereads to recommend out-of-print books need no longer result in a barrage of bleated requests that we SEND you a copy of each! Just click on over to Alibris, and tell 'em Stevereads sent you!

300!

Well, with this post Stevereads turns 300, and what better book to feature on such an occasion than Frank Miller's comic book reshaping of the famous incident from Herodotus about how a handful of Spartans and their allies stood at the 'Hot Gates' of Thermopylae against the vast hordes of the Persian Empire under the despotic rule of Xerxes?

Of course, the Persian Empire doesn't come off all that well in Miller's telling - this is a comic book, after all, and comics (except for the current continuity over at Marvel, that is) need both heroes and villains. The heroes in Miller's book are the super-buff Spartans (despite hailing from a professional warrior culture, Miller's Spartans fancy going into battle with no clothes on) led by King Leonides. They're all uniformly fit and shapely, coolly competent at killing their enemies (the one Spartan in the book who's isn't physically fit is, of course, a villainous traitor). The villains are twofold: first, the seemingly endless force of overdressed (i.e. dressed) Persians who want to conquer the whole world, and second (because this is a Miller book and he's a grade-A paranoid crackpot) the shadowy Powers That Be who manipulate everything from the shadows.

Miller's Persians are a hoot (their weirdness is only amplified in the famous movie adaptation - amplified and added to: those of you coming to the graphic novel expecting to see the Giant Bestial Gym Teacher or the Guy With Swords For Arms will be disappointed), especially his Xerxes, who manages to be both effeminate and nine feet tall. They are decadent and weak, and the Spartan allies aren't much better, all being conscripts from other professions instead of hoo-rah professionals.

Actual women are hardly present in the book (except for Leonides' wife, she of the "come back with your shield or on it" ultimatum), which certainly introduces the waft of homoeroticism that always clings to warrior cultures. This effect is gigantically multiplied in the movie, which is practically a soft-core porn love-letter to Solo-flex.

And you all already know the ending: Go and tell the Spartans and all that, every warrior dying right there in the pass. But Miller's arresting visuals (so eerily transposed wholesale to the movie) are totally winning, especially given the book's extra-wide format. His battle-scenes convey multi-layered chaos, and Lynn Varley's coloring work is, as always, superb. And when all the bloodletting is over, Miller drops in a note suggesting his readers check out this Herodotus guy - something we here at Stevereads must always approve! You could scarcely have a more enjoyable introduction to that extremely enjoyable historian than Miller's 300, so we happily recommend it to both newcomer and seasoned (but hopefully clothed) veteran as well!

And as far as our 300th anniversary goes, we here at Stevereads would like to thank you all for stopping by so regularly and making this so much fun. For the next 300 postings, you can expect more of the same wisdom and sexiness you've always found here - plus a whole lot more, as we experiment with new ideas. Our new head of accounting has suggested, for instance, an unobtrusive Google Ads bar floating somewhere on the site, and you can look for a long-overdue overhaul of the links over there on the right-hand margin. Movies, TV, comics, the daily news, the sprawling content of the Internet ... all will be represented, plus our customary infallible book reviews!

So keep on looking in, and tell your friends! There's enough mockery here for everybody!

In the Penny Press!

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Frederick goes on:

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

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

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

The Serpent's Tale

Our book today is The Serpent's Tale by Ariana Franklin, her follow-up to 2006's Mistress of the Arts of Death, one of the best historical novels we here at Stevereads have read in many, many years. You'd think that fact would have made us eager to read The Serpent's Tale, but truth be told, it initially had the opposite effect.

Our esteemed colleague the Empress put it best: when a book grabs you the way Mistress of the Arts of Death does, you dread the follow-up because you're worried it won't - worried not only about a limp reading experience in the sequel, but worried that it'll lower your opinion of the original, which will now seem like a random fluke, unworthy of all the admiration you thought it deserved.

Fortunately, such doubts are dispelled about five minutes into reading The Serpent's Tale. It's every bit as perfectly plotted, every bit as beautifully written, and every bit as refreshingly intelligent as its predecessor. It's a marvel, and one we can't recommend strongly enough.

The scene is medieval England under the mostly-benevolent rule of Henry II, and the story features the return of one of the greatest detective-story protagonists of them all, Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, our Mistress Adelia, who was trained at the School of Medicine at Salerno and so has little patience for the primitive witch-doctoring that passes for medical science in the rest of the West. She has little patience for that world's treatment of women, either, but to forestall accusations of witchcraft (or simple, sexist assault) while in England, she must pretend to be the assistant to her bodyguard Mansur, who must pose as the actual doctor in the duo.

(Setting her story in an age of such brutal and universal misogyny might have prompted Franklin to get up on her soap box about women's rights, but she's too smart for that. Mistress Adelia is all the more perfect a focal point for thinking about such issues specifically because she's so humanly less than perfect, and that in itself is quite a feat: Franklin has created a character the reader must get to know, and the process is infinitely rewarding)

Mistress Adelia, accompanied by her steadfast friend Gyltha, by Ward, her malodorous dog, by Mansur, and by her infant daughter Allie, is called upon by Henry to probe into the death of Rosamund Clifford, Henry's mistress. Almost immediately, this mission brings Adelia and her friends into contact with Rowley Picot, little Allie's father, now made a bishop by his friend and patron Henry, and this increases the tension: Rowley would have stayed with Adelia, but she insisted that he leave her to serve his king, and he let himself be convinced. It's a sign of Adelia's wonderfully believable complexity that she's both grateful that Rowley is helping a mostly-worthy king and resentful that he would leave her, even at her own insistence.

The scene where now-Bishop Rowley first lays eyes on his tiny daughter shows with rapid-fire ease a great many of the writerly things Franklin does perfectly:

There was a sudden shout from the bedroom. "It's here? She's brought it here?" Now down to his tunic, a man who looked younger and thinner but still very large stood in the doorway, staring around him. He loped to the basket on the table. "My God," he said. "My God."

You dare, Adelia thought. You dare ask whose it is.

But the bishop was staring downward with the awe of Pharaoh's daughter glimpsing baby Moses in the reeds. "Is this him? My God, he looks just like me."

"She," Gyltha said. "She looks just like you."

How typical of church gossips, Adelia thought viciously, that they would be quick to tell him she'd had his baby without mentioning its sex.

"A daughter." Rowley scooped up the child and held her high. The baby blinked with sleep and then crowed with him. "Any fool can have a son," he said. "It takes a man to conceive a daughter."

That's why I loved him.

"Who's her daddy's little moppet, then," he was saying, "who's got eyes like cornflowers, so she has - yes, she has - just like her daddy's. And teeny-weeny toes. Yumm, yumm, yumm. Does she like that? Yes she does."

Adelia was helplessly aware of Father Paton regarding the scene. She wanted to tell Rowley he was giving himself away; this delight was not episcopal. But presumably a secretary was privy to all his master's secrets - and it was too late now, anyway.

The bishop looked up. "Is she going to be bald? Or will this fuzz on her head grow? What's her name?"

"Allie," Gyltha said.

"Ali?"

"Almeisan." Adelia spoke for the first time, reluctantly. "Mansur named her. Almeisan is a star."


Naturally, as the king's man, Rowley wants the question of who killed Rosamund cleared up as soon as possible. And as an Englishman - one of countless whose lives were torn apart by the civil war fought between King Stephen and the Empress Maud - he'd like a solution that doesn't plunge the country into civil war again. But such a solution at first seems unlikely in the extreme, since the prime suspect is none other than Henry's estranged wife, Eleanor of Acquitaine.

Franklin's chosen a perfect backdrop against which to set her independent-minded female doctor; English history would have to wait five more centuries before its affairs would be so deeply marked by the destinies of great women; Empress Maud, Rosamund Clifford, Eleanor of Acquitaine .. Adelia belongs in such company, and Franklin expertly extends this awareness everywhere, including her description of the nuns who tend to Godstow Abbey, where pivotal pieces of the action unfold:

If asked, its twenty-four nuns and their female pensioners would have insisted that it was the Lord God who had called them to abandon the world, but their air of contentment suggested that the Lord's wish had coincided exactly with their own. Some were widows with money who'd heard God's call at their husbands' graveside and hurried to answer it at Godstow before they could be married off again. Some were maidens who, glimpsing the husbands selected for them, had been overwhelmed by a sudden vocation for chastity and had taken their dowries with them into the convent instead. Here they could administer a sizable, growing fiefdom efficiently and with a liberal hand - and they could do it without male interference.

The Serpent's Tale is an utterly engrossing book, the kind of novel-reading experience you hope for always but so seldom actually get. You'll miss subway stops, you'll sit in parked cars, and you'll put off TV and the like, as it weaves its spell and draws you deeper and deeper into the mystery of who poisoned fair Rosamund. And when you're done, just as in Mistress of the Arts of Death, you'll feel like you lived the book's events, instead of merely reading them. We here at Stevereads urge you to put both books at the top of your list and waste no time in reading them.

worse than myself!

"I do so like it when one of my friends gets published," great American novelist Dawn Powell once said, "it feels like a cause being furthered."

We here at Stevereads couldn't agree more, and so it's with considerable pleasure that we notify (for those of you who didn't know it) and remind (for those of you who did) you all that our friend and unindicted co-conspirator Adam Golaski's book Worse Than Myself has just been published by the incredibly-poorly-named Raw Dog Screaming Press.

Those of you with long memories may recall that Adam's ongoing literary concern, New Genre, holds the singular distinction of being the only small press periodical we here at Stevereads have ever reviewed (and that to generally positive result, if memory serves). If that periodical is any indication of what's in this new book (a copy of which, inexplicably, has yet to arrive at our palatial offices here at Stevereads - we suspect a thieving intern and are planning a random firing-pogrom in response), readers who favor dark, introspective, challengingly intricate stories will not be disappointed.

So let's have a congratulating round of applause for Adam, and here's hoping those of you with a yen for the darker corners of genre-bending fiction will click on over to your favorite giant online bookselling combine and order up a copy of Worse Than Myself. We'd tell you to 'tell 'em Stevereads sent you,' but then they'd be so worshipfully nervous they'd probably screw up your order, so you'll have to go it alone!

May at Open Letters Monthly!

It's that jubilant time of the month again - the first, when an eager world gets to feast its eyes on a brand-new update of Open Letters Monthly! And boy, what a feast it is this time around! We have a poem from two-time National Book Award winner Clayton Eshelman, and we have the latest installment of Adam Golaski's brilliant translation of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,' Green. Newcomer Amelia Glaser makes a unique and fervent plea to Dmitri Nabokov regarding his father's last manuscript. Megan Doll reviews the latest from Siri Hustvedt, and John Rodwan confronts possible imperfections in one of his literary heroes. Redoubtable regulars Chad Reynolds, Karen Vanuska, and Thom Daly all turn in solid, delightful pieces, and Carolyn Grantham reviews a book purporting to be a collection of great blogs (our name doesn't come up, strangely). And of course there are the two main attractions: Sam Sacks doing a classic review/retrospective of the great Peter Matthiessen, and, after an absence from the Table of Contents, poetry editor John Cotter returning with a smart and deft review of the latest collection from August Kleizahler. And we're there as well, nattering on about one damn thing or another (including the ongoing 'Year with the Tudors,' which this month features videos, for those of you who like bright moving pictures!).

It's a veritable feast, so set aside an idle hour and dig in!