None as good as AmCon

Do you subscribe to Counterpunch Dan?

I actually think The Nation has gone so far in the tank for the Dems that it is nearly unreadable, aside from the occasional piece from guys like Vidal or Daniel Lazare. To be fair Jon Nichols is someone I rather enjoy and Cockburn did have a biweekly last I looked,but I haven’t purchased a copy of The Nation in quite a while. Have I missed anything of note?

World Affairs has proved interesting since reappearing on the scene and The American Interest has been quite good reading over the last years as well.

Wow. A day since I last checked Dan’s blog and he goes and hits a lightning line drive straight up my center field of Anglo-American cultural periodicals [e.g., my 1986 National Review essay "The Fourteenth Colony"]:

thefreelibrary.com/The+fourteenth+colony-a04588745

I hope to respond directly, if more briefly, this week, to Dan’s points as posted. But here, for starters, I shall append a vanished post from my 2005 Blogspot site SUB SPECIE ÆTERNITATIS, which after I abandoned said blog I later appended as a comment to a fine post cognate with Dan’s, at Kenneth Anderson’s Law of War blog, though Ken seems, alas, to have removed comments from his site sometime over the last year:

kennethandersonlawofwar.blogspot.com/2005/11/ruminating-about-book-reviews.html

Literary Cocktails, from Mazel Tov to Molotov by Scott Lahti

The New York Review of Books , that bastion of Lincoln Center left-liberalism (contrast its non-blood cross-Atlantic cousin, the London Review of Books, with its high-left Hampstead hauteur and Bloomsbury-watercolor covers), born during the 1963 New York newspaper strike (when Edmund Wilson remarked, apropos the temporary absence of The New York Times Book Review, that its being gone presupposed it had ever really existed) is often worth a look for its ongoing snapshots of the preoccupations of a particular Balzac-sliver of the high-toned haut monde. It’s had quite a ride since its mid-1960s Molotov -cocktail cover diagram and Noam Chomsky phase (no surprise it became that ripest of candidates as [Tom] Wolfe’s-bane, from radical-chic then to its Norman Mailer assault on the latter’s A Man in Full later), with a domestic stance of Dissent-and- New Republic-meet-Ronald Dworkin soak-the-rich egalitarianism (its pipe-sucking policy portions often read during the 1970s and 1980s as though they were centrally planned, as it were, by John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Heilbroner, and Irving Howe), while on the foreign-policy front more of an anti-Stalinist center-left “dovish” realism prevailed over time, distinguishing it from the mission civilisatrice de mon Oncle Sam Cold War liberalism of the post-1960s New Republic under owner Martin Peretz. Its Amnesty-International-like attention to human-rights abusers and prisoners of conscience across the globe has long been to its humanitarian credit, and its reportage from the Soviet-bloc resistance in the later 1980s was exemplary, relying as it did on, among others, the most gifted Anglophone chronicler of that place and time, the multilingual, silver-penned Oxford “historian of the present” Timothy Garton Ash, open letters from that titanic Solzhenitsyn/Sinyavsky of Soviet science, Andrei Sakharov, British Sovietologist Peter Reddaway’s flashlight unto the black night therein of psychiatric abuse – and, annus mirabilis dictu, back-channel letters from what Janet Malcolm, in The New Yorker, would later call possibly the most anti-authoritarian of world leaders, Czech playwright/prisoner/President Vaclav Havel, whose gentle charm and Luther-like here-I-stand-I-can-do-no-other incarnation of “living in truth” came in short order to win the hearts of millions worldwide, free and enslaved (first mistyped here as “ensalved”, fitting enough itself in the event) alike. As we watched the most heartwarming demonstrations in those days of “people power” against, to borrow a phrase from the British band New Order, power, corruption and lies, we could not help but recall Wordsworth’s encomium to the French Revolution as it appeared to its earliest beholders: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very Heaven.”

NYRoB-watchers have always remarked upon the politics of what is ostensibly a more essayistic version of a general book review rather than an opinion journal proper, because of its own inveterate self-styling, making it our closest equivalent to England’s New Statesman during the Old Testament phase of the modern British literary left under editor Kingsley Martin: Politics in the front, Culture in the back. This odd pantomime-horse aspect of opinion journals has long been a staple of comment upon them – Alfred Kazin, postwar America’s baton-holder of its outside-academe Grand Tradition of Edmund Wilson-style book reviewing, writing in The New Republic, contrasted that weekly’s front-of-the-book Beltway-careerist knowingness regarding last-week’s headlines with the often anthology-worthy longform review essays run in the back by its astringent, ethically-trained literary editor Leon Wieseltier. A like front-back distinction plays out in the NYRoB as well, even in the absence of section divisions: its covers, often sporting ominous, Gothic-acidulous pen-sketches by staff caricaturist David Levine (ever seen Kissinger, eyes ablaze, jowls streaked with fresh blood? So has Levine), usually grant pride of place to raising the burgundy-and-brie alarums upon any one of the latest catastrophes promised/enacted by the current cabal of Snidely Whiplashes in the seats of preponderant Power on the Potomac. Contrast this with, say, its much more Eleventh-Edition-Britannica-like great-great-grandfather in England, THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, whose typical cover might reproduce a portrait of Goethe linked to a lead review thus, and whose Commentary section might just as often devote itself to an unpublished manuscript by Rudyard Kipling or a newly-discovered correspondence between muttonchopped, Old Testament-prophet-resembling literary lions of the Victorian era, and where current politics come refracted only through the occasional hindsight book review by, say, a columnist or leader (aka editorial) writer from the centrist TIMES or center-right Daily Telegraph, social-democratic Oxbridge don, or American-history scholar attuned to America’s long tempering in the hellfired crucible of sin and redemption. Although the TLS is overwhelmingly steeped in the less-topical cultural past, its two most recent editors came to their post by way of political journalism (early Thatcherite advisor and novelist-of-manners Ferdinand Mount, 1991-2003), and Establishment journalism incarnate (current editor Sir Peter Stothard, editor of THE TIMES 1992-2002, and a student of Greco-Roman antiquity).

The New York Review’s more politicized self-fashioning extends to the e-bulletins it sends for each new issue, which almost always floodlight the topical (from the June 9 issue: Joan Didion, The Case of Theresa Schiavo, and Mark Danner, The Secret Way to War) at the expense of its often quite distinguished contributors among historians, Nobel-laureate scientists, art scholars, novelists and critics. Wags might point out that for some time, the typical humanities reviewer for the NYRoB has been a 70-year-old white-male Ivy-League Eurocentric elbow-patcher, or greybeard man of letters whose first book from the 1950s was the inaugural paving stone on the yellow-brick road leading to his bow-tied arrival at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters – a cohort holding the ivory fort from equally-talented insurgents from among the differently-gendered, pigmented and affiliated. Its two editors, after all, Barbara Epstein (her ex, Jason Epstein, launched the quality-paperback revolution at Doubleday in the 1950s and has been a publishing lion ever since, late atop the gleaming spires of Random House) and Robert Silvers (whose globetrotting career in publishing dates from the Second World War), have been on the job since they first delivered it to the world on February 1, 1963, in the prelapsarian days of Camelot, where its inaugural contributors included: aristocrat-meets-anarchist Dwight Macdonald on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (speaking of bow-tied Ivy Leaguers!), a poem from Robert Lowell, and his tribute to the just-departed Robert Frost ; Lowell’s wife, essayist-critic Elizabeth Hardwick, who would become the journal’s longest-serving regular, on the New York literary scene, and on Ring Lardner, Lillian “Scoundrel Time” Hellman’s old anti-Stalinist nemesis Mary McCarthy (“Everything she [Hellman] says is a lie – including “a”, “and” and “the” – The Dick Cavett show on PBS…slander suit, anyone? Ah, those were the days: sorry, Charlie Rose; thanks all the same, Mr. Moyers) on William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (her review also ran across the pond in Encounter), Partisan Review co-founder Philip Rahv on Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, W.H. Auden, Nicola Chiaromonte on “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” ( Albee Damned), a poem by Robert Penn Warren, poet John Berryman on Auden, Irving Howe on Partisan Review, a young Susan Sontag on Simone Weil, Alfred Kazin on Russian writers, Adrienne Rich on Paul Goodman’s poetry, Jonathan Miller on early Updike, Barbara Probst Solomon on Dwight Macdonald’s essay collection Against the American Grain, Lewis Coser on “Austrian”-school economist Fritz Machlup, the other founding co-editor of Partisan Review, William Phillips, on Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, Robert Jay Lifton on the A-Bomb, Norman Mailer on Morley Callaghan, Jason Epstein on Bury’s edition of Gibbon, a young Nathan Glazer on Italian-Americans, William Styron on “The Negro in the Americas”, and Gore Vidal on John Hersey.

If you detected amid the distinction, circa 1963, a certain incestuous insularity (the heavy Partisan Review contingent, the reviewer and reviewed in the same issue) across the roster, you will understand why the journal has been spoofed over the years as, say, The New York Review of Us (and how opportune was it to discover that the Windows font closest to that of the journal’s at once arch and august big-little cover logo is called “Bookman Old Style”?) – Manhattan being, after all, among the more provincial outposts of arriviste self-regard in modern history – it comes with the territory. As a result, readers came to expect, whenever in its life and theirs they first grew acquainted with it, the same narrowed and well-worn swath of the book world from issue to issue, much as its political “line” proved susceptible to plotting thus; one was very seldom surprised pleasantly by the unexpected appearance of a writer from outside the tony and long-tilled plantation, save for the blue-moon occasion provided by, say, its Old-Left anti-Stalinism bearing fruit in the appearance now and again by that English Cold-Warrior graduate of the stained-glass Larkinite 1950s, poet-historian (and onetime Heritage Fellow, probably the only thus to have enacted such cross-pollination) Robert Conquest.

The journal has over its storied past moved from shoestring funds to family-fortune takeover, and from Partisan Review little-magazine recruiting editorially then to a roster more tenured since, and remains in the Internet age, for all its restrictions, one among many worthy sources of enlightened longform journalism, as well as, although less than in its heyday, the occasional anthology-worthy essay. Journals of the future will some day arrive to grab from its passing liverspotted hand the baton of lettered discussion, as its origins in the Kennedy Cold War and ascent to fashionable supremacy in the faculty lounge prove it as mortal as any other human artifact. And those journals, once ripened, may one day approach it in distinction. Given the present-day dispersal of literary energy from print to pixel, and the prolonged deathwatch over the East Coast media monopolies, that inevitable surrender will find its victors quite unlike the vanquished, in form and in content. But the times must be ripe. To paraphrase from Goethe, however bathed in glory our admired past, it must subside before that excellence which has yet to awake before us. May we prove worthy in our turn.