The body of knowledge locked into and releasable from the Washington Review of Books can replace practically any university in the Republic. First things first, then. The primal importance of the WRB is what it can add to the individual mind.
N.B.:
March’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Saturday, March 29 to discuss the topic “Is there honor without revenge?”
Links:
In The Nation, an excerpt from Jenny Odell’s afterword to a reissue of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (1977, March 18):
Throughout all of this, what I recognized most was the fundamental quality of Shepherd’s relationship to the Cairngorms, a blend of obsession and humility. She tells us right at the beginning what the point is: going to the mountain is “a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it.” Her depictions of the landscape, its life forms, and its visual tricks are suffused with a breathless fixation on a subject that exceeds all description. Desire becomes the engine that not only drives her writing but also compels her back to the place, over and over again, each time revealing more complexity. “This process has taken many years,” she writes, “and is not yet complete.” It can never be complete; she goes back because she knows she will always find more.
[As Thoreau says in my favorite piece of nature writing, The Maine Woods:
The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there.
—Steve]
Reviews:
In 4Columns, Sasha Frere-Jones reviews a book about listening to music when running (Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening, by Ben Ratliff, March 18) [An Upcoming book today.]:
After a welcome digression on the disgusting, insane people who volunteer to run alongside you—an unwelcome violation of the project where we are “all solo performers playing Debussy on our routes”—Ratliff runs to “the stillest, quietest, calmest music” he can think of, which is shakuhachi (bamboo flute) music recorded by Takahashi Kuzan. “Within a minute of listening to the record you feel you are hearing a life’s work basically compressed within each phrase,” he writes, “and expressed through a medium of very limited output.” He goes on for another two paragraphs, though he knows he doesn’t need to. This is a kind of criticism that doesn’t exist in magazines and newspapers—one woven into and expressive of the fabric of daily life. There are not stars or thumbs-up or digits attached to these observations, and the main framing here is not the release schedule, but whether or not Ratliff thought the sounds were close enough to silence, an actually interesting metric.
[I feel like I keep having occasion to quote
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
in here. Personally, I’ve never been able to listen to music when running—I play it in my head, and that way its rhythm matches the rhythm of the footfalls. —Steve]
Two in our sister publication across the pond; first, Freya Johnston reviews a book about a book about marriage in Jane Austen’s world (Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen, by Rory Muir, 2024)
With this concluding point [“Female economy will do a great deal my Lord, but it cannot turn a small income into a large one.”] it is impossible to take issue: Lord Osborne is silenced. The idea that “even women”—in Osborne’s argument, the more powerful of the sexes, despite their dependent status—might not be able to arrange the world exactly as they wish is put to the rich landowner in very plain terms indeed. (Anne Elliot amplifies this argument in the climactic scene of Persuasion.) Emma’s tone in this speech, as summarised by the narrator, might describe that of The Watsons as a whole: “mild seriousness.” A related quality of the work is what the nineteenth-century novelist Margaret Oliphant identified as Austen’s “fine vein of feminine cynicism.”
[This is by no means a new observation, but the mildness gradually disappears from Austen’s work as it goes on. Consider two characters with the same fault: in Pride and Prejudice Sir William Lucas is impressed with and obsessed with his title, and in Persuasion Sir Walter Elliot is too. But the former is a goofy figure of fun, and the failing is not serious:
He could think with pleasure of his own importance, and, unshackled by business, occupy himself solely in being civil to all the world. For, though elated by his rank, it did not render him supercilious; on the contrary, he was all attention to everybody.
Sir Walter Elliot’s obsession with his rank, though, is the source of basically every problem in Persuasion:
The Kellynch property was good, but not equal to Sir Walter’s apprehension of the state required in its possessor. . . . It had not been possible for him to spend less; he had done nothing but what Sir Walter Elliot was imperiously called on to do; but blameless as he was, he was not only growing dreadfully in debt . . .
It infects those who should know better, like Lady Russell:
She had a cultivated mind, and was, generally speaking, rational and consistent—but she had prejudices on the side of ancestry; she had a value for rank and consequence, which blinded her a little to the faults of those who possessed them. Herself the widow of only a knight, she gave the dignity of a baronet all its due; and Sir Walter, independent of his claims as an old acquaintance, an attentive neighbour, an obliging landlord, the husband of her very dear friend, the father of Anne and her sisters, was, as being Sir Walter, in her apprehension, entitled to a great deal of compassion and consideration under his present difficulties.
And (to bring marriage into it) it clearly influences her advice to Anne to let Wentworth go, advice which the novel sets out to rectify. At this point the female cynicism is no longer a fine vein but most of the substance, concealed behind the usual dry wit. —Steve]
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
My father, Philip Larkin (not actually my father) and Peter Hitchens
Teaching people how to hear poetry
Hannah on a Poem by Sylvia Plath about a pheasant
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 below.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much; I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? We depend on the good will of our readers, and we depend on their word of mouth to grow; nothing is as effective at bringing new readers into the fold as a recommendation from a friend.
—Steve]
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