It was as if human society, having been torn apart, was starting to remake itself already—as if with time there could have been kings and queens on that drifting hull, and maybe even Managing Editors of the Washington Review of Books. But then the ocean washed them all away.
N.B.:
The first WRB Presents event will be held today at Sudhouse DC and feature readings by Ryan Ruby, Zain Khalid, Austyn Wohlers, and
. Doors at 6 p.m., readings at 7 p.m. Sign up to attend here.Links:
Two in The Paris Review:
Eliot Weinberger on the cultural history of bees:
Confucians know that when the ruler is wise, bees do not sting children. They saw the hive as an imperial court, with, according to Lu Tien in the eleventh century, a “proper sense of the relationship between the ruler and his officials. Their punishments and orders are strictly enforced.”
Liu Shen in the fourteenth century said that people haven’t realized how similar they are to bees because bees are so small and they sting. They attend court twice a day with a dutiful respect to their ruler; they amass government stores of food; they move in ranks like an army and set up sentry posts to defend their gates. Most of all, they observe the Five Constant Virtues: humaneness, right action, ritual decorum, wisdom, and trustworthiness.
[This story, I think, says more about my own childhood perversity than the wisdom, or lack thereof, of George W. Bush: when we were young I got my younger brother stung by a bee by giving him advice to avoid being stung—advice which, of course, would agitate the bee. Like all childhood stories told often enough, the memories of its repeated tellings have merged with the memory of the event itself, and the embellishments that come with telling a story have made their way into the original memory. Some of my favorite stories, I suspect, hardly happened at all and were constructed over years by Steve Larkin, budding employer of narrative technique, but how would I prove that to myself? There are no sources other than the ones obscured by the natural failings of memory, amplified by my own attempts to make something better of them.
As a child I was never stung by a bee. (Nor have I been as a man.) If Messrs. Clinton, Bush, or Obama are reading: thank you. —Steve]
Hannah Zeavin interviews Alice Notley:
Zeavin: Do you write in longhand?
Notley: Most of the time. Every once in a while I have a project that involves going to the typewriter, but if I do that, I write too many words.
Zeavin: Have you ever found yourself unable to write?
Notley: I don’t have that thing that everyone wants to talk about—writer’s block. Sometimes I write badly, and then I don’t keep that poem. But anytime I’m not actively composing a little bit every day, I’m afraid that I will stop writing, and I don’t feel good if I don’t write. But I’m also afraid that I will produce so many pages that people won’t want to read all of them. I can’t figure out if I should try to write less or not. I would have to try.
Capote on Kerouac: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” [There are some pieces for the harpsichord that are not playing the harpsichord but using the typewriter. In WRB—Mar. 13, 2024 we quoted Schoenberg saying that the sound of airplanes should be scored “like big bees, only louder.” The solution is the cold mechanical buzzing of the early twentieth-century harpsichord (not the reconstructions of Baroque models that replaced them later, although those have their share of buzz). —Steve]
T. S. Eliot’s process involved both longhand and the typewriter.
Two in Liberties:
Michael Kimmage on impurity in art:
The more potent impurity in Moby-Dick is its impurity of content. Prophesy haunts this novel. In its opening chapters, set in New Bedford and Nantucket, portents of death and disaster are everywhere. In chapter nineteen, titled “The Prophet,” a man named Elijah predicts catastrophe for the Pequod—“what’s to be, will be; and then again, perhaps it won’t be,” referring to the lives of those on the ship. (Ishmael dismisses him as “a humbug.”) At the core of the novel, though, is not the fact of fatalism. It is a pattern of choice that leads step by step to the crew’s enslavement to Ahab and ultimately to the lack of concern that Ahab has for the ship he captains, so concerned is Ahab to heal his wounded self by killing the white whale. On the ship, Ahab is only one person. The several dozen members of the crew do not have to follow him. They force themselves to follow. Their collective self-defeat is more terrifying than the white whale and the malice that it symbolizes.
Helen Vendler on Walt Whitman’s war poetry:
Owing to his interest in others, and because he could “effuse” himself into almost anyone, in “The Artilleryman’s Vision” Whitman invents, so far as I know, the first American poem of PTSD. Gradually, in his involuntary effusion of linguistic sympathy into the mind of the Artilleryman, Whitman diagnoses the soldier’s affliction as a form of mental illness with a tragic prognosis: the soldier cannot (in the world of the poem) awaken from his postwar “vision” and rejoin his sleeping family. The poem is not the history of a single flashback (defined as “a reawakened memory”). On the contrary, through its bizarre structures and disorganized suites of perceptions, it becomes a surreal portrait of the grim alterations of a disturbed mind.
[Behind the paywall: Steve proposes that music critics should be able to identify minor keys, the new Lauren Oyler book, Walter Benjamin, shipwrecks, Salman Rushdie, the eclipse, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]
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