Gavin McNett

There’s also the top-down list, where experts gather in a star chamber somewhere and generate an index through secret proceedings. Spin magazine’s “90 Greatest Albums of the ’90s” is one of these, and it’s about No. 6 on the list of the year’s list rankings — somewhere right between the Lincoln, Neb., Journal-Star’s “Top 100 Crimes” list and NYU’s “Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century.” Spin’s September issue highlights the magazine’s worst qualities: its long-standing tendency towards insular groupthink, its holistic admixture of taste-making and pandering and its populism via elite pressure.

The difference between this issue of Spin and any other (and between this list and the magazine’s annual best-of rankings) is that the new issue reviews a load of albums that everyone’s already had a chance to fully digest, and whose positions in the pop firmament are now, for the most part, fixed. That means the Spin method is on display with far less clothes on than usual, which makes for a perfect opportunity to examine how the magazine — not the editorial staff or the writers, but the collective organism itself — thinks.

It’s clear from the introduction that Spin’s criteria for “greatness” are going to shift around from album to album. “But hey,” the unsigned intro notes, “it’s our magazine” — and fair enough. The top three albums of the ’90s are Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet” and PJ Harvey’s “To Bring You My Love” — all of which are, again, fair enough, save for an eerie consistency. A hip-hop act couldn’t be No. 1, but there couldn’t not be one in the top three. A woman couldn’t be No. 1, but there has to be one way up there. Sigh. You can almost see the editorial huddle, wrangling over an attempt to float Lauryn Hill into the top 3 (two in one!), hair-splitting over how high Beck and the Beasties should be placed relative to the Fugees, and recalculating the race-and-gender algebra anew with each change in precedence.

The groupthink part is that this sort of thing seems to happen all the time, in smaller scale. Whatever sort of institutional process determines the artists that Spin champions, whenever a new name appears on the boards, the entire writership puts aside its individual tastes to help whirl the merry-go-round as fast as it can go. Sublime = Good! Eminem = Good! Sleater-Kinney = Good! In fact, the 90 Greatest is a pretty comprehensive list of everyone Spin has allowed into the pantheon, with a few surprises (Basement Jaxx: No. 45) and omissions (Beth Orton). In review after review (Beck, Pavement, Hole, etc.), the staff writes almost as though controlled by a single brain. Hole good! Cornershop A-OK! The opinions were all right there in the back-issues file.

And despite the introduction’s having anticipated a critique in this quarter, Spin’s crit-pick list had been getting pretty scattershot in recent years (Geraldine Fibbers!?). A new masthead has lately taken charge, which seems to be changing the magazine’s character in slow increments. But Spin’s traditional vanguardist populism — a concocted ideal of a sales-based hipster pop scene that exists only within its pages — is probably the only guiding aesthetic that keeps the nation’s premier youth pop magazine from running wall-to-wall features on God-popular teenybop acts and on horrible, multimillion-selling metal bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit. In the past, Spin’s most powerful mojo has been the trick of tap-dancing around and dropping references all over the place to keep the reader on the defensive. You knew the canonical Spin review had succeeded when you found yourself worrying not only about how much more wif it the reviewer seemed to be than you were — but also that there might be something actually wrong with you for hearing things so differently than Spin did. Even if it was mostly just rubbish and false consciousness — as the eerie familiarity of the magazine’s Top 90 album commentary helps to drive home — it sure beats having the market take over, setting Boyzone, Britney Spears and 98 Degrees to war it out for No. 1 with the Deftones and Rob Zombie, with sheer platinum the only mark of “greatness.”

Indeed, you don’t get them handed to you like that every day. (A “buzz”!) The last time was a year or two ago when my friend Doug and I were working in the garden, scooping soil from a wheelbarrow with an old mug. “Is there any coffee left?” Doug asked. “Here,” I said, handing him the mug full of dirt. “It’s fresh ground.” He made a perfect “boing!” face like a cartoon character. You treasure each moment like that because in old age, those memories become your consolation for the fool you still are.

In any event, these three new books on bees give an encompassing, if not overwhelming, treatment of a creature that’s so everyday-familiar to most of us that it’s easy to forget how strange and unlikely, even wondrous, they are. If there were no such thing as bees, and if one were to invent an imaginary animal — an insect — that builds nests with identically hexagonal, waxen cells and upholds a rigid caste system of queens, drones and workers; that communicates with waggling dances; that collects flower nectar and concentrates it into a thick, ambrosial-sweet essence (and converts pollen into cakes of “bread”), laying up stores against the chill of winter; et cetera; people would think you were attempting some kind of broad, H.G. Wells-style metaphor for industrial civilization or socialism, or at least speaking in Aesopian parable about human thrift and duty. It certainly wouldn’t seem like a plausibly real creature. And yet, this (and more) is the familiar honeybee — and the closer you look at bees, the odder and more puzzling they can seem.

Which is also true with books, often enough. And here we have three different, even archetypical kinds of book, all mustered around the same topic as though for a controlled experiment — which is interesting just in itself, give or take the infernal joy of “it’s a buzz” and even worse temptations (“Now here’s a honey of a book!”) that would certainly be easy to wallow in if one were a fiend (or writing for Slate). In any case, it’s a mystery why four books on bees would come out in such close succession — although that seems to happen in publishing with a funny regularity. Some years back, for instance, seven books on masculinity, maleness and boys hit the stores in rapid fire for no apparent reason, while in ’03 a book on the X chromosome dropped like a pair of shoes with a book on the Y chromosome. My own pet theory has been that there’s some attractive guy out there, a gifted cocktail-party orator, who keeps going to publishing events and rhapsodizing about the latest fascinating thing he saw on the Discovery Channel — and the next day a number of book editors go to their offices all charged up about the idea they had while talking to that cute guy at the party, and start ransacking the manuscript piles. His aria on bees must have been an especially fine one. (He also seems to watch a lot of those Hitler-in-the-bunker shows on the History Channel.)

“Letters From the Hive,” by Stephen Buchmann, is a slenderish volume by a professor of entomology (at the University of Arizona at Tucson) who’s spent his adult life studying bees. It’s a pleasantly wonkish book, with writing shaped and colored in by co-author Banning Repplier, that features firsthand accounts of a traditional raid on a Malaysian bee tree, a search in Yucatán for keepers of the native (and increasingly scarce) stingless bee, and other such tales. It has a rootedness in what we usually, perhaps awkwardly, call biodiversity and traditional cultures, but for which a better term might be, simply, “the vanishing world.” It’s a bit of a shame to reduce “Letters From the Hive” to a type, but it represents a sort of elegant book, modest and evenly paced, that’s dense-packed with information, but such a pleasure to read that you hardly notice how much you’re assimilating, page by page. (Another of these is the X chromosome book, David Bainbridge’s “The X of Sex.”) Buchmann covers the world history of beekeeping and honey, culture by culture; the natural history of bees (an appendix features entries on such diverse entities as polyester bees, mining bees and honey-making wasps); makes frequent sharp turns into arcana such as Australian Aboriginal hive-robbing techniques; and throws in a section on honey recipes merely to — if we were making all those bad, obvious jokes — sweeten the pot.

This passage on “swarming,” the behavior bees exhibit when abandoning a nest for a new one, or when one colony splits into two, gives a sense of the book’s pleasant wonkishness:

“I’ve been lucky enough in my career as a bee researcher and part-time bee keeper to witness the swarming spectacle dozens of times. I’ve even experienced the adrenaline rush of running inside several swarms as they traveled to their new lodgings. It’s called swarm running and I do it just for fun. The bees are gentle, their stomachs full of honey packed for the trip, and they are not in the mood to sting. As I run, bees swirl about me in all directions, but somehow the mass stays coherent, changing shape but not dispersing.”

In the available photos, Buchmann appears as a cheerful, beardlessly professorial man with thick glasses. One imagines him running with the bees in khaki shorts and a short-sleeved dress shirt, all knees and elbows. It’s impossible not to admire a man like that, knowledgeable yet childlike in his enthusiasm.

Holley Bishop’s “Robbing the Bees” is another ball of wax altogether. It represents a venerable New York dilettante tradition, in which a privileged or well-connected New Yorker will become a casual expert on a subject, reading through the literature and taking a few field trips, then reporting his or her findings in book form.

Some of these dilettante books are very good: The estimable John McPhee, one of America’s all-time research fiends and prose stylists, began as one of these writers, as did Michael Pollan (of “Botany of Desire”). The less-estimable ones tend to be hedged as personal memoirs, in the “my journey through the fascinating world of…” category, and err strangely toward the obvious (or even the no-duh), such that you can imagine the authors going through life protected by giant, Plexiglas New York Bubbles like the balls that hamsters walk around in.

Bishop, a graduate of Brown University and the Columbia School of Journalism who works in book publishing, bought a house in rural Connecticut and got a couple of beehives. Someone must have said, perhaps at one of those same parties where the Discovery Channel guy hangs out, that she should write a book about being a person who has a couple of beehives, so, as Bishop says, she studied the literature on bees and took some trips to visit Donald Smiley, a professional beekeeper in Florida, and produced just such a book. The difference between her book and Buchmann’s is striking. Both have loads of great information and detail, covering much of the same territory. And good, or simply honest, writing can make almost any topic interesting. But “Robbing the Bees” is written in a familiar, semi-precious style that’s full of facts from other sources, pat descriptions and stock phrases, and where the entire solar system seems to orbit the author. For instance, to describe my evening: My taste buds enjoyed a Jolly Rancher with gusto, and I perused a dusty old tome while guzzling a glass of the finest beer. I am now excitedly walking toward my fish tank, where I will get my recommended daily allowance of magic and wonder.

If anyone’s dying out there, I’m sorry — it’s really that bad when Bishop shifts from expository, fact-based prose, which is merely stuck together at slightly odd angles, into a more expressive, personal style. Here’s one place where you can see such a shift:

“[Honeybees] live for only several weeks and heroically die after delivering their dreaded, venomous sting. Bees shape the very landscape in which we all live by cross-pollinating and changing the plants that nourish them. After decades of living in honeyless ignorance I added these divine insects and their delicious produce to my recommended daily allowance of magic and wonder.”

This bandage on my head is from when I set the book on fire and beat myself silly with it (it’s a thick book), thinking that some people can write like that with relaxed certainty, like a bowling ball rolling downhill, whereas I could barely finish anything for years, classically blocked and in mortal dread of publishing an imperfect sentence (as you can see, I’ve largely gotten over any silly concerns with quality. And yet, there are things like a puzzling chapter of Bishop’s in which she’s hanging around her New York apartment naked during the ’03 blackout, that make “relaxed certainty” seem a more perilous mindframe than ever).

We’re on a bit of a tangent here, and we’ll be back to the bees (and Bishop’s book) in just a paragraph or two, but perhaps the best example of the contemporary dilettante book is Daniel Pinchbeck’s “Trust-fund Shaman: My Psychedelic Journey Through the Fascinating World of a Bunch of Old Carlos Castaneda Paperbacks” (published under the title “Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism”). According to Pinchbeck, a good-natured and well-meaning son of a wealthy literary family, he remembered that psychedelic drugs are widely said to have religious significance, and went around reading books about drugs while also taking a lot of them, often in far-flung locales. Achoo!, he sneezed, and a book deal was in the Kleenex. It’s an interesting topic, to be sure, although in classic low-dilettante style, Pinchbeck describes things in over-limpid, imprecise terms, as though (this is a crucial characteristic, and also the thing about “Robbing the Bees” that best explains Bishop’s writing style) a book were like a paper to be turned in for a grade: As if someone who comes from the right place socially need only demonstrate that he did the relevant reading, and write correct prose with no serious logical or factual errors, to be able to expect comments like “Great work!” or “A revealing treatment of the subject matter!” and be rewarded with an authorial career. To imitate Pinchbeck’s signature 50 yards of narrative distance (and this is a made-up passage, tuned for concision, that’s actually quite close to how the book reads): The drug, Yage, can radically dissolve consciousness. The experience can be highly individual, but I found myself experiencing beatific visions that transcended time and space.

As an expository style, that barely rates a C+ (although Pinchbeck is a nice guy and there’s no joy in poking at him). And consummately, the big noise that you didn’t hear when the book came out included literally millions of ’70s hippies, ’80s Robert Anton Wilson fans and recent Burning Man weirdos — the book’s natural constituency — not yelling, “Great work! A revealing treatment of the subject matter!” (Aldous Huxley, likewise, did not spin in his casket.) I mentioned my own period of dread-haunted blockage earlier because the signal difference between, on one hand, myself and (I think) most writers, and the dilettante tradition that reaches to McPhee and encompasses Bishop and Pinchbeck, is that most writers type under an eternal, hanging neon sign that blinks, “So what? Who cares!” — and that sign has to be argued with and answered every day, sometimes line by line or word by word. “Robbing the Bees,” like most dilettante books, reads like it was composed under a neon sign that gamely blinks, “How nice! Do tell!”

In any case, the whole “psychedelic drug” thing will be cleared up with my upcoming book, “The Slamdancing Wu-Li Masters: A Wake ‘n’ Bake, Tao-of-Fuck-You Rampage Through the Heart of String Theory, Chaos Theory, and Quantum Physics.” It will be finished as soon as these pumpkins stop chasing me.

But there’s still a third book on bees that’s yet a different kind altogether from Buchmann’s and Bishop’s. Tammy Horn’s “Bees in America” is an academic romp of the young-professor variety — meaning it was composed under a furiously blinking sign that says, “Research more! Cite more sources!”

Covering (again) much of the same territory as the other books, Horn goes further and builds a social history of the bee in America, beginning with the earliest colonists (honeybees aren’t native to North America) and ending with hyper-contemporary electronic hives and the Bee Genome Project, making a dizzying journey along the way through the bee’s appearance in advertising, popular music (the Gospel group Sweet Honey in the Rock gets two mentions; early blues artists get many more), Mormon wood carvings (the hive is an important Mormon symbol), popular film, and anything else one is likely to think of. It’s a heroic book in its scope, but like many popular-academic books, the structure starts to fly apart in the middle and the references begin to come faster and faster, becoming choppy and eventually turning into a sort of fact blizzard in which you have no idea where you are or what’s happening.

At around the three-quarter mark, it begins to seem as though paragraphs could be shuffled randomly, each with its own small topic (one short stretch, by no means unrepresentative, bounds directly from parasitic mites and the 1922 Honey Bee Restriction Act to Tom Petty’s song “Honey Bee,” to Gloria Gaynor, and Southern writer Lee Smith). Horn seems to finish the book in a state of exhaustion, notebooks empty, sources wrung dry, nothing left to do but turn off the blinking neon sign and slip deservedly into bed for the after-deadline sleep of the blessed. It’s a book that exhausts the reader as well, but one that’s worth coming back to — not just for the cram-jammed facts and references, but for the aesthetic thrill of being caught in a typhoon of data and interconnections that, one knows, one could never in decades of work have whipped up oneself. Horn learned beekeeping from her grandfather, and “Bees in America” has the glow of a book that only a serious, lifelong enthusiast could have written — not an expert such as Stephen Buchmann, but a thrillingly mad one, intoxicated with her subject.

The Discovery Channel guy is even now stirring up a new flurry of random, same-subject books, and it’s anybody’s guess as to what they might be about. It would be interesting if he were to go really deep and expound a temporary passion for light bulbs or doorknobs, or Polish army helmets. One would like to see the limits of his powers; and while bees are indeed a strange topic to produce a buzz, perhaps the next topic to swarm the shelves will really give people hives (or carry a sting), or at least lead to an equally good array of groan-worthy one-liners. Fish are a rich topic for those, if you’re out there, sir.

Then you’re in the bookstore and there’s this other book on display called “Bagels: The Story of Human Civilization.” And it’s really interesting. It starts with the cultivation of the sesame seed (circa 4000 B.C.), skimming cursorily over the oft-told tale of wheat farming. You learn of the codification of kosher dietary laws, and of the early trade routes of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), from whose pods come the edible poppy seed. The recurring clashes between lactose-tolerant and lactose-intolerant peoples. The toroid: According to some scientists, the shape of the bagel is the shape of the very universe itself. The very universe. Well, gosh. Bagels — who knew?

Then, some time later, you walk in and there’s a book on display called, “Lint: A Head-Exploding Typhoon of Unlikely Connections, Showing How the Entire Universe Is Made of Nothing but Lint (Including You).” And clearly this trend is getting out of hand. You turn to the last chapter to see what sort of scientists might be saying that the universe is made out of…? Oh, string theory.

I’m just making all this up, of course. But ever since Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” there’s been a small avalanche of books like these; they start with tiny little monads of topics, and wind up trying to account for vast swaths of human or natural history (or both). Some are great, like Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book and Mark Kurlansky’s “Salt: A World History.” Barbara Freese’s book, “Coal,” is really good. Other times, you get books like Steve Jones’ “Y: The Descent of Men.”

Jones is a sharp writer, a British geneticist with a measured style and a dry wit. He’s also known for a certain boldness: His last jaunt was “Darwin’s Ghost,” a chapter-by-chapter revisiting of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” that sought to bring the classic text to a wider readership, while updating it with everything that biologists have learned in the meantime. “Y: The Descent of Men” (the title is a riff on Darwin’s later work, “The Descent of Man”), is a treatise on the Y-chromosome, the microscopic squiggle of DNA that divides maleness from femaleness, and on how it has affected the course of all life on the planet, including all of humanity (including you). Which it certainly has — there’s no doubt of that. And the Y-chromosome’s workings on the cellular level are explained in lucid detail in David Bainbridge’s very pleasurable and absorbing new book on the X-chromosome, “The X of Sex” (about which more anon).

Jones’ conclusions are, however, somewhat far-reaching. The book says that because the Y-chromosome is really small and contains only a bit of genetic information, compared to the voluptuous female X-chromosome, all males are useless and inferior and destined for the dustbin of history.

Now, let’s just allow that to hang in the air for a moment. Jones is staring at his computer monitor now with his jaw adrop, screaming how that’s not fair and there’s an awful lot more to it than that. And indeed there is. But “Y: The Descent of Men” is being touted as something of a companion volume to Natalie Angier’s “Woman: An Intimate Geography.” And when Jones says “males,” he means not only the abstract principle of biological maleness, but male bodies and male humans. Like Jones and me, for instance, and possibly you as well. Certainly someone you know. We’re talking about going from a microscopic scrap of proteins to a biological refutation of slightly less than half the human race.

He’s screaming again. We’ll settle Jones’ objections later.

The book does that fairly boldly, tending to use terms like “the Y chromosome,” “sperm,” “maleness” and “males” as though they were interchangeable, and giving human motives to cells and reproductive chemicals (and vice versa). Wherever you find that chromosome in nature, it suggests, you find a stadium full of Promise Keepers baying sea chanteys with their dicks out, a Texas barroom full of drunken NASCAR fans with their hands all over the waitresses, a firehose of testosterone and a rain of beef jerky. For instance, in Chapter 1, “Nature’s Sole Mistake,” Jones is writing about the fact that the Y-chromosome doesn’t alter its genetic code from generation to generation: “Males evolved to stop females from degenerating into clones, but in their own intimate selves have suffered the same fate.” From the same chapter, a few lines down: “Males are, in many ways, parasites upon their partners … Like all vermin, from viruses to tapeworms, they force their reluctant landladies to adapt or to be overwhelmed.”

Yow. But here’s how the up-spiral begins that can take you from that one piece of lint in your pocket to the lint-shaped universe: From the level of microscopic proteins we move to the complex reproductive rites of different microbial, plant and animal species. Beetles are drilling holes in each other and sealing sperm inside their victims with plugs. Fruit flies are performing complex transactions. Fish, birds, mammals, etc. It’s all really interesting, actually.

Then we find ourselves abruptly standing amid human history and biology — with citations from 19th century novels and treatises, references to virility-enhancing patent medicines, the rates of boys and girls born in China and India. The economics of primogeniture, the rate of pay for semen samples, artificial insemination, the workings of the human penis, the history of circumcision and castration.

Jones is careful throughout the book to keep noting that sex is not the same as human gender, that biology and sociology should not be confused. But then he keeps imbuing tiny chemical reactions with world-shaking portent, reducing world-historical trends to the business of mating. There’s a long jaunt through the founding of human ethnic populations, as traced by DNA research. That part and a few others seem a bit out of place, actually. Then there’s more on reproduction in different animal species, and then the book concludes with a chapter on the rising rates of human male genital deformity and human male social alienation, in these modern times. Sperm counts are lowering. Women are out-earning their husbands. “Manhood,” it says, “is in full retreat.” The “fate” of the male sex is “encoded on the Y chromosome.”

It seems like a lifetime ago now, but we were talking before about how all Jones’ conclusions spring from the size and mechanics of that Y chromosome, that “most decayed, redundant and parasitic” of genetic structures, that evolutionary blank cartridge. It’s a little scrap of a thing that insinuates itself into the female genetic line, and (like a virus) forces egg cells — genetically complete in themselves — to produce Y-infused offspring. The world has long been unwillingly awash in semen, infested with spermatozoa.

Jones is still screaming. Look, Jones, you’re chair of the Galton Laboratory and a professor of genetics. I think perhaps you were writing a book about, among other things, the science of maleness, of the penis, of the founding of human ethnic populations as traced through DNA, and all that other ordinary but cool man-type stuff that ended up in “Y.” That would have been a good book. But the editor got his or her claws into the project, didn’t she? Or he — it’s possible your editor was a he. “It’s got to be sexier! Think bigger!” she said. Do you know what she said? “Steve,” she said, “men don’t read books.” I’m looking at the introduction now. It says, “This volume should be of interest to at least half the population.” Hmm.

Or maybe I’m wrong. But it’s possible to read “Y” and still not get a clear notion of what that pesky Y-chromosome actually is, how it works, or what it’s really for. David Bainbridge’s “The X of Sex” doesn’t try to be of interest to half the population. It’s for people who want to read interesting, cool stuff about genetics, written in a clear and literate hand with lots of anecdotal examples. Bainbridge is a Brit as well, a lecturer at a veterinary college. According to him, the Y-chromosome is sort of a useful thing.

Briefly, human embryos are female by default. This doesn’t mean that girls are better, or more authentically human, than boys. Bainbridge dismisses that notion right away — it could just as easily be spun as, “Males are more special.” In fact, men and women are exactly the same animals genetically — in our genitalia, our brains and body shapes, our innate potential to play credible lead guitar or even drums. The information on our “female” X-chromosomes is genderless, and both sexes have the same amount of it. The Y-chromosome is merely an extra snippet of genetic code that triggers default female body parts to develop into specialized male ones. Embryos that have the Y develop as males, and can pass it on (unaltered) to other generations. Embryos that don’t have the Y have a duplicate, inactive X-chromosome instead, and develop as females.

Now, you would suppose there might be a reason for this. Despite the practically infinite modes of reproduction that go on from species to species, with beetles wielding drill-bit penises, oysters changing from male to female and back again, fish engulfing their partners, cells cloning themselves through division, etc., the reason to have two sexes is always the same. It’s the easiest way to swap DNA from one individual to another, which is how the evolutionary gene pot stays simmering. If organisms just cloned themselves, random mutation would be the only way for them to adapt and change over time, to split off into new species, to evolve. Most probably, life on earth would still be a lot of blobby algae-like stuff drifting around in the ocean — forever.

So this tiny, obsolete, parasitical scrap of code actually accomplishes something. Somebody could even write a book about it. Moreover, DNA-swapping is the only thing that “maleness” and “femaleness” are consistently about, from one species to the next. All other sex-related differences — size, plumage, salary, behavior, proficiency on lead guitar — are variable over the course of generations, and they are as widely disparate among species as rhubarb plants are different from lobsters. Meaning: Even if the human male is, as Jones claims, of no special utility at this very instant, these last 30 or so years of industrial civilization (a single generation, Mr. Jones!), things have a way of being quite a bit different every few hundred thousand years. And somebody, Mr. Jones, is still going to have to program the DVD player around here. Oh yes, let’s just wait and see who that will be.

Darger’s landlord, Nathan Lerner, was an art-world figure with Bauhaus ties who tolerated Darger with a certain bohemian noblesse — forgiving lapses in rent, ignoring strange behavior and strange noises, and even (if perhaps a bit ironically) throwing all-tenant birthday parties for him. But failing health finally forced the old man to move out in late 1972 (he died in early 1973), and when they opened up his close-smelling rooms and walked the narrow footpaths that wound from door to bed to bathroom through a ceiling-high mountain of clutter, they found the skulls and tibiae of several little girls, polished as though by long fondling.

Actually, no. But we’ll get back to that. They found hundreds of paintings and collages that are now scattered among the world’s museums, and the longest single piece of writing ever known: “In the Realms of the Unreal,” a labyrinthine novel of more than 15,000 closely spaced pages for which the paintings serve as illustrations. Also an incomplete 8,000-page sequel, illustrated, and many thousands of pages of other writings — including a gargantuan autobiography recounting Darger’s troubled and institutionalized youth and his 53-year career as a laborer. In the latter (and this part is crucial and strange), the sole mention that he had any creative leanings at all comes in a passage in which he’s complaining about the chronic joint pain that plagued him in later life:

“To make matters worse now I’m an artist, been one for years, and cannot hardly stand on my feet because of my knee to paint on the top of the long picture.”

That’s the only time it ever comes up, and Darger, who had no known family, apparently never said a word about his colossal creative output to any of his fellow tenants or co-workers. MacGregor’s book makes it clear that like all “outsider art,” Darger’s writings and artworks were an encompassing private world to him, one which the tired dishwasher began to inhabit as soon as he arrived home from one of his 14-hour shifts and sat down at the typewriter or work table. He obsessively built it around himself, night after night, by the acts of writing and painting. And apparently the public Darger and the private one had very little in common — and very little to say to (or about) each other. Their worlds didn’t connect.

Darger’s private world centered around seven little blond moppets called the Vivian Girls, whose adventures include … But it’s a 23,000-page story, and while of course I always read every relevant source in the course of writing a review — and boy, was this one a doozy — it’s a bit involuted to go into in much detail. Actually, not even MacGregor has read more than a representative fraction of Darger’s writing, and it’s safe to say that nobody ever will. MacGregor’s book and Michael Bonesteel’s “Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings” are the only places in which significant amounts of Darger’s prose are available in English, and it might come as a surprise that Darger, despite being a mentally ill laborer with a grade-school education, was actually better than many of the pulp writers working during his formative creative years (“Realms of the Unreal” was begun sometime after around 1910, when Darger was a very young man; he seems to have finished the first volume around 1932), at least in terms of sentences and paragraphs. (It can otherwise be said that his work would not have been weakened by a greater commitment toward concision.) An outstanding passage:

“He paused for a moment, many recollections overpowering him. He seemed to have unlocked the casket of his heart, closed for so many hours, as if all the memories of the past and all the secrets of his heart and life were rushing out, glad to be free once more and grateful for the open air of sympathy.”

But basically the Vivian Girls are seven perfect, radiantly attractive, largely indistinguishable little girls who get into all sorts of children’s-book adventures, often without any clothes on, during a war between their noble and Roman Catholic land of Angelinia and an evil empire of child slavery and child hatred called Glandelinia.

It’s a nearly sexless story in the conventional sense (there’s lots of hugging and kissing), but a ferociously bloody one, in which literally millions of little girls are tortured, strangled or otherwise killed and/or disemboweled in graphic detail, by the evil Glandelinians. Hundreds of millions of children and adults are destroyed by fire, flood, warfare, tornado, massive explosions and anything else you can think of. There are tens of thousands of named characters who sometimes switch names and identities and often have doppelgängers fighting on the other side of the war. Darger himself appears in many guises, with many variant names, including as a “protector of children” and as a Glandelinian murderer.

If there’s a center around which the narrative revolves, it’s the so-called Aronburg Mystery, the incident that Darger writes was responsible for beginning this cycle of war and catastrophe. It was the unsolved theft of a coveted newspaper photograph of Annie Aronburg, a murdered little girl. As MacGregor shows, such an event happened to Darger in real life, and caused him enormous, lifelong anxiety.

That’s a brief redux apropos the “skulls” thing before, for there’s been a huge controversy whirling through the art world over whether Darger was basically just a crabby mentally disturbed gentleman (which would be good for sales of Darger’s work), or was, as MacGregor once famously said, “psychologically a serial killer” (rather likely from the book’s description of his childhood violence and pyromania and other warning signs, but hotly contested by gallerists) — and if the latter, whether he really did molest or murder anyone (MacGregor seems to have wussed out on researching that too deeply, but you really have to wonder). The real-life photo in question was of Elsie Paroubek, age 5, who disappeared in Chicago in April 1911, when Darger, at 19, had recently returned to the city from the mental asylum in which he spent most of his youth. Paroubek was later found strangled in a drainage ditch. Apparently, her photo and a notebook of early writings were stolen from Darger’s belongings at a time when he lived dormitory-style with other hospital workers.

We haven’t even touched on the art yet. To sum up an oeuvre of hundreds of illustrations, scores of which are reproduced here: The naked Vivian Girls, and all female children, are generally depicted with little-boy penises, although this interesting detail seems never to be mentioned or explained in Darger’s text. Darger couldn’t draw, and usually didn’t try, instead tracing, arranging and coloring images clipped from magazines. His compositional gifts and skill as a colorist approached genius. Many of his paintings are rather charming and even childlike, while some are tableaux of tortures, massacres and mutilated bodies.

It’s an incredibly complex and puzzling body of work, more so because of the rather few key elements it contains, repeated in practically infinite combinations: little girls with penises frolicking or carrying weapons; pastoral and military scenes; little girls being choked and disemboweled. What it all meant to Darger, we’ll never fully know, although MacGregor seems to have the core principle nailed down firmly when he says that the artist never outgrew his childhood, never developed adult feelings or desires, and suffered a bitter conflict between his angelic, or “Angelinian,” side and his glandular, or “Glandelinian,” one.

MacGregor is an art historian who specializes in outsider art and is one of the last of the old-time Freudians (he studied with Anna Freud). His analyses of Darger’s art and psyche draw heavily from the Freudian tool kit, and have a lot to do with repression and early-childhood trauma. It’s highly convincing, although it seems to leave a few holes in things. Darger, at age 4, had a sister who was put up for adoption after his mother died in childbirth, and MacGregor identifies this as the signal event of Darger’s life, upon which all his subsequent neuroses and crazinesses accreted. However, the possibility that his parents were assholes is not explored (it seems likely). Apropos the girl-penises, MacGregor writes that Darger might not even have known there was a difference between the male and the female anatomy. That seems pretty hard to credit, given that the young Darger grew up in a rough Chicago neighborhood and later worked summers on a farm.

Despite the incredible depth of MacGregor’s research (and it is incredible), he’s apparently known in the art-history field as a bit of a character, and he jokes about having picked up some of Darger’s creative habits during the 10 years he researched his subject. (He wrote much of it sitting alone in Darger’s own room, occasionally talking to the absent artist.) It’s true: His work would not have been weakened by a greater commitment toward concision.

The book’s text is also organized a bit like Darger’s writing, which is to say, you rarely get everything in a straight line. If Darger’s prose is liable to start in one place, meander up and down the hall for a while and then run around the block whooping for several hundred pages (literally) before circling back as though nothing had happened, MacGregor’s only goes around the block for a page-column or two at a time. That doesn’t at all keep “In the Realms of the Unknown” from being an engrossing read, although it’s hard to get a synthesis on Darger and his work when you have to keep skipping back and forth through 720 pages, trying to clear up details that aren’t where you’d think they’d be — names and dates, context, chronologies. The index is sparse and somewhat crude, as though the indexing person got a migraine and gave up. It’s a book that demands to be read either hard and thoroughly, or several times at leisure.

So, the tough question: Did Darger ever kill anyone? The answer is, we’ll probably never know. Darger’s ex-landlords, the late Nathan Lerner and his widow Kiyoko, seem to have managed the Darger estate in such a way that nobody who wants access to their material is allowed to ask the wrong questions, or to give the wrong answers, and MacGregor seems to have acceded to all their wishes. Eyewitness accounts have differed over whether Darger gave them his work or asked that it be thrown out — MacGregor doesn’t address the issue of ownership.

After Darger’s death, the Lerners cut apart his self-bound volumes of artwork, scrambling their context as illustrations, in order to sell the pieces individually. MacGregor notes this in passing, in the passive voice, as though nobody in particular had done the cutting. And the cataloguing of the Darger work that was sold seems to have been so lax that nobody knows what paintings might’ve ended up where. MacGregor doesn’t address that either.

Researchers, including MacGregor, have had to agree not to look for any surviving relatives of Darger’s, who might possibly claim the estate. MacGregor didn’t look for any — including the lost sister. And most signally, the research on Elsie Paroubek, and on other children who might have disappeared in and around Chicago during Darger’s time there, stopped when the police records on the Paroubek case couldn’t be found. MacGregor gives no details on the case, which was elaborately reported in the Chicago Daily News; gives no possible scenarios; describes no other leads or competing bits of evidence; and doesn’t show that he ever sifted Darger’s writings in a prosecutorial frame of mind. If you were MacGregor, wouldn’t you be curious? Hmm.

MacGregor does, however, begin his volume with this inscription, which precedes an introduction by Nathan Lerner — suggesting that inner conflict is among the habits of Darger’s he picked up during his 10-year immersion in his life and work:

All the Gold in the Gold mines
All the Silver in the world,
Nay, all the world,
Cannot buy these pictures from me,
Vengeance, thee {terrible} vengeance
On those who steals or destroys them.

— Henry J. Darger

Hmmm.

The academy is finally catching up with that one. There’s long been a rich vernacular literature on stupidity, including such titles as Michael Shermer’s “Why People Believe Weird Things,” and Charles McKay’s 1841 classic, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” But recently, a couple of academic works on the topic have appeared, so that stupidity studies would seem to be something of an emerging field — an academic trendlet. Avital Ronell, the post-structuralist theorist perhaps best known for the naked photos of herself in the Re:Search “Angry Women” collection, had a book out last year called, simply, “Stupidity.” (It wasn’t clear whether she was for or against it.) Psychologist Gene F. Ostrom’s “Why Smart People Do Stupid Things” came out last year as well (he’s against it).

Now Robert J. Sternberg, IBM professor of psychology and education at Yale and the hyperprolific editor or author of more than 60 other books, has compiled and edited “Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid,” a volume of scholarly papers on the subject.

Sternberg’s premise is that stupidity and intelligence aren’t like cold and heat, where the former is simply the absence of the latter. Stupidity might be a quality in itself, perhaps measurable, and it may exist in dynamic fluxion with intelligence, such that smart people can do really dumb things sometimes and vice versa. Each of the 10 contributors (or teams of contributors) examines the nature and theory of stupidity from a different angle, coming up with different notions of what it is and how it works — and making the book, on the whole, a rather compelling treatment of what could be humankind’s oldest and most persistent problem. That said, there also seems to be something rather odd about the book and about the way it frames its subject.

But more on that anon. The appearance of the smart and canny Ronell amid the fray gives a hot tip as to where this small explosion of stupidity literature might be coming from. These days, when complex academic works such as Ronell’s and Sternberg’s cross over to a readership outside academia, all slicked-up and flashy of cover, it’s often less because of what’s inside than because of the immediate hook of the title — and the lower the hook is aimed, the better.

Ronell’s titles include “Crack Wars” and “The Telephone Book” (both post-structuralist treatises unreadable by civilians), while the grand exemplar of the trend is the late Dominique Laporte’s “The History of Shit,” issued in translation (in a deluxe black-velvet-bound edition) by MIT Press a couple of years back. Why this might be, nobody knows. Like many stupid things, it’s mysterious. But one tries in vain to avoid picturing the editorial meeting behind Sternberg’s book:

The editor at Yale University Press leans back in his chair, puts his arms behind his head.

“OK, Bob,” he says. “I need crossover titles like you wouldn’t believe, but everything’s been done. ‘History of Shit’ is taken; there are books out on piss, armpits, you name it. University of Illinois Press just did a collection of papers by a classics professor on the pugilistic tradition of a certain Greek island, called ‘Lesbian Double Fisting.’ Your last thing on the psychology of love was good. What else have you got?”

The professor leans forward intently, hands in a professorial clasp. “Well, I’m also working on the psychology of hatred, and on a theory of what you’d call negative intelligence …”

“Hey, great!” the editor says. “Title: ‘You’re Stupid and I Hate You: Why Everyone Hates Stupid People!’”

“Well,” Sternberg says, “actually, they’re separate research topics …”

“OK, ‘You’re Stupid’ and ‘I Hate You.’ Two books. Let’s hear about the first one.”

You have to watch out for these flashy crossover titles, basically. But “Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid” is a serious book. We’re having lots of fun with it, but it’s a serious book.

Contributor Carol S. Dweck believes that stupidity is located in the beliefs of certain smart people about the nature of intelligence — false beliefs, including that “intelligence is a fixed trait rather than a potential that can be developed,” that “learning is risky,” and that “effort is only for the incompetent.” Which is unconvincing: I’m a smart person who does a lot of stupid things, and I’ve never believed that intelligence is a fixed trait, et cetera.

Richard K. Wagner gets into managerial theory in his chapter, “Smart People Doing Dumb Things,” treading on territory claimed by Mortimer R. Feinberg and John J. Tarrant in their 1995 treatment of Wall Street incompetence, “Why Smart People Do Dumb Things.” (Note to prospective authors: Despite the combined efforts of Ostrom, Feinberg/Tarrant, Wagner and Sternberg, the title “Why Smart People Can Be So Dumb” remains unclaimed.)

Then we start to really get rolling with David N. Perkins’ fleetly written, deftly argued chapter. Stupidity, for Perkins, is best thought of as a failure of adaptiveness — as “folly.” And folly “in a strong sense involves recurrent foolishness that seems, in principle, within the intellectual reach of the person to discern” — a matter of faulty switching in one’s mental processes. Basically, Perkins says, you can be really smart but not know when to engage your smartness, and the extent to which this happens is “stupidity.”

Perkins lists eight deadly sins of the stupid smart person, which seem to sum it all up rather elegantly: impulsiveness (doing something rash), neglect (ignoring something important), procrastination (actively avoiding something important), vacillation (dithering), backsliding (capitulating to habit), indulgence (allowing oneself to fall into excess), overdoing (like indulgence, but with positive things) and walking the edge (tempting fate). That sounds like my entire life, actually. Yes, that explains a lot.

Diane Halpern contributes a study of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, which has (apparently) preoccupied stupidity researchers since the writing of Ostrom’s book, and Keith Stanovich gets into a whole game-theory thing that is fascinating if jargonesque. Game theory has long recognized that people habitually make suboptimal decisions when confronted with choices that work out cleanly on paper. But, says Stanovich:

“A substantial research literature — one comprising literally hundreds of empirical studies conducted over nearly four decades — has firmly established that [...] people assess probabilities incorrectly, they display confirmation bias, they test hypotheses inefficiently, they violate the axioms of utility theory, they do not properly calibrate degrees of belief,” and so on for another several lines.

After reading Stanovich, the proper utility of game theory seems to be, not the study of human interactions, but the study of why game theory doesn’t work in real life — to wit: the study of human stupidity, including the stupidity of those who keep trying to apply game theory to real human behavior. Stanovich also contributes the excellent term “dysrationalia.” A word to keep and to use.

Elena Grigorenko and Donna Lockery’s chapter, called “Smart Is as Stupid Does,” spins the whole thing into a discussion of historical attitudes toward the learning-disabled, including attitudes toward their sexuality, as expressed in popular films. The sort of thing second-string academics are always doing. The first chapter note reads: “1. Cockney refers to lower-level working class in Great Britain.” Oh. Wait, in certain parts of London, you mean? A combination of “overdoing” and “neglect,” it looks like (pace Perkins). But whatever.

Are you getting tired now, too? It’s not supposed to be fun: This is a serious book.

But it’s difficult not to train the lens on Sternberg himself. Sternberg downplays the notion of “stupidity,” equating smart people’s unsmart behavior with “foolishness” (as opposed to “wisdom”) — which torpedoes the whole premise from the get-go (suggesting that the Yale University Press book editor really did have his thumb in the pie the whole time). (Next Sternberg book: “Why Assholes Think They Can Shit All Over You: The Psychology of Evil Motherfuckers.”)

And yet … Well, this is what they call “going deep” in one of those sports like football or hockey, but “Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid” seems to be something of a magnum opus for Sternberg, whose interest in intelligence research began in grade school, when he was found to score low on IQ tests and was shunted into the slow classes. His faculty bio tells the story of a child, and then a young man, subsequently obsessed with aptitude testing: He designed his first, which he called the Sternberg Test of Mental Aptitude, in seventh grade, and got in trouble at school the same year for surreptitiously testing his classmates with the Stanford-Binet. Sternberg’s summer jobs were with entities such as ETS, the company behind the SAT. But his troubles continued. In college, he majored in psychology and nearly flunked, then switched majors to math and did even worse. Somehow he got back into psychology and graduated with honors. And, as he relates in the third person, “The summer after the first year, he got his ideas for componential analysis, and so began his career as a serious psychologist!”

This book seems something like a magnum opus because you have to wonder about Sternberg a bit in terms of the smart/stupid question. Despite several honorary doctorates and a C.V. stuffed with prestigious positions and awards (he is, among other things, a Guggenheim fellow and the president-elect of the American Psychological Association), he seems unduly excited, as a middle-aged Yale professor, to be a “serious psychologist!” Despite an outstanding body of work on theories of intelligence and aptitude testing, his career has consisted in large part of collaborations and the editing of other people’s stuff. He seems like what you’d call a hard worker. For example, his chapter in the present book begins like this:

“According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1992), a person who is stupid is ’1. Slow to learn or understand; obtuse; 2. Lacking or marked by lack of intelligence’ (pp. 1784-1785). A person who is foolish is ’1. Lacking or exhibiting a lack of good sense or judgment; silly. 2. Resulting from stupidity or misinformation; unwise.’ (p. 707). The two definitions refer to quite different kinds of entities.”

Yes, it’s the old “according to the American Heritage Dictionary” opener, known and dreaded for its ubiquity and universal inappropriateness by graders of undergraduate papers throughout the English-speaking world. “Hmm,” your basic college sophomore will think, “I’m supposed to write a paper — but where do I start?” And 75 times out of 100, the solution will be found by looking up a key term (such as “psychology,” “narrative” or “Machiavelli”) in the wise old dictionary and saying what it says, thus committing a crime against sensibility and reason equalled only by the scream-inducing “since the dawn of time” opener, which … well, not to go off on a tangent here or anything.

What this is, besides a cardinal stylistic sin, is reasoning from usage — a logical fallacy of sorts. Ostrom, the author of “Why Smart People Do Stupid Things,” does the dictionary thing too, on the first page of his book (oddly enough), except he uses Webster’s. But if Ostrom were to jump off the Empire State Building, wouldn’t it be “stupid” to … Well, never mind; it’s just tangents everywhere. Anyway, this is simply not the sort of thing you’d expect from an acclaimed professor of psychology and education with more than 60 books under his belt. By the time one graduates from college, one learns to at least swipe from Bartlett’s.

But essentially, I believe Marcus Aurelius summed up the point in, as I recall, “Meditations,” Chapter 6, Verse 5: “The controlling intelligence understands its own nature, and what it does, and whereon it works.” “Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid” suggests a man at the verge of that great and humane understanding: Imagine that the young Sternberg had instead gotten run over by a school bus and had found himself one day, decades later, manning his perch at Yale’s Department of School Bus Studies, at the very pinnacle of the school bus academy, surveying the achievements and the awards strewn about him (as a star bus driver, an ace bus mechanic, an acclaimed designer of buses, with his first bus designed in seventh grade). “But … it is all as bitter ashes,” he thought. And he set to work, at long last, on a book called “Why Kids Can Be So Careless Crossing the Street.”

Perhaps that bit of humor was “impulsive.” In any case, it would be a case of “neglect” not to say that “Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid” is a valuable addition to a valuable new field of inquiry, and Sternberg is to be commended for initiating its … But I’m “vacillating.” It’s an interesting book, and it’s not “overdoing” it to say that it “walks the edge” between  …

… Um, since the beginning of time (backsliding)  …