Links:

Reviews:

• In Literary Review of Canada, reviews a novel by Susannah M. Smith (The Alchemy of Paradise, May):

  These are not spoilers. The plot serves merely as an occasion for short, essayistic meditations on collecting, transforming, and creating. All the characters, including the narrator, resemble mythic figures rather than real people—and they all sound the same. They live in a fantasy version of Europe and suffer absolutely no money worries. Luckily, Smith gives her readers a clue about how to approach her work at the beginning. “What if a book could be an elegant sheltering structure?” she writes. “What if a book could be a protective place? An enclosure, a garment, a building for the self.”

  The reader is thus invited to move through the lush space Smith has created, collecting material for their own “process of transforming what is dense and heavy into what is clarified and bright.” I read the book twice and flipped through it several times more. What I found was glimpses of my younger self. Take, for example, the curator’s description of falling in love with her older, knowing husband: “When I thought about him, I could feel myself hook into something larger than my own perception, as if I were standing on a high hill looking out over a vast landscape.” This sensation was precisely what I felt when I took my first English course at the University of Toronto—and what moved me to dedicate my life to literature.

  [Many books are enclosures and garments and buildings for the self. Personally, I like living in books. That’s why I manage to edit the WRB. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, Andrew O’Hagan reviews a biography of Anita Brookner (Anita Brookner: Art and Life, by Hermione Lee, November 17):

  There are parts of the story, of course, that only the novels can take up, the business of daily life being a process of deliberate omission for someone like Brookner. Even friends, who are fairly celebrated in this book, could be omitted when it suited her, and it caused some of them more pain than Lee finds herself willing to record. Shyness, embarrassment, reticence: they can be a form of aggression with some people, and, whatever regrets she had, Brookner preferred the world her way, which is the reason that the terrifying self-encirclement of her best characters is so completely authentic. She had an almost anorectic understanding of her own desire and the powers involved in containing it.

• In our sister publication on the Cuyahoga, Lucas Jorgensen reviews a book of poems by Forester McClatchey (Killing Orpheus, February) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Feb. 18, 2026.]

  The texts—the classics, what we would identify more with the scriptures—cast doubts on truth and knowledge (which is, in their own way, a part of the knowledge these texts impart). As McClatchey writes in “Wringing Lilies from the Acorn,” “Books are packed / with autumn answers, crispy, rotten things.” Meanwhile, in a poem like “Adam’s Task,” the ineffable truths contained in the natural world are celebrated: “Before he named the world, Adam heard / the whorled language of fern.” That is, the natural world communicated purely until Adam named it, cementing it in language. As stated more directly at the end of the poem, “He owned it now. The songs / of birds were passionless. Cold quiet soaked / the woods. He begged the trees. Now nothing spoke.” By putting the natural world into language, so the collection argues, we put it into the same realm as the classical texts that we return to—and thereby they require more skepticism, a separation between the natural truth and its written facsimile.

  [“Wringing Lilies from the Acorn” is a reference to Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, which, if it doesn’t quite argue that books are full of “rotten things,” portrays a man who has gotten so wrapped up in books that he fails as both a person and a poet. He cannot see things for what they are, instead reducing everything into artistic comparisons:

  The sleek head emerges

  From the gold-yellow frock

  As Anadyomene in the opening

  Pages of Reinach.

  Better poetry, then, requires almost an abjuration of poetry, or at least a deep awareness of its limitations. —Steve]

• In the Wall Street Journal, Timothy Farrington reviews a book about philately (The Madman’s Guide to Stamp Collecting, by Robert Irwin, June):

  Stamps, Irwin observes, are also a potent device for plot advancement, being “like heroin or cocaine in that a stamp collection can be low in bulk but high in value and therefore something to be smuggled and fought over.” Louise Erdrich’s “weirdly and intricately plotted” novel The Plague of Doves (2008), he writes, features a morbid collector who specializes in “mail damaged in . . . floods, fires or air crashes, but then sent on.” (Such enthusiasts really exist, he notes.) The collector eventually descends into stamp forgery before killing himself over the careless destruction of a rare collectable.

  By the end, the hyperbolic term “madman” seems like an understatement for Irwin’s subjects, many of whom are, at a minimum, fantasists. Abdurrahman Bruce Alfonso de Bourbon Condé, born Bruce Chalmers in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., imagined himself the descendant of French royalty and talked himself into a job as head of the Yemeni philatelic office in the 1950s, having been a boyhood pen pal of King Muhammad al-Badr. (Their correspondence started with a request for stamps.) After an antiroyal uprising, Condé ended up in exile, where he supported himself by writing for stamp magazines.

  [I’d like to link a stamp magazine in the WRB one of these days. It’ll have to make up for failing to get the WRB royal patronage by sending off requests for stamps as a boy and letting things go from there. —Steve]

N.B.:

• Malls are back, maybe.

• Nassau County before the suburbs.

• New issues:

  • The Drift Issue Eighteen

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

  • The Paris Review No. 257 | Fall 2026

Poem:

“The Boston Evening Transcript” by T. S. Eliot

The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript
Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.

When evening quickens faintly in the street,
Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,
I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
If the street were time and he at the end of the street,
And I say, “Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript.”

[In a blog post from a couple years ago, Geoffrey Ross takes on the question of whether when Eliot says “corn” he means maize or wheat and comes down on the side of wheat, mostly because wheat actually sways in the wind. Maize stalks are too rigid for that. I had not previously considered this possibility—as an American I read “corn” and think maize. (I assume I am not alone in encountering my first reference to the Corn Laws somewhere and wondering why maize was such a big deal in nineteenth-century Britain.) The poem is set in an American context too, and it was published in Poetry, an American magazine. For all that, I think Ross is right. The image is nonsensical otherwise.

Ross notes that, at the time this poem was published, Eliot had lived in England for over a year (I’m not sure exactly when it was written). Perhaps he had adapted his use of “corn” in general—but a poem, unlike a spoken remark upon seeing the stuff, has a deeper level of intentionality to it. The poem amounts to a kiss-off to Boston, the Boston Eliot would have known and lived in; insulting it further by opening a poem about its miserable conformity with an image it will fail to understand is another layer of disrespect.

Ross goes on to describe the poem (hinging on the reference to “Cousin Harriet”) as a “very specifically sexist satire of women” in the tradition of “Prufrock” and its “the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo,” but in its screaming hatred of the middlebrow it reminds me most of one of Eliot’s “London Letters” on the death of Marie Lloyd, a music-hall star:

The middle classes have no such idol: the middle classes are morally corrupt. That is to say, it is themselves and their own life which find no expression in such a person as Marie Lloyd: nor have they any independent virtues as a class which might give them as a conscious class any dignity.

And this last has nothing to do with “The Boston Evening Transcript,” but as I read through the piece on Lloyd to pull the quote above I was reminded that Eliot has this to say about the cinema:

The working-man who went to the music-hall and saw Marie Lloyd and joined in the chorus was himself performing part of the work of acting; he was engaged in that collaboration of the audience with the artist which is necessary in all art and most obviously in dramatic art. He will now go to the cinema, where his mind is lulled by continuous senseless music and continuous action too rapid for the brain to act upon, and he will receive, without giving, in that same listless apathy with which the middle and upper classes regard any entertainment of the nature of art.

Arguments along this line about the passivity of watching movies are back in the (well, relatively) popular imagination due to David Thomson’s new book, but this is the earliest instance of it I know. That Eliot’s main point of comparison is not reading but dramatic art is not an approach that current versions of this argument would take up, though. —Steve]

Upcoming books:

Out Saturday:

Pennyworth Publishing: Music and the Destruction of Music by Donald Antenen

University of Chicago Press | September 21

The Storytellers: Reading the Masterpieces of Nineteenth-Century Short Fiction
by Michael Gorra

From the publisher: The Storytellers offers a far-reaching account of the rich tradition of short narratives that flourished in nineteenth-century Europe and America, one that both prepared for and eventually gave way to the modern short story. Tracing unexpected resemblances across languages and decades, Michael Gorra restores a wide-angle view of the form in which works usually treated as stand-alone classics reveal themselves as parts of a single, lively conversation.

What unites these tales, Gorra argues, is their blend of novelty and unity. The book’s heart lies in a series of accessible readings of great tales by Herman Melville, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Guy de Maupassant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, and many more. Beyond its consideration of individual works, The Storytellers examines the formal and thematic concerns that bind the century together: the use of frame tales, accounts of social marginality, and an abundance of ghosts and uncanny coincidences. Over time, Gorra shows, these qualities yielded to a cooler realism, with Anton Chekhov as the key transitional figure. His compressed studies of ordinary lives inspired the modern short story and consigned the gothic flourishes of earlier tales to genre fiction.

What do we want from a story? What makes a tale worth telling? The nineteenth-century tale sought not the grand “meaning of life” promised by the novel, Gorra shows, but sudden revelations from singular events. The Storytellers gives readers an incomparable guide to a vast body of tales that still has the power to thrill and entertain.

Out Tuesday:

Da Capo: Rock*: A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music by Chuck Klosterman

W. W. Norton & Company: The Unbecoming: Poems by Kathy Fagan

Yale University Press: A Death of One’s Own: Reflections on Mortality by Terry Eagleton [We linked to an excerpt in WRB—Aug. 12, 2026.]

What we’re reading:

Steve read The Boxer by Gabriele Tinti (translated from the Italian by David Graham and Nicholas Benson, September 15). [The book is a series of short poems from the perspective of the Boxer at Rest, a Hellenistic bronze now on display in Rome. He speaks as both the boxer the sculpture depicts and the sculpture itself (“I can’t hear what you’re saying. My face is made of bronze, can’t you see?”). The confrontational approach demanded of a boxer in his work (“give me two more rounds // —you scream / Heads up, // gloves to the heart!”) becomes the confrontational approach of art itself to its audience, and even to the artist who made it:

You started to follow me

as if I were an ancient relic to worship.
Well, here I am, posed in this bronze,

worn down by the poison of an old deception,
relentlessly hounded by an obscene conceit.

There is an aggressiveness to this that borders on contempt:

He is on his feet again.
He asks for no mercy.

He seeks only a little truth,
a new wound.

The opponent—whether the other fighter in the ring or the observer in a museum—thinks they want “no mercy,” but they don’t actually want that; the boxer’s job is to give it to them anyway. (The influence of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” and its “you must change your life,” while prevalent throughout, is clearest here.) In contrast, the boxer has, through being depicted in art, achieved transcendence:

and everything
is splendor
in the place I am
everything
is calm
and rapture
and pleasure
everything
is love

“Everything / is splendor”; only from this position can the boxer carry out his work as art. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• Moul on spring in twelfth-century poetry:

  The twelfth century saw a particular flowering of Latin verse in which old themes were handled with a new spirit and in increasingly perfected new forms, with a particular kind of self-conscious pleasure in the play of word upon word and something like a characteristic mood, which Waddell describes with typical eloquence and great romance as “the eternal April of the heart.”

  The creative ferment of twelfth-century Europe was centred upon France; but at the same time, far off in the eastern part of India, Jayadeva wrote a great poem which works upon Sanskrit something not entirely dissimilar to the alchemy worked on Latin by the greatest medieval verse—and it too is about love in the springtime.

  [The twelfth-century Latin poets built much of the plane out of the Song of Songs. These lines are from Carmina Burana 143:

  Iam liquescit

  et decrescit

  grando, nix et cetera;

  bruma fugit,

  et iam sugit

  veris tellus ubera.

  (“Now hail, snow, and the rest melt and go away; winter flees, and now the earth sucks at the breasts of spring.”) It amounts to a versification of Song of Songs 2:11-12 (“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth”). And it shares with the Song of Songs a simplicity and an infectious eagerness that prevents the reader, or listener, in the moment from remembering that Horace wrote some poems about spring that come to melancholy conclusions. The most famous even opens by saying that the snow has fled (diffugere nives), and yet the feeling is so different that it doesn’t immediately suggest itself as an intertext. —Steve]

• on William McGonagall’s “The Tay Bridge Disaster”:

  You would think, reading this, that McGonagall had never marked a solemn occasion before. But you’d be wrong. [“The Burial of the Rev. George Gilfillan”], for example, is a thoroughly pedestrian elegy, with nothing to make it stick in the memory, and nothing to offend. Read around in the man’s catalogue; you are always getting an arrangement of cliches, but rarely, outside “Tay Bridge,” are they so precisely the wrong cliches for the occasion. Writing about Greenland, he gives us “churches of ice, and houses glittering like glass”; the calving of a glacier makes a noise like “big guns.” Cliches, but the ones we expect. (The use of “nice” as a line ending in that poem does yield a little hint of the anti-genius he’ll show throughout “Silvery Tay.”) His “Little Matchstick Girl,” about an underage matchstick hawker frozen to death, is tasteful and decorous in its unoriginality: the girl is so poor she hasn’t proper shoes; she is covered with snow; now she’s with Jesus. Nothing about the poem surprises. It is the poetic equivalent of showing up to a funeral in a dark suit and saying “What a shame. I’m so sorry for your loss.” Whereas the images in “Tay Bridge Disaster” are the poetic equivalent of showing up to a funeral wearing your three loud ties, one on top of the other, and accentuating your crying with the blast of an airhorn.

  [Christman is too nice about McGonagall’s other work. None of it is as funny as the last stanza of “The Tay Bridge Disaster,” but the bathos there of over-explaining everything is not unique. Consider this from “The Burial of the Rev. George Gilfillan”:

  I’m sure he will be greatly missed by the poor,

  For he never turned them empty-handed away from his door;

  And to assist them in distress it didn’t give him pain,

  The second and third lines hardly add any new information to the first, but McGonagall puts them there anyway lest the reader miss his point. The inverted word order in the third line reminds me of a line from Roger Ebert’s review of Battlefield Earth (2000): “The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why.” McGonagall has learned from better poems that poets sometimes invert standard word order, but he has not learned why. Most of McGonagall’s awkward inversions are transparently motivated by getting the rhyme, but this one isn’t even necessary for that (“And to assist them in distress didn’t give him pain” works as well, or as poorly, metrically)—he’s just doing it for love of the game.

  Later, the poem ends like so:

  Then took one last fond look, and in sorrow did leave;

  And all the people left with sad hearts that day,

  And that ended the Gilfillan burial in the Hill o’ Balgay.

  Yes, it is my experience that everyone leaving signals the end of an event.

  Christman also identifies in “’Twas about seven o’clock at night” that McGonagall is caught between the poem and the newspaper article:

  We expect both poems and newspapers to be precise about time, though the poem might do so in one way—giving you descriptively and atmospherically the 6:58PM darkness rather than 6:49PM darkness—and the newspaper another (“The disaster occurred at 6:58PM”). McGonagall disclaims both sorts of precision.

  The funniest way this shows up is at the end of the poem, when McGonagall introduces the figures of “many sensible men.” It’s as if he’s writing a mediocre op-ed and wants to introduce an idea without either being bold enough to claim it as his own or diligent enough to do some research and find the name of someone who is saying it. He does similar things in other poems, as in these lines from “The Battle of Tel-el-Kebir”:

  Arabi’s army was about seventy thousand in all,

  And, virtually speaking, it wasn’t very small;

  The second line adds nothing to the first, and what is “virtually speaking” doing there? There have been many bad poets; McGonagall’s anti-genius is to be a poet who believes that poems are op-eds that rhyme.

  I should say that I appear in this piece as a reader who “will gather in the comments to kick numbers in my face” in response to any incorrect discussion of scansion. It’s good to have a brand, I guess—I get asked about scansion a lot, or at least more than I assume most people are. I never have any idea what to say when asked about it; a friend once asked me how to write verse in a specific meter and I eventually stammered out something like “uhhhhhh you just hear it?” How you train yourself to hear it I don’t really know. (We should certainly make children in elementary schools scan poetry, though. That and play musical instruments.) But you have to learn to hear it somehow. As Ezra Pound says, almost at the start of ABC of Reading:

  The author’s conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

  —Steve]

Links:

• In The Hedgehog Review, Alan Jacobs on Pauline Kael:

  That is to say: Kael was “always shifting our attention to the drama of her thought processes” because she was writing “a single long, indirect, and utterly original kind of autobiography.” And because she was an American of her generation, that autobiography could be told only through the experience of movies. One should think of her millions of words of movie reviews not as movie reviews but rather as chapters in her own story. Schickel says that “in a sense, she practiced criticism in much the same way that audiences leaving the theater after a film practice it. ‘I liked it,’ we say, or ‘I hated it.’” He means this point as a critique; it is better seen as the key to her importance as an autobiographer.

  What Kael’s autobiography centers on, I argue, is mixed emotions—a confused and ultimately irresolvable complex of responses to the story that the movies present to us—the story about our lives, especially as Americans, but really as citizens, or inmates, of the twentieth century. John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) she wrote, is “a mixture of reverie and reverence about the American past that made the picture seem almost folk art; we wanted to believe in it even if we didn’t.” Wanting to believe but not quite believing; questioning and doubting and yet also affirming and celebrating—this is Kael’s constant experience of the movies, and of being an American. The two experiences are, effectively, one. And now that her weekly schedule, and in many cases the movies she wrote about, have receded safely into the past, we have a chance to see her real achievement and value it for what it is.

  [Later in the piece Jacobs discusses Kael’s praise of Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War (1989), from which I suddenly understood Kael’s love of De Palma and the New Hollywood more generally. These are filmmakers who, like her, grew up on movies and think about everything in terms of movies. De Palma is just the most obvious and unsubtle about it; all those fantasias on a theme by Hitchcock demonstrate that Hitchcock’s works are for him the central texts in understanding obsession, desire, the movie camera, and probably sight itself. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, Anne Carson goes to a Rosalía concert:

  At the same time, it’s hard to imagine a Rosalía performance without the video. If you were seated in the upper reaches of the basketball arena you would see Rosalía and her dancers as nothing but a tiny diagram of bodies way, way, way down on the stage—it might as well be the fifth century B.C. and the Theatre of Dionysos in Athens, where the dramatic action took place in view of probably fifteen to sixteen thousand spectators all peering down at a small central orkhestra. But those ancient actors wore masks. They were intended mythically. They had no personal faces. Rosalía’s face is projected six feet high behind her all the time. As the spectators in front of me remain standing, I mostly watch her on video. Her face, her theatre, her palimpsest of bad love. Emotional opulences flood across it, mythic in a technological way. I confess, saturating myself in the video like this feels a little uncommitted. Is there something too easy about video? As a form of attention? I don’t have to work for it. And I wanted to work for it, I wanted to work for her, to match her heroism.

  We require heroism of our entertainers. We want them sacrificing themselves to a certain ultimate degree of input. No one can sing this loud, and yet she does. No one can dance this hard and long, but she goes on. No one can survive being this intensely cherished, but it is we who are wrung out like sponges watching her, hearts pounding, slightly afraid of what’s next.

  [The heroism we want is the heroism of surviving our cherishing; we demand everything from them, and then we demand they be worthy of it as they endure it.

  Not that they ever are, and not that it ever helps them if they recognize the situation—and not that we understand them any better for their efforts. Elvis has been dead for almost a half-century now; his rock and roll from the ’50s, which is mostly of interest for its historical importance, still overshadows his far more essential ’70s period, when all the kitsch and goofiness and Vegas lounge stuff both obscure and manifest his endless desire to give the audience what they want, to give them as much of himself as he could. (As an interpreter of ballads he might not have an equal.) To listen to it now, with the benefit of hindsight, is to be wrung out like a sponge knowing what’s next.

  For all its faults, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (2022) got this—got it so well that it cribs the scene from Amadeus where a dying Mozart dictates his Confutatis to a Salieri who can’t believe what he’s hearing and has Elvis invent the intro to his ’70s live performances of “That’s All Right” as he is teaching it to his band members. Elvis is not, in that moment, dying; but the parallel is too obvious to miss. —Steve]

• Two in Portico; first, Sam Sacks on Machado de Assis:

  Death does inspire a liberating indifference to protocol, however, and the hallmarks of Cubas’ storytelling are frankness and distractibility. Cubas constantly audits his own writing, pointing out its failures. (One chapter reads in its entirety: “But, unless I am much mistaken, I have just written an utterly pointless chapter.”) At the same time, he browbeats his putative reading public, whom he says demands facile, plot-driven novels and is too frivolous to appreciate his meandering and digressive approach. Those digressions occasion some of the funniest moments. Cubas interpolates whatever pops into his head, be it a dream or random memory, a platitude, a complaint, or a curtailed observation. “I’ll say only that the most upstanding man I ever knew was a certain Jacó Medeiros or Jacó Valadares; I can’t quite remember his name,” Cubas notes. “Perhaps it was Jacó Rodrigues. In any event, Jacó.”

  The novel is founded on a sardonic subversion, as it tries to fob off a fatuous life as a grand one, worthy of a memoir in the heroic manner of Benvenuto Cellini or François-René de Chateaubriand. That Cubas’ attempt is so hapless, and therefore so recognizably human, adds to the dark humor. Machado presents the book’s ironic premise with a knowing grin—he tests the proposition that irony can be deployed ironically. In the final chapter, Cubas concludes that his signal greatness was an act of omission: He never had children and thereby rescued another generation from the misery of existence.

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

• A Poem by Kingsley Amis and making fun of other poets

• Richard Yates writes an amazing (I mean that pejoratively) sentence in a letter

• Short stories in song

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 Magazine, Parul Sehgal on Rachel Cusk:

  I once heard Cusk speak in Paris, at the sort of literary event she is famous for skewering—those parades of authorly self-commodification. She spoke haltingly, weighing her words, and then suddenly veered off, into an odd tangent. She envied those who perform menial work. Bus drivers, for example. Imagine the simplicity of those lives, I recall her saying—“to go home and be done with work for the day.”

  I copied down her words, marveling at the condescension. She had lost the room and seemed to know it. She vaped discreetly and slumped a little in her chair. “Life hasn’t been very fun for me.”

  The unheralded martyrdom of the novelist! To understand Cusk and her relationship with criticism requires little in the way of literary detective work. She is one of those writers invested in her own mythology, and often truthful about her motivations. For Cusk, a writer is someone trapped in childhood, trying to see its truth.

  • John Stuart Mill:

    Passing now from childhood, and from the childhood of society, to the grown-up men and women of this most grown-up and unchild-like age, the minds and hearts of greatest depth and elevation are commonly those which take greatest delight in poetry: the shallowest and emptiest, on the contrary, are, at all events, not those least addicted to novel-reading. . . . The most idle and frivolous persons take a natural delight in fictitious narrative: the excitement it affords, is of the kind which comes from without. Such persons are rarely lovers of poetry, though they may fancy themselves so because they relish novels in verse. But poetry, which is the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion, is interesting only to those to whom it recalls what they have felt, or whose imagination it stirs up to conceive what they could feel, or what they might have been able to feel, had their outward circumstances been different.

• In New Left Review, Mao Jian on the current state of Chinese culture:

  Such criticisms are understandable, and not without merit. Yet it would be a mistake for cultural theorists to dismiss outright new forms that are entrancing hundreds of millions of China’s citizens. Moreover, as we shall see, the “highest” modes of avant-garde literary production have been adopting comparable strategies of speed and action for quite some time. History has its reasons; and it makes sense to try to understand this cultural moment before we condemn it. “Hysterical realism” was the phrase coined by James Wood to describe novelistic reactions in the Anglosphere—by largely oppositional writers: Pynchon, Rushdie, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith—to the Thatcher–Reagan shock: fictions that “operated like a perpetual motion machine, fleshing out inhuman stories with wild plotting and larger-than-life characters”; the pursuit of “vitality at all costs.” In some respects, this “hysteria” might be said to describe the operating principles of contemporary Chinese art and literature. Television dramas and films are driven by the relentless multiplication of situations and actions; when one device or protagonist can no longer sustain the plot, a new one is rapidly drafted in. This game-like expansion of the narrative constitutes a new grammar, one that finds its most concise expression in the cultural capsule of the micro-drama form. Nevertheless, I shall argue here that actions imply actors, as verbs imply subjects; it may be mistaken to identify these new forms with passivity and isolation. To explore this, we need to shift perspective, setting them in a longer cultural history as part of a larger contemporary condition. In doing so, we can perhaps offer a more nuanced and cautiously hopeful account of their social meaning.

  [I can’t speak to China, but it strikes me that hysterical realism is no longer the approach employed in the West’s avant-garde literary production. We have—as discussed above, and elsewhere—what Rachel Cusk is doing; we also have the flat approach of something like Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection (2025), as attentive to objects as people. We all, like Jackie Treehorn, treat objects like women. This is an intrinsically passive position, one ill-suited for the hyperactivity of hysterical realism and its demand that the reader attempt to make sense of it all. As implied at the end of the quoted paragraph, the piece goes on to argue that Chinese culture today has a certain activity to it; perhaps this is the difference.

  The end of hysterical realism and the approach it represents here, though, is I think best explained by something said in his review of William Gaddis’ J R (1975):

  I think Franzen’s problem, though, is that he was writing in 2002, which was too early; J R is absolutely a novel for the present, our present. That protean slop of unattributed voices doesn’t read so much like an obnoxious literary technique any more. Rather, it’s essentially the same as a form we’re now all deeply familiar with: social media. Thousands of nameless people, all chattering inanities, all of it pouring out of nowhere into your awareness through some algorithmic process we can barely manage to conceive of. If you only know how to read self-satisfied middlebrow novels, J R is difficult. If you know how to listlessly scroll on your phone, it’s a breeze.

  Reading J R is listlessly scrolling on your phone avant la lettre, and listlessly scrolling on your phone beats J R at its own game. One of Gaddis’ achievements there is so purely depicting American life as endless noise, but you don’t need obnoxious literary techniques to see that clearly now. You can just pick up your phone and experience it without the mediation of art. And one pleasure hysterical realism offers—that of wading through endless information, obscure and convoluted, and making sense of it—is also now offered by life, which has even more information, accessible in ever more obscure and convoluted forms. It is a good thing to understand a book; the appeal of understanding life is rather more apparent.

  I said above that technology has made it possible to experience all kinds of things straight that once required mediation by art—or at least art-shaped objects. As Adorno and Horkheimer have it, “works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish.” There was, perhaps, something to be said for the culture industry. It could only be so pornographic and so prudish; the hacks had to put their names on things and live with themselves. On the internet no one has to put their names on things, and nobody lives with themselves, and so the extruded product can be more pornographic and more prudish than ever before. “Pornographic” and “prudish” are a little abstract, so let me say instead that the next few years will see new lows in violence and sentimentality. —Steve]

• In The Yale Review, Bilge Ebiri on directors who don’t make a lot of movies:

  But even, and perhaps especially, if their silence is not permanent, the years that go by in which we hear nothing from them similarly impart to their work a retroactive power and authority. As the novelist Bill Gray puts it in Don DeLillo’s Mao II, “When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.” And that, in turn, lends fresh gravitas to any new work they do produce, which must on some level live up to our expectations: if God finally does appear, we want him to make an impression. Besides, each new effort from a reticent auteur could be the last.

  These filmmakers don’t all fit the same template. While some withdraw by choice, others are, in effect, forced to be reticent. Cinema is not, by and large, an art form that can be created in solitude. Even the most antisocial filmmaker must be to some degree a social animal—hustling for funds, giving instructions to their crew, or directing actors—who is dependent on others to be able to produce work. So the history of movies, both in the United States and abroad, is dotted with directors who made a few films, or just one, and never got the chance to make more.

Reviews:

• In The Ringer, Adam Nayman reviews Coyote vs. Acme (2026):

  Their other, even more daring, leap of faith has to do with the Road Runner and potentially violating the boundaries of his mutually antagonistic relationship with Coyote. Suffice it to say that Coyote vs. Acme breaks the golden rule only to reinforce it. Green and Burch are wise enough to understand that harm and healing are part of the same love language, and they use this vocabulary to engineer a crucial late-film exchange that manages to be genuinely emotional without ruining the theater-of-cruelty vibes. It would take a couple of pretty smart filmmakers to pull that off, especially under the noses of executives who can’t sniff the difference between art and content. What the beep do they know?

  [I can’t figure out what to call these characters on second reference, so I’m going to steal a page from the New York Times and refer to “Mr. Coyote” and “Mr. Runner.”

  Their relationship is mutually antagonistic, yes—Mr. Coyote is Petrarch and Mr. Runner is Laura, and they are faithful to each other after their fashion. At one point in the film Mr. Runner testifies before Congress that he is difficult to catch. This would be meaningless, though, unless somebody were trying to catch him; the most essential fact about Mr. Runner is created by Mr. Coyote—created specifically by Mr. Coyote’s art.

  And it is art; what distinguishes Mr. Coyote from any number of other coyotes out there hunting roadrunners in the American southwest is the ingenuity of his schemes. That he keeps on trying one thing after another and that none of them ever work makes him Petrarchan. As Samuel Daniel puts it in Delia 4:

  These lines I use t’unburden mine own heart;

  My love affects no fame nor ’steems of art.

  If Mr. Coyote were really interested in catching Mr. Runner he might revisit his tactics; his real interest lies elsewhere, and so he does not. He is not catching Mr. Runner but unburdening himself of his desire to do so. As one of Chuck Jones’ commandments for the cartoons reads, “The Coyote could stop anytime—if he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: ‘A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.’ —George Santayana)” It doesn’t matter whether or not he catches Mr. Runner; in fact, doing so would ruin him. He has turned his life into performance art about his failure, and so succeeding would deprive his art of meaning. It can only be so humiliating if it works, after all. (Jones has a commandment about this too: “The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.”) In his own way, Mr. Coyote outdoes Petrarch, who, after being confronted with the death of Laura, changes. Mr. Coyote never changes, and never will.

  Or, as Petrarch puts it in Canzoniere 131:

  I’d sing of Love in such a novel fashion

  . . . .

  All this I’d do because I do not mind

  my discontentment in this one short life,

  but glory rather in my later fame.

  (Translated by David Young.) Mr. Coyote’s endless humiliation, inflicted on himself, has made him fit to be the subject of films the better part of a century after his first appearance in our culture. —Steve]

• In our sister publication Down Under, Damian Maher reviews a biography of A. D. Hope (A. D. Hope: A Life, March):

  The poem’s first stanza ends frozen on that frame the speaker has replayed all too many times. “But,” the second (and last) stanza begins, “the telephone does not ring”; the woman does not come. Dispassionately, the speaker states, “I have only used you as one puts fresh-cut flowers / In a dingy room—I shall often change them again.” Could there be a more pitiless prosthesis, a more remorseless “objective correlative” for a man’s wasted desire than fresh-cut flowers in a dim room? He spirals. This second, and closing, stanza trundles through years of tormented repetition, arriving at “the man of thirty-three who no longer pretends / that it gets him anywhere much or brings love nearer,” but still chooses “your face, your sensitive body, for ends / no subtler.” Freud might help to make sense of some of the speaker’s despairing, disintegrating self-analysis in “Private Screening.” The speaker, a Freudian might say, is compelled to screen an unpleasant experience to somehow master or bring back a lost love. (Evidently, Hope’s response to Freud does run deeper than the easy mockery found in a poem like “Private Dick”—“Call that a tree? That’s a Phallic Symbol! Boy, is that psyche of / yours a wreck!”) Freud, though, does not determine the end of “Private Screening.” The speaker does what Prufrock cannot and draws a “clever / comfort, illusion of force and growth in a brain / stopped growing, and fixed in its adolescence forever” from the singularity of his love: “that it is you, and not anyone.”

• In Literary Review, William Whyte reviews a biography of M. R. James (For the Dead Remember: The Life of M. R. James, by Darryl Jones, September 10) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Aug. 5, 2026.]

  Yet if he made his name as an academic, he nevertheless loathed all abstraction, all serious speculation. The leader of what was called the “Stupid Party” at King’s, James was famous for his injunction, “No thinking, gentlemen, please.” More than anything, he resisted reflection on questions of subjectivity, selfhood or sex. “Monty is a delightful companion,” noted Benson, “so long as you keep to the lawn & the shrubberies.” In this affectionate if rather rambling biography, Darryl Jones cannot quite decide whether this refusal was the product of a deep, dark secret or simply that James was “a man with no interior life at all.” As much as anything, it seems likely that this superficiality was a strategy—and a highly efficacious one—enabling him to operate successfully in two institutions sustained by solid chaps and rather suspicious of swots, not to mention weeds.

  [Anyone saying “no thinking, gentlemen, please” is doing a bit. —Steve]

N.B.:

• Why narwhal tusks are so straight.

• New issues:

  • The Baffler no. 85—Over Under

  • Literary Review Issue 555, September 2026 [As linked to above.]

  • n+1 Issue 54: Power Play

  • New Left Review 160•July/Aug 2026 [As linked to above.]

  • The Yale Review Volume 114, No. 3 | Fall 2026 [As linked to above.]

• Wendell Berry died on Monday, August 31. R.I.P.

Poem:

“Blame Not My Lute” by Thomas Wyatt

Blame not my lute, for he must sound
Of this or that as liketh me:
For lack of wit the lute is bound
To give such tunes as pleaseth me.
Though my songs be somewhat strange,
And speaks such words as touch thy change,
Blame not my lute.

My lute, alas, doth not offend,
Though that perforce he must agree
To sound such tunes as I intend
To sing to them that heareth me.
Then though my songs be somewhat plain,
And toucheth some that use to feign,
Blame not my lute.

My lute and strings may not deny,
But as I strike they must obey:
Break not them then so wrongfully,
But wreak thyself some wiser way.
And though the songs which I indite
Do quit thy change with rightful spite,
Blame not my lute.

Spite asketh spite, and changing change,
And falsèd faith must needs be known;
The fault so great, the case so strange,
Of right it must abroad be blown.
Then since that by thine own desert
My songs do tell how true thou art,
Blame not my lute.

Blame but thyself, that hast misdone
And well deservèd to have blame;
Change thou thy way so evil begun,
And then my lute shall sound that same.
But if till then my fingers play
By thy desert their wonted way,
Blame not my lute.

Farewell, unknown, for though thou break
My strings in spite with great disdain,
Yet have I found out for thy sake
Strings for to string my lute again.
And if perchance this foolish rhyme
Do make thee blush at any time,
Blame not my lute.

[Please don’t break my lute strings; they are doing their best. —Steve]

Upcoming books:

New York Review Books | September 8

Ambivalence: An Education
by Brian Dillon

From the publisher: When Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died, and he stopped caring about school. While he courted failure, his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films, and television. When against all odds he made it to college, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art, and ideas. Could he live up to the hopes and dreams he attached to culture? Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of Dillon’s education seemed even higher.

Ambivalence is a memoir of the author’s native city of Dublin in the 1980s and ‘90s, a portrait of the author as a young man, and an intimate defense of radical thinking about literature and life. In vivid, present-tense passages, Dillon describes his first encounters with writers such as Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida. He recalls being seduced by androgyny, ambiguity, and ambivalence on the page and in the life he hoped his reading would transfigure.

Also out Tuesday:

Seven Stories Press: Silencio by Clyo Mendoza, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney

Yale University Press: Christmas Carols: An English Enchantment by John Potter

What we’re reading:

Steve finished Shirley Hazzard’s Collected Stories (edited by Brigitta Olubas, 2021). [I am not usually one for short stories, but these were wonderful. To describe them without making them seem impossibly slight is a challenge. They are, in that high-school-English-class-but-nevertheless-correct way, usually about moments of recognition. Sometimes the subject matter gives the story a sense of importance—many of these stories are about the ends of affairs—but frequently things are far less weighty than that. One of the best stories, “Harold,” is about dreading a poetry recitation by an awkward young man at a dinner party only to discover, as he goes on, that his poems are brilliant. Also visible in that setup is Hazzard’s interest in our lazy misreadings of other people and their thoughts; one of her funniest moves is to have a character muse on what another character is thinking, sounding reasonable the whole time, only to jump immediately into the second character’s thoughts and reveal how wrong the first character was. There’s a dry brilliance to it. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• Alan Jacobs on Paul McCartney, bass player:

  Now: Does Paul overdo it sometimes? Goodness gracious yes. For instance, I think—and George Harrison strongly agrees with me here—that his playing is way too busy on “Something.” But the song that precedes “Something” on Abbey Road is “Come Together,” which also has an elaborate bass line—and it’s brilliant. Almost universally revered, though probably Walter dislikes it. But a great musician trying to extend the possibilities of his for-too-long-marginalized instrument isn’t going to nail it every time; and it’s not an unforgivable crime for him to go overboard occasionally. Heck, Paul and Ringo both go nuts on “Rain” and it’s the best rhythm track in the whole Beatles catalogue.

  One reason for Paul’s over-elaboration, I think, involves the way the Beatles recorded their songs in the latter stages of their career. Once the band, working with George Martin and the engineers, got a basic track established—drums and rhythm guitar usually—then the various Beatles would add any further contributions later, on their own. Often Paul’s bass would be the last element recorded: he sat in a studio by himself and listened to the rest of the song on headphones as he worked out his part. It’s the kind of situation that invites too-muchness, a problem that Paul was aware of, as can be seen by his enthusiasm for getting the band to record as a band again: thus the Get Back sessions. But being aware of the problem was not the same as overcoming it. The temptation to overdo was always right in his face.

  [I love the bass on “Something” and don’t really care about “Come Together,” which is comfortably the worst song on Abbey Road.

  The albums Paul made right after the Beatles broke up are additional evidence that his late-Beatles tendency towards busy bass playing is an artifact of the recording setup. McCartney (1970), on which he plays all the instruments, is not an album on which the bass is all that prominent (perhaps he wanted to remind people he could play other instruments), and neither is Ram (1971). Wings has more—“Silly Love Songs” is Paul’s statement of principles, and one of its tenets is prominent bass playing.

  Finally, it’s fitting that George’s best moment as a guitarist on a Beatles track is the solo on a Paul song, “Let It Be” (the album version), and Paul’s is the solo on a George song, “Taxman.” —Steve]

Young people are led by curiosity to read the Washington Review of Books, and losing all chastity of mind enter upon a progressive corruption of life. It would be best if they could be kept wholly from such email newsletters; but there is a good deal in them of genuine profit and literary merit, which makes it difficult to keep them wholly out of the hands of youth.

Links:

• In Poetry, Ryan Ruby on Frank O’Hara’s “Biotherm”:

  A childhood memory, a disciplinary training, an attentional practice, a poetic practice: these coordinates combine to allow Dolven to notice and attribute significance to the lines of Wyatt quoted in “Biotherm” and their use as a potential title. Noticing is often described as a skill, which it is; arguably, it is the essential skill for a critic to have. With a textual object as complex and various as “Biotherm,” where every other line seems to raise the question of what the words in it are doing there, the reasons a critic chooses to bring this detail rather than that detail to the reader’s attention has to do with something aside from training, and something deeper than taste. It has to do with the critic’s personal interests, commitments, moods, desires, and dispositions, to be sure, but it also has to do with all the chance occurrences that make up a life and a personality. It has to do with the way these combine at the particular moment and in the particular place that noticing happens. It has to do, in short, with the critic’s style. What the critic notices, and what the critic wants to do with what they notice, make the critic just as surely as style is said to make the man.

  [In some sense this is a piece about Jeff Dolven—inspired by O’Hara writing poetry to and about his friends, Ruby applies the model to criticism. I think of something T. S. Eliot said in “The Function of Criticism”:

  The critic, one would suppose, if he is to justify his existence, should endeavor to discipline his personal prejudices and cranks—tares to which we are all subject—and compose his differences with as many of his fellows as possible, in the common pursuit of true judgment. When we find that quite the opposite prevails, we begin to suspect that the critic owes his livelihood to the violence and extremity of his opposition to other critics, or else to some trifling oddities of his own with which he contrives to season the opinions which men already hold, and which out of vanity or sloth they prefer to maintain.

  This is a field that appeals to angry cranks—I should know—but, if we are serious about “the common pursuit of true judgment,” we should pay more attention to the “common” part. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In , reviews Eve Babitz’s letters (Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were), edited by Lili Anolik, June) [An Upcoming book in WRB—May 6, 2026.]:

  Yes!, you think. There she is! Our Eve! It’s inspiring to see her suddenly become herself, like watching a favorite baseball player break out of a slump. It makes you marvel at how someone can appear initially so minor—just another L.A. scenester—and yet all the while she is simmering, simmering, simmering until she boils. To see her metamorphose in real time nearly makes the slog of the first 200 pages worth it.

  The letters also provide a valuable opportunity to learn more about Babitz’s literary influences, and the picture that emerges is of someone who reveres the Anglophone novel of manners: Woolf, Forster, Henry James, Anthony Powell, and all those other magi of the drawing room. (How charming to think of her leafing through The Ambassadors or At Lady Molly’s in the soft light of morning following some raucous bender in the hills.) I still don’t think Too L.A. is as good as Woolf, but you can at least start to see why Anolik reached for the comparison. Babitz takes the drawing-room wit and the mixture of bohemian daring and Victorian propriety that defined the Bloomsbury set, applies it to her own environs, and gives it a California makeover: looser and groovier, with hotter people and better music.

  [I should perhaps begin by saying that I am from New England and therefore hate and fear California. (I once heard of a Bostonian movie audience that responded to a trailer in which Los Angeles was destroyed with laughing and cheering and clapping.) Our Puritan dream was stillborn; they put it through a funhouse mirror and are having much more success with it. “We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us,” John Winthrop said. The Californian culture industry, through its motion pictures, has very literally put itself before the eyes of all people and spread itself and its idea of the good life all over the earth. The Puritan dream was a literate commonwealth, and, while the movies were a good first step in undermining that, the Californians have come back with social media to really finish it off. The Puritans worked out their salvation with intense self-scrutiny. The Californians apply that self-scrutiny to their equivalent: being cool. And they regard being uncool with the same horror that the Puritans regarded being predestined by God to eternal damnation. Speaking of God—I hear that, since the Californians are unsatisfied with the one who sufficed for Puritan New England, they’re building a new one in San Francisco.

  Anyway. In Begler’s first paragraph:

  The dominant tone in literary nonfiction was a mix of indignant hectoring and handwringing solipsism. Neuroticism and uncertainty ruled the day. Is it okay to get on an airplane in the age of climate change? Am I adequately reckoning with my privilege when I eat this Sweetgreen salad? Is it suspect to enjoy Tolstoy or Picasso or Phil Spector or any of history’s other monster-geniuses? Am I saved or damned? Am I a Good Person?

  The striking thing about so much of this literature is its complete lack of moral seriousness. “Am I saved or damned?” and “Am I a good person?” are actual questions that demand answers; “Am I adequately reckoning with my privilege when I eat this Sweetgreen salad?” is not, but you can answer it and pretend you’re answering the real questions. While consumer choices are by no means devoid of morality, to find so much of goodness bound up in them is a failure to understand the full extent of the moral life, one that makes it less important than it really is. If morality is about consumer choices, it’s not about our relationships with ourselves and with each other as human beings.

  The magi of the drawing room never made this mistake; they knew we were playing for stakes, as it were, in those drawing-room conversations. And any deep and serious engagement with their work leaves that sense with the reader. Babitz at her best is not a “serious” writer in the way that literary nonfiction of the 2010s was “serious,” but it did not take the world seriously, and she did. —Steve]

• In The Atlantic, Hilary Kelly reviews a documentary about Mary Oliver (Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, 2026):

  Oliver’s poetry was not an act of ease; instead, she rebelled against the way that life presses our head down, away from the wonders of the world. Her advice, for all of its lucidity, is not uncomplicated or effortless. It’s to do something so difficult that most people don’t even attempt it: to notice when we’ve wandered away from how we want to live and to nudge ourselves back. “There are things you cannot reach. But,” she writes, “you can reach out to them, and all day long.” And for that, I’m grateful to have Mary Oliver’s words floating around my Pinterest page. I’d rather live the questioning life of an Oliver acolyte than the certain life of her critics.

  [“The questioning life of an Oliver acolyte”—would that this questioning were in the poetry. “You do not have to be good” seems pretty certain to me, as does “You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.” Also opposed to questioning is Oliver’s habit of concluding poems with banal statements of theme, as in:

  Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

  Let me keep my distance, always, from those
  who think they have the answers.
  
  Let me keep company always with those who say
  “Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
  and bow their heads.

  or

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do

  with your one wild and precious life?

  Those last lines are Rilke’s “you must change your life” rendered in the language of self-help. Oliver’s apparent questioning never goes anywhere because she never actually lets it. Keats says that negative capability is “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”; Oliver never achieves this. Whenever a poem of hers gets close the poem then announces that it is in uncertainties and thereby stops being uncertain. —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:

• Whether ancient Greece is alien to us, and if so in what way

• Criminals as students of depictions of criminals in pop culture

• A Poem by James Wright and football season

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

The Managing Editor related that a lady of his acquaintance implicitly believed everything she read in the Washington Review of Books; and that, by way of curing her credulity, he fabricated a story of a battle between the Russians and Turks, then at war: and “that it might,” he said, “bear internal evidence of its futility, I laid the scene in an island at the conflux of the Boristhenes and the Danube, rivers which run at the distance of a hundred leagues from each other. The lady, however, believed the story, and never forgave the deception, the consequence of which was that I lost an agreeable companion, and she was deprived of an innocent amusement.” And he added, as an extraordinary circumstance, that the Russian ambassador sent in haste to the printer to know . . . whence he had received the intelligence.

Links:

Reviews:

• In The New Yorker, Becca Rothfeld reviews the new Rachel Cusk (Life of M: A Novel, August 25) [An Upcoming book today; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Aug. 5, 2026.]:

  In light of her dream of disintegrating the particularities of selfhood into the warm liquid of universality, it is no surprise that Cusk has invented a new sort of novel that is nearly unidentifiable as such. After all, the novel as we know it concerns itself with people bound by the dictates of the social world, not people approximating the point of view of things. In interviews, Cusk has contrasted “seeing the world” in a way that relates to “society” with seeing it in a way that relates to “art,” as if the highest instances of the novelistic art—Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Henry James’ The Ambassadors, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway—weren’t suffused with social observation. We is so antisocial as to be decidedly anti-novelistic: what results is less like fiction, with its vibrant evocations, than like undergraduate art theory. “Many of the popular painting exhibitions feature abstract art,” We observes. “It is difficult to know what these paintings mean. Their distance from reality seems assured, yet what in that case are they showing? People stand in front of these paintings as though waiting for them to explain themselves. Sometimes, standing in front of paintings such as these, it has seemed possible that we too could become abstract.”

  [It’s even worse than undergraduate art theory; I’ve read those sentences on a museum label. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the Cuyahoga, reviews Phillip Lopate’s book about Washington Irving (A Washington Irving Sketch Book: Reflections on an American Writer, August 18) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Aug. 12, 2026.]:

  I left Lopate’s attack on Sontag feeling subtly better-disposed toward both of them, but I left this paean to Irving with a sneaking disappointment. Given that Phillip Lopate is eighty-two years old, this might be his final book. His effort to memorialize a writer prepared to be forgotten will not be his own best claim to be remembered. “There was something sad yet heroic,” he writes, “about the way Irving kept pressing on, trying to maximize his slender vein of genius in new ways.” What is he actually saying here? What does this book truly add up to? I have come to see it as a careful line drawn between Lopate and his idol. Their careers have been spent in the service of different ideals. Irving achieved his popularity at the price of “a special brazenness” that Lopate has always refused. If they are both minor writers, that label means something different for each. Lopate has spent a career insisting that the personal is where truth lives, but here at the end of that career he has written his most impersonal book, as if unwilling to claim for himself the kind of durable relevance time has refused Irving.

  [In Lopate’s introduction to his selection of Max Beerbohm essays for the NYRB he dwells on the idea of the “minor writer” for a couple pages:

  Beerbohm knew himself to be a minor writer . . . What makes Beerbohm an unusual minor writer is his obstinate aiming for that status. He did not fail to become a major writer; he succeeded in becoming a minor one.

  He quotes Cynthia Ozick in praise of Beerbohm as a minor writer as well as Joseph Epstein saying “Max Beerbohm was the world’s greatest minor writer.” And part of Beerbohm’s greatness for Lopate is his handling of personality:

  Today, when the memoir and the personal essay stand (rightly or wrongly) accused of narcissism and promiscuous sharing of information better left private, it becomes all the more necessary to ponder how Beerbohm performed the delicate operation of displaying so much personality without lapsing into sticky confession.

  His readers learned everything about his temperament, how he was likely to respond in any given situation—rigorously self-analytical, he was onto all his idiosyncrasies, tics, and flaws—but next to nothing about his parents, relatives, financial struggles, premarital amours, or wife.

  His approach keeps his personality alive for new readers; the specifics of his life are fixed, but in producing a record of his temperament and responses he permits his readers to imagine him alive, experiencing their world alongside them.

  In light of Minto’s review, the attraction of all this to Lopate is even more evident. But the theorizing about what it means to be a “minor writer” did not come from Beerbohm; it came from his readers. He just assessed his talents and wrote accordingly. He was not, like Irving, a hack; nor was he, like Lopate, theorizing about the meaning of his talent to the broader literary culture. The former was alien to him, and the latter would have been superfluous. —Steve]

• In our sister publication Down Under, Amelia Zhou reviews Brian Castro’s most recent novel (Chinese Postman, 2024):

  Why is love postage’s casualty, and why is the concept of postage such a dilemma for Quin? Perennial uncertainties of reciprocation and self-censorship plague his correspondences with Iryna. He “[postpones] sending the email”; “he regretted saying that immediately after sending the email”; and “even though he was hoping for a reply, he didn’t get one.” Likewise, when Quin is on the receiving end, he sometimes won’t bother to reply at all, or admits to “not know[ing] how to respond.” The message that we, as the third party to these “private” correspondences get, is that letters are destined for failure, either because of the sender’s or receiver’s sabotage or because failure is intrinsic to the medium of the letter, even to the idea of communication itself. Yet Quin welcomes the risk, and willingly inhabits the affective potential of the letter’s failure. When Iryna writes to Quin that she wants to “escape [her] life” even after her hometown Kharkiv has been liberated, he echoes her sentiment with respect to his own predicament. But while Iryna is seeking to leave behind the material realities of war, Quin escapes into unbound fancy—into the “limbo of letters, freed from linear time.” Their bubbles stay isolated, not least because Quin is a willing hostage to epistolary suspension.

  [If you would like to receive one high-quality email a week, why not subscribe to the WRB? And why not sign up for a paid subscription? Your support helps keep it going. —Steve]

N.B.:

• “Five Arrested in Connection to Stolen Works by Cézanne, Renoir and Matisse, Prosecutors Say”

• John Crowley died on Sunday, August 9. R.I.P.

• Tommy John died on Saturday, August 15. R.I.P.

Poem:

“On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet” by Dr. Samuel Johnson

Condemned to Hope’s delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts, or slow decline,
Our social comforts drop away.

Well tried through many a varying year,
See Levet to the grave descend;
Officious, innocent, sincere,
Of every friendless name the friend.

Yet still he fills Affection’s eye,
Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind;
Nor, lettered Arrogance, deny
Thy praise to merit unrefined.

When fainting Nature called for aid,
And hovering Death prepared the blow,
His vigorous remedy displayed
The power of art without the show.

In Misery’s darkest cavern known,
His useful care was ever nigh,
Where hopeless Anguish poured his groan,
And lonely Want retired to die.

No summons mocked by chill delay,
No petty gain disdained by pride,
The modest wants of every day
The toil of every day supplied.

His virtues walked their narrow round,
Nor made a pause, nor left a void;
And sure the Eternal Master found
The single talent well employed.

The busy day, the peaceful night,
Unfelt, uncounted, glided by;
His frame was firm, his powers were bright,
Though now his eightieth year was nigh.

Then with no throbbing fiery pain,
No cold gradations of decay,
Death broke at once the vital chain,
And freed his soul the nearest way.

[In Paul Fussell’s book on Dr. Johnson (Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing, 1971) (wonderful book; I wrote about it at some length in WRB—Feb. 26, 2025) he says this about the antepenultimate stanza:

What this glance at the Parable of the Talents implies is Johnson’s awareness of the multiplicity of his own talents, which contrast so strikingly with Levet’s single one. What is implied in this stanza is the prayer, “May the Eternal Master find my talents equally well employed.” The poem, as Edward A. Bloom has perceived, is “more about Johnson than Levet.”

Fussell earlier quotes a prayer Johnson wrote while midway through his work on the Dictionary:

O God, who hast hitherto supported me, enable me so to proceed in this labor and in the whole task of my present state that when I shall render up at the last day an account of the talent committed to me, I may receive pardon for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.

What comes through in the elegy is almost a longing for a life and death like Levet’s; although Johnson is aware of Levet’s flaws, the poem portrays a man who goes about his work without the endless neuroticism and self-scrutiny that so troubled Johnson for his entire life.

(I do like that Johnson wrote an elegy that says as much about the poet as about the man who died. Retract your criticism of “Lycidas,” I say!) —Steve]

Upcoming books:

New Directions | August 25

Fortress Besieged: A Novel
by Qian Zhongshu, translated from the Chinese by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao

From the publisher: Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese war, Fortress Besieged recounts the exuberant misadventures of its hapless hero Fang Hung-chien. After aimlessly studying in Europe at his family’s expense, Fang returns to Shanghai armed with a bogus degree from a fake university. On the ocean liner back, Fang’s life becomes deeply entangled with those of two Chinese beauties—Miss Su and Miss Pao. Qian writes, “With Miss Pao it wasn’t a matter of heart or soul. She hadn’t any change of heart, since she didn’t have a heart.” When he does finally make it home, he obtains a teaching post at a newly established university, encounters effete pseudo-intellectuals, and falls into a disastrous marriage of Nabokovian heights of distress and absurdity. A glorious tale of calamity, disillusionment, love, war, and wedded unbliss, Fortress Besieged was acclaimed by C. T. Hsia as “the most delightful and carefully wrought novel in modern Chinese literature.”

[We linked to a review in WRB—May 6, 2026.]

Also out Tuesday:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Life of M: A Novel by Rachel Cusk [We linked to a review above and in WRB—Aug. 5, 2026.]

New Directions: The Narrow Road of Oku by Matsuo Bashō, translated from the Japanese by Meredith McKinney

Seven Stories Press: The Eighth Wonder: A Novel by Vlady Kociancich, translated from the Spanish by Jessica Sequeira

Wesleyan University Press: A Levant Journal by George Seferis, translated from the Greek by Roderick Beaton

Sadder than Water: New & Selected Poems by Samih Al-Qasim, translated from the Arabic by Nazih Kassis

What we’re reading:

Steve finished Martin Amis’ The Second Plane (2008) and then read his Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012).

Critical notes:

• Alan Jacobs on why John Ruskin should have been horsewhipped:

  The indulgence of Ruskin’s parents, and the catechism with which they instructed him—You are a great genius, and it is our duty to nurture that genius—, ought to be interesting to anyone compelled by Ruskin’s writings, because they have everything to do with what is great in his work, and, equally, with what is frustrating about it. For Ruskin learned at an early age to trust his instincts implicitly, to believe that his every flight of imagination winged its way unerringly to some previously unseen truth. This made him a disastrous husband; in his work the results were mixed. In situations in which almost every other writer would wonder whether he was going too far, or making a claim too bold to be defended, Ruskin never had second thoughts. Indeed, “First thought, best thought” could have been his motto.

• on Tennyson’s “Ulysses”:

  Arthur D. Ward is puzzled that Tennyson’s Ulysses talks of finding Achilles in Elysion, since “his crew had already seen the great Achilles and had spoken with him, not in the Happy Isles, but at the edge of Hades . . . why remind them of a gruesome meeting in the land where sailors go after the gulfs have washed them down?” Ward thinks that Tennyson is painting Ulysses here as confused: “the confusion is Ulysses’, not Tennyson’s . . . indicative of Ulysses’ indifference to the afterlife that he confuses Hades, the Homeric ‘hell,’ with Elysion, the Homeric ‘heaven.’” But this is surely not right. Ward forgets that this crew, whom Ulysses is mustering with his speech, is not the same as the crew with which he sailed from Troy—they all died, and though Homer’s Odysseus tells the Phaeaceans about the gloomy encounter with dead-Achilles there’s no reason to believe that he also told the Ithacans. Rather we can take this as Ulysses doing an Erik the Red: “sail with me to this new land of miraculous fertility and warmth I have named Greenland! You won’t believe how warm and fertile and above all how green it is!” Ulysses is floating the beguiling possibility for them that if they join him on this voyage they might reach the Happy Isles. It’s true he also notes that they might drown, “it may be that the gulfs will wash us down,” but this is a well-known rhetorical strategy, as with Churchill’s “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”: if you are trying to persuade people to do something they know to be dangerous, flatly denying the danger will bounce them out of your persuasiveness. Better to acknowledge the danger whilst balancing it with the greater possibilities of glory. I don’t know anyone who thinks that the crew being addressed in this poem turn Odysseus down: clearly they go with him, after the poem is over.

  [Always important to remember that Odysseus is a lying liar who lies. That’s his whole thing. —Steve]

• Richard Brody:

  Bee escapes bonnet: there’s a dismaying trend in criticism now—armchair sociology, favoring button-pushing how-“we”-live-now movies like The Drama (2026) and The Invite (2026), and ignoring aesthetics; it reflects a writerly-editorial preference for culture, i.e., not art but the arts as news—

  Criticism is haunted by one fear above all, the charge of frivolity; thus critics strain self-defeatingly for importance rather than proving the importance of aesthetics by way of criticism itself.

  [A friend of mine recently said to me that “the classical romcom had something to say about love, and the modern romcom has something to say about Nora Ephron movies.” It’s easier to say something about Nora Ephron movies than about love because Nora Ephron movies are less complicated, less interesting, and less important. And this lowering of sights lets artists pretend to be critics, and, as critics haunted by the charge of frivolity, they make Serious Social Commentary in lieu of, and not in conjunction with, art. (Not that this is new; one reason Nora Ephron movies aren’t good is their putting commentary on how “we” live now over commentary on love.) As the Rothfeld piece linked at the top of today’s newsletter says, if you have some idea of what you’re doing you can make the two go together.

  But the bigger problem here is a broader abnegation of authority. Writing about important subjects, in hopes that some of the importance rubs off, is a poor substitute for writing with authority. This is a hobbyhorse of mine; in lieu of repeating myself I’ll link to past discussion of it in here and to the piece by that serves as my touchstone. —Steve]

• In the New York Times, on teaching:

  Keeping a certain youthful enthusiasm or undergraduate idiosyncrasy is difficult when you’re contending with day care colds, spirit-rending administrative work, worries about the state of the world and the future or simply the kind of routinized structures that bear the weight of bourgeois life. Being a good teacher requires being sort of odd, even a bit immature. Some of my favorite professors married scholarly expertise with considerable eccentricity. My dissertation adviser insisted her students take up social dance like polka, line dancing and zydeco; another of my former professors would alight at 4 a.m. to teach himself Japanese before undertaking woodworking projects like making a life-size chess set. The passions are nonconformist. To be moved is to be a little bit weird.

  What I discovered anew in my encounter with The Brothers Karamazov last term was that if you want students to be passionately engaged, not worried about the future, grasping, careerist or disengaged, you must transmit the spark of passion in your deeds, your mien—let’s face it, in your own soul. If you expect your students to choose books, ideas and genuine learning over shortcuts and distraction, you must be a bit courageous, too. Return to the basics. Cut through the haze of abstraction, the webs of scholarly terminology, the pretense of professionalization, and attempt to recover the basic human experiences that can move us. Remain a student in earnest.

  [I wrote at some length about the teachers most important to me in WRB—Feb. 11, 2026. (One of my favorite editorial notes in WRB history, if I do say so myself.) And while I, possessed as I am of a BA from a football school in the Midwest, hold myself at a certain distance from the latest in “whither academia?” (the period immediately after the Second World War was an aberration and not coming back, that’s whither), anyone who wants to write—anyone who wants to think—anyone who wants to do anything, really—has to reckon with the question of teaching. To pass something on requires an interchange between someone who knows it and someone who is learning it. What that interchange looks like depends on the subject and on the medium; but it is always, in some form, there.

  To read this essay, though, is to be confronted with how completely we have forgotten. This is no critique of Dinan; teaching, after all, has to take into account what the students (the readers, in this case) already know. And to write an essay in the New York Times dedicated to the proposition “you must transmit the spark of passion in your deeds, your mien—let’s face it, in your own soul” is to have concluded that the readers of the New York Times have no idea how to answer such questions as: what is education? What is its purpose? How is it done? It’s not their fault. Nobody ever taught them, and how could they possibly believe in something of which they have not heard, let alone experienced?

  Perhaps the overarching trend of my time being cognizant of the world—or perhaps this is merely what it means to become cognizant of the world—is that many institutions whose actual justification (whatever they may have told themselves) for continuing to exist was inertia are now finding that inertia won’t cut it. And they tend not to find themselves up to the challenge; existing out of inertia means you became weak and flabby. Meeting the moment demands that they rearticulate the fundamentals to the world, but even before that to themselves. If you don’t know what your purpose is, you’re not going to convince anyone else of it. —Steve]

The Managing Editors of the Washington Review of Books have always had a hard time of it in the Republic. It has ever been their endemic luck to starve, become a Harvard professor, commit suicide, lose their reading glasses before an audience of sophomores, go upon the people à la Barnum, and serve as homework in state universities, where they could in nowise get a position and where their presence usually scatters the English faculty like a truant officer among the Amish.

Links:

• In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, T. J. Clark on the Chauvet caves:

  Here is the moment, I’m saying, at which the masters luxuriate—almost pedagogically—in the very nature of depiction. Their delight in convergence and overlap of shapes; the set-piece discontinuities of viewpoint; the mad multiplication of rhyming lines; the “reversible cube” switching between positive and negative, black and white, solid and space; the field filled to bursting with figures jostling for room; and the lordly toying with the idea of reversal become escape from the crush, disappearance from the scene . . . This is an art of high abstraction, but in the service of a shameless “reality effect.” “Disappearance from the scene” equals entry on stage, in front of the torches, here where we are.

  I want, to repeat, to think of the depictions on the cave walls as an answer to language, and of the line of escaping bison as a demonstration of depiction’s ability to twist and reframe the illusion at will, and in doing so reveal its machinery—its syntax, if you like. Here’s what depiction is! The force of that demonstration derives in great part, I’m convinced, from its implied negative: Here’s what language is not. To justify that conviction I have to say more about what these image-makers—these users of language 37,000 years ago—may have thought and felt language was. What was using language like for them? How did speakers, in the first heydays of speech, conceive of language’s limits? What was their notion of “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should be silent”? And in the silence, what “things more apparent than words” did they see as depictable?

  [I had some notes on cave art last week in which I quoted Guy Davenport, and here’s even more Davenport, this from “The Symbol of the Archaic”:

  Picasso liked to say that modern art is what we have kept. To his eyes Brancusi was Cycladic; Stravinsky in the Sacre du printemps was a primitive Russian. Conversely, the bisque-colored, black-maned prancing tarpan of Lascaux, the very definition of archaic painting, is one of the most characteristic works of twentieth-century art, for quite literally ours are the first eyes to see it ever. It was painted in the deep dark of a cave by torchlight, an uncertainty to the man or woman who painted it. The best way to see it has always been as a color reproduction in a book; and now this is the only way to see it; twenty years of tourists’ breaths caused bacteria to grow in the paint, and Lascaux, the most beautiful of the prehistoric caves, has been closed forever.

  The pieces of Clark’s essay describing the intent of the art (elsewhere: “Excursion (depiction) raises the pen from the paper. It reaches out, it does not return to itself all the time, its aim is a kind of discourse that is interrupted—touched—by the objects it describes”) could very well be about sculptures by Giacometti. The second sentence in the chunk I excerpted is about Cubism. And Cubism itself, with its desire to present multiple perspectives at the same time, is one of the things language is not: non-linear. You hear one word at a time; you read one word at a time. And you almost certainly read them, and hear them, in the order the user of language intended. To use language effectively requires, on some level, knowledge of this fact, and demands an awareness of how an audience, whether present or imagined, will respond to each new word, phrase, sentence.

  But the world is not like this. It is experienced, if not quite all at once, then at least with more freedom than language is, and capturing the world in a depiction requires capturing that aspect of it. —Steve]

• In Commonweal, an excerpt from Terry Eagleton’s upcoming book about death (A Death of One’s Own: Reflections on Mortality, September 22):

  All the same, it is true that once you are dead you are free to be defamed, in reality if not in law. Public figures with unpopular political views tend to be particularly vulnerable in this respect, though that, too, is an extension of what may happen to them on this side of the grave. I have heard, for example, that I died of AIDS in China some years ago. Indeed, I have heard this story so often, along with other more unsavory tales about myself, that I am convinced there must be something in it. A surprisingly large number of people have fond or embarrassing memories of me playing a guitar at my lectures, though I have never played a guitar in my life. It has been reported that I have three houses (I have the conventional one), that I own two Porsches (that was Stanley Fish), stay when in London at the upmarket Brown’s hotel (that was Edward Said), and insist that everything in my hotel room should be white (that was Luce Irigaray). It seems that I also conducted a long-term relationship in an overseas city, though I have never visited the city in question long enough to have to change my socks, let alone have a relationship. Even so, there is some foundation to this story, as I am not the only Terry Eagleton on the planet, and the activities of my namesake have sometimes been attributed to me. Perhaps he in turn has been berated for corrupting the youth with his Stalinist garbage.

  [A few years ago the Boston Globe ran a piece on the less-famous men who are also named “Tom Brady”; one of them says that it’s good for getting dinner reservations. Poor old “Terry Eagleton”—can’t even get dinner reservations as he goes around getting yelled at for corrupting the youth with his Stalinist garbage. Or maybe “Terry Eagleton” does get you dinner reservations. (I’m now hearing that that, too, was “Stanley Fish.”) —Steve]

• In , on narrative poetry:

  Narrative verse is an art of elision and excision as well as of compression. This, too, is part of its intrigue. In Carter’s poem, we might wonder about the daughter’s mother, about the farmer’s relationship with his daughter, about her attitudes toward the farm. Had he visited her in Florida before? Why does he shoot the dogs? Was the “man from the courthouse” who informs him about the eminent domain order kind or callous? Did he get right to business or did he delay the hard news with chummy small talk about crops or weather? A short story would probably answer some of these questions. It would probably at least name the characters. That’s not necessarily a weakness. Elaboration and development are narrative virtues in their own right. But there is also power in leaving these questions unanswered. They make Carter’s poem more archetypal, metaphorical, symbolic.

  [Ezra Pound, in ABC of Reading:

  Dichten = condensare.

  I begin with poetry because it is the most concentrated form of verbal expression. Basil Bunting, fumbling about with a German-Italian dictionary, found that this idea of poetry as concentration is as old almost as the German language. Dichten is the German verb corresponding to the noun Dichtung meaning poetry, and the lexicographer has rendered it by the Italian verb meaning “to condense.”

  (“To condense” is about as close as language can get to Clark’s “excursion (depiction)” above.) Anyway, we are devoting insufficient attention to E. A. Robinson. When Robert Frost met Pound, Robinson was the first poet they talked about. Take that, New Hampshire! —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:

• Television, the great villain

• I improve on an eighteenth-century harpsichord that replaces sounds with colors

• A Poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and shifts in perspective

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, interviews Bill Buford about his book following soccer hooligans (Among the Thugs, 1990):

  Robson: Did you feel that you were a lone voyager in the hooligan world?

  Buford: Yes, sometimes, and it was a privilege. And a burden. I can cite an example. I was invited to a dinner at Mario Vargas Llosa’s apartment in London. He had all these established literary figures around his table. And I’d come straight from—I don’t know if I’d call it a riot—but a street fight after a Chelsea–Manchester United match. I showed up a little late and very sweaty because in the aftermath of the match, I fell in with the Man United brigade. And they had this strategy of zigzagging around blocks so they could surprise the Chelsea fans. But it was just street violence and I kept getting hit by beer cans. They’d just fly out of nowhere and hit me on the side of the head—fortunately, always the soft part of the beer can. Well, after midway through the dinner, I just said, “I had an interesting afternoon.” And it all came out.

  It was Germaine Greer who stopped me. Sorry, this is very name-heavy, but I was running a literary magazine and I was in this world. Germaine said I was talking about it too much. She said, “You’re just telling your story. Stop telling your story. Write your story. Every day, get up at six in the morning and I’ll send you breakfast.” She didn’t send breakfast, but I did start getting up by six in the morning.

  [I’ve never been at a dinner where somebody showed up a little late, very sweaty, and rambling about the soccer hooligans they encountered on the way there. Sounds like fun. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Anahid Nersessian reviews Jorie Graham’s latest collection of poems (Killing Spree, May) [An Upcoming book in WRB—May 20, 2026.]:

  All this is to say that Graham is a poet who consistently confounds her own self-representation, withdrawing from testimony even when she lays herself bare. Not for her the torrential unbosoming of so much contemporary lyric, with its mawkish self-regard and biographical appetites. Dramatizing the experience of one’s consciousness is only worthwhile (or, to use Wordsworth’s phrase, “really important”) if that consciousness is capable of understanding itself as operating within a shared historical condition, independent and idiosyncratic but nonetheless irreducibly in dialogue with other minds or essences. The broken line, the hard scar of the dash—these are gestures toward the uncertain and intractable distance between self and other, presence and absence, “awareness” and its loss.

• In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews a book about silence (Silence: A Literary History, by Kate McLoughlin, June):

  I may be wrong, but I don’t think that David Cameron, who led the Remain campaign, was exhumed and hanged in chains by the victorious Leavers, or that his dead head was cut off and stuck on a spike for more than twenty years—the punishment meted out in 1661 to Oliver Cromwell, or, at any rate, to his guilty corpse, after King Charles II was restored to the throne. Nor is it quite clear what this excursion into historical parallels has to do with silence. Uncoupling from social media, as McLoughlin did, may be a wise move, but to what degree does it muffle the universal racket? Never having joined Facebook, Twitter, X, Instagram, TikTok, or any of the other treats from Pandora’s app store, I’m unqualified to comment. All I know is that I have yet to attain the tough tranquillity of a Trappist.

  [We linked to an earlier review in WRB—July 29, 2026. I would advise Lane to borrow a trick from Bill Belichick and start mangling the names of the apps on purpose—“SnapFace,” “InstantChat,” things like that. —Steve]

• In Literary Review, Zoe Guttenplan reviews the new Rachel Cusk (Life of M, August 25):

  But by far the most interesting parts of Life of M are the short opening and closing sections, written from that more familiar Cusk perspective of the first-­person singular. Here we catch a glimpse of her talent for observation seen in Outline (2014), the vast and various world as filtered through the eyes of someone committed to noticing things. The narrator’s partner, in hospital when the book opens, complains about the constant interruptions of doctors doing rounds and machines beeping. “Yet it also seemed desirable to be constantly interrupted, to have the responsibility for oneself taken away,” the narrator thinks. Once they melt into M, the world flattens, becomes superficial. “I” reflects that “the removal and return of the bier-like [hospital] bed was like a rehearsal for absence”; “we,” on the other hand, “see things, we meet people. We go to parties or are offered food in people’s houses.” Cusk’s writing, often direct and unadorned, here reads like that of a child explaining what they did on their summer holidays.

N.B.:

• Bee doctors.

• Icelandic turf houses.

• The youths are playing mahjong.

• New issues:

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

  • The Point Issue 37 | Summer 2026

Poem:

“Choriambics” by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Love, what ailed thee to leave life that was made lovely, we thought, with love?
What sweet visions of sleep lured thee away, down from the light above?

What strange faces of dreams, voices that called, hands that were raised to wave,
Lured or led thee, alas, out of the sun, down to the sunless grave?

Ah, thy luminous eyes! once was their light fed with the fire of day;
Now their shadowy lids cover them close, hush them and hide away.

Ah, thy snow-coloured hands! once were they chains, mighty to bind me fast;
Now no blood in them burns, mindless of love, senseless of passion past.

Ah, thy beautiful hair! so was it once braided for me, for me;
Now for death is it crowned, only for death, lover and lord of thee.

Sweet, the kisses of death set on thy lips, colder are they than mine;
Colder surely than past kisses that love poured for thy lips as wine.

Lov’st thou death? is his face fairer than love’s, brighter to look upon?
Seest thou light in his eyes, light by which love’s pales and is overshone?

Lo the roses of death, grey as the dust, chiller of leaf than snow!
Why let fall from thy hand love’s that were thine, roses that loved thee so?

Large red lilies of love, sceptral and tall, lovely for eyes to see;
Thornless blossom of love, full of the sun, fruits that were reared for thee.

Now death’s poppies alone circle thy hair, girdle thy breasts as white;
Bloodless blossoms of death, leaves that have sprung never against the light.

Nay then, sleep if thou wilt; love is content; what should he do to weep?
Sweet was love to thee once; now in thine eyes sweeter than love is sleep.

[I spend more time by far thinking about Swinburne than about any other poet I don’t really like. Some of this comes down to reading Housman’s critique of him (best line: “It is historically certain that he had seen the sea, but if it were not, it could not with certainty have been inferred from his descriptions: they might have been written by a man who had never been outside Warwickshire”) at a formative age, but the real draw, I think, is Swinburne—at least, Swinburne’s poetry—pushing a particular set of values and approach as far as it will go. Swinburne, after all, is the greatest poet of all time if you care about sound and don’t care about what words mean.

But what a sound. Housman acknowledges as much:

Among Swinburne’s technical achievements the most conspicuous, if not the greatest, was his development of anapestic verse. . . . not only did he create new meters but he recreated old; and in particular he resuscitated the heroic couplet . . . he possessed an altogether unexampled command of rhyme, the chief enrichment of modern verse.

A few years ago had some notes on this poem and Swinburne’s use of a classical meter:

It breaks the flow into these swooping units, something Swinburne reinforces with his tendency towards separating clauses within the main sentence, parentheses that further deliquesce the rhythm into discretions (the “we thought” in “life that was made lovely, we thought, with love?,” the “alas” in line 4, the “for me” at the end of line 9 and so on). Above I suggest that this pulse perhaps evokes weeping or sobbing; or perhaps the sense of a catch in the throat interrupting the smoother flow of happier discourse.

That Swinburne can get such effects out of forcing what was originally a quantitative meter into English, with its stress-based accentuation, is his genius. (Compare his “Sapphics” to the average in English, which sound like somebody tripping over themselves again and again.) And whenever I get fed up with him, which is all the time, I keep coming back to that achievement. Maybe one of these days I’ll even come around on “Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Dolours),” about which I am with Housman:

There is no reason why they should begin where they do or end where they do; there is no reason why the middle should be in the middle; there is hardly a reason why, having once begun, they should ever end at all; and it would be possible to rearrange the stanzas which compose them in different orders without lessening their coherency or impairing their effect.

(The plural there is because he is also talking about “Ilicet” and “The Triumph of Time.”) But then, if you were writing a poem about complete immobility, it would go nowhere, make no progress, and have no particular reason to begin or end, wouldn’t it? It’s no accident that two of the great twentieth-century works about kinds of immobility are so indebted to it: Nabokov, always aware of the import of his references, has Swinburne’s poem in mind when choosing Lolita’s real name. And Dylan, as Christopher Ricks argues in Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2003)—very Swinburnian title, that—has it in the background of his “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” which also just keeps going, asking more questions, even though the musicians ramp themselves up as if each verse were going to be the last. —Steve]

Upcoming books:

Out Monday:

Oxford University Press: For the Dead Remember: The Life of M. R. James by Darryl Jones

Penguin Press | August 11

Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind
by Thomas Meyer, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch

From the publisher: Drawing on newly discovered archival materials and previously overlooked documents—from both Germany, where Hannah Arendt was born to a Jewish family in 1906, and the United States, where she was a citizen from 1950—Thomas Meyer tells the story of an intellectual icon whose character and ideas continue to captivate and challenge us to this day. Tracing anew Arendt’s journey from Königsberg to Paris, where she fled after being imprisoned in 1933, and finally to New York in 1941, Meyer illuminates her formative years and the development of her radical and brilliant books, as well as her lifelong philosophical debate with Martin Heidegger, whose Nazism was a permanent challenge for her. Meyer’s account centers on two pivotal phases—Arendt’s years in Paris after fleeing Nazi Germany and her time in the United States leading up to the landmark publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951—providing not only a meticulous reconstruction of her life but also a compelling invitation to rethink her legacy for our times.

At a time of acute political polarization, with liberalism in crisis and urgent debates about freedom, responsibility, and truth unfolding all around, Arendt’s writings and ideas resonate more powerfully than ever. Meyer’s account of her extraordinary life is groundbreaking and sensational, not just for his illuminating and peerless research, but also for his incisive exploration of what Arendt’s work has meant over the decades—and continues to mean for us today.

Also out Tuesday:

Basic Books: On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World by Florence Hazrat [We linked to a review in WRB—July 8, 2026.]

Knopf: Under the Falls: A Novel by Richard Russo

What we’re reading:

Steve read House of Meetings by Martin Amis (2006).

He then read The Well-Beloved by Thomas Hardy (1897). [The obvious explanation for why nobody has ever mentioned this to me is that nobody knows any Thomas Hardy novels besides the big hits—but I prefer the explanation “if we had told you that there was a Thomas Hardy novel retelling the myth of Pygmalion you would have become extremely annoying about it, so we decided not to tell you.”

The plot is very silly. Jocelyn Pierston, a sculptor, unsuccessfully courts a woman; twenty years later, he unsuccessfully courts that woman’s daughter; twenty years later still, he unsuccessfully courts that woman’s daughter, the granddaughter of his original interest. Needless to say the three women look basically identical; they also all have the name of Avice. All the while, he muses on whether his elusive feminine ideal, the titular “Well-Beloved,” has chosen to inhabit these women, how long it will stay there, and where it may be found. This devotion makes him completely thoughtless, as shown in the following turn of events. After the initial Avice fails to keep a rendezvous to “carry out Island Custom in our courting” (wink wink nudge nudge), Pierston meets another woman on the road back, with whom he almost immediately elopes despite their fathers hating each other. The delay in getting married caused by him messing up the paperwork—this is Hardy, after all—allows her father time to show up and persuade her that the whole thing was a big mistake. Having undergone all this, Pierston decides maybe the Well-Beloved did inhere in Avice after all.

As I said, the plot is silly. In a sense, this is the book’s weakness; the interrogation of Pierston’s psyche does not cohere with the funny-if-horrifying situations he keeps working himself into. But the contrast between Pierson’s immense self-seriousness and the grim comedy of his life is the point. All those notions of the Well-Beloved, and for what?

I would start recommending this to everyone, but it shouldn’t be anyone’s first Hardy novel (that should be Tess of the d’Urbervilles), or probably anyone’s second or third. It’s more effective when you can see Hardy putting his old tricks to a new purpose. —Steve]

He then read Football by Chuck Klosterman (January). [Klosterman argues that “football is the best television product ever produced”:

Providing only 11 minutes of action within the expanse of three hours is not evidence of a failed concept. As it turns out, 11 minutes of action is the ideal amount. The intermittent moments of nothingness add to the pleasure. . . . Your mind can relax without detaching from engagement.

He’s right. But this is, more broadly, how being a fan of any sport works. It’s not like the sport is always on, although the NFL is going to try its best at that. Instead, it happens intermittently. You go about your life, you watch the game, you go about your life, you watch the game. The natural rhythm of a season leaves room for you to process what just happened and prepare for what’s next. It’s like a toy version of life that way—take your mind off the real wheel of Fortune with a smaller one that spins at set times and for limited stakes. They’re big enough, though; as somebody said (I cannot find the origin of this quote), “of all the unimportant things in life, football is the most important.” (Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: my expectations of Notre Dame for this upcoming season are too high,a and this is definitely going to go great for me.) —Steve]

He then read Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan (2011). [I was going to open with something about the “old weird America,” but then I looked at the back cover and saw that Greil Marcus had blurbed it. The best essays, though, are about that—in many ways, about the work of finding and preserving and sharing it, while being aware of what exactly much of it is worth. As Sullivan says about the people who preserved 78s of the country blues:

When the music was all but unknown, they hailed it as great, invincible American art; when people (like the Rolling Stones) caught on and started blabbering about it, they rushed to remind everyone it was just a bunch of dance music for drunken field hands.

It’s both; it’s always both.

My favorite moments were those where Sullivan reminds us that he is the closest thing to Guy Davenport we have. One of the essays, about the nineteenth-century French naturalist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, a man who spent much of his life in Kentucky, is dedicated to Davenport. Even more infused with Davenport’s spirit is an essay on Native American cave art in the South:

There are no extant myths for those Woodland people, not even indirect sources. We will never know the names or characters of their gods. But what Jan and his colleagues were seeing was something deeper, something antecedent to myth, namely a spiritualized vision of the landscape. Both the caves and the aboveground sites “identified places of power, where they tied themselves spiritually to the land,” and the sites were connected.

There is something here of Davenport on the prehistoric cave paintings of Europe here:

When Breuil was copying the ceiling of bulls in the Spanish cave Altamira, a young man from Barcelona crawled in beside him and marvelled at the beauty of the painting, the energy of the designs. He would in a few years teach himself to draw with a similar energy and primal clarity, and would incorporate one of the enigmatic bulls into his largest painting, the Guernica. He was Pablo Picasso.

Something, too, of Davenport on hunting for Indian arrowheads with his family as a child:

And I learned from a whole childhood of looking in fields how the purpose of things ought perhaps to remain invisible, no more than half known. People who know exactly what they are doing seem to me to miss the vital part of any doing.

—Steve]

He then read More Than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature by Joshua Hren (May). [The subtitle here is not correct; it should be “The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of the Novel.” The nineteenth-century novel, really, with late appearances made by Proust and Joyce. And while Hren is right that this sort of artwork, inasmuch as it edifies, does so by aiming at a clarification and expansion of vision, challenging whether its readers’ perceptions can understand and interpret the world as presented in the novel, this is hardly the only approach to the matter art has taken. If anything, that novelistic approach is in part a reaction against more overtly didactic art. Horace’s Ars poetica is hardly a nineteenth-century novel:

Let what thou feign’st for pleasure’s sake be near
The truth; nor let thy fable think whate’er
It would must be; lest it alive would draw
The child, when Lamia’s dined, out of her maw.
The poems void of profit our grave men
Cast out by voices; want they pleasure, then
Our gallants give them none, but pass them by;
But he hath every suffrage can apply
Sweet mixed with sour to his reader, so
As doctrine and delight together go.

(Ben Jonson’s translation.) Nor is Pope’s Essay on Criticism:

True wit is nature to advantage dress’d,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d,
Something, whose truth convinc’d at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.

But they are certainly concerned with the moral imagination. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• More Odyssey discourse? More Odyssey discourse! [The Odyssey discourse, will, I assume, stop when Athena shows up and tells everyone to stop doing Odyssey discourse. (Previous Odyssey discourse in this fine newsletter here and here. “Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold, / And many goodly mags and critics seen,” as the man says.) —Steve]

  • Emily Wilson again, this time in The Atlantic:

    Where Virgil’s Ulysses is cruel and predatory, and his mendacious instrument, Sinon, is unambiguously a bad guy, Nolan re-creates Sinon as his film’s sinless moral center. The focus on “sin” is presumably the reason for the odd but consistent pronunciation of the name: More normally pronounced by English-speakers as Sigh-non or See-non—echoing the long i of the Latin—in Nolan’s film, it’s always Sin-none as if to reinforce the Christlike innocence of Elliot Page’s version of the classical “harmer.” Nolan’s Sinon is not a trickster but a poor innocent to whom Odysseus has lied by omission, in failing to tell him about the trick with the horse. The episode is a cautionary fable about a director who fails to trust an actor to play his part: Odysseus lies so that Sinon will give the most convincing possible performance when he falsely tells the Trojans, with his dying breath, that the horse is a gift.

    [Part of me thinks that Nolan should have adapted the Aeneid—more aligned with his preoccupations—but if he botched it I would be more upset. Virgil is probably bad for box office compared to Homer anyway. —Steve]

  • In Poetry, :

    The Odyssey has gifted us so many rich and durable metaphors—the siren’s song, the straits of Scylla and Charybdis—precisely because the fairly brief encounters described in the poem exist in a world of mythological meaning. They speak to much more than their literal selves because they partake of a larger constellation of other symbolic meanings which both predate and surpass language, much as oracular poetry predates the written world. Nolan’s film is frequently composed of mere images of mere things, signifying little beyond their own immediate spectacle. Characters are rendered passive and powerless, not by the gods on Olympus, but by the divinity in the director’s chair.

    [I assume “written world” is a typo but it’s perfect. —Steve]

  • On his Substack, :

    Why does the cyclops have one eye? Well, what else has one eye? Look at pictures of Nolan on set, shoulders hunched, face vanishing into the obscene mask of his enormous roaring IMAX camera, that regards the world through a single unblinking lens. The land of the cyclopes is clearly another, even more pointed vision of our own society in the twenty-first century. Like us, the cyclopes are fantastically rich, they have a level of material wealth a Greek of the seventh century B.C. could barely dream of, but a Greek of the seventh century B.C. visiting Nolan’s neighborhood in Beachwood Canyon, Los Angeles would find it a savage place, barely even human. The same bright Ionian sunlight, but no public square, no public life, not even people greeting each other as they wander out into the streets to shit; everyone stays in their air-conditioned homes, looking at screens. Here’s how he describes it: “All the crops they require spring up unsown and untilled, wheat and barley and generous vines. The cyclopes have no assemblies for the making of laws, but live in hollow caverns, where each man is lawgiver to his own children, and nobody has the slightest interest in what his neighbors decide.” The cyclopes are also, like Nolan and the rest of them, fundamentally not interested in the gods. “We care nothing for Zeus with his aegis,” Christopher Nolan tells Odysseus, “nor for the rest of the blessed gods, for we are much stronger than they are.” Only once he’s been blinded does he start praying to the gods for revenge.

    [Aristotle says in the Politics (as translated by Benjamin Jowett) that “he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.” He might as well be glossing Odysseus’ journey as he describes it to the Phaeacians—he various beasts and gods, none of whom have any room in their lives and worlds for human beings, and when human beings act like beasts and gods they leave no room for human beings either. When the poem makes this explicit, as in Circe turning Odysseus’ men into pigs, Nolan adapts it hamfistedly; I almost wonder if, having heard the phrase “men are pigs” enough, he never considered any broader meaning of it. And when the poem approaches the subject more obliquely Nolan has no idea what to do with it. He cuts the one detail I will never forget, the last thing Odysseus’ men do before they all die:

    Meantime from man to man my tongue exclaims,

    My wrath is kindled, and my soul in flames.

    In vain! I view perform’d the direful deed,

    Beeves, slain in heaps, along the ocean bleed.

    Now heaven gave signs of wrath: along the ground

    Crept the raw hides, and with a bellowing sound

    Roar’d the dead limbs; the burning entrails groan’d.

    Six guilty days my wretched mates employ

    In impious feasting, and unhallowed joy;

    (Pope’s translation.) “Heaven gave signs of wrath” requires you to be interested in the gods, or at least accept that they influence the action of the poem, which Nolan is not and does not. But this—who eats living cattle? Predator animals, yes, but they don’t cook. The gods don’t. Beasts are beasts; the gods are the gods; human beings unable to live in society, or supposedly sufficient for themselves, become neither beasts or gods but something else, something different, something much worse. —Steve]

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

Links:

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Even then.

Reviews:

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

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

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

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

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

• What if Augustan Rome was mid-century America?

• A Poem by Bei Dao and flowers

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

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

Read more

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

Links:

Reviews:

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

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

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

  • In The New Republic, Katie Kadue:

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

  • On his Substack, :

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

  • In Engelsberg Ideas, Armand D’Angour:

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

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

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

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

  And as sad men at sea when shore is nigh,

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

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

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

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

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

  With joy as much as they did worlds command;

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

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

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

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

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

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

  That fall’n before his city by the sword,

  Fighting to rescue from a cruel fate

  His town and children, and in dead estate

  Yet panting seeing him, wraps him in her arms,

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

  Lies on him, striving to become his shield

  From foes that still assail him, spears impell’d

  Through back and shoulders, by whose points embrued,

  They raise and lead him into servitude,

  Labour, and languor; for all which the dame

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

  With miserable suff’rance; so this king

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

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

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

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

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

  [That’s just how it is. —Steve]

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

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

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

N.B.:

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

• William S. Burroughs and Maya scholarship.

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

Poem:

“Baudelaire” by Delmore Schwartz

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books:

New Directions | July 28

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

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

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

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

Also out Tuesday:

Knopf: Beginning Middle End: A Novel by Valeria Luiselli

What we’re reading:

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

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

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

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

Critical notes:

• Moul on what to read about Homer:

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

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

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

Links:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviews:

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The Hardy-Brontë English landscape thought nexus

• Bob Dylan and the Great American Songbook

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

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

Read more

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

Links:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Two in Portico:

  • Nic Rowan on visiting Rome:

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

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

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

  • Matthew Buckley Smith on staging Macbeth:

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

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

    Alas, poor country,

    Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot

    Be called our mother, but our grave, where nothing

    But who knows nothing is once seen to smile;

    Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rent the air

    Are made, not marked; where violent sorrow seems

    A modern ecstasy. The dead man’s knell

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

    Expire before the flowers in their caps,

    Dying or ere they sicken.

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

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

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

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

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

Reviews:

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

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

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

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

N.B.:

• 4Columns has shut down:

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

• Babitz book club.

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

• New issues:

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

  • New Left Review 159•May/June 2026

  • Portico Issue 2 [As linked to above.]

Poem:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books:

Bloomsbury Academic | July 9

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

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

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

Out Tuesday:

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

Coffee House Press: Ada: A Novel by Mark Haber

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

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

What we’re reading:

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

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

Right before this Adams does a little sex talk:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical notes:

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

Links:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviews:

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

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

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

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

• A history of newspapers

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

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

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

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

Read more

Links:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviews:

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

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

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

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

• Two in Harper’s:

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

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

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

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

    But never did Henry, as he thought he did,

    end anyone and hacks her body up

    and hide the pieces, where they may be found.

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

    Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.

    Nobody is ever missing.

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

    Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

    Twenty times better; but once in special,

    In thin array after a pleasant guise,

    When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

    And she me caught in her arms long and small;

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

    Unstable dream, according to the place,

    Be steadfast once, or else at least be true.

    By tasted sweetness make me not to rue

    The sudden loss of thy false feignèd grace.

    By good respect in such a dangerous case

    Thou broughtest not her into this tossing mew

    But madest my sprite live, my care to renew,

    My body in tempest her succour to embrace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

N.B.:

• A history of searching for Timbuktu.

• Restoring Edvard Grieg’s house.

• Old coupons for Bed, Bath, & Beyond.

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

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

• Colors you can’t see on a screen.

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

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

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

Poem:

“I Looked Up from My Writing” by Thomas Hardy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books:

Faber & Faber | June 30

Devotions: Eight Stories
by Lucy Caldwell

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

Also out Tuesday:

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

What we’re reading:

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

Critical notes:

• on pop music fandom:

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

  . . .

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

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

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

Links:

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

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

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

  Whitman presages this all.

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

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

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

• on various treatments of the fall of Hephaestus:

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

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

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

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

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

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

  But cloud in stead, and ever-during dark

  Surrounds me, from the chearful wayes of men

  Cut off, and for the Book of knowledg fair

  Presented with a Universal blanc

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

  And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out.

  So much the rather thou Celestial light

  Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers

  Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence

  Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell

  Of things invisible to mortal sight.

  —Steve]

Reviews:

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

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

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

• I invent a poem by A. E. Housman

• Esoteric readings of “the wheels on the bus”

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

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

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

Read more

Links:

• In , Clifford Thompson on Ralph Ellison:

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

  [More on Samson, eyeless in Gaza, below.

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

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

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

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

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

Reviews:

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

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

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

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

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

  Lector salteado, per Caddell:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

N.B.:

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

• “Anatomy of a Galileo Forgery”

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

• Screenshots as preservation.

• The Chinese-language literary scene in Australia.

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

• New issues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poem:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books:

Cornell University Press | June 15

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

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

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

Out Tuesday:

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

Hogarth: The Frenzy: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates

What we’re reading:

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

Critical notes:

• Moul on Horace’s ode to a wine-jar:

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

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

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

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

Links:

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

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

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

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

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

• In , on the little magazines of modernism:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• I talk myself into opposing taking pictures on your phone

• Nigerian scammers and artistic inspiration

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

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

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

Read more

Links:

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

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

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

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

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

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

  [To me, this is Jacobitism. —Steve]

Reviews:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  If I could stick a knife in my heart

  Suicide right on stage

  Would it be enough for your teenage lust?

  Would it help to ease the pain?

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

N.B.:

• The UK is using beavers to prevent flooding.

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

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

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

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

• New issues:

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

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

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

Poem:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rail: Rimbaud.

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

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

Upcoming books:

Atlantic Monthly Press | June 3

Drayton and Mackenzie
by Alexander Starritt

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

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

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

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

Also out Tuesday:

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

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

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

What we’re reading:

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

Critical notes:

• on taste:

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

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

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

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

• In Prospect, on J. H. Prynne:

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

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

  • Prynne, in “Moon Song”:

    Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

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

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

    he wrongs, he is wronged, he advised,

    he deliberated, they seized, they were quarreling,

    grasping one another, they rage,

    they went on a rampage,

    whew, those boys act primitive right at

    the verbal root with a cap . . .

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

Reviews:

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

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

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

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

• How to write words good

• Brian Wilson and our Romantic moment

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

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

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

Read more

Links:

• In Van, Leah Mandel on insects in music:

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

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

• on Pet Sounds (1966) at 60:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviews:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And we all love Housman’s thing about poetry:

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

  But “ecstatic lash” is shorter. —Steve]

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

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

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

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

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

N.B.:

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

• Polyglot prose.

• “What Is a Bob Ross Painting Worth?”

• Preserving ancient libraries in Mauritania.

Poem:

Delia 17 by Samuel Daniel

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

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

Upcoming books:

Out May 15:

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

Europa Editions | May 19

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

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

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

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

Also out Tuesday:

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

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

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

What we’re reading:

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

Critical notes:

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

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

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

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

  —Steve]

• on her approach to criticism on her Substack:

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

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

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

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

Links:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviews:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• A Poem by Robert Herrick and me complaining about flowers

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

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

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