When its materials are regarded in the mirror of memory, the Washington Review of Books resolves itself.
N.B.:
The recording of this week’s WRB x Liberties salon discussion on the topic, “Is there loyalty without nationalism?” is now available wherever podcasts are served:
The next discussion will take place on May 18, with the topic, “Should you like your friends?” If you would like to participate, please contact Chris or Celeste Marcus.
Links:
[Since “the discourse” has dwelled on the negative reviews of Lauren Oyler’s book we linked to on Wednesday for the past week—I’m not sure what it says about the state of criticism that a couple harsh reviews occasion all kinds of thoughts about criticism itself, but it probably isn’t good. In any case, this is my favorite contribution I’ve read so far to that debate. —Steve]
on the state of criticism and social media engagement with it:But after reading dozens of tweets about them, I grew frustrated by the mob—which had metastasized into something far less intellectual than any of the writers who provoked it. The writing had lost its meaning in favor of dumb jokes and empty proclamations of various careers starting or ending, and I was quickly reminded that Twitter and Goodreads and Instagram—the platforms of the people—unfortunately cannot match the serious intellectual depth of real literary criticism. If you’re like me, and you enjoyed reading any of the pieces mentioned, you should keep reading pieces like them, and subscribing to those publications which publish works of comparable quality, and acknowledging that that work is something infinitely different than the clickbait we all have on our timelines.
In Vulture, an excerpt from Adam Moss’ upcoming book (The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing, April 16), this from an interview with Louise Glück about “Song,” the final poem in her last collection (Winter Recipes from the Collective, 2021):
I knew that in order to do the “never again,” there had to be a plan. At some point it was “I make plans,” or “I plan,” or “I tell him I’m going to . . .” These were all variants. And then on your long walk—the same walk every day like a prisoner—you repeat these phrases, and sooner or later they get fixed. But you don’t feel as though you fixed them; something in your head fixes them. And when you get the thing right, you begin to see the shape emerge. And the more the shape emerges, the faster you can work. This poem was written pretty rapidly but for that recalcitrant stanza.
In The Atlantic, Judith Shulevitz on the quest for personal freedom and its effects in the novels of Helen Garner:
The attempt is worth it, though, because these novels teach an important lesson about literature from the past, or near past: that its authors may understand the moral complexities of their age better than the inhabitants of the enlightened present are willing to admit. Garner in particular makes herself easy to underestimate. Her prose is plain, artless; her narrators don’t give a lot away. They describe; they don’t judge. But their author does. Garner has many harsh things to say about her protagonists and their louche mores. It’s just that she offers her criticisms on the down-low, and a reader who dismisses her as out-of-date will miss them. Garner’s preferred mode of distancing herself from her adult characters is dramatic irony, and the instruments of ironic reversal are, in fact, the children.
[“Has it ever occurred to you that today, looked at from Jane Austen’s perspective, would look even worse?” —Steve]
In The Public Domain Review, Thom Sliwowski on the importance of people being thrown out of windows to Czech national identity:
Words seem inadequate to the task of describing something so outlandish, and yet “defenestration” comes close. This word is grammatically a compound nominalization—and a flagrantly Latinate one at that. “Fenestrate,” the verb ostensibly at its root, only appears a couple centuries later, carrying two unrelated technical usages in the fields of surgery and botany. From this we can surmise that “defenestration” was a linguistic artifact constructed intentionally. Perhaps it meant to lampoon the Latin of Bohemia’s Catholic rulers: in Czech it is simply “defenestrace,” a rare Latinate word in that language. The humor here derives from the fact that a form of free fall carries a name as clunky as the doctrines and mores of the Catholic rule it sought to swiftly overturn.
[Tired of coining words to describe new developments in technology. Bring back coining words to describe people being thrown out of windows. —Steve]
In The New Yorker, Lauren Michele Jackson interviews Maggie Nelson:
I love Hilton’s writing because often I really don’t know what he means, and it’s very evocative. It becomes an invitation to be, like, what the hell does that mean—for something to “fill your mouth like love”? And it got me immediately thinking about [William Carlos] Williams’ famous quote that men die for lack of what’s found in poems. It’s a much more charged-up conversation than just, like, “Well, do we like love? Do we love?” I mean, “Do we like art? Do we love art?”
This question about nourishment—which obviously links to other conversations about the nature of art and survival and different communities in different times and places. In On Freedom (2021), I perseverate in a different idiom about problematics of the word “care,” and it being applied in the realm of art. I don’t think caring about life and caring about art are necessarily two different things, but they’re not easily synonymous, either. And so I think that the title of the book holds that along with its positivity.
In the Verso blog, Daniel Hartley with the first of a series of essays on Fredric Jameson for his 90th birthday (which is tomorrow; happy birthday to him):
In the face of a devastating historical defeat for Marxism, Jameson invented an “unintimidated language for which there is nothing that cannot be said.” Sartre is cast in this book as what Jameson would eventually come to call a “late modernist.” Part of his situation was precisely the existence of those high modernist forebears who had apparently exhausted “the possibilities of direct experimentation’ and ‘the multiplicity of new roads traced.” Is this not precisely our situation today with respect to Jameson himself? His Sartrean philosophy should warn us against celebrating his 90th birthday by simply showering him with accolades that “are impossible to feel from the inside because consciousness never ‘is’ anything, but is always in action.” So let us put it, instead, in Sartrean terms: Jameson remains the untranscendable horizon of our situation. May he long be in action, and may we have the courage to invent unintimidated languages of our own.
[Another—doubtless very different—high modernism. —Steve]
Reviews:
Two more in the new issue of Bookforum:
Lisa Borst reviews Nicholson Baker’s account of learning to draw (Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art, April 2) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Mar. 30, 2024.]:
Baker’s paintings and drawings appear on nearly every page. The earliest works have the lumpily dutiful quality of high school art class projects. “The brush was an impossibly clumsy tool—not a rational way to apply pigment to a surface,” he writes. (Elsewhere, more baroquely, he calls his paintbrush a “glop-tipped eraserless mop-flopping palette-puttering art wand.”) He’s bashful about, occasionally “disgusted” by, his own work, and some of the book’s best lines—its best similes, especially—come from his most self-critical self-ekphrasis. One drawing “looks a little like Beavis in Beavis and Butt-Head.” In a suburban landscape painting, a car “comes out looking like a pool table.” Trying another car, “I lost my temper at one point and typed, ‘I HATE THIS TOAD OF SHIT THAT HAS EMERGED FROM MY BRUSH.’” The comparison is apt, as usual—his Honda painting really does have an amphibian quality.
Hannah Gold reviews Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel (Parasol Against the Axe, March):
Oyeyemi’s previous novels have featured settings that think for themselves—a talking house, a scheming train. This one is narrated by the city of Prague itself, where Oyeyemi, born in Nigeria thirty-nine years ago and raised in London, has lived for the past decade. We open on Prague making itself miserable by scrolling through a WhatsApp group chat dedicated to visitors’ complaints. “I’m not even one of the grander metropolises!” Prague huffs. “If I was I could have just eaten you and yours alive! I didn’t, but no need to thank me! My self-esteem is in good health and doesn’t require your gratitude!” Our narrator may only be a medium-grand metropolis, but it’s still too sprawling to exercise much control over the story. It can change its point of focus, say what it thinks really happened, or dither, or fib, but it cannot find resonance, coax beauty or coherence. The story, composed of people who find themselves in Czechia’s capital, walks all over its teller in a million directions.
In Poetry, Maya C. Popa reviews a new edition of Emily Dickinson’s letters (The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, April 2):
Those closest to her knew she kept notes on language that stirred her and that could be later adapted as the phrases of a letter or the lines of a poem. In fact, she even insisted on receiving intriguing details in a letter to Austin dated June 15, 1851: “Wont you please to state the name of the boy that turned the faintest, as I like to get such facts to set down in my journal, also anything else that’s startling which you may chance to know—I dont think deaths or murders can ever come amiss in a young—woman’s journal.” In another later letter to Austin from June 11, 1854, she admits to writing without her usual reserve of material: “John Emerson just went away from here—he has been spending the evening, and I’m so tired now, that I write just as it happens, so you must’nt expect any style. This is truly extempore, Austin—I have no notes in my pocket.”
In the local and free Beacon, Dominic Green reviews a book about Kind of Blue (1959) and the men who made it (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, March):
The leap from show tune to modal moodiness shows how Kind of Blue is both rooted in its sources, while also a long way from them. The same goes for the final track, “All Blues,” another single take. It’s a blues, but it’s a modal blues. Jimmy Heath, the saxophonist who replaced Coltrane in Davis’ group in 1959, observed that where a normal blues in G would go to C at the fifth measure, “All Blues” uses “a G minor sound” that's “a little dissonant, and a little more sophisticated.” As Kaplan says, “Less chordal, more modal. Kind of blue.”
Kind of Blue is high-concept, mass-market modal modernism, decades after the principles of modernism had been established in print and on the canvas. Davis, who was invariably high as a kite, highly conceptual, and highly aware of the market, applied the European conservatory to the American nightclub. An avant-garde, theory-driven reinterpretation of jazz harmony cleared out the chordal clutter to emphasize the popular basics of the form: swing feel and blues phrasing.
[The end of this review quotes Nicholas Payton saying that jazz “separated itself from American popular music” in the late ’50s and early ’60s and “never recovered.” Maybe, but it goes both ways—American popular music was moving away from show tunes and Tin Pan Alley songs, which make up much of the Great American Songbook and provided many jazz standards, to the likes of doo-wop and rock and roll. (Jazz fusion was an attempt to pull popular music and jazz back together, but it was only possible once pop music in the age of rock had developed, in funk, static grooves that could support all kinds of experimentation on top, and, in progressive rock, a taste for complication that required instrumental and conceptual virtuosity.) And what could you expect the likes of Thelonious Monk, who once said of bebop “we’re going to create something that they can’t steal because they can’t play it,” to do with music whose appeal is its simplicity? “Roll Over Beethoven” isn’t just about classical music. —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
“Novels aren’t diaries, but readers, I’ve found, often want them to be.” [The WRB isn’t a diary, but readers, I’ve found, often want it to be. —Steve]
Amit Majmudar on two poems by Robert Frost.
Norm Macdonald’s O. J. jokes as media criticism. (R.I.P. O. J., who died Wednesday, April 10.)
People don’t post on Instagram anymore.
- on CDs in Japan.
New issues:
Bookforum Spring 2024 [As linked to above.]
Image Issue 120 | Spring 2024
n+1 Issue 47
Local:
Events related to the National Capital New Play Festival are ongoing until Sunday, April 28.
The National Gallery of Art will show Love Under the Crucifix (1962) today at 2 p.m.
The Asian Art Museum will show Japanese silent films, narrated by a benshi and accompanied by Japanese musicians, today at 7 p.m. and tomorrow, April 14, at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.
Poem:
“The Figure” by Joseph Fasano
You sit at a window and listen to your father
crossing the dark grasses of the fieldstoward you, a moon soaking through his shoes as he shuffles the wind
aside, the night in his hands like an empty bridle.How long have we been this way, you ask him.
It must be ages, the wind answers. It must be the music of the windturning your fingers to glass, turning the furniture of childhood
to the color of horses, turning them away.Your father is still crossing the acres, a light on his tongue
like a small coin from an empire that has always been ruined.Now the dark flocks are drifting through his shoulders
with an odor of lavender, an odor of gold. Now he has turnedas though to go, but only knelt down with the heavy oars
of October on his forearms, to begin the horrible rowing.You sit in the chair in the room. The wind lies open
on your lap like the score of a life you did not measure.You rise. You turn back to the room and repeat what you know:
The earth is not a home. The night is not an empty bridlein the hands of a man crossing a field with a new moon
in his old wool. We abandoned the dead. We abandon them.
[This is from Fasano’s 2014 Inheritance, his second collection. —Julia]
Upcoming book:
April 16 | McNally Editions
Free Love: The Story of a Great American Scandal
by Robert Shaplen
From the publisher: On the night of July 3, 1870, Elizabeth Tilton confessed to her husband that she’d had an affair with their pastor, Henry Ward Beecher. This secret would soon transfix America, for Beecher was the most famous preacher of the day, founder of the most fashionable church in Brooklyn Heights, a presidential hopeful, an influential supporter of Abolition, and a supporter of the campaign for women’s suffrage. When Beecher tried to silence the Tiltons, it was a whisper network of suffragists, notably Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who spread news of the affair, and it was the radical Victoria Woodhull—an outspoken proponent of “free love”—who seized on it, as political dynamite, to blow up the myth of monogamy among the political elite. Her public accusations led to even more public trials, which shocked the country and divided the most progressive thinkers of the era.
In 1953, the journalist Robert Shaplen revisited the Tilton-Beecher affair in a series of articles for The New Yorker, relying on 3,000 pages of contemporary accounts—court transcripts, love-letters, newspaper reports and illustrations, even political cartoons—to reanimate a scandal that shook the American reform movement and to expose a strand of America’s cultural DNA that remains recognizable today.
What we’re reading:
Steve finished reading Portnoy’s Complaint [I don’t have anything new to say about it. Sorry to anyone disappointed. —Steve]. He also read
’s new essay collection (All Things Are Too Small, April 2) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Mar. 30, 2024; it was good and great fun to read, even if it commits the unpardonable sin of using “puritan” as a pejorative. —Steve] and the essay collection Motive and Method in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1954), in which he particularly liked the essays by Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport.[This reading list juxtaposed two works with titles derived from everyone’s favorite word for masks. First, Rothfeld:
If Bergman’s masterpiece is a surface, it is a cracked one, an exterior that hints at its own inadequacy. Persona (1966) is a movie about our dissatisfaction with surfaces, and this is precisely what makes it more than a persona—more, that is, than a mask. And this, in turn, is what makes it a mask, for a mask implies a hidden face. Persona is a depth disguised as a surface, a skin that conceals a soul, a movie that invites the very interpretative grasping that it pretends to eschew.
While this is an overstatement of the case—no film in which the director turns the camera around to show himself and the cinematographer on a crane is pretending to eschew entirely the need for interpretation—the central claim, that Persona is a mask implying a hidden face, is right. Whose face? Bergman’s, but not that of Bergman the man. It is that of Bergman, the director of the film. And so, when he turns the camera on himself, it shows him in the act of directing. In the child feeling the screen, and in the film strip appearing to tear, the film explicitly presents the limits of film, which are made as essential to the film itself as the story it tells. The film strip appears to tear at perhaps the height of the film’s emotion for a reason.
Kenner identifies a similar emphasis on the means of creating the work itself in Pound:
The title of the 1909 Personae, Pound’s earliest collection of verse to achieve general circulation, implies not merely masks but a man donning them. It is the first of a long sequence of efforts on his part to draw our attention to the status of the poetic process itself as the central drama of his poetry. He will not have us think of him as a medium in which things happen, nor yet as a poet-hero striding and declaiming before backdrops of his own design. He will not, in fact, have us think of him at all: but he will ensure our awareness of his existence, exploring, voyaging, selecting, gathering experiences into a mind in which towards the close of his magnum opus they remain like Wagadu’s City, “indestructible.”
Here too there is a man behind the mask, but the man’s intent is to get us to look at the mask he is wearing, which is that of the artist working within a medium. As the women say in “Cino,” probably Pound’s finest work in Personae, “Peste! ’tis his own songs? / Or some other’s that he sings?” In other words, where do these songs come from? How are they created? How is the raw material of life turned into this art? What is its relation to the work of other artists employing the same medium? Cino says of the women, “And they are not; / Having become the souls of song.” The souls of song; capable of being depicted in song, as Pound, wearing the mask of Cino, does in poetry, and yet somehow beyond it, as Alma and Elisabet are beyond the ability of Bergman’s direction, and film itself, to capture. —Steve]
Critical notes:
- reviews Adelle Waldman’s new novel (Help Wanted, March):
It’s a fundamental tension as a writer—or any artist—of wanting to enshrine moments and events as they’re happening, when they’re most vivid and raw, but also wanting to allow time to pass to let us ruminate. I suspect that this conflict has gotten much worse these days when the speed of production and distribution can be near instantaneous, so there’s more pressure to be the first rather than the best.
[We linked to previous reviews in WRB—Mar. 9, 2024 and WRB—Mar. 16, 2024.]
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sam Adler-Bell reviews a book on the New York Intellectuals (Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, by Ronnie Grinberg, March):
And yet, of the writers in this circle, it is the men—memoirists like Norman Podhoretz and Alfred Kazin—who best fit this description. By Trilling’s criteria, Podhoretz was by far the most womanly writer among them: His memoirs are shockingly revealing (and sometimes perceptive) about his own psychological hang-ups, and they’re far more concerned with relationships (marriages, affairs, and betrayals) than with political ideas. Podhoretz described Making It, his disastrously received 1967 memoir, as a “confessional work” that “deliberately set out to expose an order of feeling in myself, and by implication in others.” The backlash to Making It could be summarized thus: It was too self-exposing, too indiscrete, too ingratiating, too entitled. In other words, like many women before him, Podhoretz was accused of being too much.
[We linked to a previous review in WRB—Mar. 30, 2024.]