Flecks of Gold in the Penny Press!

March 18, 2010

Since I’m the argumentative sort (this will be no news-flash to most of you), it’s easy for me to get so caught up in yelling at the Penny Press that I overlook one of the biggest reasons to read it – and the biggest single reason why you should all be reading Open Letters every month: it’s only in the admittedly amorphous field of ‘literary journalism’ that you’ll find really smart, really articulate authors cutting loose with wit, acid, accumulated experience, and a certain free-floating brilliance you often won’t see in their more considered (i.e. less deadline-driven) prose. We all revere Edmund Wilson, after all, but who wouldn’t honestly prefer reading him dishing up his thoughts on John Dos Passos than slog through To the Finland Station again? The same thing with Virginia Woolf: the difference between reading one of her novels and reading her glorious, chatty, discursive book-essays is the difference between listening to your parish priest give a sermon during Mass on Sunday morning and listening to him freely discoursing after supper and supper’s cordial glass of wine – the former is no doubt good for your soul, but the latter is good for your mind, for your mercurial heart.

It’s only in literary journalism (a bugboo of a title, I know, by which I essentially mean short essays about somebody else’s art-production: a theater review, an author career-overview, one of Locke Peterseim’s brilliant movie reviews, somebody writing intelligibly about dance, etc) that an author will ask questions for which he doesn’t already have a whole seminar’s worth of answers prepared; it’s only in literary journalism that you’ll find lifelong serious readers actually talking about books, as opposed to lecturing about them. This difference is facilitated – almost necessitated – by the nature of the genre: a book-critic is forcibly reminded that his subject exists on a continuum: the author is still alive (usually – or not usually, in my own case), the work is still ongoing, so not all the answers are in. Great theater reviews can’t avoid this provisional humbling: they’re seeing one, at most two performances of a show before deadline comes calling. Literary journalism – especially the online variety – is more plastic than literature … corrections can be made, debates can flourish in letter columns, and everybody’s still filling all their spare time with reading. It’s thrilling.

Well, it can be, when it’s done well. Which, admittedly, is not all that often. We’ve all read countless book reviews, movie reviews, TV reviews, etc. that were ‘phoned in’ (a rhetorical holdover from when it was literally true, when distant reporters would commandeer a phone line and call in their stories to waiting typists back at the newsroom – the implication of haste has largely scrubbed off the term, but the implication that the resulting prose wasn’t considered at all by its writer is still with us, and still accurate) – a writer will pick up a couple of obvious points off the surface of a work, roll them around for a few paragraphs, then toss off a semi-witty exit-line and call it a day. The goal of any editorial team worth its salt is to use such pieces as seldom as possible, to hunt continuously for better, more lively prose to publish. It can’t always be found in time for deadline, but when it is – oh! Then you can have some great reading experiences!

Take the latest Harper’s – not the place I tend to go for such pith and merit, and my trepidation only increases when the subject of one such potential experience is Arthur Koestler, a boring, overrated author who’s nevertheless managed to snare and hold a certain amount of critical attention for the last fifty years. Literature periodically turns up such people, like rocks in a plowed field, and then you just have to wait patiently for the vogue to die down (which it sometimes doesn’t do – I’m still waiting for the world to wake up to the fact that 90 % of Hemingway is garbage and 100% of Gertrude Stein is too, but thanks to the heedless engines of academia, it isn’t likely to happen).

I was encouraged this time around by the fact that the article in Harper’s was written by Nicholas Fraser, one of the best book-essayists working today. And he didn’t disappoint: his review of Michael Scammell’s mammoth new biography of Koestler is infinitely better reading than the 200 pages of that book I managed to wade through before feeding it to my dogs – hell, it’s infinitely better than almost everything Koestler himself wrote. And the joy here, as I opened so many windy paragraphs ago, is that of great prose finely honed against the ticking clock:

… he repaired to the English countryside and played chess, preferring the company of his dogs to that of humans. In his later years, he wrote many books in which he alternately proffered science as a solution to the ills of mankind and attacked scientific pretensions on the grounds that science had become an orthodoxy as powerful and misleading as the Communism of his youth. Some of these books sold well, but without exception they have aged badly. Koestler attained brief moments of notoriety in the late 1960s when he said that man’s violence might be tamed by the development of a drug that diminished aggression. He became famous for encouraging and even attending unsuccessful spoon-bending sessions. Koestler insisted that his later work was important; he was wrong, of course, but one must appreciate in the aging, cranky Koestler the true skeptic’s disposition to overthrow any orthodoxy in sight.

That ought to stand as the final word on the author – at least until some equally talented writer comes along and offers a spirited challenge to that ‘he was wrong, of course’ – I hope it happens in Harper’s: the symmetry would be appealing.

Still, it’s not usually Harper’s where I go to find such great stuff; usually, I start with those twin titans of the literary-criticism world: the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books.

In the latter, Tim Dee writes a very lively “Diary” essay about bird-watching (with a tip of the hat to Jeremy Mynott’s Birdscapes, which also got a favorable review at Open Letters) – or rather, bird-watching versus birders:

It’s easy to distinguish between the two types. Birders are the green-clad, kit-festooned action men of blasted headlands, sewage farms and reservoir causeways. They take pelagic trips and dribble a bucket of rancid bouillabaisse behind a boat to entice rare petrels: this is called ‘chumming’. What is crucial for them is the moment between sighting a bird and identifying it. There is a potent second or two (this can extend to hours if a tricky rarity is glimpsed) when the bird is wrested from a backdrop of wind or sea or marsh, or singled out from a cloud of lookalikes, and then named. In their itch to tag the wild, birders travel through the world as if they were closing it down.

But the prettiest gem this time around comes from the TLS, where Juliet Fleming turns in one of the most delightful, insightful theater reviews I’ve read so far this year. She’s writing about Peter Hall’s new production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for the Rose Theatre, and practically every line of her review is ebulliently quotable, starting with the very first, which made me laugh out loud:

Could it be that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not a very good play?

She’s talking about what a poorly-constructed, scatterbrained, ultimately silly play it is, but she’s mindful of the fact that a play – especially one by Shakespeare – can be all of those things and still work incredibly well, and she’s absolutely right that this is a defining characteristic of the play in question:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in particular, celebrates the power of theatre to move audiences in ways for which there is no accounting.

This is wonderful stuff (as is her throwaway quip while narrating the performance’s action: “So far, so adequate”), and yet it will likely never be anthologized anywhere or reprinted in any venue – it enjoys its only brief lifespan right here, in this evanescent staging where so much fine, fun writing happens. Like I said: thrilling.

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Comics: The Penultimates!

March 18, 2010

Marvel Comics served up two pivotal chapters in its “Siege” storyline this week – the penultimate chapter of “Dark Avengers” (a series in which psychotic government hatchet-man Norman Osborn, with duped official sanction, creates his own team of Avengers using bad guys costumed as good guys), and the penultimate chapter of “Siege” (a series in which the aforementioned Osborn and his ‘dark’ Avengers and their storm troopers launch a full-scale attack on the fabled city of Asgard, home of the Norse gods, which at the moment is hovering about twenty feet over some empty badlands in Oklahoma). The tension – as events that have been percolating for a couple of years now start to boil over – is extremely well-handled by all involved, and the feat of these two issues, which tell very closely interlinked stories in perfect cooperation, is, to put it mildly, not Marvel’s usual way of doing things.

“Dark Avengers” should be read first, if only for the enormous pleasure of seeing Norman Osborn’s secret ally finally revealed. Some of you may recall that I made a prediction about this ally’s identity waaay back when this whole adventure was starting, and I’m happy to admit I was wrong – happy mainly because the actual identity of that mysterious ally is so perfect, so plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face that I laughed a bit when it was revealed: I should have seen this, the simplest possible answer, coming.

Of course the secret ally is the same ultra-powerful secret ally Osborn’s always had: the super-strong energy-wielding Sentry – only in his Edward Hyde persona as ‘the Void.’ Brilliant.

In the previous issue, readers saw Norman Osborn talk the Sentry down from a tantrum in which he might have destroyed Manhattan, and in a moment of criminal insight worthy of the former Green Goblin, Osborn realizes that the Sentry’s terrified, traumatized wife might be the disruptive element in Osborn’s control over her husband. He orders his ‘dark’ Hawkeye (actually the murderous Daredevil villain Bullseye) to make Mrs. Sentry disappear.

In this issue that happens. Under the pretext of flying her to a safe house to wait out the current crisis, Bullseye gets her alone in an auto-piloted plane and proceeds with his trademark snide mind-games:

You’re husband, he’s almost a god – and you – you’re kind of, well, frumpy is the best word I can think of. I mean, he can have anybody.I mean, I can have anybody and all I do is kill people. And I swear, I can get any girl I want. Imagine the ass he’s missing out on because he’s married to you. And look at you. Do you even own a brush? Or a mirror?

This is great, ghoulish stuff, perfectly in character for everybody, despite how ugly those characters are. The issue’s only weird element comes not from the writing but from the artwork. Artist Mike Deodato has been doing the best work of his career on “Dark Avengers,” and that continues here (even the bare-bones horizontal sequence in which Bullseye kills Mrs. Sentry is a homage to the similar linearity other artists have used in some of Bullseye’s more famous murders in other comics), but every so often there are panels that were constructed entirely on a computer, and the contrast between them and Deodato’s regular work is jarring.

The issue segues perfectly into the big-scale goings-on in “Siege,” Marvel’s breakout hit (sales are running at almost three times Marvel’s own exuberantly pumped expectations), in which all Hell is breaking loose during the aforementioned Osborn invasion of Asgard. This issue features more fantastic Oliver Coipel artwork, and it’s a great thrill-ride, despite multiple oddnesses in the storytelling (one minute Thor is furiously fighting the Sentry, the next he’s calmly standing over a defeated Norman Osborn, for instance, and a newly-returned Iron Man (Tony Stark) is able to remotely shut down Osborn’s own super-armor even though we were specifically told many, many issues ago that Osborn had all the Stark-technology suits replaced with his own armor and weapons-tech).

We get some absolutely great, glad-you-waited-for-it moments, the best of which is certainly comes from the fact that writer Brian Michael Bendis remembered which Marvel character should have the payoff moment of finally decking Norman Osborn (and he gives that character a perfect line while doing it, a ‘real person’ line instead of a comic book slogan)(and there’s the fitting little image of Captain America putting a calming hand on his shoulder the moment after). And of course Coipel’s action-sequences are spectacular, especially the fight – such as we see of it – between Thor and the Sentry. When Coipel draws Thor hammering the Sentry with lightning, you can practically feel it (and he’s one of the only working artists who could have convincingly portrayed what happens to the city of Asgard in this issue). But for me, the neatest such little moment passes so quick you almost don’t notice it: in the midst of the melee, Captain America and his former WWII sidekick Bucky are bantering, just as they did in the Jack Kirby-drawn comics of seventy years ago. I smiled.

Oddly, the issue is almost as full of missed moments too – after all, this is the issue where Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man are reunited on the same side after years of separation, alienation, and heartbreak, and yet in this issue they just take up fighting the bad guys with nary a word or look exchanged. I presume such payoff moments will come later, but considering the fact that five pages of this issue are a text-only backup feature, I wonder that room couldn’t have been found to work in just a single panel or two in the main issue, showing how these three react to seeing each other again.

But picky comics fans can’t have everything (!), and this issue delivers a lot, including a slam-bang cliffhanger that sets up what promises to be a very exciting conclusion. You can read all about that here when it ships to comic stores, I’m guessing  sometime in August.

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The Red Hourglass!

March 17, 2010

Our book today is Gordon Grice’s mesmerizing 1998 thriller The Red Hourglass: The Lives of Predators. This is electrifying, horrifying stuff – Grice takes a close look at the predatory tactics and the encounter-lore of a few common predators in the natural world: spiders, snakes, mantids, and, interestingly, pigs and dogs. We get brief, intense natural histories of the black widow, the tarantula, the rattlesnake, and – in this great book’s most indelible chapter, the brown recluse spider. And like all the best strong, impressive writing, it has unintended side-effects: after you finish The Red Hourglass, you won’t pay an anxiety-free visit to your basement, patio, or attic – to say nothing of the great outdoors – for about a year. And this effect is evergreen: reread the book after many months, and you’ll still be out for another full year.

Part of the secret to this dark magic is the fact that Grice picks omnipresent creatures as his subjects, rather than, say, the great white shark or the grizzly bear. He picks animals you often don’t have to make any special effort to meet (especially if you live in the American West and Southwest). In fact, reading his book you’re reminded of that old saw of natural history books, that no matter where you’re doing your reading, you’re probably not more than five feet from a spider of one variety or another. In the grip of The Red Hourglass, you’ll become certain all of those watching spiders are venomous.

He studies the black widow spider as a passionate amateur who’s caught and kept several throughout his life and never been bitten. He recounts in fearful detail the agonies healthy adults tend to experience upon being bitten, and you can tell he revels in the fact that genuine mysteries lurk in the exact method of that agony:

The venom contains a neurotoxin that accounts for the pain and the system-wide effects like roller-coaster blood pressure. But this chemical explanation only opens the door to deeper mysteries. A dose of the venom contains only a few molecules of the neurotoxin, which has a high molecular weight – in fact, the molecules are large enough to be seen under an ordinary microscope. How do these few molecules manage to affect the entire body of an animal weighing hundreds or even thousands of pounds? No one has explained the specific mechanism. It seems to involve a neural cascade, a series of reactions initiated by the toxin, but with the toxin not directly involved in any but the first steps of the process. The toxin somehow flips a switch that activates a self-torture mechanism.

There’s the same grisly, respectful fascination in the chapter on rattlesnakes – he points out what anybody who’s spent any time in out west will confirm: each rattler’s personality is different. Some will go out of their way to avoid even indirect proximity with humans, while others will seek out a confrontation. Some are meek, others flagrantly aggressive (although Grice keeps his focus pretty much squarely on the United States, this same dichotomy is true of the cobras of India – except for the part about any of them being meek). And all are potentially harmful, even the young:

Rattlesnakes are born venomous. They can already hunt for themselves. My father once reached into a patch of grass and was struck on the fingernail by a baby rattlesnake. The nail eventually blackened and fell off. He suffered no other effects. Some people claim young rattlesnakes are more toxic than adults. Possibly the explanation for this paradox is that young rattlesnakes show less restraint in using up their supplies of venom when biting defensively. A certain medical student, assuming the young harmless, handled one. He showed off for friends, telling them how ironic it is that such an emblem of fear could be handled freely. That’s the way most people get bitten: an urge to handle fire. These days the young doctor has nine fingers.

The curveball of The Red Hourglass is its inclusion of pigs and dogs, two species most people might not at first classify as predators. The chapter on pigs does scarce justice to their gentle intelligence, but to be fair, Grice spends most of its pages talking about wild boars. And the chapter on dogs … well, it has some interesting personal recollections about sharing a town with a large pack of feral dogs, but as for the rest-let’s just say Man’s Best Friend continues to be one of natural history’s most persistent mysteries (which is another way of saying what we’ve said many times before here at Stevereads: dog-writing done by people who aren’t me tends to have lots of problems). My biggest chuckle is always the part where Grice interviews a man in Special Forces training who talks to him about facing a canine guard dog in mano-a-pawo combat:

Your big dogs go for the throat. I’m talking Doberman, German shepherd, most of the ones used as attack dogs. You put your arm up to protect your throat. You let him bite your arm, but you fall back with his momentum. As you fall, you put your other forearm just behind his head. As your back hits the ground, you’re bringing your knees and feet up to push him up over your head. Basically you’re giving him a monkey flip, and you’re holding your arms rigid. His mouth is hooked onto one arm, the other’s behind his neck, and as he flips his momentum snaps his spine. One dead dog. Not hard to do, but you have to sacrifice your arm. You’re okay if you’re wearing a thick jacket. If not, your arm gets pretty torn up. You could bleed to death.

Hee. See? I’m chuckling again. So the thing you learn in Special Forces training is that when you’re attacked by a large guard dog (the elasticity of whose neck muscles and tendons is roughly four times that of a human), the first thing you should do is lay down on your back and expose your abdomen and genitals. Why, that’s downright sensible! You know, sometimes I think the much-vaunted ‘Special Forces training’ we civilians hear so much about consists entirely of learning how to bullshit on epic levels. I’m 100 percent certain no Special Forces op ever used this preposterous ‘let me wrestle with you before you disembowel me’ tactic, but I’m equally certain the guy Grice interviewed told it all to him with a straight face and an earnest voice. That’s expert training for you.

Grice accurately reports that dogs are second only to humans as killers of humans – their sheer ubiquity makes virtually every human around them careless, so the fatalities are much higher than those of black widows or tarantulas or rattlesnakes. And fatalities aren’t really even the main issue in the book’s most grotesque and striking chapter, on the humble brown recluse spider. The brown recluse is exactly the kind of crack-and-crevice-dwelling creature you could almost certainly find in your room right there at home, if you were foolish enough to go looking. It’s a shy, retiring creature, but its venom contains an even bigger mystery than the extreme toxicity of the black widow’s bite. The bite of the brown recluse doesn’t poison flesh: it kills it. And the toxins involved somehow prevent the body’s natural systems from cleaning the wound – with the result that bite victims often have an open, suppurating gap of dead flesh to deal with for the rest of their lives, from a bite so tiny nobody ever remembers getting bitten. Grice finishes his gruesome, hypnotic book with his account of this animal and its bizarre defense:

The flesh affected by a recluse’s necrosis never heals. Somehow, the venom turns off the immune system and the body’s capacity for repairing itself in that patch of flesh. The victim can only hope the dead area stays small. But sometimes it doesn’t.

Despite its disturbing subject matter, The Red Hourglass is a book you should most definitely read. Grice is a master prose stylist with a perfect ear for the pace of drama. Just be prepared, once you’re done with the book, to live in a less comfortable world for about a year.

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Penguins on Parade! Christopher Smart!

March 16, 2010

Some Penguin Classics remind you of old melancholy – they can’t help it, since the history of literature is perforce so heavily littered with the stories of some very melancholy men and women. One such story is that of Christopher Smart, who was born in 1722 in the beautiful countryside of Kent, the son of Lord Henry Vane’s estate manager and a favored son of that privileged household. So the story doesn’t start out sad: young Kit had the best of everything, and that continued even after his father’s untimely death, when he was sent to Durham School and spent his vacations at Lord Barnard’s Raby Castle with the children of earls as his playmates.

But in this glorious beginning lay the seeds of future tragedy, because those titled children and those castle playgrounds (and the academic praise and prizes he started winning in his own right from a very early age) made Smart forget one vitally important thing, something we hardly ever talk about in America these days: he forgot his station. He spent all his happiest times around people who were in possession of an effectively limitless supply of money, and it impressed on him a taste for living far in excess of what was possible for the son of a bailiff.

Smart went on to Cambridge and got a degree in 1744 – and a reputation for wild, extravagant living. He decided to go up to London and try to make a literary career for himself, but he was already trailing massive debts, and had at least once been arrested for debt. London was not designed to improve such tendencies, and it didn’t: despite being gainfully employed and moderately popular almost from his first minute in town, Smart was never out from under crushing debt and never seemed to realize that he himself, his own habits and lifestyle, were to blame.

He married a smart, lovely girl and they had two daughters, but the stress of never having two farthings to rub together wormed its way into his mind, which was flighty and highly impressionable anyway. His father-in-law, the savage, opportunistic genius John Newbery, put Smart to work editing the various periodicals Newbery published, and even when Smart’s personal financial life was falling apart, he took to that work with an inimitable gusto – he edited everything, oversaw everything, wrote an enormous amount of funny, provocative, intelligent commentary, and then wrote a whole bunch more under various pseudonyms. In his work he was joined by some of the best literary minds of the day, all of whom had a blast being caught up in such fun times (although Samuel Johnson would have grumbled to admit how much fun he was having).

In 1755 Smart signed a 99-year contract with Tom Gardner to write for the Universal Visiter, and the following year (shortly after his largely delightful translation of Horace was finished) he fell down in a crowded street raving in prayer. The following year – after many, many weird incidents that a merciful history would cover in silence – he was locked up in Saint Luke’s Hospital for the Insane, where he continued to write, was beloved by the staff, but didn’t always recognize the friends and family who at first flocked to see him (strangers could pay a small sum to go and look at him too … Saint Luke’s, like every other madhouse, made most of its operating budget by such revenue). He was also, perhaps pointedly, free from prosecution for debt while he was there.

And that was the remainder of Christopher Smart’s life, which is a pretty melancholy prospect. He continued to write poetry – and some of it is monumentally, almost monstrously strange – but his marriage disintegrated, and finances were as abysmal as always (friends – including the renowned actor David Garrick – often put on benefits for his aid, but the lessons of Raby Castle ran too deep, and Smart never shook them off). In 1770 he was arrested for debt one last time and died in debtor’s prison the following year, with most of his work lost and even the extant stuff – plays, essays, prefaces, and some of the strangest, most luminous religious poetry ever written in English – scattered to the four winds.

Probably his recalcitrant, mysterious masterpiece was the Jubilate Agno, which runs on for verse after verse like this:

Let Merari praise the wisdom and power of God, with the
Coney, who scoopeth the rock, and archeth the sand.

Let Kohath serve with the Sable, and bless God in the
Ornaments of the temple.

Let Jehoida bless God with an Hare, whose mazes are
Determined for the health of the body and to parry the adversary.

Let Ahitub humble himself with an Ape before the Almighty
God, who is the maker of variety and pleasantry.

And as it unwinds, the rhythm – insistent, learned but nevertheless impenetrable – slowly mesmerizes you, like listening to foreign incantations at prayer time. The Jubilate Agno is the work of a visibly disordered mind – but a poet’s mind nonetheless, a poet playing and trifling with a gift he refused to refine.

The more you know about Smart’s life, the more melancholy and heartbreak entwine his verses (even the happy Horace translations take on a shadow, since Smart’s life-destroying insistence on extravagance was the precise opposite of Horace’s self-proclaimed moderation). For me, the almost unbearable little master-stroke of such sad knowledge comes in Hymn 32, which is titled “Against Despair”:

A Raven once an Acorn took
From Bashan’s tallest stoutest tree;
He hid it by a limpid brook,
And liv’d another oak to see.

Thus Melancholy buries Hope,
Which Providence keeps still alive,
And bids us with afflictions cope,
And all anxiety survive.

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

March 13, 2010

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

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

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

To which Hitchens replies from high atop his high horse:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

gratuitous shot of rancid tobacco addict Kellan Lutz, from this issue

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The Perils of Lordly Disdain in the Penny Press!

March 12, 2010

The mighty TLS, being the single best literary review forum in the Western world (although surely it won’t be too long before it’s no longer cheekily presumptuous to claim the #2 spot for a certain online venture of growing renown?), is always foremost in the demonstration of literary journalism’s two signature functions: to war down the proud, and to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer.

Ooops – sorry, that’s the ancient Romans, by way of the Aeneid! Although the mix-up is easy enough to understand: after all, the deluge of books is, thankfully, never-ending, and one’s reading time isn’t. And the problem goes one step deeper – because as Mark Twain aggrievedly pointed out a hundred years ago, sometimes the damndest fools are given publishing deals.  Confronted with that fact month after month, the TLS (and every other regular review) can be forgiven for occasionally developing a frontier legion-style mentality toward the books that just keep showing up at the office.

No, the two arts of literary journalism aren’t Virgil’s, but they’re pretty close to Horace’s: at its best, it not only guides us in what to read but also how to read. And of course nobody does that combination better than the TLS.

Take two examples from last week’s edition. First, Martin Goodman reviews The Invention of the Jewish People, a contentious and controversial new work by Shlomo Sand, in which he maintains that the modern Jewish cultural identity is an entirely artificial construct with no basis in history. Sand’s book has received a bit of press (most of it damning), and it’s clearly Goodman’s aim to provide the final nail in the thing’s coffin. When the TLS sets out to do this, the results can be more fun than a barrel of monkeys, and this piece certainly is:

What has possessed Shlomo Sand, a Tel Aviv historian of contemporary European history, to write about a subject of which he patently knows so little? The answer is refreshingly simple. His aim, which he  does not try to disguise, is to undermine the claim of Israeli Jews who come from diaspora communities to have returned to the land from which their people originated.

Goodman writes that the book as “received praise from historians and others who ought to have known better” and proceeds to demolish its historical claims. But as with any first-rate critic, Goodman has deeper goals in mind than simply ripping apart the pretensions of an overstepping book:

So why bother to review such a book? So far as I know, no scholar who works on Jewish history in the Roman period has deigned to pay it any attention. But such lordly disdain is dangerous. The cover of Sand’s book proclaims it an international bestseller, and it has been widely discussed by journalists and on television and radio both in Israel and France, and now in Britain. For the general public, what catches the attention are the headlines, not the arguments or the evidence…

The general public is on the mind of Caroline Miller elsewhere in this issue, where she reviews Zadie Smith’s collection of occasional essays, Changing My Mind. I went into the review a bit tense, since I’ve very much liked Smith’s recent forays into periodical nonfiction – although as a novelist she’s never done anything but frustrate me, as a critical ‘common reader’ in the Frank Kermode/Clive James mode, she turns out to be a delightful and entirely approachable generalist. I could happily see her writing a book of short literature-essays every year (with no further thought ever given to novel-writing), so I was a bit apprehensive that Miller would find her wanting and issue a patented TLS Olympian dismissal.

Happily, no. Miller accurately warns that “Collections of multi-purpose, previously published prose are often bitty and unsatisfying,” but she, too, likes Smith’s version – including its gentleness:

Changing My Mind, whose title is itself a pre-emptive disclaimer, is a far cry from the rebarbative polemics of an older generation of essayists, such as Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens. Connoisseurs of literary bile may even be disappointed by the fact that Smith so rarely resorts to the slam-dunk of the insult.

That ‘so rarely’ is in fact ’never,’ and although it’s the heart of what made Smith’s collection so friendly, it also rubbed me the wrong way (I don’t think good literary journalism has the luxury of leisure necessary to be friendly more than about fifteen percent of the time) when I read the book, and when I read most critical reactions to it. Leave it to Miller and the TLS, then, to offer the much-needed corrective that simultaneously mans the battlements and invites Smith and others like her to join the fight:

Value judgement and tolerance can be awkward fellow pilgrims: Smith often praises writing she believes to be “right” or knows to be “beautiful.” As a corrective to academic dryness this is refreshing. But, as a wider credo, it has little except its superior eloquence to recommend it – and no principle from which to recommend superior eloquence. If we each decide whom to worship, then there can be no arbiter on beauty and truth other than the mass market. If the dreams of our fathers are to be realized in literature, then we need a critical vision to make the case for its value.

With which I of course whole-heartedly agree. The key here is not to be didactic, to allow for the validity of different critical visions while at the same time insisting that some kind of principle-schema is absolutely necessary. If I had a dime for every time some hippie has told me that ‘reading is subjective,’ I would load all those dimes into a shotgun and blast every single hippie back to Hell where they belong. Of course reading is not subjective – but neither is it monotheistic. The key is to find a critic who espouses principles that match your own, and then to slavishly follow that critic and surreptitiously send lumps of money to his Google ads account.

My hope is that Smith’s ‘what I like is beautiful, I hope what you like is beautiful too’ namby-pambyism gives way in the natural procession of things to a more formulated, discriminating sense of criticism that nevertheless doesn’t lose its enthusiastic open-mindedness. How nice it would be, to have a Virginia Woolf working among us again!

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Salt Tide!

March 12, 2010

Our book today is Curtis Badger’s 1993 Salt Tide, a quiet little masterpiece fit to share shelf-space with The House on Nauset Marsh (and yes, to those of you who’ve written – privately, of course – asking: John and Mildred Teal’s The Life and Death of a Salt Marsh would most certainly also be on that shelf). Badger is exactly the kind of guide and explicator we most want in such a book: a passionate amateur who’s been besotted with salt marshes his entire life.

The particular salt marshes in question here are the innumerable and incredibly picturesque barrier beaches and islands that stretch south in a narrow sprit from the Virginia/Maryland border and separate the Atlantic Ocean from Chesapeake Bay. Badger explored these marshes and studied their wildlife for years before writing Salt Tide, and the book shows it: this is a rich, conversational, quietly passionate hymn of praise not just to a fragile, endangered ecosystem but, like The House on Nauset Marsh, an entire way of life that seems doomed to vanish, crowded out of existence by louder, faster, cruder ways.

Badger’s book is the best kind of natural history: it’s totally sincere, casually informative, and positively bursting with little epiphanies. Anybody who’s ever spent time on out on marshes will recognize most of these epiphanies and greet them like old friends, as with Badger’s little description of the joy of going by canoe:

I like most of all the first few moments of a canoe trip, when you leave land and glide through water, testing the balance of the boat, getting the feel of things. It’s like being weightless. You look up and see the sky and you look down and see the sky reflected in the water. You’re floating, and only a gentle wake defines the margin of air and water. It’s a pleasure to leave land and its firmness; to glide through water seems so effortless – one pull on the paddle and away you go. The transformation is sudden, and it is a delight.

Or the peculiar joy at the return of a homely harbinger:

The flounder’s great value is that it gives us our first excuse of the year to leave the warmth of home and hearth and get out there, to be buffeted by spring northeasters, to endure the wet and cold and fishless days sane people avoid. The first flounder of spring is cause for celebration, because it is a tangible reminder that the cycle of seasons grinds on, ensuring us that the gray days of winter are retreating and that better times lie ahead.

Salt Tide is full of carefully-learned animal lore disseminated always in a tone of wonder and, often, a reserved tone of humor. There are long digressions on cordgrass, piping plovers, salting fish, and of course, considering the proximity of the once-mighty Chesapeake, clams:

The remarkable thing about the clam’s odyssey is that it reproduces, grows, avoids predators, selects a healthy home environment, and develops a discriminatory palate without conscious thought. The clam has no brain. It is a digestive and reproductive system unhobbled by fear, conscience, greed, envy, ambition. All it knows is food and sex. Hence, perhaps, the saying “Happy as a clam.”

And all of this learning and passion and humor is here harnessed into a pointed plea, although Badger is never strident or doctrinaire about it. He doesn’t just love these marshes and barrier islands, he believes in them – their conservation, their uniqueness, the dynamic purposes they serve:

It is a wonderfully productive system. Not only do the islands protect the mainland from storms, but also the marshes and shallow bays provide homes for many species of fish, shellfish, mollusks, migrating waterfowl, and shorebirds. Acre for acre, the salt marsh is one of the most productive natural systems on earth; it is a giant protein factory that supports a wide variety of life, ranging from microscopic zooplankton to those of us at the top of the food chain.

That passion fills the book and helps even the most sedentary, landlocked reader to love the salt marshes too. For those of us who’ve spent a good deal of time slogging and hiking and especially canoeing along such quiet, aromatic waterways, Salt Tide is even better, serving, as does The House on Nauset Marsh, as a never-changing repository for cherished memories in the face of relentless change.

Badger is so fervently caught up in the life and death of his own salt marshes that he can easily envision himself as part of that cycle:

… I think that when I die I would like to become part of the salt marsh estuary. Scatter my ashes over the marsh and the creek water, and put my old body back in circulation. Don’t put me in an expensive satin-lined box and drop the box into a concrete vault six feet under. No, I’d rather be returned to these waters, to the grasses and the phytoplankton, where there is no such thing as death, only the cycles of life. Make my marker a lush stand of cordwood grass. Watch it wave in the breeze, observe how it catches the light of the fall, and think of me.

It’s a pretty picture, and like the rest of this gentle, wonderstruck book, it’ll leave you smiling and happy and just a bit wistful. If you happen to find it in your used book travels, snap it up. And if you happen to find yourself anywhere near a well-channeled salt marsh, rent a canoe and go see for yourself.

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Kaa’s Hunting!

March 10, 2010

Our story today is “Kaa’s Hunting,” the second tale of an Indian baby boy who was washed into the jungle by a storm and adopted by a wolf pack. Rudyard Kipling introduced Mowgli (“Little Frog” – the name his wolf-family gave him, noting his furless state)(a free book to the first of you who can identify another fictional jungle character who’s initially named after his furless state! Hint: it’s the very first name that occurred to you when you read the phrase “fictional jungle character”) to the world in his 1894 The Jungle Book (written in Vermont, but very much a product of the British Raj), and the book was an instant success. In it, the Indian child grows to boyhood under the protection of the Seeonee Wolf Pack; he’s taught the Jungle Law by kindly old bear Baloo, and he’s befriended by the elegant, deadly black panther Bagheera – and he’s the mortal enemy of the ravenous tiger Shere Khan.

“Kaa’s Hunting” opens during one such teaching-session, or rather, the interruption of one: Baloo had been teaching Mowgli all the master words of the jungle-folk, so that he could ask for courtesy of anything he happened to encounter (when Bagheera teases Baloo that such a long list of master words might be excessive, Baloo answers “Is there anything in the jungle too little to be killed?” – which, in its own roundabout way, is the ultimate justification), and Mowgli had been refractory, earning him a swat from one of Baloo’s enormous paws and sending him running away in anger.

He eventually returns, and in the ensuing conversation Baloo and Bagheera learn, to their horror, that Mowgli in his depression was befriended by the Bandar-log, the Monkey People who are despised by all jungle-folk. Mowgli can’t understand why this would be – after all, the Monkey-People look very much like him, they stand upright, and they seem to play all day long. Bagheera says only “that is a great shame,” but Baloo goes into more detail to his wayward pupil:

“Listen, man-cub,” said the Bear, and his voice rumbled like thunder on a hot night. “I have taught thee all the Law of the Jungle for all the peoples of the jungle – except the Monkey-Folk who live in the trees. They have no law. They are outcaste. They have no speech of their own, but used stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep, and wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They have no leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten.”

Mowgli is well rebuked and agrees to have nothing more to do with the Bandar-log, but only a short while later, during a midday nap, the Monkey-Folk stealthily steal the boy away from the sleeping Baloo and Bagheera and loudly swarm up into the treetops and speed off. Mowgli doesn’t struggle for fear of being dropped, but he does manage to cry out for help to Chil the Kite – using the master words Baloo had been teaching him. Chil marks their passage – they’re headed to a deserted and jungle-covered old Indian city the Jungle-folk call the Cold Lairs (he shares the jungle dislike of the Bandar-log: “Always pecking at new things are the Bandar-log; This time, if I have any eyesight, they have pecked down trouble for themselves, for Baloo is not fledgling, and Bagheera can, as I know, kill more than goats”).

Baloo and Bagheera are distraught, and when Bagheera mentions that the Bandar-log fear none of their kind, Baloo belatedly remembers who they do fear: Kaa the immense rock-python. He and Bagheera hasten off to ask Kaa for help – which he’s only too willing to give, since he’s just shed the whole length of his skin and is very, very hungry. He and Bagheera hurry off to the Cold Lairs (Baloo isn’t nearly as fast and rushes after as best he can), where Mowgli is under a half-witted, mean-spirited house arrest. The Bandar-log want him to teach them how to make things with their hands, but the instant he tries, they lose patience and run off chattering.

When a cloud covers the moon that night, Bagheera strikes – he knows better than to offer warning or take his time, and Kaa is still looking for a way past the dilapidated walls. The Monkey-folk only fight, Kipling tells us, when the odds are a hundred to one, and soon Bagheera is fighting for his life for the very first time in his experience. The Bandar-log have stowed Mowgli in a broken-down summer house (where he’s saved from death yet again by remembering the words Baloo taught him; he uses them to pacify the cobras who’ve taken up residence there) and roused themselves to blood-lust: they swarm over Bagheera and the late-arriving Baloo, and things are looking grim – until Kaa finally arrives.

This changes everything, as Kipling describes:

Generations of monkeys had been scared into good behaviour by the stories their elders told them of Kaa, the night-thief, who could slip along the branches as quietly as moss grows, and steal away the strongest monkey that ever lived; of old Kaa, who could make himself look so like a dead branch or a rotten stump that the wisest were deceived, till the branch caught them. Kaa was everything that the monkey feared in the jungle, for none of them knew the limits of his power, none of them could look him in the face, and none of them ever came alive out of his hug.

The Bandar-log are terrified and mesmerized – Kaa orders them all to be still, and they are. When he’s introduced to Mowgli, he’s pleased by the boy’s hard-taught manners:

“A brave heart and a courteous tongue … they shall carry thee far through the jungle, manling. But now go hence quickly with thy friends. Go and sleep, for the moon sets, and what follows it is not well that thou shouldst see.”

What follows is the Dance of Kaa, drawing the Monkey-folk helplessly to their doom – and not just the Monkey-folk. When Kaa, after twining and re-twining himself hypnotically a few times, orders the Bandar-log to take one step forward, they all do – and so do Baloo and Bagheera, until Mowgli touches them and asks them what’s wrong. Moments later, when they’re outside the Cold Lairs and safely away from Kaa’s feasting, Baloo warily comments that he’ll never again ally himself with the python. Bagheera agrees:

“He knows more than we,” said Bagheera, trembling. “In a little time, had I stayed, I should have walked down his throat.”

“Many will walk by that road before the moon rises again,” said Baloo. “He will have good hunting – after his own fashion.”

“Kaa’s Hunting” is only the second Mowgli story in Kipling’s first collection of them – longer and far more ambitious stories will follow (including the fascinating “The King’s Ankus,” the epic “How Fear Came,” and the heartbreaking “The Spring Running”) – but already you can see all the elements that will go so far to separating these stories from the simple children’s animal-tales they look like on the surface. If Kipling ever intended them to be that and only that, he quickly abandoned that thought – in the place of sweet little picture-book tales like The Just So Stories, we have in the Jungle Books a pioneering work of high fantasy that predates – and lays the groundwork for – all the later epics to follow. The great tales of Lord Dunsany, The Worm Ouroboros, the Gormenghast trilogy, and certainly the works of Tolkien (to say nothing of the far more obvious imitator, already alluded to in this posting!) … all owe their debts to Kipling’s unassuming Jungle Books, with their meticulously thought-out background, their sometimes heavy-handed allegorizing, their wealth of specially-created lore, and their powerful sense of an alternate world from our own, filled with noble and despicable beings who have their own ancient cultures and operate by their own complex codes.

Kipling created such a world and then did the only thing you can do with it: he introduced an outsider to experience it all. In that sense, Mowgli is the direct ancestor of everyone from Steerpike to Christopher Robin to Frodo to Thomas Covenant – he comes into this ancient, alien world and changes it forever. Kipling may not have created that concept, but he re-crafted it for a modern audience – and gave us some fantastic, infinitely re-readable stories in the process.

I’m betting that somewhere in your library there’s a copy of The Jungle Book, perhaps read in grade school and relegated to some high shelf where fond memories but no active books are kept. Do yourself a favor: reach up and pull it down, re-read these stories with the eyes of an adult, as they were intended to be read. You’ll be glad you did. Good hunting!

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The Book of John!

March 9, 2010

Our book today is the Gospel of St. John (we’ll use the New International Version, just to keep everybody reading and happy!), and it comes to us today courtesy of the dozens of you who emailed me from the heart of the Silent Majority about a recent posting lambasting Beverly Lewis’ “Annie’s People” series in general and The Englisher in particular. Some of you accused me of hating all religious fiction, and the rest wondered if there were any religious fiction I actually like (no Amish themselves wrote to me, since they’re cramped and narrow enough to believe God doesn’t want them to have the Internet).

I should stress that the point I was trying to make in that posting about The Englisher wasn’t that religious fiction as a whole is insipid or limiting, but rather that I hate the examples of it that are. In The Englisher (and religious novels like it that I’ve read), religious belief is an extremely thwarting thing, a constraint that will inevitably force you to lop off living parts of yourself. Characters “successfully” deny their sexual orientation, they spend their whole lives married to people they don’t like, they voluntarily enter a kind of mental servitude based on readings of a text that’s 2000 years old … in short, they do what Annie does in The Englisher: they take the beautiful paintings they’ve created, wrap them up tight, and store them in the attic. Forever.

I confess, I don’t see the payoff of ‘faith’ like that. How on Earth do you ever know it’s good for you? You live your whole life, die, go to Heaven, and there, finally, God pats you on the back and says, “I instilled in you the talent to paint and the lifelong desire to do it, and you successfully forced yourself to resist that longing every day that you were alive – good job!”?

Probably “Annie’s People” bugged me because it so relentlessly ennobles one of the most backward and repressive back-alleys of Christian faith I’ve ever encountered (I’ve spent zero time around snake-handlers, so I might not know what I’m missing here), and it keeps doing it, in book after book. But it need hardly be said (except maybe to Richard Dawkins and his ilk) that Christianity has been the inspiration for many, many great expressions of art, including many wonderful books.

And the first of these is John. He’s not the first Gospel – the shorter, more telegraphic ‘synoptic’ gospels of Mark, Luke, and Matthew were almost certainly all composed first – but his is the first Christian novel, the first book in which the author is doing something more than simply reporting the ‘and then He did … and then He did …” happenings of Jesus’ ministry on Earth. John tells that story too, but he makes it his – and so he sweeps us along in a way no other gospel does.

Despite five hundred years of exuberantly intense scriptural study, we can’t say with certainty when John’s gospel was written, or by whom, or for whom. “Sometime in the first century” is about the best that can be managed, with guesses ranging across the reigns of five different Roman emperors. The neatest narrative is that Jesus took John and James, the sons of Zebedee, as his disciples while they were very young men and that John lived to be a very old man, writing his testimony sometime toward the end of his life using as his guides and prompts all the other written accounts that had cropped up in the intervening years but enhancing and improving them as he went along. This is almost certainly not what happened, but like I said, it has the most attractive simplicity.

However it came about, we can say two certain things about the Gospel of Saint John: first, it reads nothing like the other gospels, and second, although we might not know the who, the where, the how, or the when of it, we most certainly know the why: John wants to preach the Word made flesh. Not for him the mere bare-bones tallying of miracles and sayings – he crafts a long, complex, and at times maddening narrative in which Jesus cannot possibly be construed as some random wonder-worker but is instead the way and the life, the door to salvation, the son and avatar of the living God (the synoptic gospels contain this element as well – more so than is often given credit to them, I think – but John is the only one that raises it to an art).

Which makes reading his book one of the ur-strangest literary experiences anybody – and especially any Christian – can have. Coming to the text fresh, as it were, you notice one thing before anything else: Jesus here doesn’t come across as the meek and mild Lamb of God. He’s confrontational, peremptory, enigmatic … one might almost say rude (if one weren’t leery of offending his Dad). In other words, he seems far closer to the heroes and demigods of Greek mythology than to the wan and lissome figure who emerged from Renaissance hagiography. He’s decidedly not quite human, and time and again, John makes clear that his semi-divine status caused his own disciples to get a little jumpy. They loved him and believed in him (most of the time), but they’d also never seen anything like him before, and many of John’s anecdotes preserve that fact, like the classic story of the storm on the Sea of Galilee:

When the evening came, his disciples went down to the lake, where they got into a boat and set off across the lake for Capernaum. By now it was dark, and Jesus had not yet joined them. A strong wind was blowing and the waters grew rough. When they had rowed three or three and a half miles, they saw Jesus approaching the boat, walking on the water; and they were terrified. But he said to them, “It is I; don’t be afraid.” Then they were willing to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the shore where they were heading.

Readers will of course notice that it isn’t the storm or the rough waves that terrify the disciples – it’s the sight of a man walking on water and perhaps looking slightly transformed while he does it (or else, why the need to identify himself once he draws near?). Unlike the primary impression given by the other gospels, here is a Jesus who feels his own supernatural status immediately. He knows he only has a limited amount of mortal time, and he’s impatient with practically everybody for not straight away seeing what his words and signs (one of John’s favorite words) signify.

The Jewish priests and authorities form a Greek chorus of constantly grumbling throughout the book, constantly griping about the liberties Jesus takes in identifying himself with ancient prophecies. Who does this guy think he is, they’re constantly asking. Don’t we know his parents? Don’t we know where he comes from? John never misses and opportunity to paint a picture of the new confronting the old, and the resonances are made all the more thrilling in light of the subsequent 2000 years (of which John – and perhaps Jesus – could know nothing):

You have sent to John and he has testified to the truth. Not that I accept human testimony; but I mention it that you may be saved. John was a lamp that burned and gave light, and you chose for a time to enjoy his light.

I have testimony weightier than that of John. For the very work that the Father has given me to finish, and which I am doing, testifies that the Father has sent me. And the Father who sent me has himself testified concerning me. You have never heard his voice nor seen his form, nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

I do not accept praise from men, but I know you. I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts. I have come in my Fathers’ name, and you do not accept me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him. How can you believe if you accept praise from one another yet make no effort to obtain the praise that comes from the only God?

But do not think that I accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set. If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?

Passages like that one also underscore something else: there was simply no way the Jewish authorities of Jesus’ time could let him live. And John’s account of the Crucifixion and Death is a small masterwork of tragic storytelling – and the scene he presents to us with such effusive artistic joy, the scene where a grieving and heartbroken Mary Magdalene is the first to encounter the risen Jesus, is virtually Homeric in its clarity and power.

I think Matthew, Mark, and Luke actually benefit by being read together – but you owe it to yourself to read John apart. There’ve been many lovely little paperbacks over the years of this gospel alone (some of you will remember the playful – and now intensely collectible – series of little hand-sized paperbacks that Penguin, naturally, did of each book of the Bible, including John), and that’s how you should read it. And then you should write and tell me your impressions – privately, of course!

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The World of the Porcupine!

March 8, 2010

Our book today is from 1966 – it’s David Costello’s The World of the Porcupine, part of Lippincott’s great old line of “Living World Books” covering nearly a dozen iconic and intriguing North American animals (should you be trolling online, Leonard Lee Rue’s volumes on the beaver and raccoon are particularly good as well, as is The World of the Great Horned Owl by Ronald Austing and John Holt). The subject of this particular volume, Erethizon dorsatum, had been an object of study for Costello for many years before he wrote his book – and object of study and sympathy.

Those of you who’ve never encountered a porcupine in the wild or in person might wonder why this critter would need a writer’s sympathy. After all, the porcupine is not a skunk (to the best of my knowledge, there is not “Living World Book” on the poor misunderstood skunk) – its quills might make it a figure of some concern to owners of over-curious dogs or cattle (using pliers to pluck thirty quills out of a howling beagle’s nose is not, trust me, a pleasant experience), but that concern is never the reflexive disgust many urban Americans feel for, say, the skunk or the bat. And porcupines aren’t endangered or especially popular in the black market meat trade. So why the need for sympathy?

Costello clearly feels it, just as clearly as he feels affection for his prickly charges. His descriptions throughout the book are delightfully personal and immediate, as when he discusses a fact about porcupines well known to anybody who’s ever been around them – the fact that they never shut up:

At times, even its voice leads to its undoing. Like a mumbling old man it sometimes announces its presence around camps at night and in the woods during the mating season. The porcupine does have a voice, and it has many variations and meanings. I have heard them murmuring beyond the shadow of my campfire from Yellowstone National Park south to Arizona and west to Oregon. Some of their sounds have been almost inaudible grunts. Others have been a pitiful whining, which by no means meant that the animal was in distress.

I have never heard a porcupine give the coo-coo-coo sound or the weak high yipping bark that others have described. But I have cuddled their babies in my hands and heard them murmur and grunt like an overfed puppy dog.

(That bit about cuddling is not exaggeration: I once knew someone in the Midwest who had, in addition to three house dogs, a 20-pound porcupine as a pet. The sedate creature would waddle from room to room, mumbling like it had lost its car keys, matter-of-factly hauling itself up onto its owner’s lap for a nap – in every way an adorable, completely adapted house pet)(I of course spent much more of my time with the aforementioned dogs – for what it’s worth, once they actually started talking to me instead of slurping my face, they had only one unanimous topic in mind: would I please, please help them to kill and eat that porcupine?)

So again one might wonder: why the need for sympathy? Why the special pleading tone throughout Costello’s book?

The reason stems from another well-known quality of the American porcupine (the larger and more aggressive African variety is an entirely different kettle of fish), a quality Costello is at some pains to declare a myth. He himself uses delightfully euphemistic phrases like “experts in the art of relaxation,” but his book is too accurate to avoid the imputations that legions of hunters, trappers, gamesmen, and amateur observers have put upon this species. It makes Costello defensive:

In spite of the porcupine’s quills and its deliberate actions, it is not the animal moron so often described in the hunting magazines and forestry literature. In fact, it is a rather sensitive creature which responds to patience, kindness, and firmness when handled by people.

Costello points out that captive porcupines have been observed solving intricate lock-and-key puzzles as fast or faster than cats or monkeys solved the same puzzles. He talks at length about their extensive vocal repertoire. He testifies to the agile wits of the creatures he’s owned himself. But time and again in his accounts, other people – people who don’t know each other, people with no reason to lie, will make nearly identical-sounding comments that almost always feature phrases like “dull, witless, and generally unaware of its surroundings …”

The World of the Porcupine will certainly have you rooting for these lovable butterballs who just happen to be covered in 30,000 razor-sharp and easily-detachable quills. You may even end up believing Costello about their misunderestimated cognitive abilities. Me, I’m not convinced. I observed that porcupine in the Midwest in close proximity with three dogs for several days, and I have to say: they came off looking like a trio of Rhodes scholars by comparison. I’m the biggest fan of Canis familiaris there is, but even I have to admit: any animal that can make three dopey farm-hounds look smart probably deserves its reputation for being the dimmest bulb in the chandelier.

Still, should you encounter it (or any of its shelf-mates) at a dusty flea market some day, don’t miss the book. It’s great fun, regardless of contested intelligence quotients.

Written by Steve Donoghue — Leave a Comment
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