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I love it when marketing people talk about “branding.” No, seriously, I love it. Today, the New York Times talks with branding expert Brian Collins about the Obama campaign’s use of the typeface Gotham, designed by Tobias Frere-Jones—brother to New York music critic Sasha Frere-Jones. (Slackers. Don’t these guys know that the Foer brothers are writing bestselling novels, editing The New Republic, and writing kick-ass pieces for National Geographic?) Anyway, typophiles, start your engines.

President George Washington was a weird guy. He was an anachronism in his own time, a stiff, shy man who really never fit in. His contemporaries were legendary intellectuals, but Washington had no interest or education in matters philosophical or scientific. As Charlottesville’s Thomas Jefferson put it, Washington had “neither copiousness of ideas nor fluency of words.”

There’s a famous story about Washington, related here by Michael Novak, author of Washington’s God:

Professor Morgan tells this probably apocryphal story: One evening during the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Washington’s friends were commenting on the reserved and remote manner Washington maintained, even among his closest friends. Gouverneur Morris countered that he could be as familiar with Washington as with any one else. Alexander Hamilton offered to provide a dinner if Morris would simply walk up to Washington, slap him on the back and greet him jovially. So, a few evenings later, Morris approached Washington, bowed, and placed his left hand on Washington’s shoulder and said, “My dear General, I am very happy to see you look so well.” Immediately, Washington reached up, removed Morris’s hand, stared icily at him, and stepped back in silence until Morris retreated into the crowd.

Washington was also a bad-ass — a giant of a man, a self-made hero, a man of virtue; in short, the very model of a modern major-general. This was the fundamental conundrum of Washington’s life: he worked hard to cultivate respect and adoration from Americans, but was so caught up in that persona that he couldn’t breach the wall he’d built between himself and the world.

All of this is by way of introduction to Gordon Wood’s “The Greatness of George Washington” from our Spring 1992 issue. Wood recounts Washington’s rise to power and the regret and uncertainty that he felt about each new post and every new responsibility thrust upon him. After his two presidential terms elapsed, Washington watched helplessly as partisan politics took over, and he at last found himself so far removed from society that he could no longer relate to his ostensible peers. It was, of course, Washington who had made partisan politics possible; “the great experiment”^* allowed nations to be led by men of ideas, rather than high-minded war heros. The irony may well have escaped him.

* One of these days I’m going to chart the frequency with which the phrase “the great experiment” has appeared in VQR each year since its 1925 founding. When did we stop thinking of the United States as an experiment?

I like this n+1 review of Kevin Brockmeier’s work for two reasons. The first is because it introduces the literary term “Magic Feelism,” an expression I wish I had coined:

Thus sadness is a literary strategy. I have come to think of [Kevin] Brockmeier’s version, so reliant on the tropes of science fiction and fantasy, as Magic Feelism. The stories in [The View from the Seventh Layer] tend toward a common moral: Life inevitably ends in death, which is necessarily sad, yet death may allow us, magically, to perceive the beauty inherent in the most mundane aspects of life and thus, glory beheld, to feel happy.

If you are going to evoke powerful emotion in your writing, you better have something to back it up besides magic.

Magic Feelism—and Brockmeier is exemplary but not alone in deploying this style—asserts emotions without inspecting them. It is never comic, but it is often cute.

The second reason I like the n+1 piece is because Christian Lorentzen inadvertently gives me new criteria for judging fiction: don’t just read critically, count the erections.

“Home Videos” is told by a producer of a show indistinguishable from America’s Funniest Home Videos, who is fired for sneaking edgy pieces of video art onto the air. In the story’s favor, it does contain one of two erections I counted in the collection. . .

In the future, when I prepare my book reviews, I will not only make notes on character, point of view, style, and scene. I will also keep a working spreadsheet of all erections.

I’m not sure VQR is ready for me to blog for them.

Hillary Clinton is now, officially, weirding me out. Today, in Philadelphia, she entered a rally to the theme music from Rocky before telling a crowd:

“Could you imagine if Rocky Balboa had gotten halfway up those art museum stairs and said, ‘Well, I guess that’s about far enough’? That’s not the way it works. Let me tell you something. When it comes to finishing the fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit.”

Okay, laying aside the fact that this reference is thirty years outdated, it’s a very strange comparison to make. First, did Clinton see Rocky? Yes, Rocky fights bravely to the end—before he loses. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to rally the crowd.

But, stranger still, Sylvester Stallone—you know, the star and writer of Rocky—has already endorsed McCain.

You can see the video of Clinton’s speech here. And note that at the end, when referring to “finishing the fight,” she stumbles over “I never give up,” instead inadvertently saying, “I never get up.” Hmm, isn’t that called a knockout?

Our Spring 2008 issue is winging its way to mailboxes and appearing on newsstands everywhere now. The first thing you’ll notice is the cover, which is jarringly unlike our normal covers. That’s courtesy of contributor Art Spiegelman, who reimagined our logo and header, in addition to rendering the cover illustration. (Astute readers will note that this is temporarily the new normal, given that our winter issue was given the same treatment at the hands of Chris Ware.) Spiegelman allowed this exception to his lifelong refusal to draw superheroes, although looking at this “hero,” it’s not clear how super he really is. Tom Bissell, George Singleton and Scott Synder have all created superheroes for the occasion: The Avenger, Manna Man, and Everett Batson, respectively.

We’ve also got a lengthy profile of Pat Robertson written by Bill Sizemore, a veteran Virginian-Pilot reporter who has covered Robertson for well over a decade. Sizemore looks at Roberton’s weight-loss diet shakes, his Liberian diamond-mining operation, African gold-mining operation, his Cayman Island for-profit corporation, and his role in the US attorney appointments scandal. In short, Sizemore doesn’t find much to like about the man.

Then there’s Learning to Speak: The New Age of HIV/AIDS in the Other Jamaica, by Kwame Dawes. The author explains how impoverished HIV-positive Jamaicans are living out their lives in the face of their prognosis. This is a result of our latest collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. It features gorgeous photos by Joshua Cogan, and we even have a special website with supplementary material, including documentary video, music, interviews, poems, and dozens of additional photographs.

We also have another installment of Chris Ware’s “Jordan W. Lint”; a series of illustrations by Gary Panter; essays from Geoffrey Hayes, Rosamond Purcell, Lawrence Weschler, William Logan, Glen Retief and Matthew Power; and poetry from Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, Charles Simic and Charles Wright; plus a bunch more that, really, you’ve just got to read if you don’t want to look like a big mook next time you talk to your fancy-pants literary friends.