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]

“What do you think of the Washington Review of Books?”
“I think it would be a good idea.”

Links:

• In New Left Review, Xi Ruochen on Hong Kong’s role in Chinese publishing:

  Huge numbers of pirated editions, smuggled tamizdat and anonymous self-printed materials now began to circulate through flea-markets and other “secondary channels.” Although both the authorities and serious authors voiced alarm at the amorality unleashed by this tide, to which new regulations as well as scholarly debates on “the demise of Enlightenment” and “loss of humanistic spirit” (renwen jingshen) bore witness in the late 1990s, a new literary ecosystem gradually emerged between cultural entrepreneurs and their readers, both registering a certain autonomy. The state’s extensive privatizations also gave rise to an unofficial trade in primary sources for historical research, as old Party documents from shuttered factories and downsized institutions flowed onto market stalls and circulated through the networks of second-hand book sellers and private collectors. Party history has always been a highly centralized practice in the prc, where all publications—chronicles, anthologies, biographies of Party leaders—were lodged in a handful of specialized institutions, including the Bureau of Party Literature and Party History Research, whose “official historians” enjoyed privileged access to Central Archives. The expansion of the market allowed researchers to bypass official obstacles to historiographic production. Identifying themselves as minjian they began to revise the official narrative from alternative perspectives. The 1990s thus saw a diversity of approaches in the field of PRC history. In addition to domestic practitioners, these “grassroots archives” also enriched the fieldwork of foreign scholars, nurturing a body of scholarship sometimes referred to as “Sinological garbology.”

  [“Sinological garbology” is an incredible phrase. —Steve]

• In The New Statesman, interviews Will Self:

  Fictional worlds are, in some sense, even more inevitable than the real one. The man who commits suicide in the new book realizes that he is a powerless fictional character. But as Self wrote, quite beautifully, in the essay “Being a Character”: “It’s precisely in fictional characters’ conviction—despite all evidence to the contrary—that they are the authors of their own lives, that they resemble us most . . . It’s precisely this shared predicament which makes them so very worthy of our compassion.” In the same essay, Self reflects that, while he initially dismissed characters in favor of ideas, “People who need people—I began to suspect—are the luckiest people in the world.” I repeat that line. He snorts.

  “It’s something like a tagline from Friends or something—utterly cheesy.”

  “Why did you write it, then?”

  “Umm, oh no. I do believe it. I do believe it.”

  [As Norm Macdonald said: “if something is true it is not sentimental.” —Steve]

Reviews:

• In the Journal, Michael O’Donnell reviews Tom Junod’s book about his father (In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man: A Memoir, March 10):

  The book builds on a 1996 feature that Mr. Junod wrote about his father’s fashion tips and lifestyle rules. The article’s accompanying photo of a tuxedoed Lou holding a martini and staring into the camera is extraordinary: He is Hollywood handsome, the pinnacle of manhood, virile and bold even in the September of his years. But the enterprise was a kind of sham. Mr. Junod now reveals that by that point, at age 77, Lou had abandoned his own maxims about turtlenecks (the most flattering thing a man can wear) and witch hazel (for cleaning the navel), dressing shabbily and throwing his money away. Mr. Junod says he wrote the piece to show Lou “that I am finally successful, and to make him understand I owe much of my success to him.” Yet Mr. Junod confesses that he desperately doesn’t want to be like his father.

  [The feature in GQ is one of the finest magazine pieces I’ve read; I think about it whenever I put on a turtleneck, which I do with some frequency. Junod’s “style is the public face you put together in private, in secret, behind a door all your own” is as good a definition of that word as you’ll find.

  That Lou had apparently “abandoned his own maxims” makes his son’s feature about him an act of printing the legend as filial piety. But in hiding the truth, it functions as critique for those who know it. For all Tom Junod’s ambivalence about his father, he insists that the man he owes much of his success to is not a broken-down old man who no longer cares to keep up appearances but a fastidious man who paid attention to style. (As in fashion, so in writing.)

  But the question haunting the feature (and, to take this review’s word for it, the memoir) is what lies under all the style. When Tom asks his father when he looked his best and gets the answer “The best I ever looked? Every day of my life,” it is impossible not to admire the self-assurance; it is also impossible not to note that to give a specific answer, to tell a story, to reminisce about a moment, would reveal something about Lou, something about what he found most important, something about a defining day of his life. The answer he gives is an impenetrable surface. —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 Zoomers listen to old music, and how to use the internet better

• The targets of satire

• A Poem by Thomas Wyatt, kissing, and the weather

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

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t managed to edit all the email newsletters that you have.”

Links:

• In our sister publication Down Under, Jo Langdon on young children and poetic expression:

  The moon appears too in Galchen’s work. “Mysteries of Taste,” for example, which catalogues the baby’s interests and preferences, and closes with the line, “Always she is the first to notice the moon.” It is through Brown’s Neon Daze that I learn how Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon, “possessed no special desire to write children’s books” and “wanted to be a serious modernist—a Gertrude Stein or Virginia Woolf” but “believed she was stuck in childhood.”

  While this might imply an opposition between (the texts and perspectives of) childhood and the works of “serious modernists,” it feels worth contemplating how the disruptive presence of motherhood, babies and children—present in the works of many—has the potential to unsettle language and perception in meaningful and arguably positive ways. Children might interrupt and disturb the focus of adults, but what new forms—of listening, receiving, and response—might emerge through these ruptures, giving rise to potential for dialogue and interaction?

  [I discussed certain similarities between Goodnight Moon and the Cantos of Ezra Pound in WRB—Sept. 17, 2025.

  Listening to small children talk is fun. (He says, not having any himself.) They do things with language that you simply do not encounter anywhere else. Some of it comes down to their lack of familiarity with the language; they don’t know enough words, and so they use the words they do know in ways that would never occur to someone with a more developed vocabulary. And some of it is their endless desire to categorize things and understand their relationships, which combines with their lack of set conceptual frameworks to produce new ideas of how to understand the world. Part of the modernist project was defamiliarization, and few things are as defamiliarizing as trying to see the world through the eyes of a three-year-old. —Steve]

• Two in Literary Review; first, Peter Davidson on John Aubrey:

  An Oxford-educated Wiltshire gentleman who lost his small estates to lawsuits and debts after the Civil Wars, he was somehow set free by this personal disaster to live, in Auden’s words, “a wonderful instead.” Instead of worrying about lawsuits and estate work, he lived on and with his innumerable friends. He travelled and observed places, traditions and monuments, always with a sense that many of his contemporaries, especially during the wars, were intent on the destruction of all these things. His drawn records of the megaliths at Stonehenge and Avebury are still valued today; but so are his records of people’s customs, songs and beliefs, which he gathered in Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (1686–7). Both comic and melancholy, his writings offer a paper museum of people and things. “How these curiosities would be quite forgot,” he writes in his celebrated Brief Lives, “did not such idle fellows as I am put them down.”

  The context for this delightful sentence about memory comes at the end of one of his most intricate and memorable pieces of writing. His notes for a life of the short-lived beauty Venetia Digby (as edited from Aubrey’s manuscript by Kate Bennett) are haunting: “She had a most lovely sweet turn’d face, delicate darke browne haire . . . her face, a short oval, darke browne eie-browe: about which much sweetness, as also in the opening of her eie-lidds. The colour of her cheeks, was just that of a Damaske-rose: which is neither too hot, nor too pale.”

  [“Such idle fellows as I am”—writers can’t resist the chance to be self-aggrandizing and self-effacing at the same time. The artistic temperament is caught between the two.

  “Much sweetness . . . in the opening of her eie-lidds’: to read great writing is to be shamed for our comparative lack of attention. —Steve]

Reviews:

• Second, Declan Ryan reviews John Berryman’s unpublished Dream Songs (Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, edited by Shane McCrae, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Dec. 9, 2025; we linked to a piece by McCrae about the Dream Songs in WRB—Sept. 10, 2025.]:

  The poems here are immediately recognizable thematically, syntactically and in their means of address for anyone familiar with the original 77 Dream Songs (1964). In truth, there’s little to match the intensity or dazzle of those, but that same heartbreak note, wry self-scrutiny and bawdy romanticism are all present and correct, as well as some more occasional, elusive or private-­seeming work. These Songs retain the same blend of the Blues, Shakespearean phraseology and bar-room chatter, something Berryman comments on in one of the poems here: “He make their minds blur, with that syntax. Then / he abandon syntax and he count on tone. / Then he go underground.” This sort of exegetical turn isn’t a rarity. Throughout, Henry or his pal, who addresses him here as previously as “Mr. Bones,” annotates and explicates as he goes, foregrounding the poems’ making as much as their impact, either on his sanity or on his trophy cabinet: “One typewriter & very sharp pencils. / —Mr. Bones, take it easy”; “Star-showers of honors hesitated and then fell on Henry, / knocking him to his knees”; “every time most people praise me / I figure there must be something wrong with my style, / trudging away at perfection.”

• In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, David Trotter reviews Lydia Davis’ book about why she writes (Into the Weeds, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Sept. 13, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Oct. 15, 2025.]:

  By Into the Weeds, any remaining reluctance to discuss the virtues of what we might call inadvertently long-form writing has long since disappeared. Witness the illuminating account Davis offers of the composition of “The Cows,” published as a pamphlet in 2011, and then in Can’t and Won’t. In this case, the raw material really was “found in a field”: the one just across the road from her house. Davis had no “overall plan” for her “observations,” which she entered in a notebook among other jottings. Days might go by, or weeks, or months, before she felt moved to add a further entry. “And so the set of 83 observations was written by accumulation over several years.” She has spoken in a recent interview of the “many, many, many, many pages” of her journals which “never were used in stories and never will be.” About halfway through Into the Weeds, she comes clean. Asked to write about why she writes, she eventually settled, she says, on a form that bears “some resemblance” to a diary. This text, too, has been allowed to accumulate. Its method is the enactment rather than the exposition of a motive.

  [A diary is an accumulation of impressions, but reducing all the impressions of a day to a couple sentences demands ruthless editing. Only these hard-edged synopses of a day—or, for those who use diaries as commonplace books, material selected from elsewhere—are allowed to accumulate, because they provide an understanding of the day that would not be possible if the diary entries were more diffuse. Trotter refers to Davis’ predilection for “the yield from pithiness and extreme brevity”; this also characterizes one kind of diary worth reading. —Steve]

• In The New Yorker, Sarah Chihaya reviews a new translation of Emi Yagi’s second novel (When the Museum is Closed, translated from the Japanese by Yuki Tejima, January):

  The world of Venus and Rika, though, is vague. They talk in an unnamed museum in an unnamed city. Venus is amusingly casual and surprisingly more street-smart than Rika, despite her centuries-long captivity; beyond the shock of her attitude, though, we learn very little about her. One might think that an ancient living statue might be the most interesting character in this story, but we never discover what motivates her, beyond a clichéd desire to get out and see the world. The novel’s villain is the handsome male curator Hashibami, who wants Venus for himself; a consummate collector, he thinks of female beauty as something that can be revealed and perfected only by the male gaze. Hashibami, who we find out lives in the museum, seems to want both to possess Venus’ timeless beauty and to embody it himself. There’s a rich commonality between him and Venus that could be explored here—who’s manipulating Rika more? But the novel ultimately retreats from these complicating questions. The final message is a little too clear; the fairy-tale setting makes the fairy-tale plot too easy.

  • Rilke: “you must change your life.”

  • Housman:

    I too survey that endless line

    Of men whose thoughts are not as mine.

    Years, ere you stood up from rest,

    On my neck the collar prest;

    Years, when you lay down your ill,

    I shall stand and bear it still.

N.B.:

• Mail clubs. [The subhead here says that “people still really love to get things in the mail”; if you’ve ever doubted this, look at all the junk mail that uses a font imitating human handwriting for the address. Even though people hardly ever get hand-addressed envelopes in the mail anymore, the sense that this is what mail should be lives on.

  Maybe I should start mailing out the Print Edition of the WRB. —Steve]

• The life and times of extremely annoying alarm clocks. [I pretty consistently wake up before my alarm; interesting to see how the other half lives. And I feel like we lost something when we went from alarm clocks named “the Rattler, the Slumber Stopper and the Tornado” to “Nuj” and “Alarmy.” We lost something before that when we went from the factory bell to the alarm clock. Make the whole town wake up early. Really, what they should do is ring the bells whenever a new WRB comes out. —Steve]

• “Last Wednesday, The Times officially launched the Midi, our new daily medium-size crossword.”

• “Is Post-Piece Silence a Recession Indicator?”

• “Staffers at Film at Lincoln Center keep a list of the incorrect movie titles they’ve heard from patrons. That list is very, very long.” [What about a list of incomprehensible plot summaries from which it is impossible to figure out what movie the person is talking about? —Steve]

• The Royal Mint is training its coin-makers to make jewelry.

• “Targeted Dream Incubation”

• New issues:

  • The Hedgehog Review Spring 2026 / Volume 28 / No. 1: Humanism in a Posthumanist Age

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

Poem:

“A Vision Vpon This Conceipt of the Faery Queene” by Walter Raleigh

Me thought I saw the graue where Laura lay,
Within that Temple, where the vestall flame
Was wont to burne; and passing by that way,
To see that buried dust of liuing fame,
Whose tombe faire loue and fairer vertue kept;
All suddeinly I saw the Faery Queene:
At whose approch the soule of Petrarke wept;
And from thenceforth, those graces were not seene,
For they this Queene attended: in whose steed
Obliuion laid him downe on Lauras herse:
Hereat the hardest stones were seene to bleed,
And grones of buried ghostes the heuens did perse,
Where Homers spright did tremble all for griefe,
And curst th’ accesse of that celestiall theife.

[The WRB is, as always, a Spenser newsletter.

The first stanza introduces a paradox of poetic immortality—“buried dust of living fame”—and hints that poetic immortality is somehow inconsistent with life. The living fame granted by the poetry is only necessary because Laura is not, in fact, alive. But poetic immortality’s problems don’t end there; it turns out to be inconsistent with itself. The text of the poem says that the appearance of the Faery Queene causes Love and Virtue to desert Laura’s tomb; it might as well say that The Faerie Queene is going to take some portion of the attention and reputation Petrarch has. Human time and attention are limited resources; any new claim to artistic immortality is—has to be—made at the expense of the existing canon, and require us to revise our relationship to it. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” T. S. Eliot says:

The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.

Raleigh argues that Spenser’s poem, and the historical situation that gave rise to it, demand of us that we revisit Petrarch and reconsider his work. How does it change if Laura is no longer a moral exemplar? And the seemingly-unprompted reference to Homer in the penultimate line (and in a state somewhere between dead and alive—“spright”) pushes the question all the way back to the beginning. —Steve]

Upcoming books:

Out March 8:

ACMRS Press: Shakespeare and the Senses by Holly E. Dugan

Grove Press | March 10

The Quantity Theory of Morality: A Novel
by Will Self

From the publisher: In The Quantity Theory of Morality, Will Self’s unconventional new novel, his pen remains dipped in vitriol and elegance as ever. In this dark yet hilariously satirical “state-of-an-era novel,” Self’s target is a collective morality that is nothing more or less than pure sociability. His middle-class, middle-English characters appear trapped in a timeless go-round of polite chitchat in dinner parties that refract like a hall of mirrors as the novel progresses, until one day someone says something to the effect of, “This way to the gas chamber, please, ladies and gentlemen.” The Quantity Theory of Morality finally solves the equation of time and money that dominates our lives, in a way that is simultaneously deranging, destabilizing, and hilarious.

With recurring—if defeated—appearances from now-canonical characters like Zack Busner, the repetition of each chapter, or “Proposition” shows Will Self to be both a master of satire and slapstick humor and a sublime and thoughtful critic of the alienation of modern life. With The Quantity Theory of Morality, Self provides the sequel to his award-winning debut of 34 years ago: The Quantity Theory of Insanity. That literary psycho-surgery proved there wasn’t enough sanity go around—now he’s established what many of us fear to be the absolute truth: there isn’t enough good to go around, either.

Also out Tuesday:

Columbia University Press: The Traitor: A Novel by Abe Kōbō, translated from the Japanese by Mark Gibeau

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Down Time: A Novel by Andrew Martin

G. P. Putnam’s Sons: Judy Blume: A Life by Mark Oppenheimer

Melville House: Still Talking: Stories by Lore Segal

Viking: The Complex: A Novel by Karan Mahajan

What we’re reading:

Steve read more of The Recognitions.

Critical notes:

• Moul on Gérard Bocholier and what we find in what we read:

  I taught language and literature (in English, Latin and Greek) for twenty years and for me teaching—whether it’s an elementary language class or a doctoral student—is mainly about helping both others and myself to read better. There are so many ways to do this, both as a reader and as a teacher, but one thing that comes up quite a lot is the difference between a purely personal response and a critical one. A line of a poem might move me because it reminds me, for example, of a nursery rhyme that my grandmother used to say to me. The particular memory of my grandmother and all that that brings with it is entirely personal to me; but the way that the line echoes a well-known nursery rhyme is not. On the other hand, if I am struck by a piece of writing because it happens to use a word that my grandfather or my first school teacher often used, that might make it very moving for me, but it probably does not have much relevance beyond myself.

  As sophisticated readers, we know that coincidences or echoes of this latter kind are not really critically significant in themselves. We teach students, and learn ourselves, to sift them out of formal writing. But all the same, these sorts of associations can be very important to us as readers, and are quite often part of what draws us into a work of literature, even if they are not what keep us there. And perhaps we can talk meaningfully about how literature may provoke such associations—the way that some kinds of poetry, for example, seems designed to elicit them.

• Patrick Kurp:

  Writing is a reliable antidote to boredom. A well-crafted sentence, an elegantly framed argument, a neatly arranged set-up and punchline focus our attention and feel substantial, even permanent, even when we know otherwise. In addition, every act of writing is a reply to a predecessor, one half of a conversation—a lesson taught by Guy Davenport. Literature is a vast kinship network of precursors. Readers and writers have no excuse for feeling alienated, apart from self-pity.

Links:

• In Harper’s, Nicole Krauss on Caravaggio, La Tour, and attention:

  What is it to live near to light, in sustained awareness of it? How does it braid itself into our sense of revelation, our communion with grace? Attending to it, where does it lead us? “We have all known moments in life when light appeared to transfigure a familiar scene and to make us feel what Wordsworth felt on Westminster Bridge,” Ernst Gombrich once wrote, referring to the moment of wonder brought on by noticing the spine-tingling peace of a city bathed in morning light. But a great artist doesn’t merely wait for such rare moments, Gombrich suggested; instead, he has the power to transfigure the commonplace by his imagining and handling of light. For Caravaggio, that handling was not just of light itself, but of the darkness that allows for its existence, and vice versa. This lesson transcends optics and speaks to the existential, to matters of the soul. It’s easy to describe Caravaggio as a genius of light, but he was an expert in darkness too, in life and in art, on how it also calls to us, how it can be soft or beckoning or another side of the story, and not just obscuring, or an absence, or the opposite of knowledge.

  [I was once in a class—I can’t remember what the class was actually about, since it certainly wasn’t Baroque painting—where we spent quite a lot of time looking at Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew, and our teacher called our attention to the detail that, even as Matthew points at himself to question Christ’s decision, he seems to be positioning his legs and feet to stand up. He is responding before he knows he is responding. This is a statement about grace, but it is also a statement about art, which knows more than it first lets on and calls us into it. —Steve]

• In The Paris Review, Frances Lindemann on Virginia Woolf’s approach to reading:

  Rapture, for Woolf, is recognition. Recognition relies on something that already exists, and this is Woolf’s ideal of writing: it calls forth what already exists, but is not yet known, in the reader. You might call this a kind of emotional knowledge; you might call it the unconscious, a submerged level of sense that the conscious mind can register only as “random”-ness. It is worth noting here that Woolf’s Hogarth Press was Freud’s publisher in English, and she was reading his work around the time she drafted “Reading at Random.” One penciled margin note on a typescript passage of “Anon” conjures Woolf’s idea of reading as a recognitive process: “It brought to the surface the old hidden world.”

  In To the Lighthouse (1927), Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay sit together reading in the library after dinner. Each longs to communicate with the other, but neither can find the right words. Taking up a volume of poems, Mrs. Ramsay “began reading here and there at random.” The words resonate and echo in her mind, seamlessly interweaving with her thoughts, lulling her “like a person in a light sleep.” The book, though Woolf does not say so outright, is a collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets; and it can be no coincidence that Shakespeare, for Woolf, is the quintessence of anonymity in writing. In her “Reading at Random” notes, she writes, “About Shre: the person is consumed: Sre never breaks the envelope. We dont want to know about him: Completely expressed. When the incantation ceases, we see the person.” Who is “the person,” exactly—Shakespeare or his reader? For as long as the incantation lasts, both are “consumed” together.

  [Cf. the idea of the artist transforming the commonplace in Krauss’ piece above. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Edward Mendelsohn reviews reissues of two books by Margaret Kennedy (The Feast, 1950, 2023; and Troy Chimneys, 1953, 2022):

  In the book’s unacknowledged autobiographical allegory, Pronto stands for the best-selling writer celebrated everywhere for what was taken to be the tear-jerking titillation of The Constant Nymph (1924), Miles for the same writer’s less visible probings into psychological and philosophical depths and linguistic complexities supposedly reserved for modernist masters. Simone de Beauvoir perceived Margaret Kennedy’s aspect as Miles; an English biographer of Beauvoir, Margaret Crosland, seeing only Kennedy’s Pronto aspect, was puzzled to find that Beauvoir “seems to have admired” The Constant Nymph “more than one might have expected.”

  Double portraits of the same person are fairly common in novels: Dickens typically portrays himself as both innocent victim and canny exploiter, David Copperfield and Uriah Heep; Mary Shelley portrays her husband, Percy, as both the grandiose Victor Frankenstein and the generous Henry Clerval. Troy Chimneys is a rare portrait of a novelist’s doubleness within herself. One hint of the hidden authorial allegory occurs when Miles Lufton names Emma and Mansfield Park as his favorite novels; Kennedy had published a book about Jane Austen two years before Troy Chimneys.

  [Since Mansfield Park is one of my favorite novels, I can confidently report that anyone who says Mansfield Park is one of their favorite novels is deeply disturbed. —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:

• Life in various ruins (R.I.P. Michael Silverblatt, R.I.P. books coverage)

• The sources of Thom Gunn’s poetry, and his transformation of them

• K. T. on a poem by Maria Zoccola and body horror

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 New York Times, on love and Wuthering Heights:

  Whether or not we’d want to be around Heathcliff and Catherine in real life is irrelevant to whether or not we can be moved by their love story. And whether or not their story is one we’d want for ourselves is irrelevant to whether or not Wuthering Heights says something true about love.

  For this pair, love is where you find your lost other half, your twin, something deeper than even a best friend, something as inextricably you as your own organs. (“Nelly, I am Heathcliff!” Catherine says.) In this story, sometimes love kills us and sometimes it frees us; sometimes it degrades us and sometimes it saves us. Sometimes it does both at the same time.

  Who can deny that love wears all these faces? The mechanisms through which Heathcliff and Catherine are eventually redeemed and reunited are dramatically satisfying because in real life obsessive love usually does not have such consequences.

  [I was initially afraid that I would have to take back all the mean things I said about the Times’ books section last week, but this piece is in Opinion, so I stand by what I said.

  Even in Wuthering Heights obsessive love does not really have these consequences. The story of the second generation is the story of people who had nothing to do with Heathcliff and Catherine’s love, and weren’t around for it, but whose lives are completely shaped by it anyway. That part of the story doesn’t have much of a dark glamor to it—it’s mostly just sad—but haven’t we all, at times, dreamed of a love that would shape lives for generations? —Steve]

• In The Guardian, an excerpt from from Namwali Serpell’s book on Toni Morrison (On Morrison, February 17) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Feb. 11, 2026.]:

  In a 1981 Vogue profile, Morrison spoke of a reader who had “told her how difficult it was to understand black culture in her books—it was so removed from his experience.” She had responded: “Boy, you must have had a hell of a time with Beowulf!” The Vogue interviewer, missing the wit in this retort, commented: “Morrison has no patience with people who plead ignorance; but then, she does not pride herself on being a patient woman. ‘I find myself being more and more difficult,’ she says. ‘It’s something I really relish.’” Morrison’s literary difficulty was often translated this way into a personal difficulty, a moral failing: How dare she be impatient! Well, wouldn’t you be?

  One reason for Morrison’s air of pique was surely the strain of trying to balance the demands of multiple careers simultaneously. She was an editor, a professor, a writer, a critic and a public intellectual. I have worked in these fields as well, so I know that extending many branches can be a way of distracting yourself from the core vocation. The commitment to writing over all else is often viewed as selfish; when gender is factored into the equation, the charge can carry the stigma of illegitimacy. “For a woman to say, ‘I am a writer’ is difficult,” Morrison noted succinctly.

  [“You must have had a hell of a time with Beowulf!” is a better version of the line everyone loves quoting:

  So much contemporary fiction, even when it’s well written, is sort of . . . self-referential. I used to teach creative writing at Princeton and I would say “Don’t do that. Don’t write about your little life.”

  The framing of “your little life” supplies its own context, but your own life being found wanting is not the same as you being found wanting by Beowulf. —Steve]

• In The Dispatch, A. M. Juster on Petrarch:

  Those sins, however, are an integral part of Petrarch’s greatness. His story begins with a traditional infatuation with Laura’s beauty, progresses to an appreciation of her spiritual qualities, then those qualities start drawing him to aspire to become closer to God. That aspiration leads him to the path of relentless self-examination laid out by Saint Augustine in his Confessions, thus one can view Petrarch as the godfather of both the sonnet and the confessional poetry tradition that exploded in the mid-twentieth century with the work of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, John Berryman and many others. Petrarch’s Canzoniere is more than a collection of love poems—it is a record of a long and difficult spiritual journey.

  Despite the beauty of the text’s poems and its contributions to Western poetry, a declining number of people are reading Petrarch, even in our universities’ “great books” programs. There are undoubtedly many reasons for this sad phenomenon, but one factor is that early twentieth-century academic biases have been difficult to overcome. Unwilling in that era to deal with either the sensual or the Catholic, many academics presented Petrarch as a safe and foppish “troubadour” whose praise of Laura was merely courtly cosplay, and translations of that era tended to reflect that interpretation.

  [Juster has a new translation of Petrarch’s lyric poetry coming out in April, which I am very much looking forward to. As with anyone who produces a new translation, he is obligated to be dismissive of earlier attempts; he says of Robert Durling’s literal translation of the Rime Sparse that it “has been extraordinarily helpful to scholars, but no one reads it for pleasure.” The nice thing about Durling’s edition, though, is that it has the Italian on the facing page, and this non-reader of Italian can manage to magic eye it. Perhaps this is closer to scholarship than pleasure, but I like it.

  It would be difficult to imagine a more comprehensive misunderstanding of Petrarch than as a “troubadour.” (Or perhaps a more comprehensive misunderstanding of the troubadours than to think they were engaged in the same thing as Petrarch.) The troubadours were writing songs to, and for, actual women, in the same way that a later generation would pick up the guitar to get chicks. The Petrarchan project is not that; it is more interior, mysterious, self-aware as an artistic enterprise.

  John Freccero, putting Petrarch in conversation with Augustine and determining that he is very consciously committing idolatry, concludes:

  In germ, it suggests that all the fictions of courtly love have their semiotic justifications: the love must be idolatrous for its poetic expression to be autonomous; the idolatry cannot be unconflicted, any more than a sign can be completely nonreferential if it is to communicate anything at all. Spiritual struggle stands for the dialectic of literary creation, somewhere between opaque carnality and transparent transcendency. Finally, it might be suggested that the illicit or even adulterous nature of the passion has its counterpart in the “anxiety of influence”: communication demands that our signs be appropriated; poetic creation often requires that they be stolen. Petrarch’s prodigious originality is that he was entirely self-conscious about the principles of which his predecessors were only dimly aware. By transforming the Augustinian analysis of sin into a new aesthetic, he made self-alienation in life the mark of self-creation in literature and so established a literary tradition that has yet to be exhausted.

  Freccero also notes that Dante’s Beatrice is always pointing beyond herself, like a good Augustinian: “God the Word is at once the end of all desire and the ultimate meaning of all discourse.” “Beatrice” points towards the one doing the blessing; “Laura” points to the empty air—l’aura—and poetic immortality—lauro. Whose laurel is it? Not hers, but Petrarch’s; it points back to him.

  The Rime Sparse is, after a fashion, an extremely lengthy commentary on Catullus 85 (which Petrarch knew):

  I hate and love. Why? You may ask but

  It beats me. I feel it done to me, and ache.

  (Ezra Pound’s translation; I don’t love it but I don’t love any others I know either.) It’s a poem about a woman’s effect on the poet—and it never mentions her at all. —Steve]

  And it has long been the position of the managing editor that Berryman is at his most interesting when most explicitly engaging with Thomas Wyatt and Philip Sidney and, through them, Petrarch. (One such sonnet of Berryman’s was the Poem in WRB—Nov. 26, 2025.) —Steve]

• In Bookforum, interviews A. S. Hamrah:

  Lorentzen: What are the damaging legacies of Entertainment Weekly?

  Hamrah: Consumer guide thinking. Herd mentality. A certain kind of smugness. Slavish interest in famous people in the industry. The hope that someday you’ll maybe be the Toluca Lake bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal entertainment section, and also writing very big, long, thick biographies about famous people in the film industry. Those are the legacies of Entertainment Weekly, which is not weekly anymore, but it’s still called Entertainment Weekly. Yeah, I don’t know why they still call it that. They insist on Entertainment Weekly.

  Lorentzen: That’s the brand.

  Hamrah: Who cares? Nobody cares.

  Lorentzen: The Atlantic got rid of Monthly.

  Hamrah: But what would it be called without Weekly, just Entertainment? That’s not a magazine, it’s a Gang of Four album. So I remember when I really started to dislike Entertainment Weekly as a vehicle for film criticism. It was when I saw a guy I knew had started in zines, and now he was reviewing films for Entertainment Weekly. He gave the Godard film Two or Three Things I Know About Her a B-plus when it came out on VHS. It’s a one-paragraph review of a Godard film from 1967, and it gets a B-plus. That is no way to live.

  [Maybe I should rebrand this thing. “Please. The WRB was my father. Call me Washington.” Or perhaps “Books.” One of those names so obvious you wonder how nobody else claimed it before. Like “Society of Jesus.” —Steve]

  Another note: I don’t know how old I thought Hamrah was, but I was sure it was not old enough to be reading reviews of VHS releases in Entertainment Weekly. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Thames, James Wolcott reviews Updike’s letters (Selected Letters of John Updike, edited by James Schiff, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 18, 2025; we linked to earlier reviews in WRB—Nov. 26, 2025, WRB—Dec. 13, 2025, and WRB—Jan. 14, 2026.]

  The letter continues as Updike makes fifteen additional numbered notes, running through the pad of Hotel Australia stationery helpfully provided by management. Number 15: “My cock is yours—up or limp, your toy and acolyte and (sometimes timid) explorer.” The next letter, composed on the same stationery on the same day, is addressed to his estranged wife, Mary: “In the plane from Honolulu I had to watch The Way We Were (1973) again and found myself crying over the way we were (and are).” What an operator.

  [The Way We Were is a tedious movie that could only have been taken seriously in the mid-’70s, when having mixed feelings about one’s life and conduct was in itself proof of emotional sophistication. All the sex writing in Updike’s letters is awful (Wolcott, like most of the other reviewers, provides the—choicest—excerpts for our delectation), but in its shamelessness at least it isn’t self-congratulatory. —Steve]

• In The New Statesman, reviews George Saunders’ latest novel (Vigil, January) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Jan. 21, 2026.]

  As her erstwhile self, Jill was “limited” in view, “constricted” in pity. “One judged,” she tells us, “one preferred.” None of this is true of “elevation”—or of Chekhov, who, according to Saunders, is unburdened by “a political or moral stance,” remains “open” and “perpetually curious” and used the short story “to move beyond opinions.” Saunders claims that as the reader watches Chekhov doubt all conclusions, we feel “comforted.” At one point, Jill notes that remembering her mortal life “always caused me to become less powerful and effective.” Hearing Tobias Wolff read aloud from a trio of Chekhov stories, Saunders realised that fiction was “the most effective mode of mind-to-mind communication . . . a powerful form of entertainment.” The novel’s heroine is a paragon of wisdom, acceptance and freedom from vanity whose only terrestrial counterpart, with the exception of certain spiritual leaders, is a great fiction writer while at work. In this analogy, Boone—whose own strength has been to make companies “profitable” and “efficient”—is equivalent to a character, whose inner world Jill inhabits, and a reader, beneficiary of comfort and communication.

  [“The most effective mode of mind-to-mind communication” and “a powerful form of entertainment” are rather different things. And who is reading Chekhov to feel comforted? (Cf. on Saunders and other male writers of his generation, as linked to in WRB—Jan. 29, 2025.) —Steve]

N.B.:

• “Two months into what was quickly becoming known as the Great War, the Financial Times asked its readers to predict the impact the conflict would have on the map of Europe. As a game. With cash prizes.” [Should the WRB start running contests? —Steve]

• Götterdämmerung during the Winter Olympics.

• [I don’t have a good place to put it, but I want to give Dan Neil at the Journal some kind of award for opening a review of the new Ford F-250 with this paragraph:

  Russell Crowe’s portrayal of Nazi leader Hermann Göring in the film Nuremberg (2025) is brilliant but incomplete. Little is made of Göring’s outrageous personal style: the power-blue Reichsmarschall’s uniform, the fur-lined capes, the diamond encrusted badges and batons, the face makeup. Göring’s sartorial choices raised suspicions among both the Allies and Nazi high command that he was homosexual.

  Who said the review as public service is dead? —Steve]

• Van Gogh truthers.

• “Constant Sexual Aggression Drives Female Tortoises to Walk Off Cliffs”

• Foucault’s old car.

• New issue: Bookforum Winter 2026 [As linked to above.]

• Robert Duvall died on Sunday, February 15. R.I.P.

• Frederick Wiseman died on Monday, February 16. R.I.P.

Poem:

“Helen of Troy Calls Her Sister” by Maria Zoccola

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

    cly, you remember when it was us and the boys
                     and mom and dad and we all drove up to
                     chincoteague for the summer and the car just
—collapsed—
                     —just broke down, and dad took the hood up
                     and put his head in the engine and hollered
                     for mom to keep turning the key and the sky—
—like fire—
                     —record heat, air-con kaput with the rest
                     and the sun crushing down like a mouthful
                     of lemon peels, like the inside of a deer’s gut—
—and castor wouldn’t—
                     —wouldn’t get out of the car, he was afraid
                     of the snakes, you remember the snakes,
                     buckets of them wiggling around the trees—
—rising up—
                     —leaping up to strike, and i said momma don’t
                     you see what’s happening, but that’s when dad
                     all punked on motor oil snatched up a rock—
—a boulder—
                     —biggest one he could find, and he smashed
                     that thing down on the engine so hard i thought
                     the earth had split, sound like a plane crash—
—like a death—
                     —but damned if that engine didn’t roll right
                     over for him, just spread its legs and purred,
                     and there was nothing sweeter than pulling out—
—past the trucks—
                     —past the men, none of whom had stopped
                     to help, and castor, poor kid, didn’t he throw up?
                     all over the back seat, smelled like milk and rot—
—all the way to virginia—
                     —all the way to the big house, you remember
                     the hurricane? you remember the hydrangeas,
                     how they looked so bright inside the storm?

[Zoccola lays out some more great similes here: “the sun crushing down like a mouthful / of lemon peels, like the inside of a deer’s gut” though my favorite phrase is “dad / all punked on motor oil.” The affection and admiration, still slyly amused; the knowledge of his potential for failure, here blessedly unrealized; and maybe a twinge of fear.

Beyond the standout phrases, this is another poem as conversation—not quite a contrapuntal poem but nearly—located firmly in the States, in the near past, all invention besides the names. The two voices give way to a certain escalation, but also a validation of narrative, a mixed up memory reinforcing itself in sisterhood. It’s the knowledge of the referenced story’s arc that gives the poem its bite. We know how Helen will alter to Clytemnestra’s life, foreshadowed perhaps by Clytemnestra’s interjection — “like a death” and the final image of the hurricane, to which Clytemnestra makes no rejoinder. Helen remembers alone, the flowers, their blinding beauty. —K. T.]

Upcoming books:

Carnegie Mellon University Press | February 19

Killing Orpheus
by Forester McClatchey

From the publisher: A book that holds death in one hand and wonder in the other, Killing Orpheus explores the horror of mortality, the brutality of history, and the gentle miracles of love. Using received forms, especially the sonnet, this collection cycles through various speakers, including an aging Penelope, Frankenstein’s monster, Isaac beneath Abraham’s blade, and an elephant in Hannibal’s army. Here are sprays of flowers and hungry alligators, lethal snakes, and a baby’s first breath. Here are poems that reckon with death, but for the sake of life. Here is a poetic consciousness that shows us we must dare to make “a truce with loss” in order to go “spinning into love’s bizarre abyss.”

Out February 24:

Belt Publishing: The Trouble with Loving Poets and Other Essays on Failure by Elizabeth Zaleski

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: I Give You My Silence: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West

Knopf: The Distance of a Shout: Selected Poems by Michael Ondaatje

What we’re reading:

Steve read a bunch of articles about Petrarch.

Critical notes:

• Charles Lamb on Valentine’s Day (h/t Patrick Kurp):

  In other words, this is the day on which those charming little missives, ycleped Valentines, cross and intercross each other at every street and turning. The weary and all for-spent twopenny postman sinks beneath a load of delicate embarrassments, not his own. It is scarcely credible to what an extent this ephemeral courtship is carried on in this loving town, to the great enrichment of porters, and detriment of knockers and bell-wires. In these little visual interpretations, no emblem is so common as the heart,—that little three-cornered exponent of all our hopes and fears,—the bestuck and bleeding heart; it is twisted and tortured into more allegories and affectations than an opera hat. What authority we have in history or mythology for placing the head-quarters and metropolis of God Cupid in this anatomical seat rather than in any other, is not very clear; but we have got it, and it will serve as well as any other. Else we might easily imagine, upon some other system which might have prevailed for any thing which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, “Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal;” or putting a delicate question, “Amanda, have you a midriff to bestow?” But custom has settled these things, and awarded the seat of sentiment to the aforesaid triangle, while its less fortunate neighbors wait at animal and anatomical distance.

  [As far as I can tell nobody knows why the heart symbol is shaped like that (instead of being a pulsing fist of flesh). And as always I encourage people to send letters in the mail. (Maybe not Updike. But everyone else.) —Steve]

Links:

• In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, Seamus Perry on pluralism and modernism:

  “And” is a conjunction, so one might think there is some purpose in placing it in so awkward a position in lines that are, after all, about discovering a sad disjunction between people. The Friar inquires at the aborted wedding service in Much Ado about Nothing if there is “any inward impediment why you should not be conjoined”; The Waste Land is all about inward impediments to conjoining of one kind or another. Well, okay; but I nurse another thought, which, I admit, is the reason I chose that passage. For the word “and” is a hallmark pluralist word: a thought that is not my own fancy, but what James tells us in the closing lecture of A Pluralistic Universe—“The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence.” And, he might have added, every sentence effectively begins with an “and” as well. Remember the wonderful opening lines of Pound’s Cantos: “And then went down to the ship . . . ” Every sentence in the pluralistic universe enters in on some previous, unfinished business.

  In “And,” an essay collected in Habitations of the Word (1984), William H. Gass writes: “If we were suddenly to speak of the “andness” of things, we would be rather readily understood to refer to that aspect of life which consists of just one damned thing ‘and’ after another.”

  [I recall reading in something about Milton, which I cannot now find, that in his work “or” frequently means, in effect, “and.” (I’m sure one of you will write in with the source; the WRB is Milton Weekly, after all.) I also recall once being given the writing advice that, if you have written “but” to combine two clauses or sentences, you should see if you can replace it with “and,” since they mean basically the same thing and “and” flows better. From this I conclude that there is only one conjunction. —Steve]

• In The Lamp, Jaspreet Singh Boparai on Éric Rohmer’s classicism:

  Rohmer developed his early vision further in his first essay for the Cahiers du cinéma, “Vanité que la peinture,” in which he claimed that cinema was not merely the art form of the future but that the other arts, including literature and painting, were exhausted, and increasingly inadequate in their current form for dealing with reality. He asserted that in breaking off from nature, modern art degraded man, whereas it ought to elevate him. Now that modern art and literature had run out of things to say, and had unsatisfying means of saying them, we should turn to a “classicism” within the cinema.

  According to Rohmer’s provisional definition in 1951, in a classical art, the artist serves the transparency of nature instead of sticking “critically” out of it. Here, for the first time, he spelled out what he saw as the classical virtues: elegance, efficacy, naturalness, and sobriety. Like the French classicist critics of the early twentieth century, Rohmer identified classicism with the capacity to represent, with a detached serenity, the intricate, contradictory obscurities of human beings; he associated it with a sense of measure, of balance, of order, and of unadorned simplicity. Yet instead of building on the precedents of Sophocles, Pheidias, and Aristotle’s Poetics, Rohmer extrapolated his classicism from the films of Howard Hawks and Hitchcock.

  [Rohmer was a subject of Movies across the decades in WRB—May 2023 Film Supplement. (It was a different time; my feelings on Whit Stillman have changed some since then.)

  When Rohmer said all this he had written a novel (coming out in English translation later this year). His suggestion that this novel served as the “matrix” for the Six Moral Tales, then, seems like an indication on his part that the novel did not succeed in depicting life as he wanted, and he needed to use another art form in order to do so. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In the TLS, Thomas Keymer reviews two books about publishing in the eighteenth century (Periodicals, Fiction and the Novel, 1700–1760: Ecologies of Print, by Jennifer Buckley, 2025; and The Novel and the Blank: A Literary History of the Book Trades in Eighteenth-Century British America, by Matthew P. Brown, 2025):

  Among the bracing provocations of The Novel and the Blank is Brown’s insistence that the arrival of print in any given community needn’t change very much. What matters is “the presence of a second printer”—the upstart player whose rivalry ushers in a new world of competition, controversy and contestation. A rich cast of incumbents and insurgents fleshes out the point: Samuel Keimer, Franklin’s “knavish” associate and later adversary, who never lived down his fanatical past with the Camisards, a millenarian sect notorious for their “violent and strange Agitations or Shakings of Body”; George Whitefield, celebrity preacher (and favorite theologian of Fielding’s Shamela), who berated bishops as infidels and idolaters, and wrote an autobiography at the age of twenty-five; Robert Bell of Philadelphia, self-styled “Provedore to the Sentimentalists” and “Professor of BOOK-AUCTIONEERING,” whose wares included everything “Old or new, that is come-at-able, in the American World of Books”; William Goddard, the Rhode Island stationer who invited female customers to send in their underwear, “and he will cause it to be wrought into the finest Paper, so that it may be returned to them in Letters, from kind Correspondents who are abroad.” Goddard may in fact have taken this play from a rare moment of sauciness in Addison’s Spectator.

  [From this review I learned the word “colporteur,” which refers not to a writer of such songs as “I Get a Kick Out Of You” and “Anything Goes” but to “an itinerant hawker of cheap print, especially religious.”

  Really unsure why I gave myself the title “Managing Editor” when I could have gone with “Provedore to the Sentimentalists.” You live and you learn. —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:

• The end of the local Post’s book section, the teachers I owe the most to, and why I put this thing together

• Love in the ruins of the monoculture

• K. T. on a poem by Maria Zoccola and weird 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 Engelsberg Ideas, Alastair Benn on “hyper-literacy”:

  Many modernist novelists sought to impose discipline on the sprawling realism of the Victorian novel. They were intensely aware of the potential risks in doing so. In E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, George describes Lucy Cavendish’s fiancé Cecil as “the sort who are all right so long as they keep to things—books, pictures—but kill when they come to people.” The drama of the novel turns on precisely this fault line. Aesthetic refinement can lead to moral weakness if precision and discernment are used to avoid the messiness of real human encounters. Robert Louis Stevenson, a consummate stylist who nevertheless experienced a persistent sense of inadequacy even after achieving worldwide commercial success, found himself wanting against his forebears—men who had built the first lighthouses along the Scottish coastline: “Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life,” he wrote.

  • Ezra Pound [In arguing that Chaucer is superior to Shakespeare, strangely enough. —Steve]:

    Men do not understand BOOKS until they have had a certain amount of life. Or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. The prejudice against books has grown from observing the stupidity of men who have merely read books.

  • Gilbert Highet:

    The poetry of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound is full of similar abrupt transitions from the present to the distant or mythical past. In The Waste Land, among scenes and speeches from contemporary London, the figures of Tiresias, the old blind seer of Thebes, and Philomela, the ravished princess who became a nightingale, appear several times, in order to add dignity to the modern themes, or perhaps, by contrast, to emphasize the squalor of today. 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. So also the great painters often portrayed the women they loved, not simply as contemporaries in the dress of their time, but as saints, goddesses, nymphs, and madonnas.

    [“The mythical parallels that intensify his experience are a load of crap,” I think my father, Philip Larkin (not actually my father), said. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Thames, reviews a biography of Peter Matthiessen (True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, by Lance Richardson, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 11, 2025.]:

  After the split​ from Patsy, Matthiessen stopped playing at being a fisherman and started freelancing for magazines, turning in pieces that he would then expand into or collect in books. More than twenty of these appeared over fifty years, most of which can be categorized as travel and nature writing, always with a shade of political advocacy. Richardson calls him the New Yorker’s “gentleman naturalist.” The job description no longer exists, certainly not the “gentleman” bit. He ventured into the wilderness with anthropologists, zoologists, oceanographers, paleontologists and occasionally crackpots, a few of whom he threw in with during his decades-long search for Bigfoot, a quest that never yielded what he was looking for but introduced him to the landscapes and people that inspired his books on Native Americans as well as his trilogy of novels about the Everglades. He wrote about auks, cranes, peafowl, gulls, condors, sharks, whales, turtles, crabs, otters, beavers, badgers, bears, wolves, lions, cougars, tigers, wildebeest, elephants and zebras. Air travel was now making travel writing simpler in terms of logistics, but globalization was rendering it both obsolete and politically suspect—however noble Matthiessen’s conservationist intentions. The tendency to romanticize “traditional people” (his preferred term later in life) as noble innocents, especially in their relationship to landscape and wildlife, never quite left him. He was taken to task for it in this paper: “His specialty is to articulate that sense of innocent wonder at the natural world usually assumed to be the prerogative of primitive peoples,” Kathryn Tidrick wrote in the LRB of February 25, 1993. Indeed, innocence, its absence and its possible reclamation is the theme that unifies Matthiessen’s fiction and non-fiction, for better and worse.

  [“We are stardust, we are golden / And we’ve got to get back to innocence, its absence, and its possible reclamation,” I think Joni Mitchell said. And hanging out with “traditional people” to get your innocent wonder at the natural world is like going to a restaurant because you can’t cook the dish yourself. Fishermen don’t have an innocent wonder at the natural world anyway. Especially not the ones who do it for a living. —Steve]

• Two in Literary Review:

  • First, Felicity Brown reviews a book about love (In Love With Love: The Persistence and Joy of Romantic Fiction, by Ella Risbridger, 2025 in the UK):

    Risbridger’s self-proclaimed resistance to serious scrutiny of her subject reads as more defensive than liberating. George Eliot’s essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” is not an example of cool-girl disdain for the genre, as is implied. It is a playful polemic on the ethical demands of fiction in a gendered marketplace. And Austen’s novels—on the page as opposed to the screen—do not float along on fond feelings, but are propelled by a ferocious satirical intelligence. Irony is not a rejection of love, nor is expertise. They are its conditions: ways of ensuring that attachment is earned rather than merely asserted. To mistake critique for contempt, as Risbridger repeatedly does, is to underestimate quite how robust romance can afford to be, in literature as in life.

    [“What has romantic fiction to do with love?” I think Tertullian said. (“Fiction” is in the name! “None of it really happened, it’s all made up by the author.”) Critique is not identical to contempt, but I would go further: critique is not even necessarily negative. Being a critic, like being a lover, is to choose a particular way of being in the world, a way of orienting oneself towards the other things in it. For me, at least, it’s basically the same—wanting to understand, whether it’s the lover or the world (each of which reflect the other.) . —Steve]

  • Second, Jonathan Keates reviews a collection of essays by Patrick McGuinness (Ghost Stations: Essays and Branchlines, 2025 in the UK):

    Movement, for McGuinness, paradoxically implies a chance to find balance and stillness where the rest of us grow fretful, muddled or merely exhausted. Throughout this collection of essays and sketches the railway station takes on a positively numinous significance, linked to the author’s absorption with worlds in a state of flux. “Anything on the spectrum of terminality, from the freshly stricken to the fully decomposed, interests me,” he tells a journal interviewer. “I think things reach their apogee just as they’re about to collapse.” He likes crossings, bridges and hinterlands, a world of becoming as opposed to just being.

    [“The owl of Minerva flies just as things are about to collapse,” I think Hegel said. “In the railway station the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo,” I think T. S. Eliot said. Having spent more hours in my life than I care to recall in railway stations due to the vagaries of Amtrak, I think the idea of them as being places in flux is precisely wrong. People pass in and out of them; they remain the same. You might as well say a dentist’s waiting room is a place in flux. It’s the trains themselves where things change. —Steve]

• In the Literary Review of Canada, reviews a verse novel by Daniel Cowper (Kingdom of the Clock, 2025):

  At the same time, Cowper offers the sensuous pleasures and insights of verse. His metaphors fuse nature, technology, and human life: a nervous mother’s “thumbnails click / her fingernails like a sequence of switches.” Elsewhere, he harmonizes the city’s sounds through internal rhyme and assonance. At breakfast, “toasters ding when their springs release,  // bowls flecked with cereal clink in sinks / and seagulls keen.”

  Cowper has a gift for arresting images that also develop the story. As the sun rises, Connor eats breakfast at his window, looking at “his bleary, slowly self-erasing / likeness on the glass.” It is a perfect snapshot of a man who has already lost himself. A bus drives by “glittering sheets of condo curtain wall // that show, like screensavers, gliding icons / of innumerable gulls.” The suggestion might be that the people inside those condos have become machinery as well. Visual motifs echo one another, adding more beams to the poem’s structural frame. In one scene, Viró throws a cigarette filter from her bedroom and “watches it flitter // like a de‑winged moth” into the alley below. The moment is told in slow motion, so it can seep in. Many things in the book will follow that falling arc.

• In The New Yorker, Katy Waldman reviews Daniel Poppick’s new novel (The Copywriter, February 3) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Jan. 28, 2026.]:

  Like all believers, D__ must also grapple with the problem of doubt. How do you keep something alive when you’re not sure what it is or if it even exists? Poetry makes nothing happen, poets like to intone. In The Copywriter, D__ experiences his art as invisible, ineffable, lacking the numerical markers of value possessed by, say, a commercially successful novel or a viral social-media post. He writes Lucy an anniversary pantoum; she breaks up with him anyway. He writes a eulogy for Ashbery, and the guy’s still dead. (Given his friend group’s protracted mourning period, it’s unclear that he can raise any spirits at all.) At one point, he buys his twenty-four-year-old boss a used copy of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde, passing it off as a cherished keepsake. He explains that the text reenchants online shopping, revealing the “invisible webs of relationality” behind digital transactions; it’s a naked attempt to keep his job. The ploy fails, delaying but not averting D__’s scheduled termination. Poetry, he concludes, is “labor’s ash.”

  [Do poets really like to intone “poetry makes nothing happen,” or do they do so because whatever the ancient connection between poetry and magic was has been lost? (Maybe the wave of poets experimenting with writing novels should instead experiment with rhyming rats to death.) Maybe Yeats knew it, or at least wanted to seem like he did. Auden didn’t, hence the line. —Steve]

N.B.:

• on Homer’s “wine-dark sea”: “The perhaps over-obvious explanation (Homer was blind, and didn’t know shit about colors) does not seem to have been part of the critical debate.” [Imagine a world where οἶνοψ πόντος went over like “bag of sand” in The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005). This would, however, deprive me of substituting in “wine-dark” for metrically identical descriptions of the sea. My favorite is in “Nova Scotia Farewell”: “For a poor simple sailor just like me / Must be tossed and driven on the wine-dark sea.” (Perhaps the Mediterranean is wine-dark—I don’t think the North Atlantic is.) —Steve]

• The lack of trash cans in Japan.

• Epistolary novels and love letters. [“Every thinkpiece about epistolary novels that is written and every thinkpiece about love letters written signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who are lonely and not consoled,” I think Dwight Eisenhower said. —Steve]

• New issues:

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

  • Literary Review of Canada March 2026 [As linked to above.]

  • The London Magazine February/March 2026 [As linked to below. Can somebody please figure out what month it is? Thank you. —Steve]

  • n+1 Issue 52

  • The Point Winter 2026 | Issue 36

Poem:

“helen of troy on the affair (vii)” by Maria Zoccola

Musée National Gustave Moreau: Helen at the Scaean Gate, Gustave Moreau

on the night i knew was our last, we sat down to a feast
in the smoking section of the perkins beside the city walls,
which differed from the perkins in my town only in the number
of dead men who ate there. the air con was running pretty good,
stiffing up the hair on my shins and souping the windows
thick enough to hide what the sky was doing outside,
a mean mess of clouds tinting themselves yellow and gray
and yellow again, galloping above a world pre-flinched
for its next bruising. he lit a cigarette and passed it to me,
which was a new thing i was doing, another small light
flashing frenetically in the background. i was so hungry
in my body. i wanted more than the glut on the laminated menu,
identical in every offering to the one at the perkins back home,
the same meals exhumed from a walk-in’s dark freeze.
columns of smoke rose from every table. the booth heaved
with plates of grease and blood. when the hail began
at last to hurl itself downward, it struck against
the wood paneling with a hollow call i felt in my belly,
a pounding that signaled the end of what we were eating,
whatever it was we were putting in our mouths.

[Like Sebree, Zoccola has written a collection of persona poems. Hers is a reimagining of Helen of Troy, set in 1993, often in conversation with other works referencing the Iliad, such as Helen at the Scaean Gate.

I like what this poem is doing with verbs: “stiffing up the hair on my shins and souping the windows”, “galloping above a world pre-flinched for its next bruising,” “hail began at last to hurl itself downward.” I enjoyed less the choices made in “the booth heaved with plates of grease and blood” or “clouds tinting themselves” but those are the exceptions. In each instance, even the less successful, Zoccala’s pairing of active verbs with inanimate objects gave a sense of unreality to the poem, adding texture to its aura of malaise. And, while it might be because the story here is so well known to me, I was nonetheless impressed by how effectively this poem was able to capture that story—yet make it a little new. Helen of Troy, whose new thing is cigarettes, knows the boredom of sameness, that the menu has never been good and will never change. —K. T.]

Upcoming books:

Pantheon | February 10

The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief
by Richard Holmes

From the publisher: Tennyson rose to eminence as rapid and revolutionary discoveries were being made in the fields of biology, astronomy, geology, and marine science. It was a period of immense change akin to our own. For the first time, people were pursuing answers to questions that had felt previously unknowable—about biological evolution, the notion of a godless, unpitying universe, and of planetary extinction. These were as terrifying to Tennyson as climate catastrophe is to us today. It forced many to grapple with their understanding of the known world and their place within it and fostered a growing tension between religion and science.

Tennyson’s work during these years is suffused with strangely modern magic, and in Holmes’ extraordinary biography, we witness Tennyson wrestling with mind-altering ideas about geology and deep time, the vastness, beauty, and terror of the new cosmology, and the challenges of social revolution. Tennyson’s wild imagination and deep engagement with these concepts helped him emerge as the poetic voice of his generation—and he remains an inspiration for our own age.

[We linked to a profile of Holmes in WRB—Sept. 27, 2025. You can find my abortive career as a rapper by looking up “Young Tennyson.” —Steve]

Also out Tuesday:

Archipelago: A Parish Chronicle by Halldór Laxness, translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton

Celadon Books: The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema by Paul Fischer

Duke University Press: Ocean, as Much as Rain: Stories, Lyrical Prose, and Poems from Tibet by Tsering Woeser, edited and translated from the Tibetan by Fiona Sze-Lorrain and Dechen Pemba

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Frog: And Other Essays by Anne Fadiman

Out Wednesday:

University of Michigan Press: Robert Altman’s “Nashville”: An Archival Exploration by Justin Wyatt

What we’re reading:

Steve didn’t really read anything. [Sorry. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• In The London Magazine, Zoe Guttenplan on style as message:

  Publicity budgets have been slashed and authors are often expected to promote not just their books but themselves on social media. Surely related is the fact that, despite some claims to the contrary, the first-person essay still dominates the glossy and pixellated pages of periodicals. In 1946, George Orwell proposed that “one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality.” But personality is the hottest commodity on the internet.

  Orwell’s next sentence is one of his most famous lines: “Good prose is like a windowpane.” Like Warde before him, he saw his craft as best when invisible, when it doesn’t get in the way of the real meat: the idea, or the truth, depending on how worthy you’re feeling. It’s possible he was influenced in this by the radical writer William Hazlitt, who, a little over two centuries prior, wrote “On the Prose Style of Poets.” Hazlitt claims that poets’ writing is often too concerned with beauty to arrive at truth. In good prose, he contends, “nothing can be admitted by way of ornament or relief that does not add new force or clearness to the original conception.” Here, too, extraneous decoration is the enemy. Clarity is the goal.

  [In the first line Guttenplan quotes, Orwell is cribbing T. S. Eliot:

  In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

  “One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality” is, more or less, “In fact, the bad writer is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious.” (“In fact, the bad editor is running personal essays that he ought to kill”?) Personality is pretty easily changed into content, but art requires a bit more craft. —Steve]

• Moul on compasses (both kinds) in seventeenth-century poetry:

  Moreover, Borough’s image, though clearly of a navigational compass, seems to be slightly infected by or mixed up with the much better-established poetic image of the mathematical compass. Line 5—“Yet doth the constant compasse quiet stand,” surely the best single line of the poem—draws on the contrast between constancy or fixity on the one hand and movement on the other (“the moving barke”) which is the standard set of associations with the mathematical compass, as we saw in Jonson’s poem.

  One other element similarly seems to fit the mathematical compass better than the navigational one, and that’s Borough’s striking phrase “howe’er . . . my forked body move.” I thought immediately of Shakespeare again, especially King Lear (“unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art”). A person is “forked” because he or she has two legs. But when you think about it, the image of the “fork” of a man’s legs works much better for a mathematical compass—the prongs of which are indeed often described as “legs” or “feet”—than it does for a navigational compass, the needle of which is a straight, not forked, piece of metal.

  [The most famous compass in English poetry, I think, is Donne’s:

  Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

  If they be two, they are two so
  As stiff twin compasses are two;
  Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
  To move, but doth, if the other do.
  
  And though it in the center sit,
  Yet when the other far doth roam,
  It leans and hearkens after it,
  And grows erect, as that comes home.
  
  Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
  Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
  Thy firmness makes my circle just,
  And makes me end where I begun.

  There is motion here, but motion in the service of constancy; so that the poet’s foot of the compass returns to where it started, the other “leans and hearkens after it.” And there is also constancy in the service of motion; both legs of the compass are “stiff,” and the last two lines explain that this stiffness is necessary to make a circle. What at first seems opposed is revealed to be unified. The stanza before this conceit, employing a frankly even stranger conceit, works similarly:

  Our two souls therefore, which are one,

  Though I must go, endure not yet

  A breach, but an expansion,

  Like gold to airy thinness beat.

  Just as the compass is both moving and constant, the two souls are both separated and united. In fact, their seeming separation creates a broader unity than was previously possible, like the gold that becomes impossibly thin in order to spread out—“not yet / A breach, but an expansion.” —Steve]