WRB—Mar. 22, 2025

“vaguely human-shaped”

But there certainly are not so many Managing Editors of the Washington Review of Books in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them.

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 Point, the first of a four-part series on trash and speculative fiction by

  BDM
  :

  Thus Moore uses the “weird” to reveal and to disguise, to make her subject familiar and strange. She achieves her effects through a careful manipulation of what we expect and think we know (and therefore what we think we know to expect). And in this use of expectation, genre is crucial, because you only can expect an outcome if you think you know what sort of a story you’re already in. But her particular genre is also important because its essential quality involves introducing something that cannot, will not and in some ways should not exist, but which we nevertheless desire. That “something” is not life on Mars, but the Shambleau. Moore’s repetition of the phrase “the soul should not be handled” is effectively ominous, but her singular achievement is giving you a sense of what that might mean and why it might be alluring enough to need a prohibition. Indeed we might think the true height of intimacy would be to find someone who could perceive and handle our soul. And maybe it is, but, should we ever be offered the chance to have this experience, we will not survive.

  [The danger of getting what you want is getting what you want. —Steve]

• In The New Criterion,

  Micah Mattix
  on Andrew Young:

  Such coy reversals are typical of a Young poem. There is yet one more in “Autumn.” Tiresias is “new” in Young’s poem, not simply because he is “unreproved” and therefore able to see, but also because he is not “stricken by the goddess that I loved” (my emphasis), which is to say he is not in thrall of her. This is a proto-Christian Tiresias who is no longer enamored with the pagan gods but with the one true God who reveals himself in nature.

  It is for poems like these that Young was praised in the 1950s when he began to be recognized more widely for his work. He was already in his sixties at the time and had stopped writing short poems. He became an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1951 and was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1952. In 1953, Richard Lawrence, who later edited a collection of essays on Young’s poetry, described Young’s verse as “Terse” and “highly-charged.”

  [In what has to be one of the more—distinctive—things anyone’s ever said to me, when we read Oedipus Rex in high school a friend told me that he read all of Tiresias’ lines in my voice. (Look at the things I’m willing to admit in this newsletter for the entertainment of you, the readaer.) The experience left me with, among other things, a taste for revisionist versions of Tiresias. —Steve]

• Two in Harper’s; first, an excerpt from a new translation of a collection of W. G. Sebald’s essays (Silent Catastrophes, translated by Jo Catling, March 25) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Mar. 19, 2025; we linked to a review in WRB—Feb. 1, 2025.]:

  The central activity of the learner, however, is not writing, but reading: “Read until the eyelashes are almost audible with fatigue.” The knowledge the learner accumulates is not possession, not education, and not power; it remains presystemic, and is, at most, a function of studying, which is its main concern. Learning appears identical with life itself. In this, [Canetti] is part of a long Jewish tradition, in which the ambition of the writer is directed not toward the work which he has created, but to the elucidation of that which is written. The literary form which that illumination takes is that of the excursus, the commentary, and the fragment. It stays true to the objects of contemplation, without devouring them like the pig with the books in the pawnshop. For Canetti, there is a crucial difference between the act of reading and the assimilation of knowledge with a view to power. Freedom, for him, is the “freedom to let go, a giving up of power.” The stance alluded to here is that of the sage, capable of resisting the temptations of the knowledge he bears within him. “From day to day, you grasp more, but you are reluctant to sum up; as though it could ultimately be possible to express everything in a few sentences on some single day, but then definitively.” A few sentences, uttered at the right time—this, for Canetti, would be the correct response to the compulsion of the system, which madness and power and art and science are forever passing down to one another.

  [We linked to reviews of Canetti’s work in WRB—Apr. 27, 2024, WRB—Aug. 3, 2024, and WRB—Aug. 17, 2024. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” —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:

• I return to my theories about Mansfield Park and Milton

• Various takes on plants and art

• K. T. on a Poem by Timmy Straw about an ax

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.

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—Steve]