“How did you start managing to edit the Washington Review of Books?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Steve said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Links:

• In UnHerd, on Hemingway and talking about your feelings:

  Contrary to popular belief, if you look carefully in Hemingway’s work, you find it absolutely full of characters who talk a lot about their feelings—it’s just that these characters are inevitably the frauds and phonies and self-deceivers, men who could use a hunting expedition or two to clear their heads. In The Sun Also Rises (1926), the role is performed by Robert Cohn, champion boxer at university and reader of far-fetched romances set in South America, who spends most of the novel punching people, then tearfully seeking amends by explaining how lovesick he is for Brett. You can hear an adumbration of 2026: Oh, I’m sorry I ignored your messages, but that’s how my trauma response manifests. Won’t you forgive me? In perhaps the greatest Hemingway short story, “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), the structure is even clearer. For three or four pages, the male protagonist inveigles his girlfriend into having an abortion by going on and on about how it is her choice and he will support her no matter what. He is communicative, attentive, and articulates his own preferences in a spirit of what seems to be openness and honesty: “I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really want to.” It is, I think, one of the saddest scenes in twentieth-century fiction.

  [I once read something about an abusive husband who went to therapy and used everything he learned there to further emotionally manipulate his wife.

  Hemingway’s loathing of his characters who talk about their feelings is of a piece with his style. Fearing that eloquence as traditionally understood is a means of shading and concealing the truth (as Humbert Humbert says, “you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”), he simply abjures it. This is not a new worry—Plato expressed it in the Gorgias:

  Socrates: And the same holds of the relation of rhetoric to all the other arts; the rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know?

  Gorgias: Yes, Socrates, and is not this a great comfort?—not to have learned the other arts, but the art of rhetoric only, and yet to be in no way inferior to the professors of them?

  Socrates: Whether the rhetorician is or not inferior on this account is a question which we will hereafter examine if the enquiry is likely to be of any service to us; but I would rather begin by asking, whether he is or is not as ignorant of the just and unjust, base and honourable, good and evil, as he is of medicine and the other arts; I mean to say, does he really know anything of what is good and evil, base or honourable, just or unjust in them; or has he only a way with the ignorant of persuading them that he not knowing is to be esteemed to know more about these things than some one else who knows?

  (Translated by Benjamin Jowett.) Gorgias’ questions there get to a point not explicitly in Robert Cohn or the man in “Hills Like White Elephants”; do these guys actually have any idea what they are talking about, or have they merely discovered that talk in this vein gets them what they want?

  Cohn, at least, comes across as very pleased with his discovery that he is behaving like a maniac because he is lovesick—so pleased that he has to let everyone else know about it too. The man in “Hills Like White Elephants” is harder to read. And in making him so opaque Hemingway runs up against the limits of his style:

  The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.

  “They look like white elephants,” she said.

  “I’ve never seen one,” the man drank his beer.

  “No, you wouldn’t have.”

  “I might have,” the man said. “Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.”

  Hemingway gives us a description of the hills in his style (“white in the sun”) before the girl’s metaphorical description reveals more about them, and reveals more because it induces a response from the man that he never would have made had she said the hills were white in the sun. There is no escape from artistic decisions, and feigning to have escaped them is merely one more. —Steve]

• In Engelsberg Ideas, David Womersley on the reception of Gulliver’s Travels:

  In the light of contemporary horrors, it was no longer plausible to dismiss the darker patches of Swift’s imagination as inhuman, for they had become our very element. The energies of Swift’s mind (no matter how bleak his vision), and his ingenuity in giving that energy and vision appropriate and disturbing literary expression, now began to be more generously recognised. Following pioneers such as Flaubert and Conrad, even novelists as fastidious as Nabokov drew imaginative strength from Swift. In The Enchanter (1939), a dry run for Lolita (1955), Nabokov’s protagonist is obliged to marry the mother of the child he secretly desires. On his wedding night he imagines himself as a “little Gulliver” lost in her “multiple caverns,” and repelled by the “rancid emanations of her wilted skin.”

  But perhaps the most faithful modern response to Gulliver’s Travels is to be found in the philosophical fictions of Borges, pre-eminently in “Brodie’s Report” (1970)—an engagement supported and informed by Borges’ many reflections on Swift in his critical writings. When he read Gulliver’s Travels, Borges understood that this ostensible account of voyages to remote nations was really the record of a voyage through a library, and his imagination vibrated in sympathy with that aspect of Swift’s project.

• In The Point, Ben Cosman on the baseball novel:

  In this way, Coover’s novel is the most honest of baseball novels, because it is about the impossibility of a baseball novel. Baseball—sports in general, really—is a fiction that transcends an author, because there are as many authors as there are players, coaches, umpires and even fans, and this proliferation, and the tensions between them all, results in the presence of genuine chance. The game is, as Coover might remind us, an artificial construct that requires something like a suspension of disbelief—or, rather its opposite, the adoption of belief, the acceptance that the rules of the game matter—but one that adheres to no single participant’s narrative. Baseball can be used as a literary device, a metaphor, but a fictional baseball game can never provide the same experience as an actual baseball game because a fictional game is, despite Coover’s hopes, always the “definitive utterance” of its creator. It is, definitionally, contrived. Whereas I watch baseball because I don’t know what’s going to happen, and neither does anyone else. An alternative approach to baseball fiction is to forgo fictionalizing the game altogether and instead fictionalize around the game, as in Don DeLillo’s Pafko at the Wall. Initially published as a story in Harper’s, Pafko is the novella that opens DeLillo’s Underworld and was reissued as a standalone volume by Scribner in September to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the actual baseball game it depicts: Pafko is Andy Pafko, left fielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers in game three of their three-game playoff in 1951 against the New York Giants, and he’s at the wall because he’s watching Bobby Thomson’s game-winning home run fly into the stands. This was “The Shot Heard ’Round the World” in one of the most famous baseball games in history, in which the Giants completed the most improbable of improbable comebacks to overtake the Dodgers and win the pennant.

  [In contrast the great football novel, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes (1968), is mostly about watching football on TV, as God intended.

  Here Coover is right and yet not right enougb:

  Baseball—sports in general, really—is a fiction that transcends an author, because there are as many authors as there are players, coaches, umpires and even fans, and this proliferation, and the tensions between them all, results in the presence of genuine chance.

  This is also true of life, in which we are all at different moments players and coaches and umpires and fans. As the man says:

  All the world’s a stage,

  And all the men and women merely players;

  They have their exits and their entrances;

  And one man in his time plays many parts.

  And while we do not know what is going to happen in a baseball game, we do know that it will be baseball. There will be pitching and hitting and fielding, and there will be nine innings of this unless it’s tied, and so on. Life has no such rules to limit what might happen to us. Sports give us the unknowability and suspense of life, and they let us invest as much of ourselves as we want into them, all with the knowledge that it is always, just barely, only a game. There is only so much we can gain, and, more importantly, there is only so much we can lose. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In Harper’s, Benjamin Kunkel reviews the new Cormac McCarthy biography (Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited, by Tracy Daugherty, October 6) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Sept. 30, 2026.]:

  In his novels, McCarthy apprehends the world as a scene of material dilapidation and social disorder, few if any governments or corporations in sight. Somehow this vision is that of one of the central writers of postwar consumer society, a place of mass higher education, of industrial plastics, consumer electronics, and personal automobiles, of cheap and attractive clothing. For all that this society furnished the historical ground of McCarthy’s career, it barely registers in his fictional accounts of ragged and desperate illiterates making their way on foot or on horseback through an almost immemorial scene of stone, wood, metal, fire. To restrict his style only to the objects that suit it, McCarthy must flee contemporary society to set his novels in the remotest parts of Appalachia, untouched by the TVA, as in the earlier novels; along the bloody frontier of westward expansion in the American Southwest of the mid-nineteenth century (Blood Meridian); and in the lonesome backcountry of the desert Southwest during the Forties and early Fifties (the Border Trilogy). The Road leapfrogs the period between the end of the Second World War and the outbreak of some future world war—“A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions”—altogether.

• In The Paris Review, Alessandro Tersigni reviews a collection of essays by Turner Brooks (Spatial Memories and Preoccupations of an Architect, October 27):

  The buildings that the adult Brooks likes and designs are replete with mazes, alternate routes, spaces within spaces. He loves a secret garden, exulting in labyrinthine spaces because they force us to “reconnoiter with where one is, where one is coming from, and where one is going to next.” One of his primary influences regarding the virtue of architectural interstices is Kafka’s short story “The Burrow,” in which an unidentified animal loses itself, to Brooks’s delight, in the tangled bowels of its own den to elude home invaders. Another is Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. Visiting Soane’s Frankensteinian Georgian townhouses, he found that, though their “spaces are intimate, the wandering among them, as among trees in a forest, seems infinite.” He sees in both the Kafka tale and the museum some echo of his own philosophy: that what we undergo within a work of architecture is encoded in its infrastructure and blueprint, its tangible twists and turns.

  • Jorge Luis Borges, “The House of Asterion” (translated by James E. Irby):

    I have also meditated on the house. All parts of the house are repeated many times, any place is another place. There is no one pool, courtyard, drinking trough, manger; the mangers, drinking troughs, courtyards, pools are fourteen (infinite) in number. The house is the same size as the world; or rather it is the world. However, by dint of exhausting the courtyards with pools and dusty gray stone galleries I have reached the street and seen the temple of the Axes and the sea. I did not understand this until a night vision revealed to me that the seas and temples are also fourteen (infinite) in number. Everything is repeated many times, fourteen times, but two things in the world seem to be repeated only once: above, the intricate sun; below Asterion. Perhaps I have created the stars and the sun and this enormous house, but I no longer remember.

N.B.:

• on where Marvell got his chariot and his desert. [Bring me my Bow of burning gold: / Bring me my desert of desire: / Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! / Bring me my Chariot of fire! —Steve]

• Ernest Hemingway: “I write standing up because sitting down broadens the ass.” [And narrows the mind? —Steve]

• “Just like the Greeks want their Elgin Marbles back, so we want our Winnie-the-Pooh back, along with all his splendid friends.” [You’d think this would be a joke at the expense of the British, but no. —Steve]

• New kinds of literary scams.

• That one tree that got cut down in the UK.

• Taking walks.

• New issues:

  • The Baffler Issue 86 | Tight Ship

  • Harper’s Magazine November 26 [As linked to above.]

  • The New Criterion Volume 45, Number 3 / November 2026

Poem:

“A Noiseless Patient Spider” by Walt Whitman

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

[Have you ever met a spider that wasn’t noiseless and patient? And yet those adjectives get right to what a spider is. —Steve]

Upcoming books:

Out Friday:

Columbia University Press: The Book of China: A Persian Merchant’s Description of the Ming State for the Ottoman Court by ʿAli Akbar Khatayi, edited and translated from the Persian by Kaveh Hemmat, John Curry, and Hyunhee Park

Ecco | November 3

Totem: The Untold Story of Scripture
by Jo Baring

From the publisher: Why have we always made sculpture? What draws us to carve, cast, and mold forms from the materials around us? What do these objects say about the artists who create them and the societies they belong to?

In Totem, art historian and curator Jo Baring uncovers the untold story of sculpture, not through a traditional survey but by tracing how it has shaped and been shaped by human experience across cultures and millennia. From prehistoric artifacts like the Lion-man figure found in a German cave to to an ancient Mayan pyramid that conjures a serpent made of shadows, to the icons of the Italian Renaissance and the radical innovations of the twentieth century, Baring reveals how sculpture expresses power, loss, identity, and the need to make meaning through form. Along the way, she introduces us to the artists who have expanded sculpture’s possibilities—including Barbara Hepworth, Constantin Brâncuși, Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, and Antony Gormley—and revisits familiar works with fresh eyes.

Featuring original illustrations by Julia Ashe—line drawings that work in concert with Baring’s lithe, intimate storytelling to bring us closer to this thoughtfully curated selection of sculptures—Totem is a powerful reflection on our need to make, to remember, and to understand ourselves through the things we shape.

Also out Tuesday:

Harvard University Press: The Blickling Homilies edited and translated from the Old English by Robert Getz

Metropolitan Books: Just a Shot Away: Martin Scorsese’s Life in Film by Mark Binelli

What we’re reading:

Steve read more of Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 by Gordon S. Wood (2009). He also, while trying to pull quotes for earlier in the newsletter, ended up going back through the whole of the Gorgias and “Hills Like White Elephants.” [You guys heard about this Plato fellow? Pretty good! Same for this Hemingway character! —Steve]

Critical notes:

• In The American Scholar, Bonnie Friedman on remembering what you read:

  I’m convinced that a neurological change happens when one analyzes a passage aloud. Doing so must activate a different, more pertinacious function of the brain. Therefore, to build one’s internal library, it helps to have a group or at least a friend with whom to discuss what you read. In the absence of such a group, careful rereading on one’s own does much good. It also helps to copy passages out. And to consider a book’s shape. When you’ve put your book down for the day, spend time recalling the most haunting scenes. Certain images enter us saturated with meaning, like emblems on a tarot deck: Josef K.’s neighbors across the street peering into his bedroom as he demands to be told why he is under arrest, Emma Bovary taking out of hiding the green silk cigar case her husband found (after their thrilling night as guests of an aristocrat) and gazing at the emblem at its center—a coat of arms like a carriage door. Every time you think of a scene like this, you reinforce your hold on it and its hold on you.

  [If a sentence or passage really sticks with me I end up remembering whether it’s on the left or right page and about how far down it is. This has occasionally proved useful in finding quotes for the WRB—I only have to scan the bottom half of the left pages, or whatever the case may be. —Steve]

• In , on 30 years of If You’re Feeling Sinister:

  And in the center of all this is the ultimate abject child Murdoch, who finds his way into some dozen of the most perfect expressions of adolescent melancholy in the history of recorded music: “All I wanted was to sing the saddest song . . . ” “Kid in the snow, way to go / It only happens once a year / It only happens once a lifetime, make the most of it . . . ” “Second just to being born / Second to dying, too . . . ” “The best looking boys are taken / The best looking girls are staying inside . . . ” “What is it I must do to pay for all my crimes? / What is it I must do, I would do it all the time . . . ” I could gather up half the lines from the record, like this, and they’d serve just as well—they all have that tender, miniature perfection, like the thoughts young people think they’re jotting down in their private journals, only to look back on later in life, realizing they thought the same things every young person everywhere has always thought. And from moment to moment, that’s often exactly what If You’re Feeling Sinister is: the transcription of the world’s own cringy teenage diary, taken to its most exquisite, ultimate expression. Because it’s being written by an older man, with years of loss and hard-won wisdom behind him, it never stoops to bad high school poetry, but makes those sentiments something timeless.

  [I came to If You’re Feeling Sinister and Tigermilk too late to love them—senior year of college, I think?—it’s just too hard to get past the fact that they’re metaphorically written in crayon. And, if, like me, you fell for the Smiths first you quickly start missing Morrissey’s anger and winking. Adolescent melancholy is hard to do; it’s all the same but, since none of us know how to have independent thoughts as adolescents, it’s all bound up in the specific music and books and art and objects of romantic obsession we morosely meditated on.

  For all that, when “We Rule the School” is on it’s the saddest song you’ve ever heard. —Steve]

• Anton Chekhov (h/t Patrick Kurp):

  Anyone who says the artist’s field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. . . . You are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.

  [Negative capability! Get your negative capability here! —Steve]

Links:

• In The Dispatch, on 70 years of Howl:

  But ultimately, Howl’s celebration of humanity in all its wild glory, its reverence for music and intoxication, love and conversation, stands up against these charges. It’s true that idealists often become oligarchs and ecstatic visionaries often become dull clowns. And it’s true that all movements, if they gain any purchase in the public sphere, are quickly absorbed by mass culture and distorted until they become unrecognizable versions of themselves. But the pure products of the initial revolution in consciousness, whether Emerson and Whitman or Howl and “Like a Rolling Stone,” retain their potency. Though Howl is ostensibly an elegy and a lament, one can’t help but read its vigorous, energetic lines and feel called to action. All around you, it says to the disaffected reader, despite the indignities and iniquities of life in the straight world, there are fellow travelers, sympathetic souls; there is a secret army of people who feel the way you feel. Ginsberg, for all his later failings, never spoke of exhaustion, neurosis, and withdrawal, the feelings that seem to terminally afflict the modern world of letters. (“I have seen the greatest minds of my generation / Wait no I haven’t— / I haven’t seen anyone because the forests are on fire and I have asthma” reads a recent riff on Howl published in the prestigious Threepenny Review.) He believed that the imagination was infinitely powerful and could overcome any obstacle.

  [That Threepenny Review thing is so funny. I don’t even like Ginsberg much, but he had an ear and therefore did not write “I have seen the greatest minds of my generation.”

  When I want this stuff I go back to Blake. Or Kit Smart. Or even further back: “Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters: who maketh the clouds his chariot: who walketh upon the wings of the wind.” Begler’s right about Ginsberg at his best confirming within you that “there is a secret army of people who feel the way you feel,” but the populist and the prophetic don’t play nicely together (as any number of political speeches will attest). It is very American to try combining them, though.

  Howl doesn’t really get anywhere that “I wander thro’ each charter’d street / Near where the charter’d Thames does flow” did not get to (let alone “mind-forg’d manacles”), but it at least has the decency for its American audience to get there in a poem not titled “London.” The feeling is different and American, too; “London” is terse, but Howl aims (as other great American artists put it) to “tear the roof off the mothersucker.” There is something in Americans, and in Americans making art “about” America specifically, that demands maximalism. The innovation of so many great American artists is not necessarily doing anything new but simply doing more than had ever been done previously. Whitman and Ginsberg run over the restraints on the Psalmist’s lines; Moby-Dick frees Paradise Lost from the limits of iambic pentameter and the Biblical source material and sets it among Americans, people capable of anything; Scott Joplin builds on the likes of Chopin turning peasant dances into art by forcing the style of Romantic pianists into the precise and mechanistic rhythms of the march and the rag; Ezra Pound writes “a poem containing history” and decides that “history” means every historical detail that may prove useful to someone somewhere; Bob Dylan realizes that Rimbaud would get through the mind’s defenses easier if the mind were already set reeling by the loudest music available in 1965. Even if none of it were any good, the daring is its own thrill.

  I would like to put in a good word for exhaustion, neurosis, and withdrawal, though, and more specifically I would like to distinguish them from laziness and flabbiness, which is what we actually have. (To quote more great American artists: “we’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas!”) Plenty of good work has been done by the exhausted, neurotic, and withdrawn, but it requires more than simply being bored and complaining about what everyone else complains about. At their best those feelings create distance and alienation from the world, letting the artist see it from a distance and (to borrow from a great American artist) slant, without the self-indulgent boredom. And, as yet another great American artist quoted his mother saying, “Ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no // Inner Resources.” So much of our exhausted literature is the work of people with nothing in themselves and nothing to draw on, which will help them write neither Howl nor The Waste Land, say.

  But I am not Begler, and I read him for the California, the sunniness, the vision, the confidence and enthusiasm in himself and the art and the audience. As regular readers will know I have none of these things, being exhausted, neurotic, and withdrawn, and furthermore being a pessimist, a self-hating American with a case of Kultur envy, a crank, and so on. But, in writing as in friendship, what we like is sometimes as different from ourselves as possible. (There’s a great passage in some novel—I thought maybe Anna Karenina about Levin and Oblonsky but I couldn’t find it—about a friendship that works in part because the two have nothing in common; it comes to my mind a lot despite my not knowing where it’s from.) For all that, I’m with you in Substack.

  What I really want to say, though, is this: Ginsberg’s greatest contribution to culture is his backing vocals on Leonard Cohen’s “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On.” —Steve]

• In The New Statesman, Anoosh Chakelian on 100 years of Winnie-the-Pooh:

  Returning to them for the 100th anniversary, though, I was reminded how far from some kind of cute Myers-Briggs shorthand the premise actually is. None of the characters represent one set attitude to life. Pooh, for example, is no contented buffoon. He yearns for brain enough to understand Christopher Robin as his boy-master tells him unsettling real-world things about suction pumps and kings and queens. He silently wishes he could jump as far as Kanga, or knew what a Heffalump looked like. He is every bit as anxious as Piglet can be. He can be as woe-is-me as Eeyore too—when stuck in the entrance to Rabbit’s burrow, he harrumphs that “it all comes of not having front doors big enough,” and slopes into a corner when Piglet is more useful in the quest to capture Baby Roo.

  Having read a great many bedtime stories over the past two years, I can report that it is rare to find picture-book characters with such depth, and such little purpose. “Nothing” with a capital N is their favorite pastime. Milne’s characters are more motivated to do things out of boredom or necessity than some moral teaching about the value of imagination or friendship from the hand of the author.

• In The Walrus, Amarah Hasham-Steele on good and bad filmed adaptations of novels:

  All of this makes the process of adaptation feel somewhat grand. You’re not just reimagining a single, clearly defined text; you’re contributing to the collective imagination of a story. Put this way, the stakes are impossibly high: a bad adaptation constructs our shared understanding of a story, just as much as a good adaptation. What’s more, bad adaptations and good ones construct our understanding just as much as the “originals.” It’s a little bit terrifying to think that our cultural memory of a story is constructed by adapters—who sometimes read the source material, and sometimes grasp the author’s meaning, and are sometimes motivated by nobler incentives than profit.

  [The new Sense and Sensibility is wonderful—as with all adaptations of the novel, it makes Edward Ferrars into something because movies don’t work well when the male lead is a void lacking any charisma or interest. George MacKay is up for playing him as admirable, though; I’ve thought for a few years since seeing him in The Beast (2023) and Femme (2023) that he’s one of our finest young male actors, one who specifically plays inscrutable and unreadable very well, and even an admirable Edward Ferrars remains those. The film also has an idea of how to convey the opposition between the sisters’ ideas in visual language: the shots of nature are wild and free, while the shots of society range between mannered and claustrophobic.

  Earlier in the piece Hasham-Steele suggests that Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley is “brilliant” and in need of an adaptation. It’s not; it’s a huge mess about how great Emily and Anne Brontë (especially Emily) are. I can’t blame Charlotte for that too much, though, because they both died as she was writing it. Villette, though—that’s the Charlotte Brontë novel we need on the big screen. —Steve]

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

• The truth about Christmas carols

• A Poem by Michael Drayton and the thrills of repeating yourself

• The ambiguities of Aubrey Beardsley

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

O ho, O ho! would’t had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else
This isle with reviews of books.

Links:

• In Liberties, Ben Libman on voyeurism:

  As should by now be clear, the taboo in question is not merely the manner of Aphrodite’s undress, but more seriously the act of spying on a woman in the privacy of her toilette—of peeping-tomism, simply put. The interdiction in Greek culture is encoded in the myth of Actaeon, the hunter who stumbles upon a clearing where Artemis is bathing in private. Outraged by his transgression, Artemis transforms him into a stag, and has his own dogs tear him limb from limb. Or we may turn to Herodotus, who tells us of Candaules, king of Lydia, who is so proud of his own queen’s beauty that he implores his friend Gyges to hide in their bedroom and spy on her to see for himself. When the queen catches him peeping, she forces him to choose: either he kills Candaules and marries her, or he submits to his own execution. (His decision is predictable.) In either case, we are left no doubt that for a mortal to spy on a woman in this way is wrong.

  And yet, at the same time, the very erection of the Knidian Aphrodite in her temple authorized this mode of spying by circumscribing it in a devotional and aesthetic experience. She creates a structure of permission, an environment in which the taboo can be enacted as a sort of game between viewer and artwork. That it is a game, a sort of make-believe as might befit the child in each of us, distinguishes it from an act of violence. The rules which are meant to be broken are sheltered within other rules, which are not.

  [“She” doesn’t do anything, because she’s a chunk of marble. Voyeurism is more complicated than this, especially when it involves not stumbling onto a situation but having it carefully set up for your viewing pleasure. The content of the fantasy is not your own but the creation of the artist; you are merely led to think that you came up with it independently. The seeming power that comes with gazing at something distracts from what is actually happening and who is actually in charge. Vertigo (1958) and Body Double (1984) put it bluntly; to be a voyeur is, perhaps, to be manipulated, and the manipulation is only effective because the pleasure of voyeurism makes you stop thinking. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, Toril Moi on Fredric Jameson, reader:

  The striking feature of Duke’s Literature Program, then and now, is that no faculty member tried to emulate Fred. Fred was Fred, sui generis, and his capacious, dialectical vision of intellectual life inspired him to create a programme that could sublate, without chafing contradictions, an exceptionally wide range of intellectual interests. He arrived at Duke in 1985, four years after publishing The Political Unconscious, his great book on interpretation. The programme he created was made in that book’s image. It was not, Fred decided, going to educate specialists. Its mission would be to train intellectuals.

  Fred had three overarching ideas as to how to achieve this. First, there was his slogan, the first words of The Political Unconscious: “Always historicize!” The second idea could be summarized as “Always theorize!,” or perhaps “Always engage in metacommentary”—which means something like, “Always explicitly reflect on the moves you make in your efforts to think about your subject.” Finally, the third injunction: “Know your archive!” Fred believed, firmly, that students had to have an archive, that is, some cultural form or historical period which they knew intimately. A few classic works would never do. Fred included three cultural forms from the start: literature, film, and the objects and phenomena studied under the label “cultural studies”—the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, for example.

  [I am not sure that this is exactly what Moi means, but I acutely feel a sense, when I have merely read a few classic works from a period, that I don’t actually understand what distinguishes them from similar work that has not endured in the cultural memory. I can say, generally, why something is good, but saying how it puts the ideas floating around in an artistic culture to better use requires a familiarity with what the average looked like. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In The Wall Street Journal, Matt Gallagher reviews an annotated The Sun Also Rises (The Annotated Sun Also Rises: 100th Anniversary Deluxe Edition, edited by Robert Trogdon, October 13):

  As a veteran of the war in Iraq, I’ve been struck by how The Sun Also Rises continues to resonate among the reading ranks of my cohort. Something about the book connects and transcends. I’ve taught it in workshops; I’ve recommended it to aspiring vet-writers who find me on social media. A veteran almost always reads this novel with different eyes than others.

  Yes, Jake is disenchanted and bemused by the civilian world he’s returned to; that’s a familiar journey. But other details stand out. There’s the scene with Jake standing naked at his bedroom mirror, assessing his hidden “old grievance.” On the very next page Jake, stoic and aloof up to this point, sobs himself to sleep, alone. Then there is Mike, ever-angry at everything, making fun of “bloody military medals” and how they have been earned—or not. Bill decides to disappear into irony and jokes. Brett lost the love of her youth to the war in the Mesopotamia campaign.

  [Ezra Pound, in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley:

  Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

  Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
  Young blood and high blood,
  Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
  
  fortitude as never before
  
  frankness as never before,
  disillusions as never told in the old days,
  hysterias, trench confessions,
  laughter out of dead bellies.

  The Sun Also Rises is a novel-length treatment of “disillusions as never told in the old days. —Steve]

N.B.:

• Congratulations to Anne Carson on winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. [I have no idea what box my copy of If Not, Winter is in. Sorry. —Steve]

  • In Engelsberg Ideas, Jared Marcel Pollen:

    As with the ancients, eros and alienation are the twin drivers in Carson’s work. Historically, they are the daimons of poetic expression and philosophic inquiry (for Sappho and Socrates, it was eros; for Simonides and Plato, alienation). Both occasion pangs of estrangement, but at different emotional poles; both occasion a retreat inward, and a need for a language with which to talk to oneself. The move out of the epic and into the lyric can be interpreted as the takeover of eros and alienation in the poetic imagination: the poet at last falls out of the ecstatic trance and into their own self, as an embodied, thinking, feeling thing, and is forced to step forward and reckon with the curious, agonistic and strange nature of their own existence, with only language to brace themselves. Reading Anne Carson feels a great deal like this.

    [As Horace implies in Odes 1.6 about his decision not to write epic poetry, the subject matter of lyric has its own heft. —Steve]

• Cats in hardware stores.

• Indigenous dogs in America.

• Giant trolls in Tupper Lake.

• A new apple in Canada.

• New issue: Liberties Volume 7—Number 1 | Fall 2026

• Mike Ditka died on Friday, October 9. R.I.P,

Poem:

“Vergissmeinnicht” by Keith Douglas

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Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move,
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

[There are so many nice touches in this one: the repeated “gone” in the first line; the contrast between “nightmare” and “in the sun”; the failure to specify what exactly the barrel of the gun overshadows, letting it overshadow everything; the “Look.” that makes the reader into one of the men finding the dead German alongside the speaker; the gothic script being “copybook,” universalizing it; the “almost” that complicates the men’s feelings before the next stanza moves into imagining Steffi’s; the “paper eye” that (probably due to the discussion of The Tempest below) reminds me of “those are pearls that were his eyes,” letting a transformation of the eyes into something inhuman stand for a more general transformation; the contrast between “burst”—exploding outwards—and “cave”—empty inside; the chiasmus in the last stanza of lover/killer/soldier/lover; the chiasmus in the last two lines of death/soldier/lover/mortal. —Steve]

Upcoming books:

Bloomsbury Publishing | October 20

The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City
by Susanna Clarke

From the publisher: “He had already served three kings. He did not see why he should not be useful to a fourth.”

During the conquest of Northern England, the fairy host sweeps across the countryside. The city of Durham finds itself surrounded. But the encircling forces are not fairies, nor even other humans, but trees that trap the city within an eerie wood.

Ranulf, Bishop of Durham—a consummate politician—understands that the survival of the Northern English people depends on his finding a way to unite the two races, human and fairy. And he’s not averse to improving his own position at the same time. With these aims in view, he sets off for the New Castle, in search of the new King—the leader of the fairy host, rumored to be a mysterious human boy, no more than fourteen years old, who speaks no word of any human language.

Set 700 years before the events of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City is a bewitching, must-have addition to any fantasy reader’s shelf.

Also out Tuesday:

Princeton University Press: Shakespeare at Thirty by Rory Loughnane

What we’re reading:

Steve finished Chinese Postman by Brian Castro (2024). [One of the best new novels I’ve read in a while. I only learned about this one from a review in our sister publication Down Under (linked to in WRB—Aug. 19, 2026). What else is going on in Australia? Does anyone know? If this is any indication, it might be very interesting and no one outside Australia will ever hear about it. —Steve]

He then read Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress by Ramsey McGlazer (2020). [Wonderful little book about the liberatory potential of “the old school,” made funny by all the throat-clearing McGlazer has to do whenever he wants to suggest progressive education might be bad. (Large portions of the introduction amount to “progressive education? The thing Giovanni Gentile invented for Mussolini?” I guess you have to say things like that if you want to sort of people who read academic works about education to continue reading and not clutch their Freire to their hearts.) —Steve]

He then started reading Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 by Gordon S. Wood (2009). [That’s right; this is going to become a newsletter of the Early Republic again. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• on Rachel Cusk et al.:

  That this rhymes significantly with social media, reality television, and the cultural logic of late capitalism itself is not entirely surprising. We hear much about dwindling attention spans, which is often considered from the perspective of duration. But I think there is a concomitant loss of tolerance for density. If a work of fiction does not present itself as continuous with reality—to say nothing of the content of that fiction, but only its mode of presentation—then that work will be difficult for the contemporary reader to take on board. Fiction grows ever sleeker, ever more deaccessioned of the techniques and characteristics that defined the earlier phases of literary production. In essence, it is becoming more and more like anecdote in content and form. That Rachel Cusk’s Outline novels became massively popular at just the moment when reality itself became liquified and colonized by the capitalist logics of the market does not surprise me. In fact, they seem largely part of the same general shift in our capacity to tolerate density at the interface between our individual sense of reality and culture itself. In that, the content of these novels is largely irrelevant just as the content of the anecdotes are irrelevant. What matters, I believe, is the form, which arranges all of it into a pleasant, smooth texture that is exactly continuous with our own perception of reality.

  [All this is, I think, right so far as it goes, but whenever phrases like “continuous with our own perception of reality” start getting thrown around I no longer have any idea what we’re talking about. It’s a novel. It’s a bunch of words on pages. What would it mean for a bunch of words on pages to be continuous with reality? They exist in reality, and we experience them in reality, but we have become far too used to these technologies if we encounter them without friction.

  This goes for other artistic moments purporting to get rid of all that fancy literary stuff in order to get at how things really are. quoted Thomas Hardy this week:

  Art is a disproportioning—(i.e., distorting, throwing out of pro-portion) of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities, which, if merely copied or reported inventorially, might possibly be observed, but would more probably be overlooked. Hence “realism” is not Art.

  Whether “realism” is Art I don’t know—depends on the realist—but what Hardy has actually shown is that “realism” isn’t even realism. Any depiction of anything is going to include some things and exclude others, going to have a view of which features matter in a reality and proceed accordingly. There is no escape from making artistic decisions, and feigned artlessness is its own kind of art. —Steve]

• Moul on the Philoctetes and The Tempest:

  Reading the Philoctetes this summer, I was reminded oddly and insistently of The Tempest, another play about someone trapped on an island (in Prospero’s case, for 12 years) by trickery and betrayal. (Illegally ousted by his brother as Duke of Milan, he and his infant daughter Miranda were not killed outright, but instead put to sea in a leaky vessel.)

  Obviously there are a lot of differences between the stories—there is no character like Miranda in Philoctetes, and no romantic sub-plot as there is between her and Ferdinand, the son of her father’s enemy the King of Naples. Philoctetes is not a magician, but he does, like Prospero, have a magical implement: in his case his bow, a gift of Hercules; for Prospero, his staff. Both control all the creatures of the island—Prospero by magic, Philoctetes because his bow (until he is deprived of it in the middle of the play) gives him the power to kill the birds and the beasts.

  Both will be restored at the end of the play to their proper social status. Both in the course of the play confront their old enemies and, as it were, “replay” the original deceit: Odysseus, albeit via a proxy, tries once again to trick Philoctetes; Prospero must, once again, face an ambush and an attempt to overthrow him.

  [I thought we all agreed that Prospero is Caliban is Ariel, with his internal conflicts dramatized by splitting him into three characters. Moul suggests later on that The Tempest divides Philoctetes between Prospero and Caliban; the expectations of the audience mean that Shakespeare needs more characters than Sophocles did. —Steve]

• In The New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham on how we talk about football:

  There was something thrilling about this highly informed short monologue—perhaps it was the fact that Kimes never once considered explaining (as I, just a paragraph ago, have sheepishly done) what the hell play-action is, or why not being “under center” would make it hard to pull off. The slang term for employing and interpreting lingo like Kimes’ is “ball knowledge.” There’s a heartening respect for the intelligence of the audience in this pocket of the media. If you don’t know, after all, you’ll probably look it up. If you’re searching for organic, largely unquestioned, even aspirational intellectualism in American public life, here it is. The public intellectual of the future won’t be wearing tweed or a button-down collar—the new uniform involves a coach’s headset, or the pancake makeup from the greenroom of some sports network.

  [When football comes up in the WRB—this is a football newsletter, after all—I try to explain things out of deference to the international audience because football is incomprehensible. Everything else the reader can just look up. Like the football commentators, I assume my audience is smart and can follow along. How anyone does it the other way is beyond me. Why bother doing anything for an audience of the world’s most tedious and ignorant dullards—and, if your audience is tedious and ignorant dullards, what does that say about you?

  On the other side, I do like it when sportswriters demonstrate that they are literate. (The prose most of them produce suggests otherwise.) The other day I was reading a piece about college football that included a reference to the Algonquin Round Table. Good stuff. —Steve]

1. crazy review of books
2. review of books in turmoil
3. review of books out of balance
4. review of books disintegrating
5. a review of books that calls for another way of living

Links:

• In The New Statesman, on Joyce Carol Oates:

  There is something hard to know about Oates, both because she has said so much and because she says so little. She much sooner asks about your life, family and reading than muses on her own life. When some of her letters were published by her biographer Greg Johnson, she couldn’t read them. “Would you like to read something written by yourself when you were much younger? I think you’d probably be cringing! It’s the sort of thing that is ephemeral—like who cares?”

  About her past words, too, there is reticence. She once said a fine fate for writers is dying “with one’s romantic fantasies intact”: what were hers? “I don’t know that I really had any.” But didn’t she say her first stories differed from Hemingway’s because they were “much more romantic”? “I never was writing romance in my fiction.” What about the end of Finnegans Wake, that she reads to her students for its “glorious,” “heartbreaking,” “almost overwhelmingly beautiful emotion” as a character grows old and changes from her husband—has she ever felt like that? “I don’t know how to answer that. That’s a mythic character, not really a specific character.”

  [Hard to pin anyone down like this, I think. You can build up a sense of someone out of ephemeral remarks, but asking them about specific things they’ve long since forgotten they said seems designed to get the response “yeah, I don’t know, I guess, maybe.” (Or, in the case of the line about Hemingway, “I have no idea what I was talking about there. It must have made sense at the time.”)

  And Oates’ preference for asking about other people’s life instead of thinking about hers is probably unavoidable for anyone who has written as much fiction as she does. Not for nothing are many of her plots taken from real events. Thinking about your own life isn’t going to give you new raw material for plots. That has to be sought out elsewhere. (Perhaps even on Twitter—maybe it will take an author born in 1938 to finally give us the great novel of that place.) —Steve]

• In the Wall Street Journal, Kelly Franklin on Emily Dickinson’s “Death sets a Thing significant”:

  Great lyric poems chart experience, bringing us through a process of thought or feeling that moves and goes somewhere. Dickinson offers no static picture of grief, but a poetic dramatization of grieving. She spends three stanzas working herself up to expressing her pain. Was she hiding behind generalities? We do this ourselves: “All good things come to an end,” “She’s in a better place.” Anything to avoid confessing, “I am broken by this loss.” Sharp-eyed Dickinson shows us our defense mechanism. Then, when her speaker is ready, she moves beyond it to admit personal suffering. Then the final utterance of grief: “Now—when I read—I read not— / For interrupting Tears— / Obliterate the Etchings / Too costly for Repairs—.” The poem ends not with aphoristic words but with tears interrupting words altogether, blinding the speaker as she tries to read, and blurring—maybe washing away—the friend’s irreplaceable pencil marks left on the pages.

  [Did the editors at the Journal see that over at the NYT they aim their pieces about specific poems at seven-year-olds who don’t know what a poem is and decide that this left them an opening? Good for them.

  The archetypal Dickinson move is defamiliarization; language extremely simple that somehow requires careful parsing, images both intuitive and bizarre. It even extends to little phrases that normally attract no notice—the “here and there” in the penultimate stanza is such a concession, and comes even before the poem tells us what it concedes. All that’s left of the dead person are desultory traces. —Steve]

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Alexandra Wilson on Jean Renoir:

  There are party scenes too, of course. In his book City of Light, the cultural historian Rupert Christiansen characterizes mid-nineteenth-century Paris as “a ceaseless carnival,” which acted as “catnip for the strait-laced, the pious and the hypocritical.” When painting a group of revelers on a small islet on the Seine in La Grenouillère, Renoir himself remarked that: “It was a perpetual party, and what an assortment of people!” The centerpiece of this exhibition is Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, a painting familiar from countless greetings cards, mugs and jigsaws, yet on display in Britain for the first time. Seeing it in person, you admire Renoir’s vivid evocation of movement and hubbub, imagining the raised voices and music of the dance hall drowning out the distant hum of construction noise from Paris, into which the village of Montmartre had only recently been incorporated.

  You also notice that the characters in the foreground, some of them Renoir’s real-life-friends, seem oddly disconnected. Each person looks wrapped up in their own world and Renoir has not succeeded in drawing a convincing glance or conversation between any of them. This impression is repeated throughout the exhibition, as you gradually begin to realize that painting after painting features blank-faced protagonists, who stare ahead or look right past each other.

  [If you start looking for this in crowd shots you see it everywhere. —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 George Hebert and a pun

• We need real sickos (in both senses) to write about sickness

• Koyaanisqatsi (1982) in praise of the modern world

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 Lamp, on envy:

  For people such as myself, attempting to disavow judgement and aspiration entirely is dangerous; we run the risk of being like the man who rids himself of one devil only to play host to seven more. It is easy to act self-effacingly, but if there is no real internal reform, every smile becomes another addition to a great pile of resentment.

  For hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon frère—surely you understand by now that in this affair, you are me and I am you. I write from inside the beast. That’s why I know it so well. I have greatly envied, and been greatly envied, and can’t recommend either experience. But I’ve learned one thing through my mistakes, and I’ll share it with you now: the real secret to beating envy is to realize that envy, in addition to being a great vice and an internal poison, is a drag. It is boring. Imagine, if you will, being summoned up to the great throne of God and experiencing a supercut of every time you’ve envied another person. I don’t think it would just feel like shame; it would be overwhelmingly monotonous, like listening to a monologue from the most tiresome person ever to be born, a mosquito-buzz of why not me what makes them so great why them why not me what makes them so great why them why not me what makes them so going on and on and on. And when I imagine that, I get over myself. Not forever, but for a while. Envy will resist self-laceration, but it’s vulnerable to laughter.

  [Between this and an essay from 2021 on Pilate’s envy by Robert Wyllie The Lamp has cornered the market on interesting discussion of this vice. Wyllie there:

  Our Lord surrenders himself to envy because envy is the original original sin. The Book of Wisdom tells us that through the devil’s envy, sin entered the world. Paradise Lost imagines these infernal councils in unforgettable ways. Why envy, and not pride? Ignorance is the precondition of the pride of Adam and Eve. They could be tempted to believe they were godlike beings worthy of divine knowledge and power because they lacked the self-knowledge that they were not such beings. The first sinner was not so ignorant. Lucifer sinned in the fullness of intellectual light. The son of the morning defied God despite having what Saint Augustine calls the angelic “morning knowledge” of creation. If Lucifer is proud of something he is not, or if Lucifer misunderstands the nature of his power and knowledge, what is the origin of this pride? Envy, in-vidia, is the passion that un-sees what is Good-in-itself, because it perceives what is Good, and imagines how it would be good if it were under our control and directed to our wishful purposes.

  One thing Paradise Lost is sharp about is linking Satan’s rhetorical skill to his manipulation of what constitutes admissible evidence. Manipulation might be too strong a word; it is not so much that he cleverly evades and omits inconvenient truths as that he is incapable of recognizing them, and he argues like it. In Pandaemonium everybody basically agrees with him about the situation, and so he encounters no problems. Elsewhere he is reduced to simply making assertions, as in Book 5 when he responds to Abdiel saying that he and all the other angels were created by God:

  We know no time when we were not as now;

  Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais’d

  By our own quick’ning power, when fatal course

  Had circl’d his full Orbe, the birth mature

  Of this our native Heav’n, Ethereal Sons.

  Our puissance is our own, our own right hand

  Shall teach us highest deeds, by proof to try

  Who is our equal . . .

  The argument begins with his own understanding of the world (“We know”) and then interprets everything else through it. He cannot imagine that he is not God’s equal, so the only possible explanation for his creation is that he was “self-begot, self-rais’d.” This is an improvement on “why not me what makes God so great”—in fact, it was me, Satan says. I made myself.

  But Satan’s envy only really becomes pathetic when he is confronted not with intellectual dispute but with the brute fact of what his envying has made him. In Book 4 when two angels find him “Squat like a Toad, close at the eare of Eve” he is outraged that they don’t know who he is:

  Know ye not then said Satan, fill’d with scorn

  Know ye not mee? ye knew me once no mate

  For you, there sitting where ye durst not soare;

  Not to know mee argues your selves unknown,

  The lowest of your throng . . .

  The other side of Satan’s envy of those better than him is his scorn for those he sees as worse than him. They, he thinks, should envy him in turn. One of the angels, Zephon, then explains why they failed to recognize him:

  Think not, revolted Spirit, thy shape the same,

  Or undiminisht brightness, to be known

  As when thou stoodst in Heav’n upright and pure;

  That Glorie then, when thou no more wast good,

  Departed from thee, and thou resembl’st now

  Thy sin and place of doom obscure and foule.

  “Thou resembl’st now / Thy sin”: his envy has warped him—warped him so much that, even as he immediately realizes what he has lost, his focus is on inessentials:

  So spake the Cherube, and his grave rebuke

  Severe in youthful beautie, added grace

  Invincible: abasht the Devil stood,

  And felt how awful goodness is, and saw

  Vertue in her shape how lovly, saw, and pin’d

  His loss; but chiefly to find here observd

  His lustre visibly impair’d . . .

  His envy leaves no room for realizing just how much he has lost. Instead, it supplies a coping mechanism; he starts envying the angel’s physical appearance. The worse envy makes him, the more reason he has to envy others. The vice reinforces itself. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In The New Republic, Evan Kindley reviews a book about Edgar Allan Poe (Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe, by Emily Ogden, September 29):

  She also tracks Poe’s surprising influence on psychoanalysis. There is a strong resemblance, Ogden suggests, between Poe’s “spirit of perverseness” and Sigmund Freud’s notion of the death drive: “The two concepts circle around the same mystery: why do we frustrate ourselves?” But a more direct line of descent runs through Marie Bonaparte, a great-grandniece of Napoleon and close associate of Freud. Poe’s stories had terrified Bonaparte as a child, and when she was analyzed by Freud in the mid-1920s, she decided to deliberately induce anxiety by revisiting them. Thus, “she read Poe’s stories in the evenings, dreamed about them overnight, and recounted both the stories and the dreams to Freud in the morning.” Freud went along with the plan, though he himself was not a fan of Poe’s writing: “I was so close to throwing Poe out the door, he is too ridiculous,” he wrote to Bonaparte. A year into the treatment, he was urging her to switch to Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Don’t you think Hawthorne is refreshing, compared to such a psychopath?”

  [This has to be the only time in history Hawthorne was described as “refreshing.” —Steve]

N.B.:

• Ninth-graders in China are now required to read Jane Eyre. [A good first step towards requiring them to read the WRB, the world’s leading Brontë newsletter. There’s a lot in here about Jane Eyre presenting a version of feminism that the Chinese Communist Party can get behind; it makes no mention of Jane’s specifically Christian feminism, but it would be pretty easy for those not from a culturally Christian background to not make anything of it. —Steve]

• A profile of Fitzcarraldo.

• Raccoons making and playing with toys.

• Dealing with pigeons by hiring falconers.

• New issues:

  • The Lamp Issue 37 | Christ the King 2026 [As linked to above.]

  • The St. John’s Review [Back from the dead. —Steve] Volume 63, Number 1 | Fall 2026 [There’s a great lecture in here by Henry Higuera on the history of multiplication up to the mid-nineteenth century, about which more in Critical notes below. Math stuff can only be so high up in the run of the WRB. —Steve]

Poem:

“Winter: My Secret” by Christina Rossetti

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I tell my secret? No indeed, not I:
Perhaps some day, who knows?
But not to-day; it froze, and blows and snows,
And you’re too curious: fie!
You want to hear it? well:
Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell.

Or, after all, perhaps there’s none:
Suppose there is no secret after all,
But only just my fun.
To-day’s a nipping day, a biting day;
In which one wants a shawl,
A veil, a cloak, and other wraps:
I cannot ope to everyone who taps,
And let the draughts come whistling thro’ my hall;
Come bounding and surrounding me,
Come buffeting, astounding me,
Nipping and clipping through my wraps and all.
I wear my mask for warmth: who ever shows
His nose to Russian snows
To be pecked at by every wind that blows?
You would not peck? I thank you for good will,
Believe, but leave the truth untested still.

Spring’s an expansive time: yet I don’t trust
March with its peck of dust,
Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers,
Nor even May, whose flowers
One frost may wither thro’ the sunless hours.

Perhaps some languid summer day,
When drowsy birds sing less and less,
And golden fruit is ripening to excess,
If there’s not too much sun nor too much cloud,
And the warm wind is neither still nor loud,
Perhaps my secret I may say,
Or you may guess.

[Rossetti’s winter is much more alive than her spring and summer. Winter’s winds “Come bounding and surrounding me, / Come buffeting, astounding me,” and so have a force and energy to them. Spring, on the other hand, is characterized by “brief showers” and “sunless hours,” and summer is too far gone. The birds are exhausted; they are “drowsy” and “sing less and less,” and the fruit “is ripening to excess” implies a lack of the equanimity desired in “not too much sun nor too much cloud.” This transformation of the usual seasonal tropes makes her secret—that is, what else she knows, what else she sees that the rest of us don’t—more intriguing. —Steve]

Upcoming books:

Out tomorrow:

Eris Press: Art Is Absolute Truth: Constantin Brâncuși in His Own Words edited by Doïna Lemny

Out Monday:

Columbia University Press: Big American Writer: The Bilingual Jack Kerouac by Jean-Christophe Cloutier

Arcade Publishing | October 6

A Table for Fortune
by William T. Vollmann

From the publisher: In A Table for Fortune, National Book Award–winner William T. Vollmann depicts the last half-century of American politics, war, and life in this four-part, 3,000+ page novel that is at once a family drama, bildungsroman, and national epic.

Volumes 1 and 2 gather from the half-forgotten annals of the near-past––Stasi documents, Iraqi newspaper articles, presidential radio addresses––to form a vivid and mesmeric saga centered on Elliott Stevens, or DAVE, a CIA analyst whose glee at winning the Cold War is matched only by the dread that culminates in the nightmares of September eleventh and the resulting War on Terror. The hero of Volumes 3 and 4 is Matthew Stevens, Elliott’s son, whose efforts to escape his parents and divine the fate of his life result in homelessness, addiction, and perhaps even happiness.

Spanning from 1968 to 2019, these volumes comb together––with Vollmann’s generous wit and Olympian prose––a staggeringly well-researched, definitive history of American post-war foreign policy with a deft, moving chronicle of a family’s descent into resentment and gloom. Elliott and Matthew Stevens are “passengers within a divine bullet,” which, like Gogol’s troika before it, overtakes all flying to its nation’s end. This boxed set, with all four volumes in hardcover, allows the book to be read as intended: as one towering novel, the magnum opus of one of the giants of literature.

[We linked to a review in WRB—June 10, 2026.]

Also out Tuesday:

Doubleday: Will and Attention: A Memoir by Meghan O’Gieblyn

Graywolf Press: There’s a Monster in the Lake: The World as a Fantastical Place by Laura Fernández, translated from the Spanish by Alexis Almeida

Penguin: Agate Head / Stone Soup by Patricia Lockwood

St. Martin’s Press: Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited by Tracy Daugherty

University of Chicago Press: The Rope in Bloom: A Bilingual Edition by Radu Vancu, translated from the Romanian by Paula Console-Şoican and Cyrus Console-Şoican

W. W. Norton & Company: Fair Ones: A Double Novel by Lydia Millet

What we’re reading:

Steve read Salomé by Oscar Wilde (translated from the French by Alfred Douglas [Better known for other work? —Steve]). [My revisiting this was prompted by ’s piece on Max Beerbohm and Wilde, which we linked to last week. Beerbohm is right that Wilde’s play lacks any real dramatic interest—I also went back and listened to Richard Strauss’ Salome, which is much better because the music supplies the dramatic interest that the text lacks. Strauss’ opera also improves on the play by cutting a lot of the idiotic banter between minor characters.

I will grant Wilde, though, that the idiotic banter is essential to his effect. This is a play in which Salomé and Jokanaan are connected by their incomprehensibility to everyone else, and to each other. Their speech and motivations are frequently misread. Salomé, with her love for death, and Jokanaan, with his religious ecstasy manifesting in prophecies of doom, have attained (here is Decadence) such exquisite and perverse states of feeling that they have nothing in common with everyone else at Herod’s court. Herod, who is a horny politician that likes seeing naked ladies, and the young Syrian, who moons over Salomé and then kills himself (the play is glad to be rid of him), present “normal” sexuality. The Jews and the Nazarenes, with their unedifying and noisy disputes, present “normal” religion. This is the rest of the world; it is characterized by its lack of Decadence.

The dance of the seven veils, then, is a concession to the non-Decadent world. If you want a scandal, as Wilde surely did, kissing a severed head has nothing on putting a naked woman on stage. It concedes too much, lingering on Salomé’s manipulation of Herod and not her real passion, and when performed live it must have killed whatever forward momentum the play had. (Strauss’ opera also suffers from this problem.) Decadent characters can live, at least in the mind, in their versions of Des Esseintes’ house; Decadent authors have to consider the public they intend to shock. —Steve]

He then started reading Chinese Postman by Brian Castro (2024). [We linked to a review in WRB—Aug. 19, 2026.]

Critical notes:

• on Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle:

  I wonder if too gimlet-eyed a focus on the content of Marcher’s vision. Rather, it seems to me that The Beast in the Jungle elaborates a particular shape taken by anticipation: that we look forward to something, something marvellous or terrifying (Marcher is unsure which his anticipated event will be), perhaps we look forward to this for a long time, maybe even structure our life around this looking-forward, and then, as we go through life, it suddenly occurs to us that the thing we were anticipated has happened, is now behind us, and we didn’t notice.

  [Reading the sentences of late Henry James, with all their revisions and refinements and retracings, is also like this. —Steve]

• E. A. Robinson (h/t Patrick Kurp):

  Sometime ago you asked me how I accounted for our difficulty in making a correct estimate of the poetry of one’s own time. The question is a difficult one. I don’t even say that it has an answer. But the solution of the thing seems to me to be related to what I said about the quality of finality that seems to exist in all real poetry. Finality seems always to have had a way of not obtruding itself to any great extent.

• [In the piece in The St. John’s Review Higuera says this about i (the imaginary number):

  To get my full point across I’d need to invent a whole new notation, since with i there’s no way of notationally distinguishing the sign-flipping aspect from the multiplying aspect of “multiplying by i.” For this reason I wish i had come to be written as “⏊ 1” or something, a “half-way negative one.”

  The notation is what it is; there’s no real point in wishing it was different. What I find interesting, though, is the form Higuera’s wish takes. ⏊ 1, taking the symbols to mean what they usually mean, does not mean “half-way negative one”; it means “perpendicular to” and “1.” “Perpendicular to 1” doesn’t mean anything, but interpreting it as “one unit in the perpendicular direction” shows that Higuera is smuggling in things he knows about complex numbers not immediately apparent from pondering “the square root of negative one.” The imaginary number line is, in fact, perpendicular to the real number line, and the two lines determine the complex plane. On that plane multiplication by i is equivalent to a 90 degree rotation counterclockwise. Rotating 1 90 degrees counterclockwise brings it to i; rotating i 90 degrees counterclockwise brings it to -1. Multiplication on the complex plane being equivalent to considering the numbers being multiplied as vectors and then multiplying their magnitudes and adding their angles is not something Higuera gets into, but conceiving of i, as ⏊ 1 would have us do, as having something to do with perpendicularity and rotation makes the world of complex numbers much more intuitive.

  I say all this because, to me, i poses a pedagogical problem. The math student first encounters “the square root of negative numbers” in Algebra I because the quadratic formula sometimes spits them out, but it would be silly to derail an Algebra I class with discussion of complex numbers. Even Algebra II (at least, as I took it, which was a while ago, and assuming I recall it correctly) presents complex numbers mostly as symbols to be manipulated. It was only when I saw complex multiplication as something involving rotation, whenever that was (Calculus II, maybe?), that I understood the motivation for any of this.

  What this means for math pedagogy I don’t know. You obviously can’t show Algebra I students Euler’s formula and expect them to make anything of it. But I do think letting on, when the quadratic formula results in square roots of negative numbers, that i and complex numbers more broadly have something to do with rotation off the real number line (as opposed to just being some mysterious new kind of number) is worthwhile. It supplies a motivation for setting complex numbers aside for the moment and a framework for understanding them later on that is generally missing from the student’s first encounter. —Steve]

Links:

• In The Paris Review, Stephen King [This is a Maine newsletter. —Steve] on the “Chattanooga Choo Choo”:

  There’s poetry, and there’s doggerel. The latter perfectly describes most lyrics of the early rock and roll era, where arms inevitably rhymes with charms and baby is followed by don’t mean maybe. This is miles from Wallace Stevens, Adrienne Rich, or Edgar Allan Poe. Even the lyrics of sophisticated pop writers (I’m thinking of Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen) have a tendency to look dead on the page. That is probably also the case with “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” although these lyrics fall in a gray area that’s neither poetry nor doggerel. They charm with rhymes that delight both the heart and mind, especially if you have a sense of humor. The very name of the song is alliterative, but that alliteration is combined with the childish word for “passenger train.” The combo is, as I say, both sophisticated and naïve. It’s daddy-cool.

  [“Chattanooga” has a lot to do with it. Back in 2012 Stephen Akey wrote in The Millions about Chuck Berry, who was also writing neither poetry nor doggerel as a lyricist:

  The catalog of place names in the first verse of “Sweet Little Sixteen,” for instance, is echt-country, yet the song itself is as stolid a twelve-bar blues as any composition by, say, Willie Dixon, who, as a matter of fact, played bass on it. So where are they rockin’? “They’re really rockin’ in Boston / In Pittsburgh, PA / Deep in the heart of Texas / And round the ’Frisco Bay / All over St. Louis / And down in New Orleans / All the cats want to dance with / Sweet Little Sixteen.”

  You could draw a pretty comprehensive map of America from the poetry of place names in Chuck Berry’s songs. Norfolk, Virginia; downtown Birmingham; Houston town; Albuquerque; Los Angeles: they’re all there in “The Promised Land,” inventoried with great good humor even when the traveler encounters, as we all do from time to time, “motor trouble that turned into a struggle.”

  Much of American songwriting is milking good place names for all they’re worth; both Stephen Foster and George Gershwin made good use of “Swanee,” for example. —Steve]

• In Harper’s, Max Norman on Cesare Pavese:

  The peculiar, often charming, sometimes baffling result is the key to all Pavese’s mythologies, and not just because of its dense jumble of borrowings from Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, and especially Lucian, or its overt imitation of Leopardi, who also wrote dialogues. Here, in a form equal parts poetic, novelistic, and dramatic, Pavese’s images grow back into myths, just as la donna della voce rauca has become Artemis. But these myths, particularly in Zallman Proctor’s relaxed, often funny translation, are unpretentiously told. Old Greeks and gods—some famous, like Achilles and Patroclus, others whom even a classicist might struggle to recognize—chat and complain about their condition like real people or clever schoolboys. Pavese stripped away the ancient particulars to get at what he described as the “problem” underneath, the “cruxes” that animate them and can’t be translated into another form. Mythology, Pavese writes in the book’s preface, is “a language, an expressive mode—which is to say, it’s not random, it’s a hothouse of symbols that belongs, like all languages do, to a specific set of references that can’t be conveyed any other way.”

• In Liberties, on Éric Rohmer:

  Rebecca West has a remarkable line that applies very well to Rohmer’s characters: “As we grow older and see the ends of stories as well as their beginnings, we realize that to the people who take part in them it is almost of greater importance that they should be stories, that they should form a recognizable pattern, than that they should be happy or tragic.” Some of their stories conclude more happily than others, but what connects them all is that they are intensely conscious of themselves as shaping the narratives of their own lives. And it is partly this self-consciousness that makes them of such interest to us. They want their actions to form a continuous expression of a certain idea of their own characters, and this extends to their choice of mates, both male and female. Though they may deceive themselves in this or that particular, almost no one in Rohmer’s films is simply indifferent to the direction of their lives—and their love lives especially. As Rohmer himself remarked, “My intention was not to film raw events, but the narrative that someone makes of them.”

  [Previous Rohmer discussion in basically every issue of the WRB. (There’s no official list of WRB guys, which would really just be a list of “my guys,” but if there were he’d be on it. If you’ve been reading this for long enough you can come up with the other names on the list.)

  There’s an awareness in that final quote of how to make the limits of art work to the art’s advantage. You can’t film raw events, after all, and in any kind of traditional filmmaking you’re depicting some kind of narrative. Why not, then, align the narrative you are inventing with the narrative your characters are inventing for themselves? —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 John Betjeman and how to loudly invoke other poems to good effect

• Also in the poem section: obsolete jobs we didn’t get enough art about and an American’s take on “Slough”

• I investigate whether everything is, somehow, still secretly about the 1890s

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

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

Read more

Links:

Reviews:

• In 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]

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