[Richard Roundtree would have made a great Odysseus. —Steve]

Links:

• In LitHub, Max Lawton on writing making you sick:

  I like Céline’s notion that writing in a certain way destroys the coronary arteries, but perhaps we can sublate Céline’s notion into something that smacks less of medieval physiology: writing in a way that so totally abnegates the world, that is unconcerned with its rhythms, its realities, writing so gnostically, so inwardly, must sooner or later take its toll on the body.

  As I was working on Songs of Chaos, the second volume in his Games of Eternity trilogy, Moresco also wrote to me about the blood-pressure crises he was subject to during its composition: “When I started writing Songs of Chaos, I fell ill; I began to feel sharp stabs of pain in my heart. Then, after about a hundred pages, when the pain and stabbing sensations grew more intense, I was forced to go to the nearest emergency room. At the end of the examination, the doctor told me: ‘I don’t know you, and I don’t know what you do for a living, but whatever it is—stop it immediately, for a month!’” Antonio’s blood pressure was simply too high and he had to take a break from his masterpiece.

  [What’s wrong with medieval physiology? Seems like it’s correct in this case, heart attacks frequently being caused by diseases of the coronary arteries. (Subscribe to the WRB for the latest in medical science.) —Steve]

• In The American Scholar, Jane Bernstein on Lore Segal:

  Lore always asked whether I was still writing; when I started to teach, she was eager to know what my students were reading. Once, back at her apartment, we tried to reconstruct our seminar from decades back, and I did my best to fill her in on who had published a story or book and who had turned to other endeavors. She was a serious reader of literature, but life interested her just as much: She watched The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, fascinated by the mores of these women on TV. Her delight in language and in all that a sentence might contain was such that she liked it when a stranger in the airplane seat beside her struck up a conversation. Even on international flights? I remember asking in horror.

  Even then.

Reviews:

• Two in the TLS: first, Daniel Karlin reviews a book about silence (Silence: A Literary History, by Kate McLoughlin, June):

  These instances of probing and sensitive criticism are intermittent, though, and they come at a high, sometimes silly, cost. Thomas Traherne was “[b]rought up in seventeenth-century Royalist Hereford—a culture which had absolutism in common with Soviet Russia.” Bolingbroke in Richard II “operates rather like a lethal submarine,” and so on. Then there are the many mistakes, solecisms and misreadings. McLoughlin does not know the difference between “recurrent” and “recurring,” “use” and “usage” or “deceptive” and “deceitful.” Actual misreadings include one of the oddest observations I have ever read on Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” whose speaker, according to McLoughlin, “sees from on high but is too far away to hear ‘A host of golden daffodils / . . . / All dancing in the breeze.’” Never mind that the second line is misquoted; it’s the phrase from on high that’s so disconcerting, as though the first line of the poem were not a simile but a literal indication of the poet’s vantage point. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in her sonnet “Grief”, writes of “men incredulous of despair, / Half-taught in anguish”—a metaphor about emotional intelligence that is read here as a class-based insult: “the loudest grievers are uneducated.”

  [“Characters in Shakespeare most like lethal submarines” is a rejected McSweeney’s pitch. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• Round two of Odyssey discourse inspires another fire sermon (to mix traditions) from me

• What if Augustan Rome was mid-century America?

• A Poem by Bei Dao and flowers

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

Read more

Yet come it will, the day decreed by fates—
How my heart trembles while my tongue relates!—
The day when thou, the WRB! must bend,
And see thy warriors fall, thy glories end.

Links:

Reviews:

• Reviews of The Odyssey (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2026):

  • In our sister publication on the Hudson, Daniel Mendelsohn:

    Nor can this Odysseus charm the Phaeacians with his seductive talk and beguiling storytelling, because Nolan has eliminated the Phaeacian episode altogether—a real loss, given that long episode’s enchanting portrayal of the feisty teenage princess Nausicaa, who discovers the shipwrecked hero and saves him, and of her adoring parents. This Odysseus does not break down in tears at the apparition of his mother in Hades, because that tender moment, too, has been excised, along with the most crucial encounter he has in the Underworld. The ghost of Achilles, who had given up long life in return for eternal glory, tells his old comrade that he would rather be alive, the lowest servant of a poor man, than king of all the dead: a ringing endorsement of the Odyssey’s hero, who stops at nothing to survive.

  • In The New Republic, Katie Kadue:

    It takes quite a few twists and turns of the basic plot to arrive at this framing. Something has indeed gone wrong with xenia, the Greek term for the custom of hospitality often translated as “guest-friendship,” in the world of the Odyssey. During her husband’s long absence, suitors have descended on Penelope and are overstaying their welcome, and the godless monsters Odysseus’ men encounter are not gracious hosts. But if there’s an original sin of xenia-violation in this story, it’s not the Trojan horse. Ten years earlier, the Trojan prince Paris started the war by absconding from the house of the Greek king Menelaus, where he was a guest, with his wife Helen, who may or may not have gone willingly. In Nolan’s version, it’s made clear that Helen’s abduction was used as a cynical pretext for Menelaus’ brother, Agamemnon, to gain control of the region’s trading routes, a plot Odysseus regrets abetting. A similar imperialist motive with obvious contemporary relevance is attributed to Agamemnon in Troy (2004), the loose Bush-era adaptation of the Iliad; some stories really are timeless.

  • On his Substack, :

    There’s another regard in which Nolan departs from Homer’s characterization of Odysseus. He frames his movie as a grand and epic love-story between Penelope and her husband—separated by his sense of duty, his obedience to the Greek king, and thereafter by war, happenstance and fate. Hence Nolan’s addition of the Tennysonian coda in which Odysseus, having come home, immediately departs to the west, with Penelope, so the two of them can enjoy their happy-ever-after together, whilst presumably the Sea People ransack Greece behind them. In this respect Nolan has a problem: because in Homer Odysseus spends seven years bonking Calypso on her island. To get round this Nolan combines the lotos-eater episode with the Calypso episode: to excuse his hero for his adultery. So traumatized has PTSD’d and shipwrecked Odysseus become that Calypso feeds him the lotos flower to opiate his mind. Accordingly he doesn’t remember that he even has a wife, or that he had a crew. After seven years Calypso, for reasons that the movie doesn’t divulge, decides to wean him off the magic flower so that his memories can return, and even advises him on how to get home—by surrendering himself to Poseidon’s wrath, lying on his back on a flimsy raft and letting the ocean overwhelm him. This is contrivance on Nolan’s part, to absolve his hero. It’s one thing for a man to be grief-struck by the things he did as a soldier; it would be another to be guilty for cheating on wifey.

  • In Engelsberg Ideas, Armand D’Angour:

    The greatest of the poem’s recognition scenes, moreover, is absent. In the penultimate book of the Odyssey Penelope, still unsure of the hero’s identity, tests him by asking him to move their marriage bed. He falls for her ruse—finally, his cunning is overpowered by hers—and expostulates that it can’t be moved, as she well knows, because it was carved from a huge tree trunk rooted in the earth. With greater realism if less pathos, Nolan has Penelope recognize Odysseus after he—who else?—has destroyed the suitors with the bow he alone was able to string. The taut string emits a loud and ominous musical twang when he plucks it, rather than the evocative “sound of the swallow” that Homer speaks about to affirm the idea of a return home.

  [Samuel Butler, in his The Authoress of the Odyssey, says:

  Either sex, in fact, can caricature the other delightfully, and certainly no writer has ever shown more completely than the writer of the Odyssey has done that, next to the glorification of woman, she considers man’s little ways and weaknesses to be the fittest theme on which her genius can be displayed.

  Nolan has thrown out the glorification of woman; he has gone further and thrown out the interest in women. As Mendelsohn says in the passage excerpted above, Nausicaa is gone, and, as he says elsewhere in his review, Calypso’s speech denouncing the sexual double standard is gone. The dynamic in Book 4 where Helen introduces new ideas to the conversation and Menelaus immediately agrees with them, showing where the balance of power in that relationship lies, is gone. (I would even venture to add that the hanging of the unfaithful maidservants is gone; I suspect most male authors would have considered the matter resolved with the deaths of the suitors.) Instead, Nolan presents a version of #feminism so over-the-top that, as a friend of mine put it to me, it circles back to misogynist parody. Helen has been physically abused (scars cover one side of her face) and copes with her powerlessness by screaming that Agamemnon had it coming. Circe gives a thudding speech explaining that she has turned Odysseus’ men into pigs because they are pigs. Calypso is a therapist who just wants to help Odysseus heal from his trauma. Not even Penelope is immune; she yells at Telemachus that she has actually been ruling Ithaca for a decade, and people refuse to accept it because she is a woman—not that we see her do any ruling. We are very far away from the simile of Book 23 that appears at the start to be about Odysseus but is actually about Penelope:

  And as sad men at sea when shore is nigh,

  Which long their hearts have wish’d, their ship quite lost

  By Neptune’s rigour, and they vex’d and tost

  ’Twixt winds and black waves, swimming for their lives,

  A few escap’d, and that few that survives,

  All drench’d in foam and brine, crawl up to land,

  With joy as much as they did worlds command;

  So dear to this wife was her husband’s sight,

  (Chapman’s translation.) Nobody is going to write The Directress of The Odyssey.

  Man’s little ways and weaknesses are gone, too. There is no Elpenor to fall off a roof while drunk, and Matt Damon’s Odysseus is far too self-serious to make a joke about Elpenor beating him to Hades despite Odysseus having a boat. He’s also far too self-serious for the joke about his name being Nobody. Even if Penelope had introduced the idea of moving the bed, this Odysseus would never respond by furiously insisting that it could not be moved. (“Man’s little ways and weaknesses”: Odysseus keeps his cool until his wife belittles his sideline in carpentry, requiring him to respond with lengthy praise of his own taste and technique.) In adapting the fall of Troy from the Aeneid, Nolan apparently picked up the idea that his hero shouldn’t do anything funny. He definitely picked up the idea from the Aeneid that his hero should spend some time during the sack of Troy wandering around, watching the Achaeans commit various sacrileges and atrocities, and feeling bad. What this has to do with Odysseus I don’t know; what it has to do with the protagonists of Nolan movies I do.

  As various commentators have observed, Nolan’s Odyssey is his Oppenheimer (2023) but with the Trojan horse as the Bronze Age equivalent of nuclear weapons. In The Odyssey Nolan forgot what he apparently knew there, though: that to feel guilty about ending the world demands something like narcissism. When Oppenheimer quoted “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds” he was, if not identifying himself with Krishna, at least associating himself and his actions with a borrowed divinity—something you only do if you have a very high opinion of yourself. Other characters in the film point out that Oppenheimer’s hand-wringing is inextricable from how important he thinks he is. This insight is absent from Nolan’s Odyssey. Odysseus says to Penelope that their story will be told and retold—something he attributes to a post-literate future, but it is one thing to say that the return to an oral culture will involve new traditions of storytelling, and another to say that the stories will be about you.

  The refusal to think this through is part of a broader incuriosity about storytelling. The previously-mentioned exclusion of the Phaeacians means that Odysseus never tells any stories; instead, the movie introduces that material as memories he rediscovers through Calypso’s therapy. Any sense of Odysseus as a storyteller, the sort of person who tells stories, why he tells stories, what he gets out of it, is absent. Also absent is him responding to hearing his own story told:

  And as a lady mourns her sole-lov’d lord,

  That fall’n before his city by the sword,

  Fighting to rescue from a cruel fate

  His town and children, and in dead estate

  Yet panting seeing him, wraps him in her arms,

  Weeps, shrieks, and pours her health into his arms,

  Lies on him, striving to become his shield

  From foes that still assail him, spears impell’d

  Through back and shoulders, by whose points embrued,

  They raise and lead him into servitude,

  Labour, and languor; for all which the dame

  Eats down her cheeks with tears, and feeds life’s flame

  With miserable suff’rance; so this king

  Of tear-swet anguish op’d a boundless spring;

  (Chapman again.) Cut this and you don’t have to figure out what sort of story could produce such a response, or why. There’s not really a place for storytelling in Nolan’s relentlessly grim world anyway. Homer, as Mark Van Doren said, is a world; Virgil is not a style, but Nolan’s film is. —Steve]

• In The New Yorker, Richard Brody reviews Éric Rohmer’s novel (Élisabeth, 1947, translated from the French by Aaron Kerner, July 7) [An Upcoming book in WRB—July 1, 2026.]:

  The cinema offers in a glance what it takes the narrator a page of description to capture, and then offers still more. The sheer fact of filming fills a frame, even one composed with quasi-documentary plainness, with a plethora of details of narrative, expressive, aesthetic, intellectual, and historical import. But Rohmer was right to put an asterisk on his cinematic classicism: it doesn’t bring to mind the familiar and canonical manner of classic Hollywood or its leading auteurs (for whom he had, as a critic, been a discerning advocate). His self-consciousness about the power of movies—their inherent and instant richness of description, their automatic profuse multiplicity—raised movies to the level of high art by way of a disarming simplicity, without emphatic visual rhetoric, spectacular effects, or theatrical grandiosity. With movies, Rohmer achieved clarity along with complexity, dispelling the Post-Impressionist blurring of lines and the modernist veiling of figures that marked the difficulty, however sublime, of Élisabeth.

  But, far from repudiating the subjects and themes of Élisabeth, Rohmer pursued his directorial career by extending and deepening them. Most of his films have a master plot—the rejection of false loves, however tempting, in anticipation of one true love—which is to say that they’re films of faith and fate, the conversion of accidents into destinies. They’re also films of refusal, rejection, self-denial, and frustration. (These themes mirror his own Catholic observance and, for that matter, his political conservatism.) In lieu of the finely variegated texture of his intricate prose, Rohmer’s films offer transparent but reflective surfaces that are as taut as they are thin, and which are pressurized by passion, stretched tight by these conflicts; they strain against the pent-up force of unsatisfied desire and threaten to burst.

  [That’s just how it is. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, Jonathan Coe reviews a book about Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann (Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores That Changed Cinema, by Steven C. Smith, 2025):

  Frappat insists that Hitchcock has crossed a line, that his real-life romantic obsession with his leading lady has blurred the distinction between film and real life and it’s the actress herself who is now being subjected to violence. Writing his sleeve notes for The Great Movie Thrillers, Herrmann, trying to put a more positive spin on his former collaborator’s emotional life, insisted that “most people think of Hitchcock as a master of mystery and suspense. Although this is fundamentally true, he is also a great romantic director, his films allowing enormous scope for sensual and lyrical musical treatment.” But what happens when these “romantic” feelings become impossible to control, and are directed towards someone who is never going to return them? That’s the point at which they may curdle into violence, and it was this mutation that Herrmann was able to capture so well, and express so brilliantly, in his scores for Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960) and Marnie (1964). Perhaps, in the end, that was why Hitchcock broke with him: perhaps he couldn’t forgive Herrmann for being the man who knew too much, and understood him too well.

  [“Yeah, boss, got this score for your movie about how you treat your actresses, don’t ask me why it sounds like Tristan und Isolde. No reason.” —Steve]

N.B.:

• Writers are, and have been, in Syracuse. [The one in New York, although Plato was in the one in Sicily. Delmore Schwartz, apparently, doesn’t rate a mention. I have rectified this oversight by the Times by linking to Lou Reed’s foreword to a collection of his work here and with the Poem below. —Steve]

• William S. Burroughs and Maya scholarship.

• “A Locomotive Named Big Boy Is Making Grown Men Cry”

Poem:

“Baudelaire” by Delmore Schwartz

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

When I fall asleep, and even during sleep,
I hear, quite distinctly, voices speaking
Whole phrases, commonplace and trivial,   
Having no relation to my affairs.   

Dear Mother, is any time left to us
In which to be happy? My debts are immense.
My bank account is subject to the court’s judgment.
I know nothing. I cannot know anything.   
I have lost the ability to make an effort.
But now as before my love for you increases.   
You are always armed to stone me, always:   
It is true. It dates from childhood.

For the first time in my long life
I am almost happy. The book, almost finished,   
Almost seems good. It will endure, a monument
To my obsessions, my hatred, my disgust.   

Debts and inquietude persist and weaken me.   
Satan glides before me, saying sweetly:
“Rest for a day! You can rest and play today.   
Tonight you will work.” When night comes,   
My mind, terrified by the arrears,
Bored by sadness, paralyzed by impotence,   
Promises: “Tomorrow: I will tomorrow.”
Tomorrow the same comedy enacts itself   
With the same resolution, the same weakness.   

I am sick of this life of furnished rooms.   
I am sick of having colds and headaches:   
You know my strange life. Every day brings
Its quota of wrath. You little know
A poet’s life, dear Mother: I must write poems,   
The most fatiguing of occupations.

I am sad this morning. Do not reproach me.
I write from a café near the post office,
Amid the click of billiard balls, the clatter of dishes,   
The pounding of my heart. I have been asked to write   
“A History of Caricature.” I have been asked to write   
“A History of Sculpture.” Shall I write a history
Of the caricatures of the sculptures of you in my heart?

Although it costs you countless agony,
Although you cannot believe it necessary,
And doubt that the sum is accurate,
Please send me money enough for at least three weeks.

[This is what it is like to be the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books. Please subscribe for at least three weeks. —Steve]

Upcoming books:

New Directions | July 28

Five: Novels
by César Aira, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, with a contribution by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer

From the publisher: Five, selected from over 100 untranslated novels and stories by “the Duchamp of Latin America” (Natasha Wimmer), brings together—each an astonishing work—Margarita: A Memory, The Dream, Musical Brushstrokes, Princess Springtime, and The Hormone Pill. Following a cast of dreamlike characters including cyber nuns, a young princess making ends meet as a hack translator, a newspaper vendor, and General Winter and his sadistic sidekick, the Little Christmas Tree, Five shows the many facets of Aira’s master mind as he turns expectations inside-out and gleefully explodes genre conventions.

Five is a must-have for Aira’s legion of devoted fans around the world and a fine introduction to the as-yet uninitiated. A satisfyingly hefty installment from this “exquisite miniaturist” (WSJ) and writer whose “cubist eye sees from every angle” (NYT); because “once you start reading Aira, you don’t want to stop” (Roberto Bolaño).

[We linked to an essay adapted from the introduction in WRB—July 15, 2026.]

Also out Tuesday:

Knopf: Beginning Middle End: A Novel by Valeria Luiselli

What we’re reading:

Steve finished The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy. [I stand by my commentary last week that it reads like “Hardy does Emily Brontë.” The inhuman landscape (the heath, in Hardy’s case) is almost as much a character as any of the human beings in the book. The aspects of Wuthering Heights that would not have interested Hardy are jettisoned by the decision to combine Heathcliff and Catherine into one character, Eustacia Vye. Like Heathcliff, she has an exotic ancestry (her father was Greek) that makes her an oddity in rural England; like Catherine, she has an inexhaustible desire for the finer things in life that leads her into a marriage she almost immediately regrets. What Hardy makes of the supernatural elements in Wuthering Heights is clear from his choice of who believes in such things—only the dullest, most fearful, and most ignorant of the country people. Having disposed of that, he can get to the elements of sociological interest in such a setup. Here he moves beyond mere imitation of Emily Brontë; after all, in Wuthering Heights society does not exist.

The extent to which any Hardy novel succeeds comes back to one question: do the characters’ misfortunes feel like they emerge out of the world as it is, or do they feel imposed upon it by the author? Hardy’s characters, after all, find themselves in the situation he wishes for in “Hap”:

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”
Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

Whether it would have consoled them to know that Thomas Hardy willed and meted them the tears they shed, I don’t know. The Return of the Native is one of his more successful novels in this regard; hasty and poor marriages are enough to drive the action. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• Moul on what to read about Homer:

  To stay with unexpected perspectives, Silk writes briefly but very helpfully about Homer and jazz (jazz being, as he puts it, “the only developed improvisatory art that is native to the modern Western world”). This analogy is taken up at slightly greater length in the final part of Chiara Bozzone’s Homer’s Living Language (2024), which is undoubtedly the best new book I’ve read about Homer for several years (and, I see, is now out in paperback). She sets out to answer the question of how, given all we know about the formulaic nature of much of Homer’s language, we can “reconcile all of this mechanicity with Homer’s standing as the first great poet in the Western tradition?” How can you be formulaic and creative? This is an old question in the study of Homer but Bozzone both presents the issue with wonderful clarity and provides multiple fresh perspectives, drawing on modern corpus linguistics as well as classical philology. She is particularly excellent on formularity as a feature of language in general.

  [I think we can all agree that Homer, whoever Homer was, would have loved “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by T. S. Eliot. —Steve]

[After—years—there is finally again some truth to the name of this newsletter; today’s edition comes to you from Washington County, Maine. —Steve]

Links:

• In The Paris Review, an essay adapted from Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s introduction to a collection of César Aira’s work (Five: Novels, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, July 28):

  And, given the stipulation in the flight forward against revision, mistakes cannot be fixed but must be incorporated into the whole as the novel progresses, making an Aira book always surprising, even (or especially) to himself. The resulting pull of his fiction’s compulsive, ever-fresh flow along unusual narrative channels feels somehow at once both organic and precise. Perhaps it is Aira living so fully in the moment—catching his thoughts in midair as he writes his scenes—that makes life itself, in all its random strangeness, come so startlingly alive on his pages.

  And while Aira’s process relies on improvisation and incorporates chance events—a bird, for example, once flew into the café while he was writing, and he worked it into a story—the fruits of his technique fell far from haphazard. If Raymond Roussel’s feverishly detailed machines are a touchstone for Aira, so is the rigorous observation of Balzac’s Comédie humaine. Aira combines an innate genius for fiction with a humbling erudition—he’s read everything, and translated much of it, from Shakespeare to Stephen King—which is how he can, before our very eyes get away with his flights. Any process is, in theory, replicable, but applying Aira’s would end the career of most writers.

  [I know what people mean when they refer to writers characterized by “rigorous observation,” but we need another term for it, since the words actually refer to all good writing. Not all rigorous observation manifests in precise description of objects. —Steve]

• Two in the TLS; first, Douglas Field on Allen Ginsberg:

  Ginsberg shares his reading habits—“when I read a page of someone’s poems, I look for minutiae”—and praises the unadorned language of the poets Charles Reznikoff and Whitman, the latter the subject of “A Supermarket in California,” one of his most compelling early poems. His lectures demonstrate an impressive breadth of reading; they dart from Milton to Dylan, by way of Blake and Indian poetry, before reminding students of the iconoclasm beneath his jacket and tie, a professorial look he adopted during the 1980s. “If hypertrophic imagination takes over”, the poet explained, “it’s like an acid-head taking off his clothes and running into traffic.” Readers expecting sustained insights into Blake’s poetry are likely to be disappointed, however. Ginsberg’s discussion of The Book of Urizen (1794) is instructive, but he excels at distracting himself from the conventions of literary criticism. Ah!merica nonetheless contains some thought-provoking observations, including the claim that “Western art favors novelty rather than a stable, unvarying method”, a theory he extends to a comparison between Blake’s visual art and Tibetan paintings. Both, he claims, privilege repetition with variation over stylistic evolution.

  [As far as I can tell, Ginsberg’s most valuable contribution to culture was backing vocals on Leonard Cohen’s “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On.” The line about looking for minutiae is good, though. —Steve]

Reviews:

• Second, Emily Berry reviews a book about poets and suicide (The Poetry of Suicide: Lessons in Grief from the Lives and Deaths of Poets, by J. T. Welsch, April):

  Though this global study might itself seem to offer a rather bleak impression of poets’ susceptibility to the allure of death (“a gilded thing to which he hourly strove,” in Roach’s words), Welsch points out that a persistent statistic claiming suicide rates among poets are five times higher than average is actually based on dubious research methods. This alarming figure is in fact a bold extrapolation from a sample of just thirty-six eighteenth-century poets. Since I know a lot of poets, and none of them have killed themselves, I could just as well argue that as a group poets are remarkably immune to this major public health concern. (Of the two poets among the thirty-six reckoned to have died by their own hand, the best known today is Thomas Chatterton, and recent research suggests that even his much-depicted death may have been accidental.)

  If The Poetry of Suicide has a shortcoming, it is Welsch’s primary focus on poems by those who died by that means over poems by those left behind (though of course Berryman, whose father killed himself when the poet was eleven years old, encompasses both). Having a personal stake in the latter, I would have been interested in hearing more from that side and, given that the book’s subtitle contains the phrase “Lessons in Grief,” it seems a striking—perhaps deliberate—omission. “Poetry . . . records the voices of those lost to suicide,” Welsch writes. In citing the words of the “lost,” he allows those whose lives and deaths are so often luridly portrayed in their absence to speak for themselves, calling them back from the dead.

  [Berry quotes Keats’ “Half in love with easeful death,” and the editor chose it for the title of the review, but I can never read it without thinking about Christopher Ricks’ response: “But only half.” And Keats’ “Sonnet to Chatterton” could just as well be about a poet who died of any other cause. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• A Poem by E. A. Robinson and the poetry of absence

• The Hardy-Brontë English landscape thought nexus

• Bob Dylan and the Great American Songbook

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

Read more

is the life of the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books life? at best it is but the life of a mill-horse, who sees no end to his circle but in death. to such a life that of a cabbage is paradise.

Links:

• In the Financial Times, Yiyun Li on Moby-Dick’s America:

  In re-reading Moby-Dick, a thought often occurred to me: there are more Captain Ahabs in the world than there is that singular Moby Dick. Some of the Ahabs must have gone through their seafaring careers without encountering and without being destroyed by the white whale, and thus without bringing destruction to the crews around them. But that thought, I now believe, was too optimistic. During my latest re-reading, along with a group of brilliant young people, I’ve realized that one true Americanness of the novel is this. Everyone can be a Captain Ahab, and every Ahab has a Moby Dick to chase and to conquer. Be it power or wealth or status or pleasure or leisure, be it religious or political or aesthetic or athletic prowess, what drives America to go upward and downward is this tireless and restless pursuit of something out there in the sea, beyond imagination.

  Someone may argue that Moby Dick and Ahab are universal archetypes—more than purely American—and that is a good point. However, anyone without a white whale to chase in America is bound to be labeled as passive.

  [Wonderful work here by the Brits at the FT—I would have thought that America as a nation of Captain Ahabs would be an idea you could only get out of the highest Tory alive, and yet. (If Milton had been an American, imagine the takes we’d get about Satan.) Dr. Johnson would have said it in Taxation No Tyranny if not for the chronological issue:

  The heroes of Boston [the great actor of patriotism] tells us, if the stamp act had not been repealed, would have left their town, their port, and their trade, have resigned the splendour of opulence, and quitted the delights of neighbourhood, to disperse themselves over the country, where they would till the ground, and fish in the rivers, and range the mountains, AND BE FREE.

  These surely are brave words. If the mere sound of freedom can operate thus powerfully, let no man hereafter doubt the story of the Pied Piper.

  Or on a whale ship in the Pacific, as the case may be. Perhaps the idea is that a ship crewed by 330 million monomanics could never fall into following one man’s mania because the other 329,999,999 would resist him too strongly? The mind reels. In any case, I have read Moby-Dick, and I know how it ends, and so if this is a nation of Ahabs I’d really like to get off the boat. —Steve]

• In Bloomberg [Great day for the financial press here. —Steve], Daniel Mendelsohn on “Iliad people” and “Odyssey people”:

  To be sure, the Iliad, because of its grim confrontation with death, has always appealed to those who like to think of themselves as serious people. For many members of the so-called Greatest Generation, schooled first by the Great Depression and then by World War II, the Iliad speaks with particular force. Fifteen years ago, my father, then aged 81, decided to sit in on an Odyssey seminar I was teaching for first-year undergrads; by the end of it, I still hadn’t managed to convince him of the Odyssey’s charms. “I grew up during the war,” he growled. “The Iliad is what makes sense to me.” My great friend and mentor, the editor Robert Gottlieb, who was two years younger than my dad, meticulously went through my translation of the Odyssey before I submitted it to my publisher. When he finished, he shook his head dismissively. “Why does he go on like that? I just don’t understand why he doesn’t just get home already!”

  [I have for a while had a theory that “Odyssey people” are also “Genesis people” and “Iliad people” are “the rest of the Pentateuch people.” And a fun way to waste a bunch of time—I know because I wasted a bunch of time while I was trying to finish this up—is by assigning other works to the categories of “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” (The Managing Editor, despite his affection for all those modernists rewriting the Odyssey, is an Iliad person.) —Steve]

• Two in Portico:

  • Nic Rowan on visiting Rome:

    Such occurrences are not limited to fiction. Nancy Mitford, on her honeymoon in 1933, was at first charmed by Rome. “Why do people say they don’t enjoy honeymoons?” she wrote in a letter home. “I am adoring mine.” Then, a week later, after she had seen a little more of the city, she sent another note, this time to a friend, scribbled on the back of a photograph featuring the monstrously tasteless Victor Emmanuel II monument. “This of course is much the prettiest thing in Rome. I go and look at it every day,” she wrote mockingly. “I am having a really dreadful time, dragging a badly sprained ankle round major and minor basilicas and suffering hideous indigestion from eating goats’ cheese.” Decades later, she would get her revenge in a derisive essay, where she characterized Rome as “a capital city only in name; in fact and at heart it is a village, with its single post office, single railway station and life centred round the vicarage.”

    But the undisputed king of having a rotten time in Rome is Tobias Smollett. The Scottish novelist came to the city in 1765 with two aims: “to view the remains of antiquity by which this metropolis is distinguished; and to contemplate the originals of many pictures and statues, which I had admired in prints and descriptions.” How sorely he was disappointed! He saw the ruins, certainly, and wrote about them with windbaggy reverence. But the rest of the place drove him to a purple rage.

    [I like that the Non-Catholic Cemetery sells Dover thrift editions of Keats and Shelley. Let me edit that: I like that the Non-Catholic Cemetery sells Dover thrift editions of Keats. I really do admire the self-aggrandizing of getting “here lies one whose name was writ in water” writ in stone. As long as your name is writ in something slightly more lasting than water it works out well for you. —Steve]

  • Matthew Buckley Smith on staging Macbeth:

    The second major challenge for any production of Macbeth is the play’s tone. The script is among Shakespeare’s shortest, and the scope and complexity of the story give the audience little chance to digest all of the plot developments. The abruptness with which characters shift from unshakeable loyalty to blackhearted villainy or from cynical realism to hallucinatory ecstasy can risk producing a comic effect in the midst of what might otherwise be a scene of terrible gravity. And when the characters display ambivalence about their choices, the wobbliness of their commitments can seem less tortured than incompetent. When Macbeth returns from Duncan’s murder to confess the crime to his wife, Lady Macbeth is appalled to find her absent-minded husband still in possession of the bloody daggers. The many references to drinking that appear between Duncan’s arrival at Inverness and the discovery of his body invite suspicion that the Macbeths might even have been drunk when they committed the murder. Much has been made of the Porter’s comic soliloquy, coming as it does in the midst of one of the play’s darkest moments, but that darkness has already been confused by a series of mishaps and half-measures on the part of the murderers. The script itself does not specify the proper tone with which to present such moments to the audience.

    [While reading this the idea came to me for a production of Macbeth that maintains the tone throughout of The Death of Stalin (2017), which understands that the maneuvering of those attempting to stay on top and stay alive in such a system is, on account of the absurdities of the system itself, hilarious as long as you avoid thinking about the atrocities. For too long Richard III has received all the totalitarian adaptations; Macbeth is a much better fit. When Solzhenitsyn said that “Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. . . . The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses,” he must have forgotten this from Ross:

    Alas, poor country,

    Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot

    Be called our mother, but our grave, where nothing

    But who knows nothing is once seen to smile;

    Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rent the air

    Are made, not marked; where violent sorrow seems

    A modern ecstasy. The dead man’s knell

    Is there scarce asked for who, and good men’s lives

    Expire before the flowers in their caps,

    Dying or ere they sicken.

    This is not a description of Macbeth having a couple recalcitrant aristocrats who refused to go along with the new regime killed. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Mark Ford on Rosemary Tonks:

  The romance here is even more wobbly and unlikely than in its successors but, no doubt remembering how Colette achieved success with her Claudine novels, Tonks tracks the semi-flirtatious disputes of her characters as if a declaration of “Reader, I married him” might be the novel’s ultimate goal. Page after page is taken up by their spirited verbal sparring. While Houda propounds decadent dogma about seeking vision through pain, the Emir takes the role of cynical littérateur, deftly puncturing her pretensions. Wildean epigrams and bons mots spice their every encounter: “History is a bed on which you change the sheets when you think they look dirty”; “A poet must be one of civilization’s failures”; “I cannot harm you; because you are completely vulnerable. But if the way up a publisher’s staircarpet led over my heart, you would not hesitate to tread it.” The plot melts away into a series of almost theatrical encounters between Houda and the Emir, all lit up with verbal pyrotechnics of that kind.

• Two in Literary Review; first, Tom Cook on typesetting:

  Editors used to work closely with in-house typesetters, or even directly with out-of-house printers. All parties were fluent in the language of the craft: leading, swash, ems, points, picas, ligatures. Those printers, in turn, were proud of their own standards: questions of copy-editing not caught by editors would routinely be flagged at the galley (rough-proof) stage. Moreover, owing to the mechanical nature of setting the type—by hand at one time, via the keyboard of a Monotype machine in the twentieth century—printers engaged closely with the text itself. Today, text hurtles by, imported from a Word document then rapidly checked by someone on abysmal freelance pay, whose sole commission is to eradicate typos. Unless a proof is printed out and checked page by page—unless it is given that physical existence and a considerable amount of time and care—it will swim in the inexact, rapid world of the screen. Its visual inelegances (and howlers) will become clear only when it’s too late: when the physical book has come back from the automated printers and is stacked in warehouses all over the country.

Reviews:

• Second, Graham Elliott reviews a book about punctuation (On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World, by Florence Hazrat, August 11):

  Drama, communal storytelling and printing presses had their say in the contrivance of the dash. Both Jonson and Shakespeare (or rather, Shakespeare’s printers—we do not have his original manuscripts) could play fast and loose with the dash. Jonson’s Poetaster (1602) sees multiple hyphens used to form dashes in the rebarbative scene involving Crispinus and Tibullus. Compositors and printers, spotting this tendency—and presumably eager to save time—fashioned a longer line. In the 1608 and 1619 editions of King Lear (1605), long dashes appear when familial and political disintegration is the subject matter.

  On the Mark has many origin stories like these. The ampersand, for example, is a ligature of lower-case letters “E” and “T”; its early forms date back at least as far as Pompeii. Sometimes still seen in the format &c (short for et cetera), it is an abbreviation within an abbreviation. Its name, the author writes, is “shrouded in mystery” but one possible origin is a portmanteau of “and per se and.”

  [I use &c in texting. I have no idea where I picked it up. Having never bothered practicing how to write ampersands, in my handwriting I use +c. —Steve]

N.B.:

• 4Columns has shut down:

  While the news may come as a surprise to some, the truth is that 4Columns was never meant to last. A project of a private foundation, the magazine was established with a budget to cover ten years. While our editorial team has explored myriad ways to see if we could extend the magazine’s lifespan—through grants, fundraising endeavors, subscriptions, etc.—we found no way to do so without compromising our foundational principles: to provide free issues, uncluttered by ads, to our readers; to compensate our writers fairly; and to run the magazine with absolutely no outside editorial interference or pressure.

• Babitz book club.

• “People Keep Sneaking Into an Empty IBM Campus. This Town Has Had Enough.”

• New issues:

  • Literary Review July 2026 [As linked to above.]

  • New Left Review 159•May/June 2026

  • Portico Issue 2 [As linked to above.]

Poem:

Odes 4.7 (“Diffugere nives”) by Horace, translated from the Latin by A. E. Housman

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
And altered is the fashion of the earth.

The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear
And unapparelled in the woodland play.
The swift hour and the brief prime of the year
Say to the soul, Thou wast not born for aye.

Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring
Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers
Comes autumn with his apples scattering;
Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

But oh, whate’er the sky-led seasons mar,
Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;
Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add
The morrow to the day, what tongue has told?
Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had
The fingers of no heir will ever hold.

When thou descendest once the shades among,
The stern assize and equal judgment o’er,
Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue,
No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more.

Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,
Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.

[Apropos of last week’s discussion of the classics’ influence on Philip Larkin. Larkin once described himself in a letter to Barbara Pym as “A. E. Housman without the talent or the scholarship or the soft job or the curious private life,” so I suspect much of the classical influence on Larkin was filtered through Housman—if not at the level of specific allusion then as a state of mind. And yet it’s hard to say what exactly that influence was. Much of this poem has a vaguely Larkininan flavor, but pinning down why eludes me. Hardly a phrase in it sounds like Larkin. The beginning is reminiscent of “The Trees,” and the ending of “Aubade,” but in Larkin those are two very different poems, and no journey would connect them (fun as it is to imagine a poem opening with “The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said” and eventually getting to “Death is no different whined at than withstood”). “Aubade” lets you know what sort of poem it is immediately—“I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. / Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare”—and in that way has more in common with Housman’s original poetry than his take on Horace. What distinguishes Larkin from most poets influenced by the classics is his complete lack of interest in intellectualizing it. Gilbert Highet once described the other kind of poet like this:

A poet like Eliot or Propertius, who is deeply read, and who lives as much in the world of the imagination as in reality, cannot record his own emotions without at the same time recalling the mythical parallels which intensify his experience.

To which Larkin: “Get stewed: / Books are a load of crap.” —Steve]

Upcoming books:

Bloomsbury Academic | July 9

A Grecian Lad: A. E. Housman and the Classics
by Jennifer Ingleheart

From the publisher: The first book to bring together A. E. Housman’s poetry and classical scholarship, revealing the deep connections between the two. It offers the first full-length study of his Latin elegy for Moses Jackson, including a new translation and commentary on this homoerotic poem’s links to his wider verse. The book also provides an original version and close reading of Praefanda, Housman’s little-read yet notorious scholarly article on sexual themes, written in Latin. Further, it examines how Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love grapples with the tensions in Housman’s dual careers as poet and professor.

Housman has long been seen as a man divided-the emotional poet of A Shropshire Lad on one hand, and the austere Latinist on the other. While he publicly downplayed the classical influences on his poetry, this book interrogates the subtle but intricate classicism woven throughout his work. By reading his verse alongside his scholarship, it uncovers a more integrated and complex figure, shedding new light on both his poetry and academic writings.

Out Tuesday:

Bloomsbury Continuum: Homer Haunted: The Many Afterlives of an Ancient Poet

Coffee House Press: Ada: A Novel by Mark Haber

New Directions: Twenty Minutes of Silence by Hélène Bessette, translated from French by Kate Briggs

Penguin Classics: The Poems of Catullus: A Dual-Language Edition with Parallel Text, translated from the Latin by Stephanie McCarter

What we’re reading:

Steve read The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis (1973). He also celebrated the Fourth by reading the correspondence of John (and Abigail) Adams with Thomas Jefferson. [Funniest letter I forgot about features Adams telling this story:

In 1775 Franklin made a morning Visit, at Mrs Yards to Sam. Adams and John. He was unusually loquacious. “Man, a rational Creature”! Said Franklin. “Come; Let Us Suppose a rational Man. Strip him of all his Appetites, especially of his hunger and thirst. He is in his Chamber, engaged in making Experiments, or in pursuing Some Problem. He is highly entertained. At this moment a Servant knocks, “Sir dinner is on table.”. “Dinner”! Pox! Pough! But what have you for dinner?” Ham and Chickens. “Ham”! “And must I break the chain of my thoughts, to go down and knaw a morsel of a damn’d Hogs Arse”? “Put aside Your Ham.” “I will dine tomorrow.”

Right before this Adams does a little sex talk:

Torrey a Poet, an Enthusiast, a Superstitious Bigot, once very gravely asked my Brother Cranch, “whether it would not be better for Mankind, if Children were always begotten from religious motives only.”? Would not religion, in this Sad case, have as little Efficacy in encouraging procreation, As it has now in discouraging it?—I Should apprehend a decrease of population even in our Country where it increases So rapidly.

Between that and some references to lines of Theognis about breeding, Adams puts at the end of the letter

As I have no Amanuenses but females, and there is So much about generation in this letter that I dare not ask any one of them to copy it, and I cannot copy it my Self I must beg of you to return it to me.

Second-funniest part I forgot about was Jefferson complaining about receiving too many letters:

I happened to turn to my letter-list some time ago, and a curiosity was excited to count those recieved in a single year. it was the year before the last. I found the number to be 1267. many of them requiring answers of elaborate research, and all to be answered with due attention and consideration. take an average of this number for a week or a day, and I will repeat the question suggested by other considerations in mine of the 1st. is this life? at best it is but the life of a mill-horse, who sees no end to his circle but in death. to such a life that of a cabbage is paradise.

(Very like Jefferson to count them in order to complain about it.) Earlier in the correspondence, Adams had offered some advice on this situation:

Necessity has compelled me to resort to two expedients to avoid or escape excessive importunity. One has been, by totally neglecting to answer Letter, after Letter. But this Method has cost me very dear in the loss of many Correspondences that had been and would have been instructive and profitable to me, as well as honourable and entertaining. The other has been by giving gruff, Short, unintelligible misterious, enigmatical, or pedantical answers. This resource is out of your power, because it is not in your nature to avail yourself of it.

As it happens, Adams (at least in the “elder statesmen renewing their correspondence with one eye on posterity” phase and not the “American diplomats in Europe dealing with various practical problems” phase) writes more letters to Jefferson than he receives, although Jefferson’s are more polished and tend to be longer. Adams—in a trait gratifying to me—is just having ideas and sending them off. In one case, he is so excited to ask Jefferson whether he knows anything about a history of the Jesuits “in four volumes” that he’s reading that he forgets to mention any other identifying details (Jefferson writes back “Your history of the Jesuits, by what name of the Author, or other description is it to be enquired for?”). That’s the feeling of most of this correspondence—even the subjects that were central controversies of their time as political adversaries, like the French Revolution and Adams’ thoughts about aristocracy, produce very little heat. (Jefferson concedes that Adams was right about the French Revolution in an exchange that feels like Adams reminiscing “remember how wrong you were about that?” and Jefferson also asks Adams to write more about aristocracy, which is sincere interest made funny by Adams’ writing about aristocracy supplying the material for every attack ad avant la lettre against him.) The content is interesting but not really notable in itself, since both Adams and Jefferson expressed themselves more fully elsewhere, and in any case Jefferson won the debate about what America is and means. The charm and the value is in the two looking back and living the life of the mind. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• Patrick Kurp on “cromulent”: “The word sounds authentic, a little old-fashioned and stuffy, perhaps Johnsonian. That’s the key to lastingly successful coinage.”

Links:

• In The Ideas Letter, Leonard Bernardo interviews about criticism:

  A problem for the critic who writes fiction is just not doing it enough. Edmund Wilson, Cyril Connolly, and Lionel Trilling all published novels that people have read with pleasure. Allen Tate’s The Fathers—though he was a poet, not only a critic—was hailed as a masterpiece. But you need to do it a lot to get better, or to increase your chances of encountering those elements of serendipity that a really good book requires. Not many people write a good enough first book to publish nothing else and be remembered for it. If Henry James had stopped publishing fiction after Watch and Ward, he would be remembered differently—probably as a critic who couldn’t really write fiction.

  Nowadays readers are accustomed to fiction that has things in common with non-fiction forms. A list of writers who people have gotten very excited about would include practitioners of “autofiction” and the essayistic novel, but also novelists who wrote other things readers care about: Woolf, Milan Kundera, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, David Foster Wallace, Norman Mailer, Zadie Smith, John Berger, Chris Kraus, Camus. I’m not saying people don’t prize novels, but not many of the people you’d see on a t-shirt or a tote bag were purely novelists. I don’t think being purely a novelist is very appealing, and many novelists who could get away with doing nothing else appear to agree with that. Being just a reviewer is also crap, of course. You have to work in different forms. Someone I love is John Jeremiah Sullivan, who is a fiction writer, reporter, personal essayist, critical essayist, a kind of ad hoc historian. No part of me wishes he’d specialized in any of those things.

  To be clear, I do realize that to Ian McEwan the idea that a magpie career involving a lot of journalism is as worthwhile as devoting patient solitary labor to writing twenty novels about psychology, history, science, and morality would sound utterly mad.

  [Can we one-up Tom Townsend? “I don’t write novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way et cetera.”

  (The only things the Managing Editor writes, by the way, are criticism and lyric poetry. I have no aptitude for prose fiction and tell myself that some of our greatest artists, Thomas Hardy foremost among them, gave up on the novel and proceeded to work entirely in other forms. Nobody gives up on poetry, though. They just stop writing entirely—although can you imagine Rimbaud’s Vice-style online documentaries about the coffee trade in East Africa?) —Steve]

• In Notebook, Katie Kadue on Vertigo (1958), remaking women, and remaking Vertigo:

  A common complaint among detractors is that Obsession’s (2026) form is as dark and ugly as its content, and most striking about Barker’s film as a Zoomer rendition of Vertigo—a film about the pleasure and pain of looking, exemplary for Laura Mulvey of the camera’s male gaze—is its lack of interest in images. . . . Barker’s insistently center-framed shots take a central conceit of Vertigo—that the visual field has been composed so that the viewer sees exactly what they need to see—and literalizes it: We have nowhere to look but straight ahead. When Scottie looks at Madeleine looking at her doppelgänger Carlotta’s portrait, Madeleine’s chignon is done at the back of her neck, while Carlotta’s is at the side; Madeleine’s nosegay sits beside her on the bench, pointed back at Scottie, while Carlotta’s, in her lap, faces forward. He doesn’t notice that this tableau has been set up so that he can take in every detail at once; he doesn’t realize that he has been set up. “I wanted to shoot this center-composed and have extra head space because I wanted it to feel uncomfortable in its loneliness,” Barker told Variety. “There’s something about center-composed that forces you to look and pulls you in in a way that traditional composition may not.” Yet what could be more traditional in the history of cinema, and what more reflective of the vision of Vertigo, than forcing the viewer to look, the filmmaker framing his obsession as our own? Barker’s flat-footed forcefulness betrays a similarly narrow perspective to that of his friend-zoned antihero, who resorts to black magic before really trying anything else.

  [I had some notes on the importance of gaze to this whole tradition, going back to Petrarch, in WRB—June 10, 2026.

  One important difference between Scottie and Bear, the protagonist of Obsession, is that Scottie spends the whole movie looking at stuff only to be confronted at the end with the limits of looking:

  He made you over, didn’t he? He made you over just like I made you over, only better! Not only the clothes and the hair, but the looks and the manner and the words!

  The obsession with how things look becomes a coping mechanism for the inability to alter how things are.

  Bear, though, never looks at anything, and his wish transforms the object of his desire internally. The questions this setup poses (to the extent it makes sense to interrogate the not-fully-baked premise of a horror movie) are about what it would mean for love to be compelled. Even this, though, gets bogged down in the “rules” of the magic at issue—one thing Obsession could have taken from Vertigo is how to set up your ludicrous premise in-movie so that it seems like the most natural thing in the world. Bear’s just not a very imaginative guy. That’s fine; look where being imaginative got Scottie. But it creates a disconnect between what the movie is about and how it is about it. Vertigo is Hitchcock turning his gaze, and his camera, on himself. Obsession sidesteps the issue.

  All this to say that Alfred Hitchcock was interested in how things look, and Curry Barker is not. Alfred Hitchcock was also interested in making sure audiences could see what was happening on the screen, and he was not interested in setting up shots so that they could be easily clipped for vertical TikTok videos.

  And Kadue puts Vertigo and its imitators in the tradition of “the mythic stories of Orpheus and Apollo,” with “male figures have been losing the women they love only to recover them through art.” If we are mining the Metamorphoses, two other myths seem more to the point: first, Pygmalion, who channels his hatred of all existing women by creating one perfectly to his taste, and second, Narcissus, which gets at the fundamental nature of this obsession. Not even a woman who can merely echo his own words back to him is enough; he must have himself alone. These are much nastier myths, and much more open about their nastiness, which to me explains their relative lack of cultural prominence. Compare Vertigo to the most famous cinematic adaption of Pygmalion, My Fair Lady (1964). Scottie and Henry Higgins are not all that different, but Scottie cuts a pathetic figure and Higgins spends nearly the entire movie exulting in how awful he is. And he knows what he’s really about; “A Hymn to Him” opens with “why can’t a woman be more like a man?” and ends with “why can’t a woman be like me?” That’s the question it comes down to, and always has—Laura, as Carla Freccero said, is “Petrarch in drag.” —Steve]

Reviews:

• In the TLS, Nicholas Murray reviews a book about the reception of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lady C: The Long, Sensational Life of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by Guy Cuthbertson, May):

  F. R. Leavis, whose innate puritanism made him dislike the novel, preferred to talk, like Raymond Williams, of the indictment of urban ugliness. Others were more positive. Burgess, while thinking it a poor novel to end Lawrence’s career on, agreed that it was “hot with a message that the smut-seekers miss.” One of the book’s most eager advocates was Philip Larkin. As an Oxford undergraduate during the war, in 1943, he described it to his friend James Sutton as “a great book . . . It is the greatest idealistic work since Prometheus Unbound.” Sylvia Plath, who had a few years earlier married her Lawrentian he-man from the north, makes a perhaps unexpected appearance in Cuthbertson’s roll call of writers who took an interest, and he has examined her annotated personal copy of the novel: she enjoyed reading it “drawn back again with the joy of a woman living with her own game-keeper,” as she put it. Evelyn Waugh disparaged Lawrence as a writer, especially Lady Chatterley, but Cuthbertson persuasively demonstrates its influence on The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Iris Murdoch was another disparager who thought it a flawed novel, and she made the fair point that the portrayal of Sir Clifford, a damaged soldier, lacked pity. Others have also seen it as “ableist,” and point to phrases such as “vacancy of a cripple” in the opening pages. James Joyce disliked the novel’s “cerebral obscenity”; for Dylan Thomas, Lawrence was a “talking prick.” And somewhere in between was T. E. Lawrence, who read Lady Chatterley at least three times, yet declared: “Poor D. H. I’m dreadfully sorry for a man who’s gone right through life and found that it means no more than that at the end.”

  [Tag yourself. (More on the young Larkin being the sort of person with opinions like “Prometheus Unbound is a great idealistic work” below.) —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• A history of newspapers

• Why my father (not actually my father) Philip Larkin was like that

• K. T. on a Poem by Stephan Torre and memory

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

Read more

Links:

• Two in our sister publication on the sweet Thames. First, Ruby Hamilton on screwball comedies:

  Screwball actors work with and against our impressions of them. The Lady Eve (1941) may be the slyest of these films because it’s about the ways in which conforming to type condemns you. Henry Fonda appears as a naive herpetologist who has no chance against Stanwyck’s slippery con artist. The expected scenes of humiliation—like Grant in his negligee in Bringing Up Baby (1938), or Cooper going “goofy, bim-buggy” in Ball of Fire (1941), or Spencer Tracy losing his head in court in Adam’s Rib (1949)—are funnier because there’s a quality in Fonda (a softness? A credulity?) that makes him what Grant, Cooper and Tracy never are: embarrassable. His pratfalling over sofas and Stanwyck’s leg is a joke about his character’s apparent uprightness, but also the preternatural decency signified by “Henry Fonda.” He hasn’t done much to deserve this embarrassment, but that’s the screwball logic. He’s embarrassed precisely because he’s the type of innocent who can be embarrassed.

  There’s a tautology here: it’s what Cavell is getting at when he says that, in these films, “only those can genuinely marry who are already married.” Screwball has a back-to-frontness about it. In Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), in which a Warsaw theatre troupe stages a play about the Nazis, impersonations come before the people who are being impersonated. In Bringing Up Baby the leopard doesn’t arrive until after Hepburn has said there’s a leopard; when it pootles into frame, the joke is that she isn’t lying—and yet we’re also left with the suggestion that the world bends to her word. It comes back to fast-talking and the idea behind it: that if you’re quick enough, you can out-talk the truth.

  [We had a bunch of Cavell discussion here a couple years ago. (Re-reading it I discover that I felt the best way to understand Cavell was through Milton’s divorce tracts and Samson Agonistes. Things don’t really change around here.)

  One animating idea behind all the best screwball is the power of speech, which creates love and is a sign of love. Everyone in these movies is getting talked into love because that’s what “talk” and “love” mean; if they loved each other less, they would shut up. (Here is where the divorce tracts come in: “a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and the noblest end of mariage.”) The problem identified in Cavell’s tautology, then, can be rephrased as something like “only those can genuinely start a conversation who are already having a conversation.” The general setup of a comedy of remarriage ensures that a conversation is ongoing. Those similar films in which the couple is not divorced or on the verge of it at the start frequently have the couple refer to a shared past, whether real or imagined—in some sense, the conversation must have always been going on.

  The Drama (2026), the best new movie I’ve seen this year (although I haven’t seen too many), gets at this perfectly; its final scene is a couple play-acting a first date. Its approach to humiliating its characters, though, is not the genteel mockery of the classic screwballs. Instead, it goes for the mortification of cringe comedy. There’s life in this genre yet. —Steve]

Reviews:

• Second, Adam Thirlwell reviews a new translation of Gorky’s memoirs (Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreev, translated from the Russian by Bryan Karetnyk, 2025):

  One feature of such apparently exposed writing was to collapse any distinction between life and literature. It seemed natural in this era to covet biographical intimacy, to devour lives and letters, and Gorky’s Reminiscences are especially intense. He believed that no anecdote was too domestic to be meaningful, like this story of Tolstoy praising Chekhov’s “The Darling” in front of Chekhov. “On that day, Chekhov had a temperature: he was sitting with red blotches on his cheeks and his head tilted forward, cleaning his pince-nez meticulously. He said nothing for some while, then finally, with a sigh, he said quietly and with embarrassment: ‘There are misprints in it . . . ’” Gorky writes as if everything private in the lives of these writers were a mystery to be decoded, as if this story of Chekhov might be some clue to his modesty, and therefore his talent. I don’t think he was mistaken. Maybe at a certain point all literature is personal. It’s difficult to admit this because the ideal is of something abstract and therefore perfect. It was the ideal for sure in Paris, where Flaubert proposed that the realist novel was also the impersonal novel, that the personality of the author was of no interest to anyone serious.

  But the theory was always fragile. This is why criticism since the nineteenth century has always veered between genres, the august impersonal critical essay and the memoir, the diary and the letter (one problem with Flaubert’s theory was his own correspondence, published a few years after he died, which was as exciting, as novelistic, as his novels), and why perhaps the greatest novelist in history is recorded by Gorky in this way: “It always struck me that Tolstoy did not much care to discuss literature—and in this I do not believe I am mistaken—although he was vitally interested in the personality of the author. I was frequently asked the question: ‘Did you know him?’ ‘What was he like?’ ‘Where was he born?’”

  [Best sentence Thirlwell quotes (this about Tolstoy): “Like a French novelist, he talks of women willingly and at great length.” —Steve]

• Two in Harper’s:

  • First, Rosanna Warren reviews Berryman’s uncollected Dream Songs (Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, edited by Shane McCrae, 2025) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Dec. 9, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Mar. 4, 2026 and a piece by McCrae on Berryman in WRB̦—Sept. 10, 2025.]:

    The archival poems tend to lack that precision; on the whole, they sound like disjecta membra from a more accomplished work. They’re full of gossip, complaints, literary rivalries, barroom blather, and drunkenly slurred speech (“Aw gone,” “Highlone, highlone”). At times, they read more like entries in a diary or a Rolodex than carefully crafted lyrics. One sees why Giroux and Meredith—and Berryman himself, in more sober moments—excluded them from the architecture of The Dream Songs.

    Yet Berryman’s gift to the English language and to American poetry is so monumental that it’s worth having these poetic trials and errors, which do include some successes, so we can think more comprehensively about this outrageous spirit who visited our language for a while and startled it awake. Any poet’s files will be stuffed with unpublished drafts; Berryman’s drafts are interesting because Berryman is interesting. With Only Sing, we’re invited into the poet’s disorderly study to try to understand how the grand, mysterious songs were made.

    [Imagine how lacking in precision a poem had to be to get rejected from something as inconsistent as the published Dream Songs. (The Berryman I like, the Berryman who is one of my favorite poets of the twentieth century—as discussed in WRB—Jan. 28, 2026—is the Berryman who imposes limits on himself, who works in a tradition besides that of ventriloquized blackface.) The strangeness of Berryman’s syntax, too, reads differently when subtly invoking the likes of Thomas Wyatt than when a stylistic tic. Warren quotes Dream Song 29:

    But never did Henry, as he thought he did,

    end anyone and hacks her body up

    and hide the pieces, where they may be found.

    He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.

    Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.

    Nobody is ever missing.

    Wyatt never, so far as I know, mixed tenses like this, but the tangled syntax as reflection of confused feelings towards a woman who is both there and not there has its parallels, as in “They flee from me that sometime did me seek”:

    Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

    Twenty times better; but once in special,

    In thin array after a pleasant guise,

    When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

    And she me caught in her arms long and small;

    (The title could be a Berryman line, as could “Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise / Twenty times better.”) “Unstable dream, according to the place” has similar moments:

    Unstable dream, according to the place,

    Be steadfast once, or else at least be true.

    By tasted sweetness make me not to rue

    The sudden loss of thy false feignèd grace.

    By good respect in such a dangerous case

    Thou broughtest not her into this tossing mew

    But madest my sprite live, my care to renew,

    My body in tempest her succour to embrace.

    The identity of Henry’s woman (“her body . . . the pieces . . . they”) is unstable; so is Wyatt’s addressee. Is it, as the tropes of the first lines suggest, a woman (“Unstable dream . . . be steadfast once”), or is it Wyatt’s dream of the woman (“Thou broughtest not her into this tossing mew”)? —Steve]

  • Second, Clare Bucknell reviews a biography of Vermeer (Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, by Andrew Graham-Dixon, April) [We linked to an earlier review in WRB—Apr. 15, 2026.]:

    What buyers of the period did want was pictures of figures in domestic interiors: recognizable people doing recognizable things, at leisure or at work, surrounded by traces of their lives—babies, animals, furniture, pots and pans, musical instruments, pieces of fabric, jewelry. “Seventeenth-century artists must, indeed, have had an irrepressible need to grasp things,” the cultural historian Johan Huizinga has observed. “Nothing in their environment was too slight to be noticed.” Like his contemporary Gerard ter Borch, the master painter of fabrics so resplendent they seem to crackle, Vermeer was pleased by “slight” things: the way a satin ribbon holds the shape of a previous fold; the cleft in a lower lip; a sleeve puckering under a pinafore. His attention to coiffure, Anthony Bailey points out, was exceptional. He could do it all: hair “pulled straight back from the forehead, held in place with bows, tied in a bun or braided in a chignon,” hair in ringlets, turbans, scarves.

    Just because someone is interested in ribbons doesn’t mean he isn’t interested in God. Vermeer’s pictures are often observed to harbor spiritual meanings as well as material ones, flickering back and forth between the two. In Woman with a Balance, the delicate set of scales that the subject suspends between her finger and thumb is symbolic as well as literal: they take the measure of earthly goods and spiritual ones, setting one kind of value in the context of another. But the picture’s theological implications, as the Vermeer scholar Walter Liedtke has pointed out, do nothing to stop us noticing that the woman is beautiful, or that, in general, “Vermeer’s women are never faulted for their love of things.” He infused objects with so much light that they appear almost immaterial anyway.

• In the local and free Beacon, Joseph Epstein reviews Harold Bloom’s letters (The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom, edited by Heather Cass White, May):

  Anxiety, gloom, and doubt infest the letters White has assembled. Bloom won various prizes and awards, among them a MacArthur Fellowship, or so-called genius grant. He was interviewed or written up, as White reports, in “the Atlantic, Esquire, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair” and elsewhere. But none of this seems to have eased his depression. At one point he claims to have wanted to write a modern version of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, which is surely high on the list of books the world could do nicely without.

  The letters to and from Northrop Frye, whose views Bloom admired more than that of any other living literary critic, are marked by Frye’s rejection of the argument in Bloom’s magnum opus, The Anxiety of Influence, a rejection that stung Bloom badly. Frye wrote: “I should think that this was simply something that happens, and might be a source either of anxiety or of release from it, depending on circumstances and temperament.” Frye would later write that Bloom “seems to me to be increasingly isolating himself from the general critical tradition, and I find his books progressively less rewarding.” C. S. Lewis, in a review of Bloom’s book The Visionary Company, wrote: “This is one of the most difficult books I have ever read. . . . Sometimes by a small emendation I can hammer out a meaning, but I don’t know for sure whether it is Mr. Bloom’s.” T. S. Eliot died in 1965, before Bloom came into prominence, so one can only imagine his response to Bloom’s oeuvre.

  [Bloom’s flattery of his correspondents, as quoted by Epstein, is hard to read. No doubt he meant it, and no doubt many of its respondents appreciated it. (Writers can be insecure.) But it isn’t even interesting criticism; he just finds new ways to say he liked the writing without offering a single reason. He’s just sucking up, and it feels desperate. But then I suppose Bloom enjoyed content-free descriptions of himself as a genius, and he assumed everyone else was like him. —Steve]

N.B.:

• A history of searching for Timbuktu.

• Restoring Edvard Grieg’s house.

• Old coupons for Bed, Bath, & Beyond.

• “The Rise and Fall of Britain’s Muskrat Empire”

• “Where Has All the Cottage Cheese Gone?” [In Villon’s Mais où sont les neiges d’antan the snow is a metaphor for cottage cheese. They’re both white, you see. —Steve]

• Colors you can’t see on a screen.

• New issue: Harper’s Magazine July 2026 [As linked to above.]

• Carlo Ginzburg died on Wednesday, June 17. R.I.P.

• Mark Singer died on Friday, June 19. R.I.P. [That Ricky Jay profile is—for lack of a better phrase—how it is done. —Steve]

Poem:

“I Looked Up from My Writing” by Thomas Hardy

I looked up from my writing,
And gave a start to see,
As if rapt in my inditing,
The moon’s full gaze on me.

Her meditative misty head
Was spectral in its air,
And I involuntarily said,
“What are you doing there?”

“Oh, I’ve been scanning pond and hole
And waterway hereabout
For the body of one with a sunken soul
Who has put his life-light out.

“Did you hear his frenzied tattle?
It was sorrow for his son
Who is slain in brutish battle,
Though he has injured none.

“And now I am curious to look
Into the blinkered mind
Of one who wants to write a book
In a world of such a kind.”

Her temper overwrought me,
And I edged to shun her view,
For I felt assured she thought me
One who should drown him too.

[In continuation of the notes about gazing in WRB—June 10, 2026. Hardy frames the moon’s agency in the terms of sight: “full gaze,” “I’ve been scanning,” “I am curious to look.” This emphasis revives the otherwise dead image of the poet’s mind as “blinkered.” He is incapable of looking back, and his response to the challenge of the moon’s gaze is to flee it: “I edge to shun her view.” Doing so, he removes himself from the moonlight and hides in the dark, connecting him to the suicide at the poem’s center “who has put his life-light out.” —Steve]

Upcoming books:

Faber & Faber | June 30

Devotions: Eight Stories
by Lucy Caldwell

From the publisher: In Devotions, “one of the finest short story writers at work today” (Wendy Erskine) explores yearning for distant pasts and unknown futures. A young Belfast theatre troupe brings their experimental production of Hamlet to New York. On a night-flight, travelling with a violin older than the United States, a professional musician slips through time. A man who loses all he thought he had, and finds himself haunted by all he never will, comes to a painful new understanding of what it might mean to love. Transporting and profound, these are stories of love, grief, longing, of new beginnings, and the ways we find shelter in each other.

Also out Tuesday:

Harvard University Press: Exquisite Things and Strange Wonders: In Defense of Persian Poetry by Amir Khusraw Dihlavi, edited and translated from the Persian by Alyssa Gabbay

What we’re reading:

Steve read I Deliver Parcels in Beijing (by Hu Anyan, translated from the Chinese by Jack Hargreaves, 2025). [An Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 25, 2025; we linked to a review in WRB—Oct. 11, 2025. More interesting when about day-to-day life in China more generally than when about delivering parcels in Beijing. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• on pop music fandom:

  Sometimes, upon contact with online pop fandom, people will say something like, the problem with this stuff, in particular its obsession with chart positions and records, is that it’s really misplaced sports fandom. To the extent that is true, you can tell it’s true because sports fans love whining. You whine about the refs, you whine about your team, you whine about the other team, you whine about people you’re imagining in your head who are judging you for loving sports, whatever.

  . . .

  On the other hand, there is something about it that smacks of a “real problem” when it becomes clear that the online fandom world is gamed by accruing fake fans and then picking fake fights. If this kind of Potemkin beefing works for pop music, people are going to try to replicate that success in other spheres of life where “winning” actually matters. And that is where I feel like a problem begins to emerge that is not only about how I spend my time online—though it is also about how I spend my time online, don’t get me wrong. It’s just kind of inescapable how lucrative people’s negative emotions are—spite, envy—and how bad that is for all of us. But what does one do, other than wake up each day determined to whine no more?

  [From a footnote in here I learn the real reason I am, spiritually, a Gen X dad. (And I thought it was the Steely Dan.)

  “Of all the unimportant things in life, football is the most important.” the line goes—of all the important things in life, fighting about pop music online is the least important, or something like that. At least we all, I think, understand sports fandom as a sickness, even if one with some benefits to the sufferer—would that we could carry this through to “sports substitutes for nerds.” —Steve]

Links:

• In Plough, a symposium on “America’s Homer.” Joseph M. Keegin, arguing for Whitman:

  Homer and Hesiod, Hegel notes, “gave to the Greek gods their names and their form,” but only the former concerned himself too with heroes. Both of Homer’s great poetic epics open with divine invocations directed at human objects: “Sing the rage of Achilles, goddess,” Homer demands at the outset of the Iliad; “Tell me of the man, Muse,” begins the Odyssey. Several centuries later, Virgil starts his self-consciously Homeric fabrication of the founding of Rome by pulling poetry down from the heavens: “I sing”—no longer the gods—“of arms and the man.” Nearly two millennia later, a poor, barely-schooled Quaker’s son writing from “this puzzle, the New World,” the “athletic Democracy” unfolding an ocean away from all known civilization, made himself both singer and song: “One’s-self I sing.”

  Thus Walt Whitman, too, named for the Americans their hero and their god. We are, Alexis de Tocqueville once said, natural Cartesians: “In most of the operations of the mind, each American calls only on the individual effort of his reason.” I think, therefore I am American. We are a nation of isolatoes, in Melville’s phrasing; an entire country corrupted by Socratic skepticism and folded inward by Luther’s doctrine of the heart. In earlier times, this made America a Petri dish of Protestantisms—more recently, it has made us the world’s greatest exporter of breaking news (as Hegel observed, modern man’s lauds) and all varieties of moralism, egoist occultism, and psychotherapy.

  Whitman presages this all.

  [It’s a ridiculous question. I am reminded of Ralph Wiley’s response to Saul Bellow’s “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?”: Proust is the Proust of the Papuans. In the same spirit, Homer is the Homer of the Americans. Note also that in forming his questions Bellow mentions two non-Americans: attempt to answer “who is the Tolstoy of the Americans” and you might not like what you find. The question in the article’s subhead also makes a rather large jump: “If England has Shakespeare, Spain has Cervantes, Italy has Dante, and Russia has Pushkin, then who do we have?” They do indeed have Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dante and Pushkin, but are they busy insisting that such figures are “our Homer”? (Surely “the Homer of Spain” would be the poet of El Cantar de mio Cid and “the Homer of England” Milton anyway. I was under the impression that Homer composed epic poems.)

  Framing the question in this way is engaging in almost every American intellectual vice at once: A massive inferiority complex with the Old World revealing itself in hilarious braggadocio (“we have, like, ten Homers over here!”) that poorly conceals justified insecurity (we have, in fact, zero Homers over here). An inability to understand the scope and scale of human history (part of what makes Homer Homer is that people have been reading him for three thousand years). An adjacent belief that everything that happened before America didn’t really count (“we have it in our power to begin the world over again”—immanentizing the eschaton from the beginning). And yet, as a whole, the question flinches before it can go all the way (come on, ask the question you know you want to: “what is the American King James Version?”) It makes you understand James and Eliot.

  But, if we really have to do this, someone should have suggested that the American Iliad and the American Odyssey are not in fact by the same person. —Steve]

• on various treatments of the fall of Hephaestus:

  There is a strange, knotted mytheme here, and it’s saying something interesting, only glancingly related to the events of the Iliad—or indeed of Paradise Lost. Why is Hephaestus lame and ugly? Because he has been cast out of heaven, hurled to the ground and broken. Why did this happen? In the first instance, it was because he was ugly and lame, his mother Hera disgusted at what she had given birth to and throwing him away. But this is to place cause and effect in reverse, for he was born ugly and lame before he was broken and lamed by the fall. Zeus’ hurling of Hephaestus from Olympus speaks to the artificer’s challenging of divine authority, his lawlessness; but it is only after his fall that he is taken up and raised by the lawless ones, the pirates, the Sintians. He falls onto a volcanic isle, because in popular imagination volcanoes are the smithies of the gods—hence the Roman version of his name, Vulcan—except that the Sintians are a mainland Greek population of bandits, not islanders. And in Milton the myth softens, mulcifer-mulcts, further along the lines of causality’s precession: Hephaestus falls, in the golden days of Greek myth, and tumbles slowly to Lemnos—except that he has always already fallen, before time, into a deeper abyss than a Lemnian crater. The maker, the artisan and creator, the poet, is cast out, punished for his ugliness and physical incapacity, for his lawlessness, even though it is the casting-out that causes his brokenness and lame body, that introduces him to the lawless realm, a place at once sea and land, fire and water. In this is the mystery of the artist, the poet, part of the divine world yet expelled by it, punished though innocent yet always already transgressive, to-be-broken and always already broken. The paradox of artistic creation, always both transgressively reactive to, and proactively prior to, time.

  [Whether the Incarnation would have happened if man had not fallen is beyond the scope of this newsletter. But, if not, it makes artistic creation like the first creation.

  Roberts mentions being rebuked by C. S. Lewis’ A Preface to Paradise Lost for enjoying Milton’s retelling of the pagan myths about Mulciber:

  This, Lewis insists, is not the point of an epic poem like Paradise Lost: “Milton is not a collection of exquisite little moments and images; it must be apprehended as a colossal whole, people who fixate on these moments are missing the point of” etc etc. I paraphrase.

  Enjoying those specific lines, though, gets you a rebuke from John Milton: “thus they relate, / Erring.” I assume this is Stanley Fish’s favorite phrase in the whole poem, since with it he transformed our understanding of the poem. (Well, with that phrase and finding liberals extremely annoying. This second part has, I think, been mostly ignored as a piece of Fish’s understanding of Milton, despite it being basically on the surface. When he revisited all this material in How Milton Works (2001) he included a passage that goes like this: “Liberals believe x. Liberals believe y. Liberals believe z. Liberals believe . . . [This paragraph goes on for over a page in this fashion. Next paragraph:] Milton believes none of these things.” And the argument in “There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech, And It’s a Good Thing, Too” opens by invoking the Areopagitica as not a defense of free speech but an example of what Fish says in the title (“I want to say all affirmations of freedom of expression are like Milton’s”). Fish always presents his reading of Milton as obvious; only the poor reading of liberals, forcing their liberalism into what Milton actually wrote, made Fish’s arguments were so new and shocking. But I digress.)

  In Book 3 of Paradise Lost Milton links the casting-out of his physical deformity (attributed in part to God as light: “but thou / Revisit’st not these eyes, that rowle in vain / To find thy piercing ray”) to the deeper insight (heh) necessary for his poetic project:

  But cloud in stead, and ever-during dark

  Surrounds me, from the chearful wayes of men

  Cut off, and for the Book of knowledg fair

  Presented with a Universal blanc

  Of Nature’s works to mee expung’d and ras’d,

  And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out.

  So much the rather thou Celestial light

  Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers

  Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence

  Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell

  Of things invisible to mortal sight.

  —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication in California, Eric Gudas reviews a reissued novel by Barbara Pym (The Sweet Dove Died, 1978, 2025):

  This meeting sets in motion an increasingly dire power struggle marked by jealousy, possessiveness, and desire, both repressed and painfully awoken. In her introduction to the novel’s 2025 NYRB Classics reissue, British novelist Susie Boyt astutely characterizes The Sweet Dove Died as “a matrix of longing and loathing, the two states often indistinguishable.” Pym, both mesmerized and repelled by her own fictional creation, gets drawn into the matrix too. In 1969, she disconsolately asked Larkin, her superfan and pen pal, “[W]hat reader would want to identify herself with Leonora?” Identification implies a capacity for empathy, but Leonora possesses so little that even a photograph of James’s dead mother calls forth only her “rather bored reverence.” If Pym envisioned a female readership for The Sweet Dove Died, then what Boyt calls Leonora’s “disdain for female friendships” might have been a poison pill. Within the novel, that disdain has not only grown reciprocal but has also morphed into schadenfreude. Leonora’s frenemy Liz wants “the cold, proud and well-organized Leonora to suffer as she had suffered and so to provide an interesting spectacle.”

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• I invent a poem by A. E. Housman

• Esoteric readings of “the wheels on the bus”

• K. T. on a Poem by Stephan Torre and the landscapes of the American West

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

Read more

Links:

• In , Clifford Thompson on Ralph Ellison:

  Jazz musicians, in their versions of pop songs, have often either navigated their way through the chords underlying the songs’ melodies (as did the first great jazz tenor saxman, Coleman Hawkins) or built new melodies based on those chords (as did Hawkins’s chief rival on the instrument, Lester Young). Either approach alludes to the original melody while studiously avoiding it. Ellison manages something similar in the passage above. He mentions the “oppressor’s weakness” without saying, in words, what it is—while his other words, like a jazzman’s notes, give some clues: the allusion to the grandfather’s advice suggests that the “yeses” are well received by white oppressors, which in turn suggests that those oppressors are in the dangerous position of preferring affirmation to truth. Similarly, we are not told directly how saying yes “accomplishes the expressive ‘no’”—but we can deduce that the withholding of truth, from which the oppressor might benefit, acts as a rejection of, or “no” to, the oppressor’s well-being. Finally, there is “Samson, eyeless in Gaza,” an allusion that succeeds at both being off-topic and fitting right in, as do the snippets of other melodies jazz musicians often sneak into the ones they’re playing.

  [More on Samson, eyeless in Gaza, below.

  The narrator of Invisible Man, reflecting on his grandfather’s advice near the end:

  “Agree ’em to death and destruction,” grandfather had advised. Hell, weren’t they their own death and their own destruction except as the principle lived in them and in us? And here’s the cream of the joke: Weren’t we part of them as well as apart from them and subject to die when they died? I can’t figure it out; it escapes me. But what do I really want, I’ve asked myself.

  And in the final paragraph, rendering the complaint in the argot of jazz:

  “Ah,” I can hear you say, “so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving. He only wanted us to listen to him rave!”

  In other words he “alludes to the original melody while studiously avoiding it.” —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on Lake Erie, Chapman Caddell reviews Your Name Here (by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff, 2025) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 22, 2025; we linked to an interview with DeWitt and Gridneff in WRB—Oct. 25, 2025.]:

  The unspoken appeal of the The Last Samurai was aesthetically conservative, a return to adventure legible to Defoe but more efficient, more propulsive, closer to Borges. Like Macedonio, DeWitt has always taken seriously the phenomenology of reading, how a reader in a given technological paradigm might move through a text, what literary sleights of hand might resist attention or attract it. She considers and manipulates variables like the speed at which the pages of a book, a physical book, will be turned.

  Macedonio’s insight into how his work will be read by a lector salteado leads him away from Adriana Buenosayres, a less radical text and “the last bad novel,” in his own assessment, to Museum of the Novel of the Eternal Woman, “the first good novel.” Since Museum, the bad novel and the good novel have both been said to be dying, as if either were sufficiently advanced in age to die. Architecture, painting, and style, their ancestor, are geriatric and at risk, but the novel is barely four hundred years old. It will evolve without them and achieve forms more appropriate to its age.

  In retrospect, in English, The Last Samurai may prove to have been the last good novel. Your Name Here, a departure, would be the first bad novel, the first in a large and variable class that precedes it and will endure.

  [Come for “On Substack there is vitality, experiment, invention, and maybe three or four newsletters with style and a real following, one of which is a series of annotations to other essays,” stay for the rest of the essay.

  Lector salteado, per Caddell:

  the distracted reader, the faithless reader who at the first intimation of tedium skips a paragraph. The lector salteado skims whole chapters or reaches for the next book without closing or setting aside the first.

  “Faithless” is a moral judgment and “distracted” is not. But, whether we believe such readers will be numbered among the sheep or the goats, the novel being the ideal form for them is hardly clear. To suit them we might do better to go back before the novel and reinvigorate the sonnet cycle, which tends to depict more or less the same thing happening in sonnet after sonnet after sonnet, with most changes happening so slowly that our lector salteado can skip a few without losing the thread. I would also wonder whether anything text-based is the ideal, although distractions are infinite and can accompany any work of art.

  And the novel is about 400 years old, which is also about how long the bourgeoisie have had a self-understanding of themselves as such. It has always at its core been—many of the defining achievements in the form certainly are—an interrogation of (as I always say around here) bourgeoisie mores around marriage and money (in some proportion, although the two are always connected). Even the most recent broad developments have not quite gotten away from this as much as it might initially seem. The sprawling systems novel proposes that, in order to understand money, we need to understand everything, since the whole world is interconnected and money touches every aspect of it; autofiction proposes that, in order to understand marriage, we first need to understand on the most granular level what it is like to experience the world as a bourgeois, so that we can then understand what it is like to experience the world as a bourgeois in love (or something like it). Whether the bourgeois are going anywhere is—beyond the scope of this newsletter, but as long as they are with us I think the novel will be with us too. (What do the bourgeois look like in a post-literate world? “What they look like now.” Further answers are beyond the scope of this newsletter.) —Steve]

• In The Baffler, Michael Barron reviews William T. Vollmann’s latest (At the Table of Fortune, August 25):

  The assorted typography brings a surreptitious vitality to Vollmann’s narration, as if he were testifying on declassified material. Fonts are often proprietary and expensive to rent, and Vollmann’s insistence on keeping them is what led, along with a fattening manuscript and dizzying printing cost, to him being dropped by his longtime publisher Viking. Had he listened to his editor’s advice, Vollman admits, “I could have made a living and expanded my readership. Well, I had to fight against both of those dangers. And in the great words of Bush Two: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!”

  Vollmann’s documentarian sensibilities, foundational to his legitimate bid as our preeminent literary chronicler, are underscored by his tectonic imagination. Without its quake, At the Table of Fortune might resemble something of a novelized Fahrenheit 9/11 or Ken Burns special on the CIA rendered in prose. But whether it is the duty of the novelist to commit to the highest levels of verisimilitude is debatable. When he says his extrapolations of Langley are as accurate as “a 1940s science fiction novel about Venus,” what he means is he didn’t quite nail the colors of Langley’s elevators or the species of potted plants in its lobby. Even for writers wiretapping into reality to enrich their prose, such faults are often the most capable of moving us.

• In the New York Times, William T. Vollmann reviews James Ellroy’s latest (Red Sheet, June 9):

  I read James Ellroy not quite as I would Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, those L. A. noir maestros whose lyrical loneliness is simply beautiful and whose plot-machines (call them trick coffins) I can never admire enough, right down to the last countersunk death’s-head screw. In place of the twentieth-century moral code of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and the family neuroses of Macdonald’s characters, I find in Ellroy’s books the semi-despairing ugliness of Georges Simenon.

  But Ellroy also likes to be semi-funny, his specialty being sadistic slapstick (which sometimes disgusts me), and unlike these other authors he likes to meditate on the American dream of financial and reputational success. For Otash, that means sliding into Nixon’s limousine to get his cash—and scoring an extension on his beloved concealed-carry permit.

  [“Reputational success” is not a phrase I’ve ever seen before—at least, not that I can recall—but I can tell it’s going to become a standby. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the Liffey, Eamon Maher reviews a book about Proust’s influence on Irish writers (The Irish Proust: Cultural Crossings from Beckett to McGahern, edited by Max McGuinness and Michael Cronin, 2025):

  Richard Robinson discovers traces of Proust in McGahern’s Memoir, which regularly highlights the lapses and unreliability of memory, something that struck the Irish writer most forcibly when he consulted his sisters about certain experiences they had lived through but remembered differently from him: “This very admission,” Robinson writes, “reveals how Memoir is pregnant with questions about what has been occluded—forcefully suppressed, unconsciously repressed—from the narrative.’ He shows how McGahern borrows almost word for word some of Proust’s ideas expressed in Days of Reading. I would add that passages from Beckett’s Proust are very close to ones that can be found in McGahern’s literary credo, “The Image,” with few, if any, changes. The sense of place as a trigger for involuntary memory is another aspect found in both writers’ work. For example, walking through the lanes of Leitrim in later life brings McGahern back to the time when he went to school along those same lanes hand-in-hand with his mother, with whom he was fleetingly reunited through involuntary memory. He observed in Memoir: “I suspect it is no more than the actual lane and the lost lane becoming one for a moment in an intensity of feeling, but without the usual attendants of pain and loss.”

  [We linked to a piece on the poetry of nostalgia in WRB—May 6, 2026.

  A friend about to move wrote to me in a letter recently about feeling something we could perhaps call “pre-nostalgia”—being in a place and having the thought that in the future she’ll look back at being there nostalgically. There’s a being out of time to it that resonates with the last quote from McGahern here. —Steve]

N.B.:

• on Thomas Otway influencing Keats’ “Ode on Melancholy.” [Always a highlight of my week when Roberts gets to use a phrase like “It hasn’t hitherto been noticed that.” —Steve]

• “Anatomy of a Galileo Forgery”

• What it is like to be an orchestral musician performing a film score live.

• Screenshots as preservation.

• The Chinese-language literary scene in Australia.

• The guy adjusting American Airlines’ flights based on World Cup results.

• New issues:

  • Dublin Review of Books Issue 161, Summer 2026 [As linked to above.]

  • The Yale Review Volume 114, No. 2 | Summer 2026

• Marjane Satrapi died recently. R.I.P.

• Gordon S. Wood died on Sunday, June 7. R.I.P.

  • In The Lamp, Nic Rowan on Wood reading Proust at 90:

    For Wood, to encounter Proust at all was the most important thing. He told us again what he had said to Will: he really wanted to read this novel before he died. And, standing next to him, his wife Louise confirmed. In fact, it had become something of a family project. When I asked which translation he chose, Wood grinned and said he could not remember—whichever one was on Project Gutenberg. (That’s Scott Moncrieff.)

    As I drove home, I couldn’t get the image out of my head: the renowned American historian, seated at his computer or perhaps holding an iPad or a Kindle, on a seemingly infinite scroll through the great French novel of the last century. This was incredible. It made me want to read more, to study harder, to do the things I was put on this earth to do. I had to know more about this. Everyone had to.

Poem:

“Villainelle of His Lady’s Treasures” by Ernest Dowson

I took her dainty eyes, as well
As silken tendrils of her hair:
And so I made a Villanelle!

I took her voice, a silver bell,
As clear as song, as soft as prayer;
I took her dainty eyes as well.

It may be, said I, who can tell,
These things shall be my less despair?
And so I made a Villanelle!

I took her whiteness virginal
And from her cheek two roses rare:
I took her dainty eyes as well.

I said: “It may be possible
Her image from my heart to tear!”
And so I made a Villanelle.

I stole her laugh, most musical:
I wrought it in with artful care;
I took her dainty eyes as well;
And so I made a Villanelle.

[A friend recently pointed out to me how ominous the move from “I made a Villanelle!” to “I made a Villanelle.” is—the exclamation mark expresses an innocent joy in creation, but the period is clinical and detached. Violent, even, as the first line of the last stanza suggests by moving from “took” to “stole,” picking up on the idea in “I took her whiteness virginal” and its two ideas of purity to be sullied.

The other repeated line, taking the lady’s eyes while leaving the poet’s intact, draws on a long tradition of eyes in this kind of poem going back to Petrarch, as in Rime sparse 3: “And I could not, my lady, turn and fight, / for you transfixed me with your lovely gaze.” (Translation by A. M. Juster.) To have eyes is to have power. Juster’s choice of “gaze” connects his translation to the great English poet of blindness and sight, Milton, who in Paradise Regained has the Son describe Satan as

. . . now depos’d,
Ejected, emptyed, gaz’d, unpityed, shun’d,
A spectacle of ruin or of scorn
To all the Host of Heaven . . .

“Gaz’d,” reinforced with “a spectacle,” makes the fact that Satan is looked at the chief evidence of his powerlessness. And Samson in Samson Agonistes, “eyeless in Gaza,” is eyeless in gaze of the Philistines, or, as he puts it, “both my Eyes put out, / Made of my Enemies the scorn and gaze.” They look at him; he, like the lady in Dowson’s poem, has no eyes with which to look back. (Later English misogynists would take up this idea of gazing as explicit power struggle: “Under my thumb her eyes are just kept to herself / Under my thumb, well, I, I can still look at someone else.”)

The repetitive nature of both lines, however punctuated, are the poem’s central idea, underlined by one of them explicitly identifying it as a villanelle: whatever the poet says, the form itself is evidence of his inescapable obsession. He hopes that, by taking all these things and writing them down, “it may be possible / Her image from my heart to tear!” The poem, then, is intended as a kind of purgation. But the two set lines repeated over and over again know better. The recreation—not even of her, but of her objectified and reduced to body parts—will not tear her image but further keep it in place. And in the end it isn’t the poet’s main concern either way. The last line besides the two repeated ones, after all, says nothing about her: “I wrought it in with artful care.” I broke her apart and put her back together how I wanted, how my art demanded. What was the poet’s love? Did he know this woman? The horrifying triumph of that final “I made a Villanelle” comes from a mind not particularly concerned with these questions.

The Petrarchan tradition (object of obsessive revisiting in this newsletter) gets a lot out of this transmuting of women into poetic triumphs. It comes from one of the most basic of human fears: do we know the people we love? How can we, when our perceptions and communication are so faulty and limited? How much of what we think of them is something we constructed in our own heads, which can be a more comforting place to live than the world outside? And do we love not the people out there but our own constructions? As Janet Malcolm put it in an article sent to me by the friend who made the observation about punctuation marks:

The phenomenon of transference—how we all invent each other according to early blueprints—was Freud’s most original and radical discovery. The idea of infant sexuality and of the Oedipus complex can be accepted with a good deal more equanimity than the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities—personal relations—is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems. Even (or especially) romantic love is fundamentally solitary, and has at its core a profound impersonality. The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: We cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain. A horrible kind of predestination hovers over each new attachment we form. “Only connect,” E. M. Forster proposed. “Only we can’t,” the psychoanalyst knows.

Poems like Dowson’s find it better to reign in hell than serve in heaven: “I see the problem, but to me all these women are simply the raw material out of which I make my art.” Even those poems describing the woman ignoring the poet recapitulate the ignoring, but with a difference: now the poet is in charge, crafting the scenario as he sees fit. And something seemingly more optimistic, like “so long lives this, and this gives life to thee,” is a statement of the superiority of poetic art to the actual person being described. It throws back our selfishness and our smallness in our faces, adding the additional humiliation of our failure to at least make art out of it. —Steve]

Upcoming books:

Cornell University Press | June 15

A Protestant Air: Gide, Sartre, Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernity
by Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche

From the publisher: A Protestant Air focuses on the Protestant connection linking three intellectual giants of twentieth-century French thought: André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Roland Barthes. All three came from a Protestant background and thus shared a common marginality in a nation culturally marked by Catholicism, one that profoundly shaped their personalities, thinking, and literary careers. When Gide received the Nobel Prize in 1947, he declared that if he had represented anything as a writer, it was the “spirit of protestation.”

Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche explores the filiation that this spirit weaves between Gide, Sartre, and Barthes. She shows how their Protestant difference, confronted with France’s Catholicity, informed their posture as writers, their conceptualization of literature, and their elaboration of the figure of the French intellectual as a counterauthority, with a distinctive positioning vis-à-vis the individual and the institution. As such, A Protestant Air examines the religious underpinnings of twentieth-century letters and politics, their interaction with the secularization of French society, and, more broadly, the historical and philosophical relationship between the Protestant ethos and modernity itself.

Out Tuesday:

Astra House: Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body by Erin Maglaque

Hogarth: The Frenzy: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates

What we’re reading:

Steve read most of Money by Martin Amis (1984).

Critical notes:

• Moul on Horace’s ode to a wine-jar:

  One way of understanding this stanza is that it casts into hymn form a pragmatic hope for the imminent dinner party: that there’ll be plenty to drink (Bacchus), uninhibited conversation (Bacchus as Liber, god of free speech) and, perhaps, some sexual activity (Venus, if she’s in the mood); that there’ll be something of the beauty, joy, song and dance suggested by the Graces, who typically accompany divine feasts; and that the whole thing will last until dawn (Phoebus = the sun).

  This is obviously in some sense what the lines mean. But it would, I think, be very wrong to feel that Horace’s invocation here of Bacchus, Venus, Apollo and the Graces is just a poetic convention, a way of varying the register, as religiously inert as Milton’s invocation of Urania. On the contrary, these final lines are a real hymn, intensely moving despite (or because of) its straightforward language. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what makes these lines so beautiful, but it must have something to do with the choice of details and the way in which Horace sounds at once both reverential and familiar. Venus only si laeta aderit, “if she comes in the right mood” (suggesting an acquaintance with Venus in various moods). And amid the gods we have the ordinary details of the lamps still burning around the jar of wine (vivaeque . . . lucernae).

  [So much of the magic of the Odes is in Horace starting you in one place and ending you in a very different one without you realizing how far you’ve gone until you look back at the start of the poem. My personal favorite in this category is probably Odes 1.22 (Integer vitae), which begins with basic Stoic concepts, moves into a sendup of silly conceits of love poetry, and ends with Horace rather more seriously describing the sound of his lover in such a way that love attaches almost to sound itself—to poetry, in other words. —Steve]

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee (Dear) so much,
Lov’d I not managing to edit the Washington Review of Books more.

Links:

• In The New Yorker, Deborah Treisman interviews Jonathan Franzen:

  Treisman: Adele is quickly seduced by the “spirit of theatre.” Or is she seduced more by the fact that she has a talent for acting? That she’s found an area in which she stands out? Why do you think that change in her happens so quickly and with seemingly little resistance on her part?

  Franzen: People who become artists typically have both a great talent and an unquenchable thirst for attention, and theatre offers a stage for the former and the most direct possible relief for the latter. The audience is there in the flesh, shutting up and paying attention to your talent. But this liveness of performance is the essence of theatre, its “spirit,” and so the answer to your question may be: both her talent and the theatre. When a young person discovers a talent, the change often happens quickly. You’ve stepped onto a train, and it whisks you away with it. When I started writing, in high school, I don’t remember feeling any resistance at all to it (except from my worried parents). My feeling was: why do anything else when it feels so right to do this?

  [In conjunction with an excerpt from a novel in progress.

  I suppose fighting with Oprah is probably the best way for a novelist with an unquenchable thirst for attention to try slaking it. And it must be nice for writing to “feel so right”—the rest of us do it out of an uncurable compulsion. —Steve]

• In , on the little magazines of modernism:

  In 1929, [Robert McAlmon] left for Mexico City, claiming that “what Paris had once offered was no longer there so far as I was concerned,” and continued to write and publish his novels and poems. He has often been described as one of the great might-have-beens of the Lost Generation, “the man with . . . all the right connections who never fulfilled his promise,” as a 1990 New York Times review of his novel Village put it. And indeed, as he lay dying of pneumonia in Palm Springs, aged only 60, he may have cursed fate for denying him the acclaim that so many of his friends enjoyed. In certain ways his story is a tragedy; he could run in these artistic circles as long as he was willing to pick up bar tabs and printer’s fees, but, ever the acid-tongued outsider, he was unable to form many stable friendships. William Bird remembered him as “the third corner in every triangle . . . preyed on by the vultures of the writing world.” Like the cowboys upon which he modeled his persona, he was a drifter, always moving, always after something he couldn’t quite reach. He claimed to want the literary success and status that his peers enjoyed, but one doubts that it would have made him happy. Those who did manage to form solid friendships with him remembered him fondly, and it is undoubtedly true that he was a key resource for the writers of the period. Perhaps there is something in the peripatetic nature of figures like him that inspires others, something in their eternal dissatisfaction that makes them a good friend to writers who might benefit from the eyes of a skeptical but supportive outsider. “It was a tremendous experience knowing him,” eulogized Glassco in a letter. “He was always so alive and refreshing. And I was very fond of him—even when he became intolerably insulting: somehow, one excused him everything . . . ”

  [Who wants to write about the WRB in a hundred years? (You can borrow “intolerably insulting,” if you must.) —Steve]

• In the TLS, Gabriel Rolfe on the time Geoffrey Hill and J. H. Prynne got into it over grading exams:

  In retrospect, Hill’s efforts seem futile, especially when turning to the resulting examiners’ reports. There, Prynne takes aim not at the shortcomings of the students, but at their examiners. “Coming newly to the setting and marking for this paper,” he writes, “my most forcible impression was the extremely awkward challenge presented by the shape of the Paper as a whole.” Going on to acknowledge various failures of candidate response, moreover, he records his allegiance not to any “rubric,” but to the candidates themselves. “These are the reactions of those who feel themselves severely beleaguered,” Prynne laments, “and it is hard not in some measure to sympathize with their plight.”

  [Come for Cambridge arcana, stay for Rolfe pulling out a letter where Prynne invokes Hill as an example of “elevated pseudo alternatives . . . shot through with the crudest narcissism.”

  And Prynne’s recent death (R.I.P.) has let the Brits really show that they’re better than us at this whole literary culture thing. (We linked to some earlier discussion of Prynne in WRB—May 20, 2026.) —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• I talk myself into opposing taking pictures on your phone

• Nigerian scammers and artistic inspiration

• K. T. on a Poem by Stephan Torre and architecture

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

Read more

Links:

• In The Paris Review, an excerpt from Susan Choi’s introduction to a reissue of Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories (1981, May 26):

  Barthelme was a Houstonian. To me this is the single most salient fact about him, though the competitors for that distinction are many: that he was a contemporary-art-museum director; that his childhood was spent riding in an open-top car through the undeveloped Texas prairie; that his friend and neighbor in New York City was Grace Paley; that his students called him Don B. and associated with him the powers of a mystic or shaman, if one prone to sarcasm. Barthelme was a genre unto himself, the rare writer who never wrote toward or against any previously recognized form but simply, somehow, took his own form, which is always instantly recognizable as its inept imitations are also instantly recognizable. All these qualities attest to his home city, at least for me, who shared the city with him for a while in the mid-eighties. Houston is a city of unexpected adjacencies. Because it has no zoning regulations, it has no zones. Instead, things are put places—a church, an ice house, some houses for living in, a place for strippers, a place to buy your fishing boat, a place to eat chilaquiles—in whatever way they happen to go, as if the city has said, collectively, Let’s not get too hung up on formalities, we’ve got enough room not to worry about it. Even now, Houston is a city like a prairie, its urbanity thin as a threadbare quilt tossed onto the grass, a playful indication of the urban. And this is also very Barthelme, this playing with category rather than dutifully seeking to conform, this ignoring of the very many conventions—of living, thinking, and certainly of writing—with which the rest of the world seems to unquestioningly preoccupy itself.

  [My knowledge of Houston mostly comes from The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (2003). It’s a shame Barthelme died too early to see that saga. I would have loved to see what he could make of it. —Steve]

• In Harper’s, Katie Thornton on the Esparantist dream:

  There’s a pattern here: whenever the global order enters a new state of disarray, the movement sees a resurgence of interest, just enough to keep the crusade from dying out. Its historic proximity to success is a legitimizing anchor for the movement. But it can also function as a bit of an excuse—allowing believers to attribute its failures to repression or bad luck, a fluke of history, rather than consider the possibility that language alone may be insufficient to foster world peace. Compelling as Esperanto’s interna ideo may be, I found it hard to imagine mere mutual comprehension overcoming the worst of human politics.

  Making my way through Mendel University’s campus buildings en route to one of dozens of available breakout sessions, I was approached by Seyed “Amir” Javadi, an Iranian hotelier who now lives in Germany. “Come to my hotel!” he shouted in Esperanto, waving brochures at me. “Free for Esperantists! I cook! I teach dance classes!” To prove this last point, he grabbed me by the waist and led me firmly through a basic German waltz, counting—“unu, du, tri”—before breaking into an a cappella rendition of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” with tweaked lyrics: Esperanto estas la lingvo por ni, por ni! Esperanto is the language for us!

  [To me, this is Jacobitism. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In the Journal, Michael Dirda reviews a reissue of a book by Leslie Fiedler (Love and Death in the American Novel, 1960, April):

  Certain established giants—Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser among them—earn Fiedler’s disparagement, usually for overemphasizing realism. He’s not even particularly fond of F. Scott Fitzgerald, though he praises Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) as “an utterly convincing and terrible fiction” and suggests that Robert Phelps’ neglected Heroes and Orators (1958) is a better novel about same-sex desire than more celebrated books by Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. Turning to Hemingway, he contends that For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) features “the most absurd love scene in the history of the American novel,” mainly because its author is “only really comfortable in dealing with ‘men without women.’” Fiedler even suggests that Moby-Dick (1851) might be our “greatest love story,” though “cast in the peculiar American form of innocent homosexuality.”

  [We linked to an earlier review in WRB—Apr. 8, 2026.

  Men are from America, women are from Europe. This is in Henry James somewhere, I think. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Joanna Biggs reviews a new novel by Makenna Goodman (Helen of Nowhere, 2025):

  In a play such as David Mamet’s Oleanna (1992), about a conflict between a successful male professor and a struggling female student, the man might be confronted more directly onstage. But Helen of Nowhere owes more to the closet drama, a play meant for reading rather than performing. The structure works to subdue the man’s speech by pushing other characters into the limelight even as he remains onstage, reminding the reader that we know only what these other characters are saying, not what they’re thinking. It’s as if the man believes this were a novel about him and the tragic, misunderstood end to his career, but the novel knows that it is a multivocal drama about the problem of change. Goodman’s prose is clear rather than complex, and carefully calibrated to each of her characters; the book’s form corrals the natural speed of her sentences into act-length shapes that one moves around in one’s head like puzzle pieces. In reading Helen of Nowhere, I had thoughts in the back of my mind that more usually come up in the theater: Who hasn’t yet spoken to whom? How on earth is this going to end?

  [The closet drama is going to make a comeback, I tell you. (All that time I spent thinking about Seneca is finally going to pay off.) This new wave, though, will I think have in mind being read aloud by small groups just as much as being read alone. —Steve]

• In the Times, reviews a novel by Gwendoline Riley (The Palm House, April):

  It’s the aptly named Shove who tells the staff that he wants to make Sequence, a haven of critics and historians, into “a sort of London version of The New Yorker.” Putnam and his colleagues ask what this will entail. Listings? Restaurant reviews? More newsy items and lifestyle coverage? “As long as it’s not boring,” says Shove. “That’s our motto now.”

  It’s not exactly what the former New Yorker editor Tina Brown called “buzz.” The staff wonders if Shove considered Sequence boring when he took the job. He starts opening his editor’s notes with lines like “What is it about dogs?” and “April is the cruellest month, as the poet T. S. Eliot famously wrote.” His other colorful habits include chattering about Twitter and celebrities and wheeling about the office on his chair. One senses that Sequence comes from a time before chairs had wheels and that its editors would have preferred to stay there.

  [The old Sequence would have gotten linked to all the time in here. —Steve]

• In the local and free Beacon, Dominic Green reviews a biography of the Rolling Stones (The Rolling Stones: The Biography, by Bob Spitz, April):

  The Jagger-Richards power-sharing agreement worked, with Jagger offshoring the business and Richards leading the band. It also reflected the band’s songwriting balance of power. But Jagger and Richards realized after Altamont that the rock business is a death cult, with someone always marked for sacrifice. They insist that “It’s only rock ’n’ roll,” but, as in the Athenian drama, it is and it isn’t. If it’s a show, it’s the greatest show on earth, and if it’s the greatest show on earth, it has to be much more than a show. But after Altamont, no one wants to die anymore. What remains is, as the movie title had it, performance, reenacting the Boomer ritual.

  Thus corporatized, the Stones roll on forever. No one ever wonders whether it is an accident that their early erotic triangulations coincided with their best music. No one apart from Anita states the obvious: Keith is the recurring point in all the triangles. Everyone, especially Mick, wants Keith. Richards affects not to notice this, though for decades he taunts Jagger as a homosexual by mocking him as “Brenda,” Private Eye magazine’s nickname for the old queen, Elizabeth II. As Jagger wrote in “Angie,” “There ain’t a woman that comes close to you.”

  [“It’s Only Rock ’n Roll,” that statement of purpose, contains these lines:

  If I could stick a knife in my heart

  Suicide right on stage

  Would it be enough for your teenage lust?

  Would it help to ease the pain?

  The answer to this, as to all the other questions Jagger poses, is “Oh, no, it’s only rock ’n roll . . . ” That “oh, no” has a double meaning. It denies that the Stones are in the business of suicide on stage, but it is also a literal answer to the questions. It would not be enough for your teenage lust, it would not satisfy you, it would not be enough for your cheatin’ heart. The song can gesture to death, but the Stones aren’t in that business anymore. —Steve]

N.B.:

• The UK is using beavers to prevent flooding.

• If you write a bunch of letters you can get profiled in the Journal. [Is this how I can get the WSJ to cover the WRB? Do I actually have to start sending out the fabled Print Edition? Also one of Patrick Kurp’s blog posts this week featured a Timothy Steele poem, “Old Letters.” —Steve]

• Joyce Johnson on Jack Kerouac. [For those interested in this kind of thing, which I am not. —Steve]

• Turkic influences on Narnia. [For those interested in this kind of thing, which I am not. The Horse and His Boy (1954) was my favorite Narnia book as a kid, though. —Steve]

• [The best YouTube channel released a 50-minute video about Gradus ad Parnassum by Johann Fux (1725). I am sure that at least one reader of the WRB is attempting to learn counterpoint and will find it helpful. —Steve]

• New issues:

  • Harper’s Magazine June 2026 [As linked to above.]

  • The New Criterion Volume 44, Number 10 / June 2026 [They have a cricket column now. —Steve]

• Sonny Rollins died on Monday, May 25. R.I.P.

Poem:

Délie 237 by Maurice Scève, translated from the French by Richard Sieburth

As my Lady reached toward the honeycomb,
Out darts a Wasp, testy as Death,
And stabs its sting into her tender flesh:
Her face ashen with pain, she says
Ha! it’s not this little Bee
Whose bite I find so dire:
I fear love may have opened fire:
Why fear? I say, coming to the point.
It’s not love, my Dear: When he attacks,
His sting is sweeter, & more entire.

[I love the move from the bee sting to Cupid’s arrow to the more ambiguous work of the poem (“I say, coming to the point”), as well as the poem’s images circling around sweetness and pain until they meet in the last line.

Speaking of circling around: wanting to read more on Scève I read an article by Katie Kadue on the emblems Scève puts in the Délie as a kind of meme, in which she says:

The Petrarchan lady, whose typically aristocratic profile is sometimes reproduced in the frontispieces to these collections, is generically singular: Tu sola mi piaci, Petrarch sighs to Laura; Seule je te choisi, seule aussi tu me plais, Pierre de Ronsard sighs to Hélène (a similar tune to the one he was sighing to another lady, Cassandre, not long before); “Honour the shrine, where you alone are placed,” Fulke Greville proclaims, twice, of Cælica. All these poets seem to be relying on an old trick from an old book, Ovid’s early first-century Art of Love, which instructs its reader to “choose to whom you will say: ‘You alone please me’ [tu mihi sola places],” a smooth line that, as it happens, Ovid ripped off from an older book, by Propertius. What these special ladies have in common—indeed, what makes them special—is their quintessential commonness, their infinite iterability. The poet-lovers, too, are in possession of a paradoxically generalized hyperindividuality. Nothing could be more conventional than for a lover to feel like he is inventing something, even if, as any Renaissance poet trained in the rhetorical art of inventio would know, to “invent” is simply, etymologically, to find something that was already there.

The problem faced by all of these poets is this: they desire to have invented their ideals while being aware that they have not. This failure to have been invented is a kind of betrayal—the betrayal that, as it happens, Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) is yelling about at the end of Vertigo (1958):

He made you over, didn’t he? He made you over just like I made you over, only better! Not only the clothes and the hair, but the looks and the manner and the words! And those beautiful phony trances! . . . Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? Did he tell you exactly what to do and what to say?

In other words, did he, and not I, invent you? Is this creation that I poured myself into not actually mine at all? In crafting my poetic ideal, did I mostly crib from Petrarch? (Sieburth notes in his introduction that Petrarch is the only poet the Délie mentions, in one case as “this Tuscan Apollo”—there are archers more effective than Cupid. And in Astrophel and Stella Philip Sidney tries suggesting other people not do what he has done: “You that poor Petrarch’s long-deceased woes / With new-born sighs and denizen’d wit do sing: / You take wrong ways.”) In Scottie’s case, he has to believe that he has made his fantasy real on his terms; the mere suggestion that he has not ruins it. Petrarchan poets, working with tropes instead of women, are well aware that they have not made their fantasies real and, having consulted the literature, find what is already there.

Going back beyond Petrarch to the Roman poets we find a strange approach to originality that at least honestly confronts the problem; they all claim to be the first to do this or that, but the specific thing they are the first to do is bring something previously existing (Greek) into Latin. Virgil does it in the opening of Georgics 3: Primus ego in patriam mecum, modo vita supersit, / Aonio rediens deducam vertice Musas (“I will be the first, as life lasts, to lead the muses from the Aonian peak back to my own country”). Horace does it in Odes 3.30: princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos / deduxisse modos (“first to join Aeolian song to Italian rhythms”). In Book 5 of De rerum natura Lucretius does the same thing with Epicureanism: hanc primus cum primis ipse repertus / nunc ego sum in patrias qui possim vertere voces (“I am now found the first able to translate this into our native language.”) And Propertius, near the start of Elegies 3.1: primus ego ingredior puro de fonte sacerdos / Itala per Graios orgia ferre choros. (I’ll let Pound take this one: “I who come first from the clear font / Bringing the Grecian orgies into Italy, / and the dance into Italy.”) These are all claims to originality, but the originality of the poet is the originality of the inventor in the old sense.

Maybe best to let Berryman have the last word here (this the sestet from Berryman’s Sonnets 40):

A Renaissance fashion, not to be recalled.
We dinch “eternal numbers” and go out.
We understand exactly what we are.
. . . Do we? Argent I craft you as the star
Of flower-shut evening: who stays on to doubt
I sang true? ganger with trobador and scald!

While trying to track down whether Scève’s use of ampersands was an influence on Berryman (Sieburth says in his introduction that he has preserved them from the original) I ran across this 2012 interview of Sieburth in the Brooklyn Rail. The whole thing is worth your time—one of the best interviews I’ve read in a while—but here’s a sample with some connection to the above:

Sieburth: Well they fairly soon figured out that this was what is called “a craft course.” We would say, okay, here’s a sonnet, what are you going to do with it? Because if you go back to the Renaissance, translation was taught in the schools as part of an overall training in rhetoric. You’d be asked to take a French text and rewrite it into Latin, or a Latin text and rewrite it into French, and somehow in the course of the back-and-forthing between these two languages you would somehow learn how to capture an energy—the energeia—behind language. In French they still call this exercise thème et version: Latin into French, French into German into Latin. And you know who was a master at this game, the kid who won every first prize?

Rail: Rimbaud.

Sieburth: Bingo. The reason why Rimbaud is so interesting is that we have so few examples of poetic prodigies. We have musical prodigies, we have mathematical prodigies, and we have chess prodigies, and that’s exactly what Rimbaud was, because he had figured out that poetry was numbers—the old term for poetry. He had understood in his Latin classes that poetry was numbers, music, and kind of like playing chess. This is what he learned in high school.

“Rimbaud, poetic prodigy” does a lot to explain “Rimbaud, guy who stopped writing at 20.” —Steve]

Upcoming books:

Atlantic Monthly Press | June 3

Drayton and Mackenzie
by Alexander Starritt

From the publisher: James Drayton has always found things too easy. Ambitious, brilliant, disciplined—he graduates with a top first from Oxford and is on track to become the youngest ever partner at leading management consultancy McKinsey. His former classmate Roland Mackenzie, on the other hand, is an impulsive dreamer: charming and restless, his boundless enthusiasm matched only by his knack for self-sabotage.

When Roland takes a job at the same firm as James, the two men only vaguely remember one another. But as the financial crisis starts to unfold, a chance encounter sparks an idea, and an unlikely partnership begins to take shape. Sent to Scotland to shutter offices and lay off hundreds of workers, James and Roland begin to wonder: What if they were made for more than this? What if they could build something grand and lasting—something that might even change the world?

By turns intimate and panoramic, Drayton and Mackenzie is a deeply intelligent novel about ambition, friendship, and the forces shaping the twenty-first century—the story of two men caught in, and determined to master, the tides of history.

[Also from the publisher: “Longlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year—the first work of fiction to grace the list in fifteen years.” The next time somebody translates Balzac they should put Marx and Engels’ praise of him on the cover. —Steve]

Also out Tuesday:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction by Deborah Levy

HarperVia: Meeting New People: A Novel by Daniel M. Lavery

University of California Press: Dionysiaca by Nonnus, translated from the Greek by Robert Shorrock (books 1–12), Camille Geisz (books 13–24), Mary Whitby (books 25–32), Tim Whitmarsh (books 33–40), and Berenice Verhelst (books 41–48)

What we’re reading:

Steve read Richard Sieburth’s translation of selections from Maurice Scève’s Délie (Emblems of Desire, 2007) (as discussed above). He also started on another collection of Martin Amis’ essays (Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions, 1993, February).

Critical notes:

• on taste:

  Now, a clever reader might object at this point, “Well, what about a hipster type who doesn’t want people to know about their special tastes? Aren’t they just hoarding social capital?” Yes and no, perhaps. No one gets it like I get it could be someone essentially saying, “Other people who engage with this will see it as agreeable at best, or as a piece of cultural capital to show off their taste, but I perceive the beautiful in this thing, and I want to preserve that experience.” So paradoxically, an apparent snob might be invested in the universality and permanence of an aesthetic experience, while a popularizer might be using it a) to make a buck, or b) to pose with it and have a moment of fashionability before they discard the thing in the trash heap along with all the other fads, thereby destroying the sensus communis, the universal and timeless moment of beauty. I think people who work in museums and art education probably struggle with this: how to make aesthetic experience accessible enough to the public, but also communicate its importance and rarity. I think the best art criticism also does this: it’s welcoming without dumbing down.

  • Sieburth, in the interview linked to above: “My relation to Pound was I guess always pedagogic. He was this crackpot professor I might totally disagree with but he assigned the best homework.”

    [Last month I had some notes on a piece on difficult authors where I described the kind of shameless elitist I like as trying to get everyone to give art a chance. (Pound again: “The thought of what America would be like / If the Classics had a wide circulation / Troubles my sleep.”) That’s also what we’re up to here at the WRB—it’s not like society has chosen to award honor to the writers of email newsletters. (Yet! Subscribe!)

    The educational work of a museum, though, puts the question as starkly as it can be put. (I’ve studied the question carefully, and it turns out more people visit art museums than make it through 800 words of rambling collage about the Petrarchan tradition to reach the last item in the WRB.) You have to let the art speak for itself, and yet you also have to speak for it. What I think of as the standard bad art museum caption, which focuses on one detail of the work, throws in a little historicization, and then asks you your thoughts about it, is probably the most obvious approach—and also a great example of the most obvious approach not always being the right one. If anything, it trusts the art and the audience too little. —Steve]

You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him the Managing Editorship of the Washington Review of Books,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?

Links:

• In Engelsberg Ideas, on the Voynich Manuscript and the search for a universal symbolic system:

  Whereas Descartes joked that a universal language was never likely to exist, except perhaps dans le pays des romans (“in the land of novels”), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent much of his life trying to chase down such a language. In his Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (1666), Leibniz began to elaborate the idea of a characteristica universalis, “a kind of alphabet” that could express mathematical, metaphysical and ontological concepts at once and in a way that would be universally intelligible. He described it as “ . . . a general algebra in which all truths of reason would be reduced to a kind of calculus . . . this would be a kind of universal language or writing, though infinitely different from all such languages which have thus far been proposed . . . ” At the time he was writing his Dissertatio, Leibniz was immersed in Polygraphia Nova (1663), a treatise on cryptology by none other than Athanasius Kircher, who proposed polygraphy as “all languages reduced to one” and who, at that very moment, was likely in possession of the Bacon Cipher. If Marci’s letter is to be believed, Kircher was the last known owner of the manuscript before it vanished for centuries, until it was discovered again by Voynich.

  [R.I.P. René Descartes you would have loved “The Library of Babel.” —Steve]

• In Prospect, on J. H. Prynne:

  Prynne’s work took its inspiration from the possibility that the music of poetry could be true to the fact that “we live / with sounds in the ear / which we shall never know.” In his critical prose, he sought metaphors for a dynamic vision of language as something more beautiful than “our credit-card view of the speech act”, in which meaning is transferred with maximum efficiency. An essay from 1994 on Chinese poetry, for example, begins, magnificently: “Within the great aquarium of language the light refracts and can bounce by inclinations not previously observed.” It then develops this image of words as things of glinting, fluid meaning with a deliberate ambiguity: “if you can imagine staff notation etched on the glass you can read off the scales.” Staff notation is how we conventionally represent music; but, etched on an aquarium, those “scales” become fishy, too.

  • Moul on Prynne (comparing him to Geoffrey Hill): “But all the same, what Prynne does, over and over again, is to take his strange, uprooted (re-rooted?) words, and make music of them.”

  • Prynne, in “Moon Song”:

    Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

    I know there is more than the mere wish to
    wander at large, since the wish itself diffuses
    beyond this and will never end: these are songs
    in the night under no affliction, knowing that
              the wish is gift to the
              spirit, is where we may
              dwell as we would
    go over and over within the life of the heart
    and the grace which is open to both east and west.
    These are psalms for the harp and the shining
    stone: the negligence and still passion of night.

    [Some of the passage from Triodes Moul quotes at the end of her piece is also relevant here:

    he wrongs, he is wronged, he advised,

    he deliberated, they seized, they were quarreling,

    grasping one another, they rage,

    they went on a rampage,

    whew, those boys act primitive right at

    the verbal root with a cap . . .

    From the exercise of being given an active form of a verb and being asked to supply the passive (“he wrongs, he is wronged”) Prynne derives a little narrative “right at / the verbal root.” —Steve]

Reviews:

• Two in the TLS; first, Muriel Zagha reviews an anthology of romances (Stories for Lovers, edited by Lucy Evans) and a book about romance novels (In Love with Love: The Persistence and Joy of Romantic Fiction, by Ella Risbridger, 2025 in the UK):

  In Love with Love is a book that seeks to include rather than exclude. The tone is chatty. Risbridger starts off by encouraging the reader to “picture me in the way so many heroines start off their stories: stripy pyjamas, glasses, messy hair up in one of those grabby claw-clip things”, and she knowingly peppers her book with the niceties of contemporary romance—lists, humorous footnotes, exclamation marks. Is it a deflecting strategy on the part of the author to drape herself so resolutely in the romantic flag? Quite possibly. Risbridger is acutely aware of the snobbish unease about romance fiction, which she skewers in a thoughtful footnote: “Fleabag would like the cultural pulling power of romantic fiction but without any of the humiliating, cloying, historical connotations of romantic fiction, and for that reason I will never truly love it.” She observes that the romance novel, rooted as it so often is in Austenian issues of money, property and one’s place in the world, is a social history of the time that made it.

  [Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984) (a WRB classic) argues that this reading of romance as social history is precisely backwards. Romance novels are not investigations of bourgeois attitudes towards marriage and money; they reflect instead the desires their readers have for what they are not obtaining in their real-world relationships. And to put the romance novel in the tradition of Jane Austen is not about “pulling power” (whatever that is) or historical connotations but something far simpler: insisting that the novels are good. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• How to write words good

• Brian Wilson and our Romantic moment

• K. T. on a Poem by Stephan Torre and rivers

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

Read more

Links:

• In Van, Leah Mandel on insects in music:

  A few years after Hearn wrote of his impossible-to-describe cricket sounds, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakav composed “The Flight of the Bumblebee.” Not a minute and a half long, it depicts protagonist Prince Gvidon’s apian transformation so that he can traverse the sea and visit his father’s court in secret. The orchestral interlude, from his opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan after Pushkin’s 1831 verse fairy tale, is meant to emulate the sound of a bee as closely as possible. For Rimsky-Korsakov, insects were deeply tied to the spirituality and magic of Slavic myth. It was a Romantic-style attention to the natural world, to ancient stories—and yet, Rimsky’s song became famous for being extremely difficult, at a breakneck tempo that requires its player to perform with mechanical precision. As Rothenberg notes, “It’s almost as if Rimsky wants to turn the orchestra into a warbling electronic oscillator, an instrument more comfortable with the sliding pitches and buzzing tone of the insect world.” While Rimsky reached into the past toward fairy tales, his perpetuum mobile stretched into the future logic of the twentieth century, with its cybernetics and steely mechanics. Rimsky’s bee, though, as Revell later argued, had only “an awkward timbral relationship with the songs they would imitate.” It remains an epitomic instance of the insect that bridges the fairy world with the machine world—somehow both organic and industrial. (Revell calls “Bumblebee” the “odd example of nature and formalism colliding in music,” noting that he far prefers organist Olivier Messaien’s bird song transcriptions.)

  [“Both organic and industrial” is the usual means of relating to hive insects, at least now that we have the concept of “industrial.” (Were we capable of understanding the scale of ant warfare before we had fought our own Verduns and Stalingrads?) And even those famous pre-Industrial Revolution bee metaphors gesture at a kind of impersonality. The bees to whom Virgil compares the men building Carthage are at work on various tasks but compose a unified force, and Milton compares the demons in Pandaemonium to “Bees / In spring time” who “expatiate and confer / Thir State affairs.” (Dark Satanic hive?) —Steve]

• on Pet Sounds (1966) at 60:

  Few rock acts could speak more to this fizzing era of postwar American exceptionalism; with their odes to surfing, hot rods, and summertime bliss, they were something of a synecdoche band in the popular imagination, standing in for all the promise of Southern California. And there is no way to understand the United States of America without California, the gleam and hush of the Pacific, the bleeding edge of the godly frontier. Brian, one of three Wilson brothers, had been born during World War II and inherited this particular form of manifest destiny, part and parcel of the Golden State’s youth bomb, a capitalist transcendentalist. The story of the Beach Boys has been told and retold, swallowed up in books and films and documentaries and endless reams of oral recollections, and all of it, for a writer attempting to apprehend the history, can be like scaling a mountain in a dream, the crags and cliffs forever shifting, the laws of gravity bending and breaking, nothing to do but let go and hope there’s rock beneath. Writing on Pet Sounds is no easier. Forever deemed the second greatest album of all-time—no matter how many times, in seeming anguish, Rolling Stone reshuffles its rankings, Pet Sounds can always clock in at number 2—it defies the English language, as all great music does.

  [We linked to a review of a book about the Beach Boys in WRB—Apr. 22, 2026.

  The Beach Boys were an American band; Brian Wilson was an American artist. Part of me has always found American praise of the Beach Boys to be yet another manifestation of American insecurity about our achievements compared to Europe. Say what you want about kultur, at least the Europeans were working on that when they had no idea there was a continent here. Rock music, though—we invented it, and it could never have happened anywhere else. Then we got beat at it by the Beatles and the Stones. The elevation of the Beach Boys would claim otherwise.

  In the days of rockism this project probably seemed even more necessary. Rolling Stone’s 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums had as the best album of all time a piece of Edwardiana with two songs on it that “rock” called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). Again, this genre was invented by Americans. To ask “what if Brian Wilson had finished SMiLE?” is to ask “what if against Pepper there had been an American album in 1967 of comparable achievement, one whose lyrics invoke piece after piece of Americana, whose conceptual centerpiece rejects the world of a corrupt and dying aristocracy for the simplicity and freshness of a children’s song?” Or a Brian Wilson song, as the case may be.

  But Wilson was also an American artist in the sense Ralph Waldo Emerson envisioned in “The American Scholar”:

  We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. . . . if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

  The Beach Boys do have songs that rock as conventionally understood, but, while “I Get Around” is a great song, nobody feels an emotional connection to Brian Wilson because of “I Get Around.” Most everything that rocks about the Beach Boys is imitative. The ballads are where Wilson plants himself indomitably on his instincts and abides. And it is instinct. While he was trying to write hits and compete with Phil Spector and the Beatles, he never stands outside his own work to evaluate how it will play with any given audience. (In this he was quite unlike Lennon–McCartney and Jagger–Richards.) He creates and revises by retreating deeper within himself, asking whether this combination of sounds is the best at reflecting his interior state out into the world. Barkan mentions the story of Wilson deciding that the “fire music” he was working on was responsible for actual fires in Los Angeles; as his mental state worsened he retreated so far that there was no world outside the one he made, and fires “out there” are merely the parallels of the one he was imagining in song. Wilson trusted his instincts as far as they would go, and if they betrayed him in 1967 the world did eventually come around. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Charlie Lee reviews a reissue of John Gregory Dunne’s trip to Las Vegas (Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, 1974, 2025):

  Maybe he really does feel badly, but the feeling doesn’t last very long. I get the sense that, for Dunne, the point of doing this work is precisely the opposite. The point is to feel better. “There is a therapeutic aspect to reporting that few like to admit,” he writes. “Reporting anesthetizes one’s own problems.” By the time he’s been in Vegas for a few months, it’s become clear that hanging out with Jackie and Artha and Buster is not so much a respectable professional undertaking as a sort of errant compulsion, a vice not unlike gambling or placing obscene phone calls to strangers.

  And it’s this, I think, that Dunne is really after in the book, and what finally makes it more than just another plotless novel or confessional memoir: the notion that a reporter like him should be thought of not as a detached observer, or as a civic-minded truth teller, or even as an extractive careerist, but as a shambling, superfluous figure who goes “scavenging through the bureau drawers of men’s lives, searching for the minor vice, the half-forgotten lapse.” Here is a way, Dunne seems to think, of fending off the clamor and threat of real life, real intimacies. There’s something of the garden-variety New Journalist in this, to be sure, but unlike his more gonzo contemporaries Dunne is not so bent on getting where the action is or even on filing a good story. He has come to town for his own gratification. What he wants is “absolution through voyeurism.”

  [Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” also ends with a failure to actually distinguish himself from the people he intends to feel superior to:

  “Shit,” I said. “We both look worse than anything you’ve drawn here.”

  He smiled. “You know—I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “We came down here to see this teddible scene: people all pissed out of their minds and vomiting on themselves and all that . . . and now, you know what? It’s us . . . ”

  Reporting might anesthetize one’s own problems, but I have been reliably informed that going to Vegas also does. (I haven’t been myself; I have a Puritan attitude towards gambling, and without gambling I’m not sure what the point would be.) And this anesthetized confession of a superfluous man, revealing that his voyeurism is a means of escaping his own life, is not usually handled with such distance—it can be seen luridly dramatized in many of your favorite films by Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma. —Steve]

• In Sidecar (the NLR blog), Luke Roberts reviews a posthumous collection by Fanny Howe (This Poor Book: A Poem, May 5) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 29, 2026.]:

  Despite Howe’s prestigious family, when the marriage fell apart there was no money to fall back on. She became a single mother of three, surviving on a mixture of writing, teaching and living by her wits. Her bibliography, which is vast and messy, full of nooks and crannies, reflects these pressures. It includes several odd, spiky novels (collected, in 2006, as Radical Love); books for young readers; a couple of pulp paperbacks; several volumes of genre-defying essay and memoir; an experimental film or two. At the heart of it all is more than a dozen collections of poetry. As Howe put it: “my passion, first and last, / is for the ecstatic lash / of the poetic line.”

  Her “passion” is also, in the theological sense of the word, her sufferance. Or as Simone Weil, one of Howe’s great intellectual influences, had it: “Poetry: impossible pain and joy.” The “first and last” recalls a line of scripture, Revelation 22:13: “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” Lines of poetry, with their uncertain beginnings and endings, and their strange sonic transformations: little mechanisms of connection and crossed wires. But the “poetic line” might also be her poetic lineage, Howe’s sense of place in a tradition; I hear a hint of the Party line too.

  [I change Bible quotes to the KJV here, but what Roberts gives doesn’t match any translation I can find. I assume he quoted it from memory, then—how many critics now are out there quoting the Bible and giving chapter and verse to match from memory?

  And we all love Housman’s thing about poetry:

  Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keats’ last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, “everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.” The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach.

  But “ecstatic lash” is shorter. —Steve]

• In The Paris Review, Sheila Heti reviews a novel by Andrés Felipe Solano (Gloria, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden, April):

  His thought that this is the moment that he started writing the book comes again later, and again one more time. It’s true: with certain books, you feel like you started writing them when you were ten years old, and again at twenty-four when you had a certain dream, and again when you wrote the first sentence down. Such books feel like they were fated to be written, and also could have been written only at the time they were written, and not a moment before. It’s vanity to think you can start a book whenever you wish: the big orchestrator of art decides. Solano may have wanted to write this book five years before he started, but he needed to be with his mother in New York, in that laundromat, didn’t he? He couldn’t have known that, and might have become frustrated with himself. I’m so lazy. Why haven’t I started on the book about my mother working at the Agfa photo lab when she lived in Manhattan? But he hadn’t lived everything he had to live yet.

• In , reviews a chapbook by Matthew Buckley Smith (The Soft Black Stars, 2026):

  Smith’s clever use of the word “tired” in that stanza—like “thought” and “those girls” in his opening sonnet—shows that repetition is his friend. The next poem, “My Lord You,” named after an endearment from Ezra Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” includes a magical couplet: “Time ran from us the way the river runs / And stung the way a river serpent stings.” What works beautifully is not just the parallel construction of “ran / runs” and “stung / stings,” but also the transformation of “river” to “river serpent.” It is the exact opposite of the dud effect Twain illustrated by juxtaposing “lightning” and “lightning bug.”

  All poets put a premium on finding the right word. In a Smith poem, the words are so common, so quotidian, that their usage is vindicated almost entirely by their settings: the artful rhymes or rhythms to which they contribute, or the ironic coloring they are made to wear.

N.B.:

• “A family is vying for the return of a painting it thought was by Rubens. But an expert says it’s a copy because it does not include the artist’s depiction of a peeing cow.”

• Polyglot prose.

• “What Is a Bob Ross Painting Worth?”

• Preserving ancient libraries in Mauritania.

Poem:

Delia 17 by Samuel Daniel

Why should I sing in verse? Why should I frame
These sad neglected notes for her dear sake?
Why should I offer up unto her name,
The sweetest sacrifice my youth can make?
Why should I strive to make her live for ever,
That never deigns to give me joy to live?
Why should m’afflicted Muse so much endeavor
Such honor unto cruelty to give?
If her defects have purchased her this fame,
What should her virtues do, her smiles, her love?
If this her worst, how should her best inflame?
What passions would her milder favors move?
Favors, I think, would sense quite overcome;
And that makes happy lovers ever dumb.

[Daniel had clearly read his Petrarch carefully, but someone should tell him that when singing his ideal—his Delia, sorry, it’s the same letters—he’s singing his ideal, and that’s the trick. I do like his explanation for why happy poets don’t write good poetry. —Steve]

Upcoming books:

Out May 15:

University of Chicago Press: Given Time II by Jacques Derrida, edited by Laura Odello and Peter Szendy, translated from the French by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf

Europa Editions | May 19

The Danger to Be Sane: Creativity and the Eccentric Mind
by Rosa Montero, translated from the Spanish by Lindsey Ford

From the publisher: In this bold and deeply researched blend of memoir, essay, literary analysis, and intellectual sleuth story, Montero draws on psychology, neuroscience, and literature, as well as the lives of writers and artists, to explore the connection between creativity and mental vulnerability.

With narrative élan, Montero brings to life figures such as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, and Doris Lessing, and paints a fresco of the ways in which the brain works, its quirks and dark corners. Breaking down the forces that influence creativity, Montero proposes new ways of thinking about both the creative act, and what we consider “normal.”

Part intimate memoir, part cultural history, The Danger to Be Sane is a moving and inspirational homage to minds and lives that sit outside of the mean.

Also out Tuesday:

Princeton University Press: What’s So Great About the Great Books? Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) by Naomi Kanakia

University of Chicago Press: Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old by Mary Beard

Yale University Press: Tao Te Ching: A New Translation by Laozi translated from the Chinese by David Bentley Hart and Patrick Robert Hart

What we’re reading:

Steve continued his Martin Amis journey with Other People (1981). He also read Samuel Daniel’s Delia.

Critical notes:

• Nicholas Tate on Iggy Pop’s essay about reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (h/t Patrick Kurp):

  It was not just the admiration that one hard-working artist had for a “guy” who had “stuck with things” or that the cameo illustration of Gibbon on the cover made him look like “a heavy dude,” but also the beauty of the language, the sense of being freed from the tyranny of the present, and the humbling revelation of “how little I know.” If Gibbon got it all wrong and is looking down from some other place, one can imagine the broad smile on the heavy dude’s chubby face—Gibbon was no prude—at the thought that two hundred years later his magnum opus was being read with great pleasure, to the accompaniment of drugs and whisky, around 4 a.m. in cheap motels somewhere in the American South.

  [Pop’s “In 1982, horrified by the meanness, tedium and depravity of my existence as I toured the American South playing rock and roll music and going crazy in public, I purchased an abridged copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” is one of the great opening sentences of anything. His essay appeared in Classics Ireland in 1995, and that issue features the following wonderful and very of-its-time editor’s note from Theresa Urbainczyk:

  It is an enormous personal thrill to be able to include an article by someone I have admired for more than 15 years, the inimitable Iggy Pop, who has acquired classic status himself in another field. Here he explains how he came to write the track “Caesar” on his latest album American Caesar (1993). I would also like to thank Andrew Erskine, not only for introducing me to the work of Iggy Pop, but also for help and advice about computers. It is entirely thanks to him that Classics Ireland is available on the Internet.

  —Steve]

• on her approach to criticism on her Substack:

  One thing that has shifted for me over time, but which I’ve only recently figured out, is that I used to think of naïve reading as the absence of skill. That is, naïve reading is what you do when you are not doing other things: psychoanalytic readings, formalist readings, historical readings, biographical readings, philosophical readings, and so on. Now, though, I think that naïve reading is its own skill. It is like learning to see when you draw. You have to learn how to look at things with openness and pay attention.

  Furthermore, you have to keep learning how to do it, because it is easy to forget. The most basic and most important thing for getting anywhere real is the willingness not simply to look stupid, but to be stupid. I really do believe that. There are lots of things that will try to get in the way of cultivating this necessary stupidity, including people who do not understand that it is a useful thing you’re cultivating within yourself. But we’re all gonna die one day, so you can’t really worry about them.

  [Later BDM says that she could be more naïve by not “allowing whatever associations or juxtapositions or coincidences going on in my life to infect the process,” but if I’ve learned anything from Ezra Pound, Guy Davenport, and Eliot Weinberger, it’s that the whole point of knowing things is to supply the material for juxtapositions in your criticism. —Steve]

Does he re-buckle his knickerbockers below the knee?
Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger?
A dime novel hidden in the corn crib?
Is he starting to memorize jokes from the Washington Review of Books?

Links:

• In Poetry, Boris Dralyuk on the poetry of nostalgia:

  That sofa was “pushed back” during the lessons, recalls the speaker, and the dancers “managed always just to miss” it with their “last-second dips and twirls—all this / While the Victrola wound down gradually.” Everything in the lyric—from the casually varied pentameter (so much like a slow-moving fan), with its surprising yet gentle enjambments (so much like those dips and twirls in a cramped living room), to the perfectly chosen sensory details (the spicy scent in the sultry air, the soft cushions, the drawn-out strains of a record reaching its final rotation)—works to enchant. Like the mechanism of memory for us nostalgists, Justice’s composition smooths out the roughness of the past, elevating snatches of pleasure, suppressing what we would just as soon forget. Suppressing, yes, but not eliminating. Notice the “buried life,” buried in parentheses. These “little lost Bohemias of the suburbs,” as he calls them in the final line, are worlds of desperation, of poverty barely hanging on to gentility. The “brave ladies who taught us / So much of art, and stepped off to their doom / Demonstrating the foxtrot with their daughters” in the depths of the Depression suffer an “exile” less dramatic than that of Tsvetaeva, but no less poignant. Justice dignifies them by not dwelling on their pain, but neither does he deny it. He leaves the sugar coating in place, with only a crack here and there revealing the kernel. Surely, they would have wanted it that way.

  [Like Dralyuk I also love “Miniver Cheevy,” which I once described in these pages as “about what it is like to be a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books.”

  Nostalgia is the other side of Horace’s phrase about those who rush across the sea changing their sky and not their soul—it accepts the inability to escape from yourself and escapes instead by retreating further into yourself, into those smoothed-out memories that no one else will ever possess. Really there should be even more poems about it than there are. Poets are always doing that kind of thing. —Steve]

• In The New Yorker, Ed Caesar on Jonathan Swift’s epitaph:

  Why, then, would Swift have asked for his epitaph to be placed next to such an unimpressive man? On our tour of the cathedral, Kenny showed me Marsh’s monument. It was a huge slab of white marble on which there were some sixty lines of text, in Latin, listing Marsh’s many achievements and virtues—he was brilliant, pious, munificent, and a seven-time Lord Justice of Ireland. Kenny laughed at the Ozymandian pathos of the scene: the monument was partially obscured by several towers of stacked plastic chairs.

  Kenny explained to me that the monument had originally been outside the cathedral, near the public library that Marsh had founded and that bears his name. The stone was moved inside in 1728, to save it from the weather. Swift’s will was written after Marsh’s vanity project took up residence in the cathedral. It was notable to Kenny that Swift had stipulated that his monument be “deeply cut” in black marble, to contrast with Marsh’s. In Kenny’s mind, the placement was a jab at his old rival’s vainglory: the ultimate satire.

  [Last week the WRB featured Robert Browning’s bishop ordering his tomb at St. Praxed’s and using his epitaph to show up the epitaph of another person buried in there; this week the New Yorker runs this. We report, you decide. (Did Browning know about Swift’s epitaph? I just sort of assume he knew everything.) —Steve]

Reviews:

• In Literary Review, Jane Yager reviews a memoir by Herta Müller (The Village on the Edge of the World: Writing and Surviving in Ceauşescu’s Romania, translated from the German by Kate McNaughton, May 5):

  Fear, she found, “could be tamed by writing,” and “precise observation” became a survival tactic in the face of despotism. “The regime’s use of words and its use of harassment . . . blended into each other,” Müller recalls. She writes in German, but “the Romanian language writes with me”—not the “concrete-covered, grey State language” but the “spoken language that belonged to the people.”

  After the publication abroad of Müller’s first book, Nadirs (1982), the secret police stepped up their harassment of her. Müller is an unnervingly acute observer and the account here of the nightmarish texture of persecution is equal in its intensity to any in fiction. At one of the many surreal interrogations to which she was summoned, she “had to eat eight hard-boiled eggs with onions and coarse salt from the long table they were sitting at. A woman’s voice was screaming through a closed door at the back of the room.” The Securitate also left deliberate signs they had invaded her flat in her absence: “a picture that hung on your wall would be left lying on your bed, a shoe would be on top of the fridge, or a kitchen stool would be in your bedroom, but the door to your flat would be intact.” In a final Kafkaesque touch, when she departed for Germany, the exit stamp in her passport bore the date February 29, 1987—a non-existent day, as 1987 was not a leap year.

  [Reading this I learned that my touchpoint for being forced to eat a lot of eggs is, apparently, Cool Hand Luke (1967). My first response to the detail about onions and coarse salt was to chuckle, and that made me think of some lines from Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” review of that movie:

  The movie is “crowd-pleasing,” says the critic Tim Dirks, and James Berardinelli speaks of such “comic” scenes as the one where Luke eats 50 hard-boiled eggs. I saw the movie at the time and can testify that it is crowd-pleasing, and in my review from 1967, I wrote that Luke was “always smiling, always ready for a little fun. He eats 50 hard-boiled eggs on a bet and collects all the money in the camp. That Luke, he’s a cool hand.” What was I thinking? Today, the egg-eating scene strikes me as all but unwatchable. The physical suffering and danger are sickening.

  I’m with the much older Ebert revisiting one of of his first reviews written 40 years earlier. It’s funny, conceptually; it’s horrific to watch. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• Against the idea that our cultural moment is too backwards-looking

• A review that got me to buy the book about halfway through

• A Poem by Robert Herrick and me complaining about flowers

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

Read more

Links:

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Clare Bucknell reviews a book about pedantry (On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All, by Arnoud S. Q. Visser, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Nov. 1, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Dec. 3, 2025.]:

  The essay is full of subtle connections between the “base” concerns of those who profess learning and the shape that learning has begun to take. “The care and fees of our parents,” Montaigne observes, “aim only at furnishing our heads with knowledge”—maximally, such that it “is passed from hand to hand with only one end in view: to show it off, to put into our accounts to entertain others with it, as though it were merely counters, useful for totting up and producing statements.” Students are taught to quote for quotation’s sake, parading intellectual wares that aren’t theirs: “Do I wish to fortify myself against fear of death? Then I do it at Seneca’s expense. Do I want to console myself or somebody else? Then I borrow from Cicero.” The sting here is in the metaphors. Noblemen, it’s suggested, don’t typically worry over their accounts, tot things up, or borrow from others. The impression is of a vulgar intellectual culture, presided over by vulgar men, in which more is more and you can never have enough knowledge to wave in people’s faces. Aretino’s pedantic tutor, incapable of using one word where many are possible, falls into the same trap: to him, lists of memorized exempla are like “embroidery” or precious jewels, “so many pearls,” “sapphires,” “rubies.”

  [Polonius: “Madam, I swear I use no art at all.”

  Among the behaviors that have been called pedantic at one time or another are “debating aggressively in public, teaching in an obnoxious manner, neglecting one’s wife, dressing badly, quoting poetry at parties.” Having done all of these except neglect my wife (and that omission, no doubt, comes down to not having a wife to neglect), it’s a good thing for me that being the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books came along when it did. Even if Montaigne wouldn’t like all the quotations. —Steve]

• In The Nation, Walker Rutter-Bowman reviews a novel about buying a theater (Seeing Further, by Esther Kinsky, translated from the German by Caroline Schmidt, 2024) [We linked to an earlier review in WRB—Nov. 13, 2024.]:

  Despite the narrator’s efforts, however, a revived community of cinema is never realized. Sixteen years pass between the theater’s closing and the novel’s epilogue, in which she returns to the Alföld. The narrator has seen cinemas die all across Europe, and now she wishes to revisit her twice-dead theater. “I wanted to see the multi-seated temple of moving images in its abandoned state again,” she confesses, “to ask questions from the remove of years, either to myself or to the cinema auditorium, deserted as it was, and sound out the town’s slumped promises once again, to listen out for signs of life, for the silence.” The eulogy for the institution that once attracted and honed the attention of the people gives way to something more complicated. On the one hand, the narrator, like the Romantics, valorizes the ruins, seeing in the institution’s death another kind of art. But on the other, this leads to a sense of self-satisfaction: that she was one of the select few who could value this past. Her complaints about “the illusory convenience of continually available data” and “the feeble opinion that it’s enough to watch digitalized images flicker across any old screen” have a self-righteous, sullen tone.

  [As if the Romantics didn’t also have a sense of self-satisfaction. —Steve]

• In the Journal, Henry Hitchings reviews a book about translating Shakespeare (If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation, by Daniel Hahn, April 21) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 15, 2026.]:

  One tenacious fallacy about Shakespeare is that his speeches are always clotted with gargantuan words; Macbeth’s “multitudinous seas incarnadine” is a classic example. Yet often it is the compactness of Shakespeare’s writing that troubles translators. Romeo’s line, “Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die,” or Lear’s verdict on Cordelia, “I know when one is dead and when one lives; / She’s dead as earth,” compress a huge amount into a string of monosyllables. Such succinctness doesn’t travel easily.

  To demonstrate this, Mr. Hahn acquires copies of “My First Hundred Words” in eight languages. In English, 75 of the 100 are a single syllable. In Italian and Greek, by contrast, 99 contain at least two syllables. For translators of Shakespeare working in those languages, the challenge is immediately apparent.

  [The words after “multitudinous seas incarnadine” are “making the green one red,” as if Shakespeare felt a need to gloss the gargantuan words. —Steve]

• In The New Yorker, reviews Wolfgang Koeppen’s “trilogy of failure” (Pigeons on the Grass, 1951, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, 2020; The Hothouse, 1953, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, 1991, May 5; and Death in Rome, 1954, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, 1992, May 5):

  Siegfried is largely resigned to the departure of the old gods and the innocent past they represent. Still, every so often, Koeppen’s creations wonder whether divinity could be lurking where they least expect it. Siegfried is not religious, but he lights a candle in a church and offers it up to an “unknown saint.” Maybe this figure “is even living in our midst, maybe he’s someone we pass on the street, maybe he’s the newspaper vendor in the passage shouting out the headlines.” On the book’s first page, Koeppen asks, “And what about great Jupiter? Is he here in our midst? Could he be the fellow in the Amex office, or the rep for the German-European Travel Agency?” In one mood, it is a ridiculous conjecture, a mockery. In another, it is a fleeting and fragile but decidedly real possibility.

  For the most part, the trilogy of failure casts history as an inexorable force: “water flowing through the old Roman pipes” and sweeping us along with it, a “stream . . . noisily rushing past,” a guide leading a blind man. And yet the very same characters who are most entangled in history’s meshes sometimes briefly wriggle free. In one moment in Pigeons on the Grass, the sun is setting: “The people were released from their factories and shops, and they weren’t yet caught up in the demands of their ordinary lives and the expectations of family. The world hung in the balance. For a moment, everything seemed possible.” Despite its cynicism, Koeppen’s trilogy is full of such moments, of cracks in the edifice of things, of what you might call grace.

• In The American Scholar, Joseph Horowitz reviews a collection of Michael Steinberg’s music criticism (Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe, 1964–1976, edited by Susan Feder, Jacob Jahiel, and Marc Mandel, April 7):

  Between the lines, Steinberg’s reviews confide increasing dissatisfaction with his job. In “The Power of Critics” (April 21, 1974), he writes to a disgruntled soprano unhappy with a review: “The critic can’t, for the sake of supporting a good cause, pretend to an enthusiasm he doesn’t feel. I wish it were otherwise. … Of course critics hope and like to persuade. We write to persuade, but even more to stimulate, to interest, to point out, to make people think. It’s a lot like teaching.” Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Koussevitzky’s birth (July 21, 1974), he peruses a career that mattered: “Koussevitzky was the first to see that an orchestra was more than a collection of players who gave concerts regularly, that it could be the nucleus of a musical university.” Steinberg took a leave of absence in 1975–76 to write a book about Elliott Carter—an unfinished project. He announced his resignation on September 19, 1976, in a low-key essay including a barbed aside: “By and large, journalistic criticism continues an irritant and a depressant.”

  [Before this Horowitz quotes Steinberg:

  It occurred to me that artists’ agents must be among the few people who care about keeping the review as an institution alive. It helps them sell, or they think it does. Other than that, who needs it? I submit that nobody does, really. . . . We must now question the assumption traditional to American musical journalism, the assumption that every concert—or as many as space in the paper and availability of writers permit—is followed by a review.

  I shall not go to fewer concerts. . . . I do, however, want to find a new texture for these pages. . . . The traditional commitment to the review as the chief journalistic and critical form has . . . locked us into writing about many things that were not worth writing about.

  Steinberg, writing in 1973, predicts much of our recent agita about book reviews with his complaint that the standard 800-word review was dead about music then. But I think it is not the review as such that “locked us into writing about many things that were not worth writing about”—the formulaic 800-word review where you can Mad Libs 750 of the words did that. As Steinberg says, we need a new texture.

  But more about this in Critical notes below; can’t have too much navel-gazing too high up in the newsletter. —Steve]

N.B.:

• People used to get on soapboxes in this country.

• People are once again keeping score at baseball games in this country.

• “What mending a suit taught me about masculinity”

• New issues:

  • Bookforum Spring 2026

  • The New Criterion Volume 44, Number 9 / May 2026

Poem:

“The Mower to the Glow-Worms” by Andrew Marvell

Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer night,
Her matchless songs does meditate;

Ye country comets, that portend
No war nor prince’s funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass’s fall;

Ye glow-worms, whose officious flame
To wand’ring mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
And after foolish fires do stray;

Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
Since Juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displac’d
That I shall never find my home.

[In Julius Caesar Calpurnia says that “When beggars die there are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.” In pastoral, though, even the grasses get comets when they die.

The glow-worms turn out to be the only fixed thing in the poem. Everything else is shadowy, even violent. In this instability the poem is similar to Horace’s Odes 4.12, from which Marvell derives much of his non-glow-worm imagery. The nightingale is there, in a reference to the myth of Philomela and Procne: Ityn flebiliter gemens, / infelix avis (“the unfortunate bird, mournfully weeping ‘Itys.’”) The grasses are there; Horace mentions shepherds singing their songs in tenero gramine, “in soft grasses.” And the darkness and fire are there, combined into the nigrorum . . . ignium (literally “dark fire,” but implying the funeral pyre). —Steve]

Upcoming books:

Out April 30:

University of Chicago Press: Bramble by Susan Stewart

Graywolf Press | May 5

This Poor Book: A Poem
by Fanny Howe

From the publisher: For decades, Fanny Howe has been our great poet of spirit and conscience, dislocation and bewilderment. In This Poor Book, completed just before her death, she has gathered a selection of poems and excerpts from the last thirty years, including new and revised poems, and has arranged them into an astonishing singular poem. Across this brilliant reconfiguration of her work, we follow the poet as seeker, both faithful and foolish, searching for language and existence beyond the machines of economy, judgment, and war. Howe interrogates the contradiction and violence of the twenty-first century, the misbegotten experiences that have given rise to a culture of authority and adulthood rather than one of innocence and childhood.

These spare lyrical shards move with a jagged but persistent direction—leading us between doubt and belief and toward Howe’s enduring vision for a life of humility, justice, and imagination.

Also out Tuesday:

Astra House: Offseason: A Novel by Avigayl Sharp

OR Books: American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda by Ru Marshall

What we’re reading:

Steve read a collection of Martin Amis’ essays (The Rub of Time: Essays and Reportage, 1994–2017, February) and started on his Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002, March). He also read through large parts of St. Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana to find the passage quoted below. [It turns out that ctrl-f-ing it for “words” and “signs” doesn’t narrow it down much. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• on difficult books:

  I guess my point here is that somebody who logs on to say they’re struggling with Toni Morrison is a billion times more valuable, to me, as a reader than somebody who is more sophisticated but cannot do the work of understanding the source of their own pleasure, instead pretending that reading Beloved is just another thing one can do that is no more demanding than any other thing. If you don’t want to be stuck having 101-level conversations about texts with newcomers, that’s your prerogative. (Neither do I.) What I see online, however, are conversations that are not even 101-level; they’re just talking shit in the hallway.

  [As John F. Kennedy said:

  We choose to read Beloved in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.

  I complained last week about the trend of talking about “friction” as good or bad without bothering to think about what any given piece of friction does when encountered. Because slapping labels on things is easy, and thinking is hard, something similar happens with “difficulty.” The people BDM is talking about here have decided that “difficulty” is a bad word and therefore anything they like must not be difficult. Now, people use words in all kinds of ways, but I would prefer not to reduce every adjective to an elevated way of saying “good” or “bad.” This is the end result, though, of your main engagement with art coming from fighting with a person you encountered once or maybe made up in your head, as BDM says:

  If I were to armchair speculate about this kind of person’s psychology—and I am doing that—I’d say that at some formative time they became defensive about their tastes, in particular over being accused of being pretentious and not really enjoying what they said they enjoyed. This defensiveness calcified over time into a feeling that reading modernist literature or watching art films can’t be difficult—rather than what I think is the more productive position of “I enjoy doing difficult things.”

  To quote another president, “if you’re explaining, you’re losing.” If you’re explaining to somebody who called you pretentious on the Internet once and hasn’t thought about you ever since, you’re definitely losing. —Steve]

• on writerly paranoia:

  The lineaments of these psychoses are writerly, or more precisely readerly-writerly. The nature of their psychoses is that they read their environments with extraordinary attention, taking random and non-deictic signifiers as personally meaningful and deictic: a decoding of the various texts that surround; and then all three write their experience into their fiction and non-fiction. Spark was always fascinated by codes and decoding, by secrets and blackmail, ciphers and spies, which occur and reoccur in her novels, and she wrote her life into her fiction repeatedly. Dick wrote “2-3-74” into his VALIS trilogy, where he himself appears under the pseudonym Horselover Fat. Waugh wrote Gillbert Pinfold. Madness as close-reading.

  The point is that these psychotic breakdowns are intensifications of being a writer. I have never had a psychotic or schizoid interlude like these three, but in milder form I am certainly familiar with their shape of them, with the compulsion to “read” the world, and other texts, in immense, personalised and perhaps productive ways.

  • on literacy:

    In fact, the written word is a kind of madness. It tears you out of your actual context and deposits you in a world of bodiless abstractions. Lewis Mumford called it the “general starvation of the mind,” in which actual sensuous knowledge of the world is replaced by “mere literacy, the ability to read signs.” In late medieval Europe, the printing press and the beginnings of mass literacy didn’t produce an age of sober reason, but an enormous explosion in all forms of mysticism and esotericism, astrology, divination, witchcraft, Neoplatonist sects and charismatic religious cults, some of them peaceful, some of them murderous. It’s not hard to see why. These doctrines usually centered around the idea that material facts are just an echo of mental processes; they would have made a lot of sense to people who’d just been traumatically ripped out of physical reality by the strange magic of the written word.

  • St. Augustine, in De doctrina Christiana (translated by James Shaw):

    For among men words have obtained far and away the chief place as a means of indicating the thoughts of the mind. . . . But the countless multitude of the signs through which men express their thoughts consist of words. For I have been able to put into words all those signs, the various classes of which I have briefly touched upon, but I could by no effort express words in terms of those signs.

    But because words pass away as soon as they strike upon the air, and last no longer than their sound, men have by means of letters formed signs of words. Thus the sounds of the voice are made visible to the eye, not of course as sounds, but by means of certain signs.

    [Signs within signs, signs for signs. —Steve]

  • Robert M. Durling, in “Petrarch’s Giovene Donna Sotto un Verde Lauro”:

    The image of Laura in the lover’s fantasy is an idol in a technical sense. It is an idol because he worships it instead of God, and meditates on it instead of on God; it is an idol in the technical psychological sense, and thus fashioned by the lover’s own faculties; metaphorically, it has been sculptured by his own hands; it is an idol because it is made out of wood, metal, and precious stones.

    [It is also an idol made out of words, and fashioned with words, and Petrarch in turning everything into words leaves nothing of himself but what he can convey in words; as the Psalmist says of idols, “they that make them are like unto them.”

    I think of Robert Browning’s bishop ordering his tomb at St. Praxed’s, creating in words both his own death and the monument supposed to endure beyond it. His corrupt idiot sons, as he knows, are going to betray him and skimp out on his monument; every dollar put towards dad’s tomb is a dollar not put towards various delights accessible to debauched princes of the Renaissance Church. All you get in the end is words, and they’d better be good ones (hence the bishop’s repeated mocking of Gandolf and his inferior Latin. He’s so owned.)

    Roberts, incidentally, had a good blog post about that poem a few years back, in which he mentions that

    John Ruskin later commented upon it in Modern Painters IV, praising Browning’s portrait of Renaissance Italy, “its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of The Stones of Venice put into as many lines, Browning’s being the antecedent work.”

    In Modern Painters IV Ruskin doesn’t print the whole thing: “I miss fragments here and there not needed for my purpose in the passage quoted, without putting asterisks, for I weaken the poem enough by the omissions, without spoiling it also by breaks.” That’s the business of literary criticism for you—but not for Ruskin, who later wrote Browning a letter opening with

    After all, you are in my debt for a letter you know, so really I am not quite so bad as I appear to myself thinking just now how I have been treating you. I was so ashamed of the way I had mangled that poem of yours that I dared not look you even by letter in the face for some time afterwards.

    They don’t make guys like that anymore. —Steve]

• [Speaking of Renaissance Italy, and to return to my promised commentary about Michael Steinberg’s lamenting the state of the review: one of the more depressing things I’ve read in the past few years was someone (I want to say ) tweeting that during the Italian Renaissance the population of Florence was about one hundred thousand. The population of the whole of Italy was several million. These numbers are comparable to the current population of South Bend, Indiana and the whole of Indiana, respectively. The United States has many more people than Renaissance Italy; they possess material wealth and technological marvels that Lorenzo the Magnificent would never have dreamed; there has always been enough religious, political, and economic turmoil in this country to inspire new thinking and new art, and yet—how did they do it? What are we not doing?

  These are the questions looming behind every worry about the end of criticism. The answer, we suspect, has something to do with “the audience,” since everything else is the same or points in the favor of the modern-day United States. I don’t mean merely in terms of number, although having more people patronize the arts is better than having fewer. (Subscribe to the WRB!) The real fear, I think, comes in when critics wonder if their work is actually doing anything at all to create, to form, to shape, to educate an audience. (Steinberg is so down on formulaic reviews of uninteresting concerts because he knows they don’t.) The best criticism is always reaching out to the reader, including them in the critic’s ongoing education, and is theoretically accessible to anyone. It wants to reach everyone. But what’s the point of teaching in an empty classroom? —Steve]

If his inmost heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that dream of managing to edit the Washington Review of Books, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities.

Links:

• In Socrates on the Beach, Bennett Sims on person and ending:

  There’s a larger lesson here, I think, about endings: how a story’s most unexpected and necessary developments can be emergent properties of its style; how, whenever you hit a wall (or some wallpaper) in a draft, the path forward may already have been prepared somewhere behind you. We can almost imagine Gilman arriving at “in spite of you and Jane” in this way. We can imagine her, for instance, drafting the line “I’ve got out at last” and getting stuck on it: it’s good, she feels, but merely good, the ending is still missing something. We can imagine her reading over the story from the beginning, pausing at “what is one to do?”, and gradually coming to see it: how the answer to this question—the answer to the ending—is embedded in the form of the question itself, in its shift to 3rd-person. That is what one is to do. And so we can imagine Gilman’s thrill in returning to the final paragraph and adding “in spite of you and Jane.” Now that that line has been written . . . now the story can end.

Reviews:

• Two in our sister publication on the sweet Thames:

  • Ian Penman reviews a book about the Beach Boys (Surf’s Up: Brian WIlson and the Beach Boys, by Peter Doggett, 2025 in the UK)

    The progression from the Beach Boys’ early commodity pop to Pet Sounds (1966) to SMiLE (1967) seems to mirror a broader cultural shift: clean-cut collegiate larks to reefer madness to psychedelic revelation. One of the biggest distributors of LSD in California was a gang of working-class ex-surfers called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, who merged Eastern mysticism with psychonaut politics and heavy-duty illegality. Chasing the white light and the dark sun. Chasing the memory of a high that will never be recaptured. John Milius’s wistful Big Wednesday (1978), set between 1962 and 1974, tracks the difficult transition to adulthood of three young surfers. Offscreen, two of the film’s lead actors—Gary Busey and Jan-Michael Vincent—had their own gnarly difficulties. The dream of those early surfer-boy Beach Boys songs inculcated the promise of smiley teenage omnipotence. But how was that promise to be fulfilled in a culture that allowed too many men to drift through life as if it were indeed an “endless summer,” in which they never had to grow up or make amends or lose their appetite for self-distraction? By 1975 a hollowed-out, disconsolate Wilson had retreated to his bed, where the porous line between dream and reality washed away completely. The safe space of “In My Room” had become a sorry terminus: drawn blinds, junk food and an ogreish need for drugs, heroin included. A beached boy. Willful son to blotted-out sun.

    [Penman:

    He just ups and says out loud whatever’s on his mind or in his heart, without any masks or baffles or qualifications. A complicated tenderness, with no macho bluff. Which is the reason so many men feel close to Brian Wilson in a way they never do to Mick Jagger.

    Well, I feel closer to Jagger than to Wilson (not as if “Managing Editor prefers posturing and perverse intellectual to uncalculated naïf” will come as a surprise to regular readers of this newsletter). I say that to explain the source of my belief that Penman misstates the appeal of Wilson; or, at least, he’s wrong to identify this up and saying it with the lyrics. It’s in the music. Pet Sounds and SMiLE especially are the work of a genius with no real idea what he’s doing—nothing sounded like this before, and very little would ever sound like it again—and, because he doesn’t know what he’s doing and is working with no real model, he has nothing to fall back on besides his own belief that the sounds he’s putting together to convey his emotional state sound good. And he pulls it off. This achievement is far more moving than something like the lyrics of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Plenty of ’60s rock has stupid lyrics, but none of it is as wrong about the world as that song’s attitude of “if I could just get married all my problems would go away.” —Steve]

  • reviews Ben Lerner’s latest (Transcription, April 7) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 1, 2026; we linked to earlier reviews there and in WRB—Apr. 8. 2026.]:

    Transcription is set in 2024, but Joe Biden is never mentioned, though the place where he funded a genocide is, and there’s a lot about Covid. It’s a novel about an older generation that is faltering and soon to be gone, dysfunctional youth and adults in between who are prone to fucking up (though dropping your phone in the sink is hardly a Hunter Biden-level fuck-up). Emmie’s failure to thrive might be an allegory for the novel, not this slender and subtle one, but the novel as a form, crowded out as it is by all those screens and other junk food, the broader culture contemplating offing itself in the name of AI. When Adam in Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) considers that the poetry he reads and wants to write could never effect a political revolution or overthrow the world economic system, it makes him want to swallow his year’s supply of white pills. I found all the stuff about phones and screen time in Transcription tedious and unoriginal, but I see its broader appeal. Novelists enjoy writing about these anxieties and people enjoy reading about them. They are relatable for now; Thomas likens phones to secular details in an icon painting: a newspaper, a pocketwatch, a tallow candle—details that can be burned off without a loss of meaning. That material seems to me the sugar-coating around a more bitter pill: a novel about mortality with strong suggestions of suicidal tendencies, themes that are difficult to address directly, subjects that wither with too much explanation or direct confession.

    [I talked at some length about the function in cultural criticism of people in obviously depraved relationships with their phones in WRB—Dec. 3, 2025; most of what I said there applies to novels as well. The self-abasement that is also self-exultation, the condemnations of self that are secretly condemnations of others, the elaborate ruses necessary to talk frankly about wanting to die—all this reminds me of The Fall by Camus:

    Covered with ashes, tearing my hair, my face scored by clawing but with piercing eyes, I stand before all humanity recapitulating my shames without losing sight of the effect I am producing, and saying: “I was the lowest of the low.” Then imperceptibly I pass from the “I” to the “we.” When I get to “This is what we are,” the trick has been played and I can tell them off. I am like them, to be sure; we are in the soup together. However, I have a superiority in that I know it and this gives me the right to speak. You see the advantage, I am sure. The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you. Even better, I provoke you into judging yourself, and this relieves me of that much of the burden. Ah, mon cher, we are odd, wretched creatures, and if we merely look back over our lives, there’s no lack of occasions to amaze and horrify ourselves.

    —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• Why baseball fans are like that

• A Poem by John Donne, and whether Dr. Johnson was thinking of it when critiquing Lycidas

• New frontiers in Petrarchan self-obsession

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

Read more

Links:

• In Liberties, David A. Bell on the book review:

  Although the general-interest book review had already assumed its mature modern form during the Enlightenment, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought major changes, notably thanks to the explosive expansion of book publishing itself. In 1749, the newly founded Monthly Review claimed it would report on all new books and pamphlets published in Great Britain, but already this goal was impossible to meet. By 1800, the expansion was forcing reviewers to specialize, which reduced the marvelously cosmopolitan range of the early review publications. (By 1800, no one in Europe other than a professional cleric was likely to come across reviews of a lexicon of the Hebrew psalms published in South Carolina.) In 1890, the British editor W. T. Stead could complain that there were not only too many books to read, but too many book reviews as well. He proposed a solution in the form of a publication called the Review of Reviews that provided capsule summaries of reviews published elsewhere. Meanwhile, the pressure on reviewers to keep up with the volume of new books grew so great that it became conventional wisdom among disgruntled writers that, as Anthony Trollope put it, “books are criticized without being read.” In New Grub Street, one of George Gissing’s characters declared that “I got up at 7.30, and while I breakfasted I read through a volume I had to review. By 10.30 the review was written—three-quarters of a column of the Evening Budget.”

  [Someone please notify W. T. Stead of a certain email newsletter that would solve his problem. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews Andrew Graham-Dixon’s biography of Vermeer (Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, April 7):

  For the same details, walk into a nearby room and consult View of Delft, which was painted a few years earlier. The main difference is that Ruisdael cranes upward, to behold a castle on a hill, whereas Vermeer levels his gaze across open water. For all the splendor of Ruisdael’s picture, it is the second that partakes—in ways that countless gallerygoers have keenly felt but struggled to articulate—of the miraculous. My favorite sentence in Graham-Dixon’s book has him probing the nitty-gritty of Vermeer’s roofs: “It is possible that he ground actual red terracotta tiles in with his pigments and oil to get the required result.” So compelling are these critical closeups that I found myself leaning in to investigate the surface of a yellow roof on the right, and found it stippled and dotted, as if it bore a message in Braille. I was warned away by a guard, despite the fact that my shirt was not blazoned with “Just Stop Oil.” Breaking news: oils can just stop you in your tracks.

• In The Guardian, Kathryn Hughes reviews Caroline Bicks’ book about exploring Stephen King’s archive (Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King, April 21) [An Upcoming book today.]:

  Bicks quickly spots what she is after in the editorial interventions on Pet Sematary, King’s novel of 1983 which many fans think is the scariest, certainly the bleakest, he ever wrote. There’s a moment early in the book where a tangle of fallen tree branches turns into a pile of moving bones. In an early draft, King writes “fingerbones clittered”, which the copy-editor circles and asks “Word OK?” King in turn replies “Word OK. A clitter is a very soft, ghostly clatter.” And there you have it. Clitter—softly insinuating—is so much scarier than a crash-bang clatter.

  In the same manuscript, Bicks also finds the novelist resisting the copy editor’s attempts to replace the word “rattly” which King has used to describe the labored breathing of the novel’s dying two-year-old protagonist, Gage Creed. The copy editor suggests “congested” would be better. But King knows that rattly contains within itself a whole ghastly set of subliminal associations including scavenging vermin and unquiet ghosts with their infernal chains. Congested is something a coroner would write.

  [Fallen tree branches turning into moving bones is a rather chthonic version of Apollo and Daphne.

  The events depicted in Pet Sematary are one of the better outcomes for “guy from Chicago moves to the rural Maine of the 1980s.” Most of the others involve both the wendigo and Allen’s Coffee Brandy. (The Managing Editor loves Allen’s and keeps it in his liquor cabinet.)

  And here is what Dickens writes in A Christmas Carol when the ghost of Marley does something unquiet with his infernal chains:

  At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon.

  “Shook”? —Steve]

N.B.:

• “Gentleman’s Relish is toast after its maker axes the pungent anchovy spread” [The Gentleman’s Ketchup is cocktail sauce with a lot of horseradish in it. Any good mustard mustard is the Gentleman’s Mustard. The gentleman does not eat ranch. —Steve]

• “I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America” [I almost never eat the bread but I suppose other people must. —Steve]

• “I know how things go in Stockholm. They will crown me not because I am a great poet but because I am the least bad Canadian poet.”

• “High-speed accidents, crooked lawyers, and poor people desperate for cash—it was the kind of scheme that could have been cooked up only in the Big Easy.”

• Oscar Wilde’s hair.

• New issues:

  • Liberties Volume 6—Number 3 | Spring 2026 [As linked to above.]

  • Literary Review of Canada May 2026 [The source of the line above about “the least bad Canadian poet.” Somehow comforting to know that the spirit that brought us “You said they were the best engineers in the world!” “No, I said they were the best engineers in Canada.” in Blackberry (2023) and “You can’t fix all of the world’s problems. You can’t even fix all of Canada’s problems.” in Rumours (2024) goes back a long way in Canadian art. —Steve]

Poem:

“The Definition of Gardening” by James Tate

Jim just loves to garden, yes he does.
He likes nothing better than to put on
his little overalls and his straw hat.
He says, “Let’s go get those tools, Jim.”
But then doubt begins to set in.
He says, “What is a garden, anyway?”
And thoughts about a “modernistic” garden
begin to trouble him, eat away at his resolve.
He stands in the driveway a long time.
“Horticulture is a groping in the dark
into the obscure and unfamiliar,
kneeling before a disinterested secret,
slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle,
birdbrained, babbling gibberish, dig and
destroy, pull out and apply salt,
hoe and spray, before it spreads, burn roots,
where not desired, with gloved hands, poisonous,
the self-sacrifice of it, the self-love,
into the interior, thunderclap, excruciating,
through the nose, the earsplitting necrology
of it, the withering, shriveling,
the handy hose holder and Persian insect powder
and smut fungi, the enemies of the iris,
wireworms are worse than their parents,
there is no way out, flowers as big as heads,
pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently
at me, the me who so loves to garden
because it prevents the heaving of the ground
and the untimely death of porch furniture,
and dark, murky days in a large city
and the dream home under a permanent storm
is also a factor to keep in mind.”

[Seasonal and largely a soliloquy, Tate’s poem amused me. It also made me think of my mom, who in her late 50s cleared more than half an acre of greenbrier and poison ivy by hand. In their absence, we now see a beautiful hillside, unearthed rhubarb plants and cherry trees, crawling moss. It was a labor of love and also a labor of hate. Rather than salt and fire, our recipe for destruction was vinegar spitz (for the leaves) and powdered limestone (at the roots).

The line, “flowers as big as heads, / pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently / at me” popped into my head this morning, as I was pressing the blooms I had stolen from a neighbor’s yard. The petals were a vibrant, spongey pink, the blossoms large enough to engulf my open palm, but pock-marked by water burn or blight. A few more of my favorite phrases in Tate’s poem include: “kneeling before a disinterested secret, / slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle” and “the earsplitting necrology / of it, the withering, shriveling” and “smut fungi” and finally, “the me who so loves to garden / because it prevents the heaving of the ground / and the untimely death of porch furniture.” —K. T.]

Upcoming books:

Out April 16:

Bloomsbury Academic: I Think of You Constantly with Love: The Letters of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ben Richards edited by Gabriel Citron and Alfred Schmidt

Oxford University Press: The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom by Martha C. Nussbaum

Knopf | April 21

If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation
by Daniel Hahn

From the publisher: Shakespeare may have breathed the air of sixteenth-century England, but today, all the world is his stage. Every year, millions of people, from Bogotá to Borneo, read Hamlet for the first time, thanks to the tireless work of translators. Drawing on the work of the very best of them, Hahn dives into the infinitesimally complicated ways the great playwright is reinvented and yet sounds, somehow, like himself—in Chinese, Dutch, Turkish, and more than a hundred other languages.

From word order, puns, and punctuation to metaphor, accent, and song, Shakespeare’s variety of genius presents an endless set of conundrums, among them: How does Romeo and Juliet’s love story unfold if their dialogue cannot form a sonnet (nor rhyme), as it does in the original? How can you form wordplay around the letter “I” and its sound if its meanings are not shared in other languages? These are just two out of millions of issues facing translators tasked with bringing Shakespeare to non-English languages, non-Shakespearean eras and cultures. To attempt such a feat, they must cut and add beats, maintain rhymes, adapt names and locations, and preserve meaning while not unilaterally prioritizing it, all while knowing that for each word, line, or scene they construct, another option is yet to be discovered.

Traveling the world, Hahn speaks to writers and actors engaging with Shakespeare’s work, sharing stories of his own. Hahn, whose great-grandfather produced one of Brazil’s earliest Shakespeare translations, emerges as a wise and enthusiastic guide, teacher, and sleuth. If This Be Magic does not require knowledge of any other language or more than a passing acquaintance with the Bard’s canon, but it draws out fascinating insights on both. As nerdy as they come (there is a chapter on commas), supremely readable, and funny throughout, this is a book for everyone and a fitting tribute to the Globe’s Bard.

Also out Tuesday:

Hogarth: Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King by Caroline Bicks

Knopf: Mon Cher Amour: The Love Letters of Albert Camus and Maria Casares, 1944–1959 translated from the French by Sandra Smith and Cory Stockwell

Paul Dry Books: Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood by Alexander Voloshin, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk

What we’re reading:

Steve read more of A. M. Juster’s new translation of the Canzoniere (April 7). [I was talking to a friend who made the point that the best way for someone who doesn’t know Italian to get the idea of Petrarch is to read the adaptations of his poems made by Wyatt, Sidney, and others. For one poem, I agree, but an essential piece of the Canzoniere is that there are 366 of these things, and the obsession and the endless revisiting of the same ideas and images only comes through if you can read a bunch of them in a row. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• Moul and Jeremy Wikeley () discuss a recent short collection of early modern poetry she edited (Poems Beautiful and Useful, March). Moul:

  I’m not at all against complexity or difficulty in poetry and wouldn’t want to give that impression. If anything I am rather obsessed by it—I come back and back in my own work to Horace, to Pindar, to Sanskrit poetry and grammar—these are all sort of paradigmatic examples of literary difficulty I suppose. I work a lot on very obscure early modern Latin verse and I am fascinated, both as a critic and as a poet myself, by translating poetry, which is immensely difficult—impossible, really. But I suppose like you I don’t see a contradiction. Poetry should be beautiful because that is, as it were, its proper virtue, and it should also have something to say. Pindar is very difficult, yes, because the literary conventions in which he was working were highly complex and they are very distant from ours, but he is also supremely beautiful and there is no doubt that he has something to say. Very “simple” poems can also be very beautiful. And of course many apparently “simple” poems—poems in what we might call the plain style—are in fact underpinned by very subtle and complex effects.

  [I had some notes on Poems Beautiful and Useful in WRB—Mar. 25, 2026. —Steve]

  • Hilaire Belloc:

    The whole point of Homer is knocking one down with a verb and a noun and a conventional adjective. How it is done nobody knows. It is done in the New Testament: Confidite, ego vici mundum. It is done in the song of Roland: “To God on His Holy Hill in the City of Paradise.” It is done in the Border Ballads over and over again. It is done in the twelfth century, Angevin French singing the burial of Iseult: “She by him and he by her.” How it is done nobody knows. If anyone could know, anyone could be a poet.

    [Before this Belloc argues that Ὣς οἱ μὲν μάρναντο δέμας πυρὸς αἰθομένοιο (Chapman: “They fought still like the rage of fire.”) has a power that Pope’s “Fierce as conflicting fires the combat burns, / And now it rises, now it sinks by turns” lacks. The explanation of the image is good, but why should the image need explanation?

    When I was younger I read Yeats’ early work and Housman and was stunned, but part of me wondered—look how simple this all is! Look how easy it seems! You should try to duplicate it! How hard can it be? And then I proceeded to write several poems that were significantly worse than the early Yeats and A Shropshire Lad. Part of difficulty’s appeal for the reader is that it lets us see the writer sweat; it says that, even if the work demands a lot of us, it also demanded a lot of the author. Simple poetry, though, might as well be magic. It’s not, of course. Housman says of the last poem in A Shropshire Lad that

    Two of the stanzas, I do not say which, came into my head, just as they are printed, while I was crossing the comer of Hampstead Heath between the Spaniard’s Inn and the footpath to Temple Fortune. A third stanza came with a little coaxing after tea. One more was needed, but it did not come: I had to turn to and compose it myself, and that was a laborious business. I wrote it thirteen times, and it was more than a twelvemonth before I got it right.

    But it feels as though the whole thing came into his head just as it was printed. —Steve]

• on Helen DeWitt:

  DFW isn’t hard. He wrote long sentences and long paragraphs with frequent digressions and qualifications. Since this resembles the way many people think, including me, it makes his writing intuitively easy to fall into for many of us; we pick him up and can’t put him down. Even for people who don’t fit that description, I still think a page of DFW is easier to read, if you’ve grown up assailed by television and smartphones, than a page of, say, Jack London. DFW just feels like somebody is finally talking to you rather than using words to avoid talking to you. The thing that makes him “difficult” is precisely what makes him easy, precisely what made him the author I’d read when I got home from my endless shifts at Burger King in the summer of ‘98 and couldn’t sleep because I was sad about a girl, the author I’d read instead of doing my homework that fall. And yet up till DeWitt wrote this I’d probably, if writing about DFW, just go along with the conventional habit of describing him as “difficult.” Everybody says it; must be true. I’m convinced that a lot of ideas about artistic “difficulty” or “inaccessibility” work in this exact way, as sheer mindless habit. DeWitt concludes her post thus: “But he seems to have thought that in this world, here, now, many people had been cheated by the educational system into thinking they didn’t like literature; that many people could be brought to surpass what they thought they could do, if someone was willing to take the trouble. We were lucky to have had him.” She’s dead right. If you treat the reader like they’re as smart as you are—if you treat the reader like an equal—you get labeled an elitist, though what you’re actually being is a democrat.

  [This is the other side of “difficulty,” even for writers less easy to read than DFW (about whom I will remain silent); it is always an invitation. Nobody would write like this—nobody would write anything—if they didn’t think somebody else would read it. Many of the most difficult writers, even some with a misanthropic streak, are jumping out of their skin on every page to tell the world about all the wonderful art they could embrace if they only tried, if they only made an effort, if they only gave it a chance. (This trait is central to the Managing Editor’s affection for Ezra Pound and William Gaddis.) Christman wrote movingly about this a few years ago in a discussion of Gaddis’ J R (1975):

  Late in J R, there’s an incredibly sad sequence where the title character—an arbitrage genius and Wall Street titan nobody knows is a sixth grader—is trying, as usual, to gain the attention and approval of Bast, the composer and part-time teacher whom he uses as a figurehead (and wants as a father-figure). Bast is, as always, angry at JR for meddling in things he doesn’t understand and for ruining everything with his money. He plays JR a bit of Bach, which JR doesn’t understand, whereupon Bast upbraids the poor kid—who, again, is in sixth grade, and has no cultural or spiritual preparation whatsoever that might help him “get” Bach—for most of a page. There are two ways to read this passage. One is the way that John Gardner (a sometimes difficult novelist himself, but one with a populist streak) reads it, in his damning review of J R: As Gaddis being too preoccupied with his own favorite subject, the vulgarity of America, to notice that Bast is being an asshole to a poor dumb kid who just wants a dad. The other is the way friend of the substack Roz Milner read it, when we talked about it online—as a tragic moment, one that dramatizes another Gaddis preoccupation, the inability of humans to hear each other. On this reading, Gaddis knows that Bast is being an asshole, and he wants us to half-sympathize with the content of what Bast is saying while also seeing Bast’s limitations.

  Bast finishes this rant by saying that “if there’s any way to ruin something, to degrade it to cheapen it” JR will find it, but a few pages later the conversation ends with JR musing about some music Bast has been working on (to serve as background for a film promoting importing African animals to the Everglades so they can be hunted, and surely about as good as that makes it sound, but JR doesn’t know that): “I mean I bet it’s as good as this thing [the Bach] you just made me . . . hey? even if I don’t hear exactly what I’m suppose to . . . ?” Even JR, with his total lack of spiritual and cultural preparation and having just been excoriated by the person who recommended the Bach to him, is, despite it all, willing to try again.

  I confess to Almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have filled the WRB with unfiltered crankery, reactionary posturing, Spenglerian gloom, Miniver Cheevying, despair over our post-literate present, and so on. (And you only see what I decide is fit for the page; imagine what it’s like in my head.) But I think—at least, I tell myself—that under all that rage and fury and despair is hope. It’s not like I do this for the money (please subscribe!) or the power or the women, after all. But maybe someone will read the WRB and, despite a general lack of inclination to, will give some difficult piece of art a shot. Maybe someone will read the WRB and find something new to dig around in. JR, who is basically the worst person in the world (and let’s not blame the kid for that; it’s not his fault he’s a middle-school-aged boy, and it’s not his fault he has been failed in innumerable ways by his society and by almost everyone in his life) could manage that. I believe that everyone out there, aided by not being a character in a Gaddis novel, can too. This is how I was educated (I wrote about that a couple months ago), and this is all I can do. We’re all working together, and anyone is welcome to join. If I may steal the idea of quoting this passage from William Blake: “would God that all the LORD’s people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit upon them!”

But how can you really care if anybody gets the Washington Review of Books, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along?

Links:

• In The Paris Review, Krithika Varagur on Aramco World, “the free magazine published by the U.S. subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company”:

  But Aramco World’s genius lies in its more gently gonzo offerings, which tend to be unconcerned with either Saudi Arabia or the United States. My favorite article recounts an epic journey to Uzbekistan to ascertain which of the region’s famous varieties of melon may have been the ones mentioned by the fourteenth-century Tangerine explorer Ibn Battuta. Aramco World has a breathtakingly catholic interpretation of what kinds of people, places, and things fall under its jurisdiction. “What would you have eaten in ninth-century Baghdad?” is the premise of one quite typical 2006 article, which considers the oldest surviving Arabic cookbook, Kitab al-Tabikh. (Though eggplant is now crowned as sayyid al-khudaar, the lord of vegetables, it was once a suspicious novelty from India, “considered impossibly bitter,” blamed by doctors for “everything from freckles and a hoarse throat to cancer and madness”; nevertheless, writes Charles Perry, the Kitab contains seven eggplant recipes, “probably because a taste for eggplant first arose among the aristocracy.”) A 2003 piece tracks an eighteenth-century silver coin called the Maria Theresa thaler from the Habsburg Empire into Africa and Arabia, where it survived in places like Oman as late as 1970. A 2010 feature narrates the experiences of Tichit women in Mauritania, who lead caravans while managing menstruation and pregnancy in the desert.

  [If the CIA can have magazines Saudi Aramco can too. (It’s supposed to be called the Riyadh Review of Books, though.) (I’ll change the name of the WRB for the right price.) (Or, perhaps, for the opportunity to go on an epic journey to Uzbekistan in search of melons.) (One thing a lot of the best magazine journalism has in common is that somebody spent way more time and effort hunting something down than would seem reasonable.) (In this it resembles some of the best literary criticism, which documents somebody spending way more time and effort hunting something down in the library than would seem reasonable.) (Somebody send Eliot Weinberger on an epic journey to Uzbekistan in search of melons.)

  And it had not occurred to me that “Tangerine” is the demonym for residents of Tangiers. —Steve]

• In The Lamp, Stanley Fish on insurance and noir:

  Insurance thus conceived or glorified takes on another aspect of religion. It not only establishes regularities; it promises to alter them for the better and bring us closer to the promised land. “Risk makers,” [Dan] Bouk explains, “began pitching their techniques as means for altering fates and not just predicting them.” Soon, statistical writers persuaded their readers that they could construct systems that, as [Theodore M.] Porter writes, “could be presumed to generate large-scale order and regularity that would be virtually unaffected by the caprice that seemed to prevail in the actions of individuals.” An “orderly reign of facts” could replace the “confusion of politics.” Indeed, the whole human race could be improved with the help of the knowledge provided by statistical calculations. Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, called for “the establishment of a sort of scientific priesthood,” whose “high duties would have reference to the health and well-being of the nation in its broadest sense.” In Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), the most famous example of an insurance-themed noir film, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), a claims manager at Pacific All-Risk Insurance, elevates the wielder of statistical knowledge to a position of wisdom and near omniscience. “A claims man is a doctor and a bloodhound and a cop and a judge and a jury and a father confessor all in one,” he says. On this view, the skilled statistician can do everyone’s job, including the job of the priest, and do it better.

  [Not just insurance but the statistics that make it possible—the field as we think of it begins with early modern mathematicians thinking about games of chance. In the background of both insurance and statistics is Pascal’s wager, which—if taken at face value—turns life into a game of chance, one in which the most important aspect of the game is specified in the rules and so can be quantified. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In the Times, Parul Sehgal reviews Ben Lerner’s new novel (Transcription, April 7) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 1, 2026; we linked to an earlier review there as well.]:

  It’s a misapprehension that literature is inherently threatened by new technologies; novels and poems, themselves kinds of technology, have always been curious about other forms as they appear. The Count of Monte Cristo, for example, showcases the telegraph in enraptured detail (and makes it a key part of the plot); the stories of Tagore explore a world remade by the arrival of the railways. And is there a more charming example of this genre than the essay “Personism,” in which Frank O’Hara describes interrupting himself while writing a love poem, realizing that he can just ring up the object of his desire instead?

  Lerner has always been attentive to how technology mediates communication; Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) contains one of the first convincing renditions of characters chatting online, complete with the lags and awkwardness. I suspect what is so interesting to Lerner about new technologies are the opportunities for misunderstanding that they introduce. Transcription is a chronicle of that confusion.

  • Frank O’Hara in “Personism”:

    But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.

    [Frank, who told you that was the point of a love poem? (Frank, did you make it to the end of any sonnet cycles?) Petrarch tells us otherwise in Rime sparse 60:

    What can a lover sigh if pages

    from my old rhymes provided him

    with some fresh hope she will deny?

    Don’t let a poet touch a limb,

    nor Jove indulge, and let the rages

    of the sun turn its green leaves dry.

    (A. M. Juster’s new translation; the plant under discussion is the laurel tree.) The end of John Berryman’s cycle knows it too:

    The weather’s changing. This morning was cold,

    as I made for the grove, without expectation,

    some hundred Sonnets in my pocket, old,

    to read her if she came. Presently the sun

    yellowed the pines & my lady came not

    in blue jeans & a sweater. I sat down & wrote.

    When you can’t call up the object of your desire on the phone, you call her up in your memory and your poetry. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• I propose a new model for the 800-word book review

• Jim Morrison is a good lyricist, sometimes

• K. T. on a Poem by Isabelle Baafi and fairy tales

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

Read more

Links:

Reviews:

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Boyd Tonkin reviews the Rijksmuseum’s exhibition of art inspired by the works of Ovid:

  After the Renaissance, the Metamorphoses became much more than a popular encyclopedia of the Greco-Roman legends later labelled as “mythology.” The epic came to define, almost to monopolize, the storytelling of antiquity, so that Ovid’s iteration of these motifs served as the template for their transmission. This familiarity, and ubiquity, can dull their force and muffle their shock. The most irresistible pieces on display in Amsterdam restore the shattering violence or strangeness of the moment, and process, of change. Titian’s Danäe, suffused with violating gold; Michelangelo’s Leda, the original lost but present here in a magnificent engraving, as the divine fowl entangles its victim in an invasive sensuous stranglehold; Caravaggio’s Narcissus, not idly inspecting his pretty face in the pool but actively, desperately enamored of the self as other: such works channel the uncanny terror of becoming after a divine desire attacks.

  [The familiarity and the ubiquity contribute to this dullness, but the treatments some of the myths get do as well. Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne is the world’s most skilled technical exercise.

  “Suffused with violating gold”! Ovid already links Danäe to Midas when he tells that story later in the Metamorphoses: “The water where he washt his hands did from his hands so ronne, / As Danae might have beene therwith beguyld” (as Arthur Golding has it). It also reminds me of Cassius Dio passing on the story that, after defeating Crassus at the battle of Carrhae, the Parthians poured molten gold down his throat in mockery, which is taking “suffused” and “violating” very literally.

  This same sense of excess characterizes Golding’s sets of oppositions to describe Narcissus. It reads as almost proto-metaphysical:

  All these he woondreth to beholde, for which (as I doe gather)

  Himselfe was to be woondred at, or to be pitied rather.

  He is enamored of himselfe for want of taking heede,

  And where he lykes another thing, he lykes himselfe in deede.

  He is the partie whome he wooes, and suter that doth wooe,

  He is the flame that settes on fire, and thing that burneth tooe.

  O Lord how often did he kisse that false deceitfull thing?

  How often did he thrust his armes midway into the spring

  To have embraste the necke he saw and could not catch himselfe?

  (Perhaps this would have been unremarkable, stylistically, in 1620, but not in 1567. “He is the flame that settes on fire, and thing that burneth tooe” sounds a lot like Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe,” another proto-metaphysical poem.) The circularity of the descriptions, seeming to move away from Narcissus repeatedly only to always return to him, parallel his unquenchable desire for himself.

  And Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” makes, beyond its smaller synecdoches, one change serve as synecdoche for all change, moving from sex to history to death:

  A shudder in the loins engenders there

  The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

  And Agamemnon dead.

  “Invasive sensuous stranglehold” is a great phrase too. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, Patricia Lockwood reviews a reissue of Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927, 2025) and a book about Willa Cather’s trips to the American Southwest that inspired the novel (The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop, by Garrett Peck, March):

  Thea is unsexed by her vocation, her ambition, her choice of lover—and also by her genius, a quality we recognize but are unable to quantify. When we are inside her consciousness, this quality is less apparent than when she is seen through the eyes of others: Ray, the railway brakeman who loves her; Doctor Archie, who first notices her talent during a house call; and others who view her almost as a natural phenomenon. The model for Thea was the opera singer Olive Fremstad, one of three performers Cather profiled for McClure’s in 1913. She was Swedish and had marvelously substantial arms. “Cather went to interview her in her New York apartment,” Doris Grumbach writes in her introduction to The Song of the Lark. “She saw her transformed, when the opera house needed her to fill in at the last moment, from a weary, wan woman to a glittering, radiant star.” A version of this appears towards the end of the book when Thea, who has achieved her success and whose exhaustion is now total, is called in to play Sieglinde in Die Walküre. At once, weariness transforms into fire.

  “The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification,” Cather wrote in her essay “The Novel Démeublé” from 1922. “The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.” Learn to sing, then learn to unsing. Learn how to touch and pass on.

  [Some of this is also true of Sieglinde. —Steve]

• In The New Statesman, Rowan Williams reviews some recent novels involving clergy (My Lover, the Rabbi, by Wayne Koestenbaum, March; A Private Man, by Stephanie Sy-Quia, April 14; and Communion, by Jon Doyle, April 2):

  It means the lines between failure, suicidal recklessness and exemplary fidelity are pretty shaky. Doyle offers a story with something of the same unsettling challenge as the Passion narrative itself, leaving us to think through what kinds of loyalty matter most, where heroism ends and folly begins. But ultimately, what all these fictions—and so many other novelistic explorations of clerical identity—place on the agenda is this: what if there were a place to stand beyond the realm of majority opinion, institutional compliance, the conventions that make someone popular? And what if that place were not a place of privileged freedom to ignore and demean the reality of others in the name of unchallengeable power, sanctioned by the divine, but a place of both absurdity and extreme jeopardy? What if this were the place whose existence was testified to by the life of the priest, pastor, rabbi, whatever—even when these people so regularly themselves failed to occupy that place convincingly? Is this what makes fiction about the clergy—behaving or misbehaving—still a compelling way of asking where freedom really lies and how it works in a culture ever more in love with simple, authoritarian answers?

  [“Majority opinion, institutional compliance, the conventions that make someone popular”—in other words, the bourgeois attitudes about money and marriage that have been central to the novel as an art form. The clergy are in this world but their presence points to methods of evaluating human life beyond it. All those discussions of what makes a good clergyman in Mansfield Park are not intended to resolve anything about how a clergyman should be; they instead allow the Crawfords to reveal the limitations of their thinking. To them, the whole thing is folly. And, as Paul says, “the wisdom of the world is foolishness with God.” —Steve]

• In The Atlantic, reviews a reissued novel by Charlotte Wood (The Natural Way of Things, 2015, March):

  This limits Natural Way as a novel; worse, it dramatically dulls the impact of Wood’s critique. She wants us to see how a society that treats women as naturally inferior traps, exploits, and denigrates them. Unfortunately, her plot confines these characters to another narrow set of roles, and most of them are portrayed as incapable of leaving their cage. The novel ends with the group of women gleefully giving up their own lives in exchange for small bags of luxury cosmetics—a metaphor so reductive and condescending that it scans as misogynistic. How else to read this moment but as the culmination of that “natural way of things,” which pins the blame on contemporary, commercialized womanhood? They might as well be doing it to themselves.

  [Roger Ebert’s review of A Clockwork Orange (1971):

  Alex has been made into a sadistic rapist not by society, not by his parents, not by the police state, not by centralization, and not by creeping fascism—but by the producer, director, and writer of this film, Stanley Kubrick.

  Did the characters do that, or did the artist make them? —Steve]

• In The New Republic, Hannah Rosefield reviews Ben Lerner’s new novel (Transcription, April 7) [An Upcoming book today.]:

  The ability to dissolve boundaries in this way, to make the individual social, is what originally drew the narrator to Thomas. During his breakdown in college, he started hearing voices. Thomas’ insistence that “we all hear phantom voices [ . . . ] hallucination, too, is social” was one of the many things he said and did, the narrator tells us, that “might have saved me.” Yes, there are numerous moments in their unrecorded interview that are unpleasantly destabilizing—but aren’t those just the disorientations of Thomas’s nonagenarian memory loss? Or perhaps the narrator’s own twitchiness about being separated from his phone?

  Max’s depiction of Thomas suggests otherwise. “There was no point, none, in telling him about [Emmie’s] struggles,” he says to the narrator. “Just as there was no point, there had never been any point, in telling him about my own personal problems.” Some time ago, he recalls, his partner had a biopsy to test for cancer; when Max confided his fears, Thomas’ response—at least, in Max’s memory—was “Ah, bios, opsis—what a beautiful combination. Life, sight. Did you know that it is al-Zahrawi in the eleventh century who first uses a needle to puncture and examine the material. He also, they say, invented lipstick, but this is disputed.” As a parody of Lerner’s own tendencies, it’s a darkly funny moment—but the concern it betrays is real. Max’s description of his father calls attention to how often Thomas’ words to the narrator in the book’s first section were dismissive or coercive, rerouting their conversation to Thomas’ own preoccupations. The details of the narrator’s dream are unimportant, Thomas insists; the narrator’s desire to establish the facts of Thomas’ upbringing is “silly.”

  [I sort of resent the implication that my preferred approach to WRB editorial notes is basically that of an elderly man free-associating and rambling about whatever is in his mind, but I guess it’s not wrong. —Steve]

• reviews Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz, “an eight-hour long play that represents but—importantly—does not adapt The Great Gatsby”:

  Still, The Great Gatsby the novel is not as funny as Gatz the show. When Shepherd kindly made a guest appearance in my wife’s intro-acting class this week, he apparently gave a bit of an explanation as to why. Having read the novel many hundreds of times now, and memorized every word, he knows The Great Gatsby probably better than anyone else now living, and he doesn’t like any of the movie versions. His biggest complaint about them is that the movies always try to portray the glitz of Gatsby’s parties and the glamor of Daisy Buchanan’s social world, when the point of the novel is that these things are a) completely illusory and b) exist only via the power of suggestion, which is the very power that the novel exercises over us through the miracle not of Daisy’s “low, thrilling voice,” which we can’t hear, nor Gatsby’s all-forgiving smile, which we can’t see, but through Nick’s description of these things. Everything we know we know through Nick. So a version of the text that is true to Fitzgerald’s vision will keep us honed in on that. The actors, who are all clearly capable of doing the story in a straightforwardly tragic register and making us all weep profusely, instead go for a slightly cartoonish, in places almost slapstick representation of the scenes that Nick describes, and they switch back and forth between regarding Nick as a narrator-director of the action and as a fellow-character. Their eyes communicate over third and fourth walls, and the number of walls changes from second to second.

  [The problem with The Great Gatsby is that everybody read it for the first time in high school, which makes it difficult to distinguish the novel as it actually is from the novel as everyone half-remembers it from a while back. (Personally, I refuse to re-read it; when I read it in high school I found it perfect, and I’m sure I wouldn’t if I returned to it. I won’t be borne back ceaselessly into the past! I’ll just refuse to look at it! —Steve]

• In the Journal, Belinda Lanks reviews a book about defining colors in the dictionary (True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color—from Azure to Zinc Pink, by Kory Stamper, March):

  Ms. Stamper, a former Merriam-Webster lexicographer, traces the story back to I. H. Godlove, a young chemist the publisher hired in 1931 to help bring scientific rigor to the slippery business of defining colors. His entries read like a strange hybrid of laboratory report and poetic comparison. One entry describes begonia as “a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral . . . and bluer and stronger than sweet william—called also gaiety.”

  By the early twentieth century, color had become a scientific and industrial problem as much as an aesthetic one. Synthetic dyes—dominated by German companies before World War I—had transformed color into a global commodity, while wartime shortages exposed how little standardization existed in describing it. One manufacturer’s idea of khaki or olive drab, for example, might not match another’s—a serious problem when thousands of yards of uniform fabric had to be dyed the same shade.

  [Merriam-Webster is all very fine, but I wanted to see how a real pro does it and so looked up colors in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary. Red: “Of the colour of blood, of one of the primitive colours, which is subdivided into many; as scarlet, vermilion, crimson.” Yellow: “Being of a bright glaring colour, as gold.” Green: “Having a colour formed commonly by compounding blue and yellow; of the colour of the leaves of trees or herbs. The green colour is said to be most favourable to the sight.” Brown: “The name of a colour, compounded of black and any other colour.” Poor blue doesn’t get a description: “one of the seven original colours.” And purple gets two definitions: “Red tinctured with blue. It was among the ancients considered as the noblest, and as the regal colour; whether their purple was the same with ours, is not fully known” and “In poetry, red.” (I’m not sure what Dr. Johnson was thinking about when he questioned whether the purple of classical antiquity was the same as ours; in his defense, it’s not like he had access to photographs of Byzantine mosaics. “Wine-dark sea,” maybe. No doubt he would be pleased to know that we have reconstructed Tyrian purple, and it is, in fact, purple.) —Steve]

N.B.:

• “Cucumber: The Plant That Moves More than You Think” [“My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires and more slow.” —Steve]

• 12 tons of Kit Kats were stolen in Italy [“The candy bars were molded after race cars, still featuring KitKat’s iconic chocolate-covered wafers,” the Guardian reports. Is it really a Kit Kat (I’m not indulging this stylization) if it doesn’t have the long skinny pieces you can break off? Isn’t that the whole point? —Steve]

• Americans are buying vacant Japanese homes.

• Among the things baseball teams are giving away this year include team-branded fishing lures, a Grateful Dead tie-dye puffer vest, a hat reading “BAD DAY TO BE A [hot dog emoji],” and a George Costanza calzone bobblehead. [America’s real national pastime: junk. —Steve]

Poem:

“Chiaroscuro” by Isabelle Baafi

ask me about my first crush my brother piling sand on me till i couldn’t breathe he gave me a hammer i didn’t use it but i took its power son rise son threat son drinks the rain that pools in collarbones mother’s hands raking my scalp yesterday i pressed her sponge to the lake to clean it now the lake is gone it is easier to lasso the moon than to help your father lay down to die but what if the tomatoes never went bad what if splinters are a warning to run i once found a ransom note in my ear the face in the photo was mine i pawned everything went to the drop-off point no one ever came to set me free give me a bed with no crumbs in it pluck the fishbones from my throat i forgot where i hid the matches and after that it was easier just to live in the dark

[I enjoyed the integration of spaces into the prose poem format, modifying the linebreak but nonetheless controlling the reader’s speed. I thought the spaces were particularly effective in the moments of repetition, “son rise / son threat // son drinks” and “but what if // the tomatoes never went bad / what if splinters / are a warning to run,” as they slowed my eye, but did not insist on the vehemence of a line break.

This piece also reminded me a little of Andrea Gibson, who was an artist of some significance for me in my adolescence. My taste has evolved since then, but I’m seeking to renew my appreciation for work that is unafraid of sentiment or even theatricality. My favorite lines here are: “i once found a ransom note / in my ear / the face in the photo was mine,” which elicited a shiver of anxiety, and “i forgot where i hid / the matches / and after that / it was easier / just to live in the dark,” which I read as an outbreath of frustration rather than futility. —K. T.]

Upcoming books:

Out April 3:

University of Chicago Press: Phantom Byzantium: Europe, Empire, and Identity from Late Antiquity to World War II by Anthony Kaldellis

Seagull Books: Within, Without: On Two Cities by Ilya Kaminsky and Piotr Florczyk

Farrar, Straus and Giroux | April 7

Transcription: A Novel
by Ben Lerner

From the publisher: The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail “from the future and the past simultaneously” and who “reenchants the air” when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’ house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.

What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and an exploration of fathers and sons, male friendship and rivalry, and the challenges of parenting in a burning world. One of the first great novels about the early days of COVID, it is also a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Full of startling insight, but written with the intensity of a séance, Lerner shows us how the air is full of messages, full of ghosts. Ultimately Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.

Also out Tuesday:

Biblioasis: On Sports by David Macfarlane

Liveright: Canzoniere: A New Translation by Petrarch, translated from the Italian by A. M. Juster [We linked to a piece by Juster on Petrarch in WRB—Feb. 18, 2026.]

New York Review Books: The Oyster Diaries by Nancy Lehman

Transcendence for Beginners: Life Writing and Philosophy by Clare Carlisle [We linked to a review in WRB—Nov. 5, 2025.]

OR Books: Duchamp Takes New York by John Strausbaugh

Princeton University Press: The Roman World War: From the Ides of March to Cleopatra’s Suicide by Giusto Traina, translated from the French by Malcolm DeBevoise

Simon & Schuster: In Trees: An Exploration by Robert Moor

W. W. Norton: Attention: Writing on Life, Art, and the World by Anne Enright

What we’re reading:

Steve read more of Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love by R. Howard Bloch (1991). [Haven’t figured out Petrarch yet. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• Jorge Luis Borges on Edward FitzGerald (h/t Patrick Kurp):

  Seven centuries go by with their enlightenments and agonies and transformations, and in England a man is born, FitzGerald, less intellectual than Omar, but perhaps more sensitive and sadder. FitzGerald knows that his true fate is literature, and he practices it with indolence and tenacity. He reads and rereads the Quixote, which seems to him almost the best of all books (but he does not wish to be unjust to Shakespeare and “dear old Virgil”), and his love extends to the dictionary in which he looks for words.

  [They never made them more sensitive and more sad than they did in the fin de siècle. And I typed “Edmund FitzGerald” the first three times. You know. —Steve.]

Links:

• on death by train in nineteenth-century novels:

  [The death of Lopez in Trollope’s The Prime Minister (1875-6)] resembles Dickens’ abrupt, catastrophic death: the train moving at hyperbolic speed (“a thousand miles an hour”) with banshee cacophony, Lopez’s chillingly unhurried walk into the path of the locomotive. For Tolstoy, the train is slow but implacable, a figure of inevitability—the inevitability of slow-approaching death, the crushing force of societal disapproval, of depression. For Dickens and Trollope the engine is acceleration, speed, devastating force and death an unimaginable catastrophe, an instantaneous breaking of corporeality into its bloody components.

  [The difference here is between the train as the future, specifically, or the train as inexorable force, generally. When the train appears in twentieth-century culture it no longer smacks of technological progress, and so it can symbolize such powerful forces as salvation (“let the Midnight Special shine a light on me”) or sexual prowess (the ending of North by Northwest (1959), “the train kept a-rollin’ all night long”). The only place I can think of where the train retains its association with the future is, weirdly enough, Atlas Shrugged (1957). Everybody else had already moved onto, and then left behind, the automobile for this purpose. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In The New Statesman, Cooper reviews a biography of W. H. Auden (Auden, by Peter Ackroyd, June):

  To understand Auden, readers must appreciate his sense of Englishness, which was simultaneously rooted and restless. England was that sanctuary that he intermittently fled but to which he always returned in his mind’s eye. It was at once a muse and a subject to parody, the environment that determined his eccentricities, erudition and the debauchery that likely contributed to his death aged 66: even as an aging man in America, he “always carried a bottle of vodka or gin in his suitcase, for use in the event of arriving in a ‘dry’ county.” Scotland, where Auden was a young schoolmaster, also proved ripe for poetic plumbing. An “invigorating and rhythmically inventive chant,” “Night Mail”—a poem about crossing the border into Scotland—proved Auden to be “a master of all forms of poetry” and was turned into a short film with a score by Benjamin Britten, who would become a long-standing collaborator. Being mocked for his Englishness while tutoring in Helensburgh might have suited him; he liked to stand out, and while at Oxford would scandalize his peers with vulgar sexual divulgences and provocative pronouncements about life and art. Like many a university wit, “Auden’s talk tended to be dogmatic,” Ackroyd writes. “The cinema was not of the slightest interest; modern drama was impossible; the ballet should be forbidden.”

  [Shame the headline writer didn’t go for “We must love Wystan Auden or die,” but I suppose you can’t call him that in a headline.

  And from this review I learned that “Auden claimed that for more than a year of his adolescence he endeavored to read Thomas Hardy and ‘no one else.’” I wish I had actually done this, and I wish I had thought of claiming to have done so. Maybe I will anyway. When I was thirteen I read Tess of the d’Urbervilles twenty-nine times in a row, and to that reading I attribute my vast riches, good looks, winning personality, and general success in life. —Steve]

• In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews a book about plagiarism (Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots, by Roger Kreuz, January) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Jan. 7, 2026.]:

  If that is the shape of things to come, it will be comically hard to police. Give me raiders of the lost past, any day, and forgive them their lack of footnotes. I remember listening to Bedtime Stories, Madonna’s 1994 album, and being surprised by a moony track called “Love Tried to Welcome Me,” which contains the lines “But my soul drew back, / Guilty of lust and sin.” This is an unacknowledged but unmistakable nod to George Herbert, one of the most enduring religious poets of the early seventeenth century, who wrote a magnificent poem that begins “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin.” How Herbert, who was an Anglican priest of surpassing gentleness, might have felt about being quoted, three and a half centuries later, by somebody with a Catholic name and a conical bra we shall, alas, never know. The most gratifying irony is that, in changing the mortally ashen “dust” to the cheaper and more obvious “lust,” Madonna proved only that Herbert wrote better lyrics than she did, and I can’t help wishing that she had turned to him more often for guidance both verbal and spiritual. Papa does preach.

  [The subject of whether the “plagiarized” work is better than the original, as addressed here, comes up less often than it should. (“My Sweet Lord” is a better song than “He’s So Fine,” for example.) And artists who make it worse can adapt the approach of Paddy writing to his Irish Molly-O: “Remember, it’s the pen that’s bad, / Don’t lay the blame on me!” —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• I finally finished The Recognitions, a book designed to appeal to me

• The best poems about baseball and football

• K. T. on a Poem by Karen Solie and unexpected images

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

Read more

Links:

• In The Dial, an excerpt from a chapbook by Jan Steyn (Jig, January) about gout and the language used to describe it:

  Just as my own Afrikaans version follows Du Toit’s effort, so La Fontaine’s fable follows Petrarch, who paired Spider and Gout 300 years earlier. Petrarch also wrote about gout more generally, for instance in De remediis utriusque fortunae (Remedies for Fortunes) where he recounts the case of a nobleman who lavishes more attention on his sick horse than on his own afflicted body. Confined to bed by gout, the man commissions doctors to tend to the horse, has it laid on silk sheets with a golden pillow, and grieves as if he has lost a child when it dies. The anecdote is true, Petrarch insists, and widely known. The target is not the disease itself, but the grotesque distortions of care it exposes, and all for a malady he considered preventable. He is especially caustic toward those who forsake walking, out of ease or vanity. “Did they come into the world on horseback?” he scoffs (in Susannah Dobson’s delightful Englishing of the Latin done in 1791). “Will they so ride out of it?” He calls it madness to exchange the use of one’s own feet for the anxious labor of maintaining a horse. For horsemen, he writes, nothing would be more fitting than “the rich gout”—a punishment that renders the feet useless and ensures that a retinue of horses must be kept.

  [I like the James Gillray print that portrays gout as a little scorpion-demon creature. Unfortunately this did not give rise to any nicknames for gout—not as if “disease of kings” can be improved upon. (I also appreciate the Met providing the context at that link that “eighteenth-century Britons enjoyed roast beef, beer and port.” I’m not a doctor, but I think that’ll do it. The representative of “British Slavery” in Gillray’s “French Liberty—British Slavery” is single-handedly eating an entire roast while complaining that the “damn’d Taxes” are “Starving us to Death,” which will absolutely do it.) —Steve]

Reviews:

• In Portico, Randy Boyagoda reviews Kiran Desai’s new novel (The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Sept. 20, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Oct. 4, 2025.]:

  Sincerely rendered moments of transformative connection between two people are more acceptable (whether to enjoy or criticize) if they come to us from the distant and exclusively Western literary past—Dante seeing Beatrice for the first time, Romeo with Juliet, Milton’s Adam marveling at Eve, or the feelings between Ladislaw and Dorothea in Middlemarch, never mind between Anna and Vronsky in Anna Karenina. Even the cynical and melancholic narrator of Graham Greene’s The Human Factor observes, “Love was a total risk. Literature had always so proclaimed it.”

  But to reach the heights of literature, to match the total risk that is love, you can’t go in for irony. You can’t assure the reader that this is a cliché moment constructed to conceal the psychosomatic and historical materialist determinations at play in two privileged, cisgender, able-bodied heterosexuals responding to each other’s biomarkers and selective-school BAs—and isn’t this all just the author’s critical comment on failing Indian infrastructure (the blackout just before they meet)?

  [Great literature sometimes ironizes the “total risk” that is love; think of Emma Bovary entranced by Roldophe’s flattery at the fair while a man gives a speech about manure.

  But the problem is more fundamental than this. Roland Barthes:

  Every amorous episode can be, of course, endowed with a meaning: it is generated, develops, and dies; it follows a path which it is always possible to interpret according to a causality or a finality—even, if need be, which can be moralized (“I was out of my mind, I’m over it now” “Love is a trap which must be avoided from now on” etc.): this is the love story, subjugated to the great narrative Other, to that general opinion which disparages any excessive force and wants the subject himself to reduce the great imaginary current, the orderless, endless stream which is passing through him, to a painful, morbid crisis of which he must be cured, which he must “get over” (“It develops, grows, causes suffering, and passes away” in the fashion of some Hippocratic disease): the love story (the “episode,” the “adventure”) is the tribute the lover must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it.

  Once you start telling “a love story” you’re already in the domain of irony, forcing the ineffable to obey a narrative logic. And, whatever the problems with heterosexuals who have BAs from selective schools, we have a word for things “literature has always so proclaimed”: cliché. The power of a love story is not in escape from cliché but in wallowing in it. This can be done with perfect sincerity, but it must be done nevertheless.

  As Boyagoda says, when we read a love story we think about Dante and Shakespeare and Milton. We think of many other works of art as well, and we also think about our own lives. When we come to a work of art about love we are not impressed by its sincerity—probably all of us have been in love before and are therefore aware that love can sincerely express itself dully and stupidly. We want it to approach the subject with something new, a new variation on the oldest theme. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the Thames, Nicholas Spice reviews a book about lieder (Lyrical Diary: Lieder from Franz Schubert to Wolfgang Rihm, by Christian Gerhaher, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside, 2025 in the UK):

  In his 1912 essay “The Relationship to the Text,” Arnold Schoenberg implicitly acknowledged the tendency of great songs to ingest and metabolize the poems they set when he explained that for years he had enjoyed Schubert’s lieder without ever taking in what they were about, and that, when he did bother to look at the words, they were no surprise to him, since he had intuited them all along. Leaving aside the daffiness of this last claim, the point he was making about the relative importance of music and words in the lied is surely correct, at any rate from the listener’s perspective: many of the most memorable lieder live in our imaginations as pieces of music, not as intoned poetry. We are so used to thinking of the process of songwriting (not, that is, the songwriting of a singer-songwriter—an altogether different thing) as setting a poem to music, the song in some sense an interpretation of the poem, that we fail to see how, in many instances, the process reverses itself and the poem becomes just one possible interpretation of the music rather than its progenitor. As an example, in the transition from Heine’s poem “Am Meer” to Schubert’s song, we move from one powerful semantic field to another so distinctive—as music—that the poem is left behind, cast off like the shell of a previous instar. Indeed, Schubert’s song is no longer concerned with the poem that inspired it but opens itself to all the yet unwritten poems it might engender, all the poems that might set its music to words. And just as there are any number of possible musical settings for a given poem, so there are any number of possible poetic settings for a given song.

  [Since I don’t know German this is how I feel about basically all lieder; even when I know what the text is about and have looked at translations that’s not enough to give the words an independent existence from the music. The lieder I probably think about most, Schumann’s “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” attained that status because I know of no better portrayal of what it feels like to say something vulnerable and then wait the seeming eternity for the other person to respond. This idea is, sort of, in the text; that the whole song should be an expansion of that moment into a minute and a half is not, and this moment of waiting exists in situations besides confessions of love. —Steve]

• In Now Voyager, Ryan Ruby reviews Christian Bök’s books about encoding poetry into bacterial DNA (The Xenotext: Book 1, 2015; The Xenotext: Book 2, 2025):

  Just so: The thirty-six unique words that make up “Orpheus” and “Eurydice” are unlikely to be found next to Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” Rimbaud’s “Voyelles,” or one of Rilke’s sonnets to Orpheus in a future anthology. In that sense, Bök’s experiment, like Fitzcarraldo’s opera house—or indeed, Orpheus’ trip to the underworld—could be regarded as a failure. But the idea and the process that Bök documents in the other poems of The Xenotext have all the grandeur, virtuosity, and strangeness that, to me, are the hallmarks of great works of art, especially those whose achievement requires time to acknowledge. If, as critic Guy Davenport has argued, one of the characteristic features of high modernism is the merger of the cutting edge and the positively archaic, these are but a parenthesis to the cosmic time scale of The Xenotext. “The job of the avant-garde,” Bök said in a recent interview, “is to show up for the future on time, because the future is coming fast.” And in that sense, The Xenotext is an outstanding, even alarming success.

  [In an essay on Ronald Johnson Davenport comments “Someday someone will explain why the Romantics wanted to rewrite Paradise Lost and the moderns to rewrite the Odyssey.” (Unlike Davenport to leave this as an exercise for the reader instead of explaining it in a brilliant two-sentence digression.) In other words, you can define an age and identify its central concerns by its artistic touchstones. As Ruby notes, many different artistic movements and mediums have rewritten and retold the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the three reasons Ruby gives for this—it being the “mythmaker’s myth,” it being paradigmatic for the “immortality project,” and Orpheus failing—are universal concerns for artists, no matter their other commitments. Everyone wonders what their art could really achieve, and the myth gives the satisfyingly unsatisfying answer “everything and nothing.” —Steve]

• In Modern Age, Jude Russo reviews Megadoc (2025), a documentary about the making of Megalopolis (2024):

  Megadoc invites comparison to Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), another movie about an Italian director, Guido, struggling to make an epic movie—stuffed to the gills with quasi-classical erudition, sentimental personal motifs, and ill-defined futurism—despite the on-set chaos, the skepticism of the press and some of the director’s own notional collaborators, and the huge expense.

  Inevitably, the production of the unnamed movie ends in disaster. Guido’s friend and script collaborator, the pretentious critic Daumier, with a sublime indifference to the director’s feelings of failure, congratulates him for maintaining his artistic integrity by not producing a flawed film: “Believe me, you should feel neither nostalgia nor remorse. It’s better to destroy than create when you’re not creating those few things that are truly necessary. And finally, in this world of ours, is there anything so just and true that it has the right to survive? For [the producer], a bad film is only a fiscal event. But for you, at this point in your life, it could have been the end.”

  That all sounds good, as far as it goes—but Guido and Coppola both know it’s really bunk. As Daumier’s monologue drags on, he sneers at the idea that Guido wished “to leave behind . . . a complete film, just like a cripple who leaves behind his crooked footprint,” the director, hanging his head under the onslaught of words, begins to see in his mind a fantasy of his characters gathering together for a grand dance. “But all this confusion—it’s me, myself,” he thinks to himself. The difference is that Coppola was his own producer, and he got to make the movie.

  [Longtime readers of the WRB will know that I regard Megalopolis as one of the essential artistic works of the past few years.

  Before embarking on Megalopolis Coppola had already made a masterpiece of nearly-incoherent references to the canon all shoved into the present day: Apocalypse Now (1979). (And like Megalopolis it was the subject of a documentary detailing its disastrous production.) This exchange between Willard (Martin Sheen) and Kurtz (Marlon Brando) might as well be about Coppola himself:

  “They told me that you had gone totally insane. And that your methods were unsound.”

  “Are my methods unsound?”

  “I don’t see any method at all, sir.”

  Where Megalopolis surpasses Apocalypse Now is in its integration of the personal strain of 8½. The confusions of Apocalypse Now are the material getting the better of Coppola, but the confusions of Megalopolis, like Guido says, simply are Coppola. —Steve]

N.B.:

• “In America, the maneuver is known as an Irish exit or an Irish Goodbye. But it has existed under different names in other cultures, too—in England it’s the “French leave,” in France a “filer a l’anglaise.” In Germany, it’s attributed to the Polish.” [The various names for it in different languages attributing it to places all over the world connect leaving a party without saying goodbye to the turkey, currently, and syphilis, historically. —Steve]

• When Susan Sontag met Thomas Mann.

• John Steinbeck, source of ecological data.

• New issues:

  • BOMB Issue 175 | Spring 2026

  • Now Voyager Issue 01 [As linked to above.]

  • The Paris Review No. 255 | Spring 2026

  • Portico Number 1 | Spring 2026 [As linked to above.]

  • The Yale Review Volume 114, No. 1 | Spring 2026

    [Both the new magazines here are great and have plenty of interesting pieces in them besides the two I linked. Particularly happy to see in charge of a magazine; discovering Prufrock at thirteen or so was important for me, and I like to see good things happen to my fellow workers in the books-and-culture roundup newsletter mines. —Steve]

• Len Deighton died on Sunday, March 15. R.I.P.

Poem:

“Caribou” by Karen Solie

Why, after so many years, is she with me now?
We who were not close in life
walk among the caribou lichen

whose coral-like low forms, white against the mosses
and wild blueberry in its red phase,
seem to give off light.

She has escaped
through the window of the body’s house of harm
into the freedom of a truth that will never be recognized.

And indeed they do give off light, fungi and algae
in a collaboration that obscures
the individual collaborators

who’ve taken it entirely off-spectrum,
reflecting every wavelength and phosphorescing under the UV
intensely where appearing most delicate

as though, as has been written, the best metaphor for stillness
is constant motion. Out of weakness
are made strong, I guess.

A cold-hardy, slow-growing, clean-air species.
The fog makes surprising
what it does not conceal, and what is concealed reminds us

that an excess of surprise should be avoided, if one can help it.
Listen to the sea, she says,
surprising again and again the rock of the shore.

[Since first reading the poem, I’ve been thinking about the idea of the body as a “house of harm” and implicit relief of escape. The next line, and the word “freedom,” is almost superfluous. But what a forgiving way to acknowledge the pain of someone for whom selfhood is not simple. In a poem dense with ideas and images, there is still a sense of organization and moments of easy delight. “[C]ollaboration that obscures / the individual collaborators” is the language of indictment that has been transposed to a new context. Solie briefly interjects cliché—stillness and motion, weakness and strength—to bolster the light’s claim to delicacy. I also love the contradictory repetition of surprise in the final section, just short, it would appear, of the excess that should be avoided. —K. T.]

Upcoming books:

Mariner Books | March 24

Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry
by David Streitfeld

From the publisher: Before Larry McMurtry became one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century, he worked on his family’s ranch in rural Texas. At night he heard vivid stories of his cowboy uncles driving herds of cattle across the plains where there once were bison and Native Americans. “McMurtry Means Beef,” as one ranching magazine put it. By the time he died in 2021, McMurtry had published forty books, won a Pulitzer for Lonesome Dove and an Oscar for his cowritten adaptation of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, and seen his work made into such classic films as Hud and Terms of Endearment. Now, McMurtry means great stories.

For all his fame, McMurtry was an elusive figure. He loved women but was married to his typewriter; he was wary of critics and distrustful of other men—except David Streitfeld. When McMurtry gave the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist the keys to his past, Streitfeld dug into every archive and interviewed everyone who would talk. He found that, even as McMurtry’s work criticized the old cowboy myths, he loved making up stories about himself.

Western Star reveals the real and complicated life of a storyteller who was both an icon and critic of Texas, the favorite of presidents, confidant to movie stars like Diane Keaton and Cybill Shepherd, friend to Ken Kesey and husband to his widow Faye, an obsessive bookseller, and the most enduring voice of the American West.

Also out Tuesday:

Columbia University Press: The Melville Effect: A Literary Afterlife Across the Arts by Joseph Allen Boone

Harper: Python’s Kiss: Stories by Louise Erdrich

What we’re reading:

Steve read more of The Recognitions.

Critical notes:

• In the Times, Ryan Francis Bradley on “sync music”:

  Sync, it’s called. Once it was known as library music; sometimes it’s called production music. It’s not really a genre. It’s a category, defined by its function: This is music that exists to be paired—synced—with video. That’s why it’s so ubiquitous. Modern American life is absolutely steeped in video, which follows us, at every hour, from TV screens to smartphones to laptops, from movies to social media rants to workplace anti-harassment training modules. The soundtrack to most of it is some form of sync. This is partly because sync tends to be the cheapest and easiest option. But it’s also because sync is specifically crafted to be cut to video—and in a time when more and more of human communication involves editing video, this stuff is rapidly becoming our dominant form of music.

  • Erik Satie, most contemporary of composers:

    One might nonetheless create a musique d’ameublement [furniture music], that is to say, a music that would be a part of the ambient noise and take account of it. I imagine it to be melodic, softening the noise of knives and forks without dominating, without imposing. It would fill the sometimes awkward silences between guests. It would spare them from banal conversation. At the same time, it would neutralize the noises of the street, which enter without discretion.

  • Will Tavlin, in a piece about Netflix for n+1 last year:

    Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”

    [From trends in culture I can only conclude that the most beatific state attainable in this life is half-watching TV. Or perhaps technology has shifted the supply curve of art all the way to the right. —Steve]