WRB—Apr. 27, 2024
And you manifest this, as far as poor creatures may do, to be a Day of the Power of the Washington Review of Books.
N.B.:
The next WRB x Liberties salon will take place on May 18. If you would like to come discuss the topic “Should you like your friends?” please contact Chris or Celeste Marcus.
Links:
In the JSTOR blog, an annotated version of Noah Webster’s preface to the first edition of the American Dictionary of the English Language:
A great number of words in our language require to be defined in a phraseology accommodated to the condition and institutions of the people in these states, and the people of England must look to an American Dictionary for a correct understanding of such terms.
The necessity therefore of a Dictionary suited to the people of the United States is obvious; and I should suppose that this fact being admitted, there could be no difference of opinion as to the time, when such a work ought to be substituted for English Dictionaries.
There are many other considerations of a public nature, which serve to justify this attempt to furnish an American Work which shall be a guide to the youth of the United States. Most of these are too obvious to require illustration.
[The WRB is also an attempt to furnish an American Work which shall be a guide to the youth of the United States. —Steve]
In Granta, Nuar Alsadir on boredom:
It’s important to note that the psychoanalysts I’ve quoted here were all writing before the invention of the iPhone, which has become the ultimate tool for managing boredom. I can’t tell you how many sessions I’ve spent listening to someone describe the misery they felt after scrolling on social media for hours—a misery, it always turns out, that was pursued because it was preferable to some other more miserable thought that was then displaced. An upsetting thought that comes from the external world that is familiar and easy to interpret can defend against a more unmanageable thought by bumping it out of consciousness. But replacing one agitated state with another doesn’t bring anyone closer to relief.
At the core of boredom is an urge that is impossible to satisfy because the bored person is always looking in the wrong place. Substitutes in the outside world—either too far removed from the actual desire or too close and thus provoking anxiety—will not only feel not quite right but are likely to call up feelings of dissatisfaction, frustration, even rage. Annoyance, anger, and bad odor are etymological roots of ennui, the French loanword. Boredom is a complicated stink of an emotion, one that is far more layered than we presume.
[Let’s ask the French. Baudelaire (translated by Robert Lowell):
It makes no gestures, never beats its breast,
yet it would murder for a moment's rest,
and willingly annihilate the earth.
The narrator of Camus’ The Fall (1956) finds chastity boring (translated by Justin O’Brien):
As a result, I conceived such a loathing for love that for years I could not hear “La Vie en rose” or the “Liebestod” without gritting my teeth. I tried accordingly to give up women, in a certain way, and to live in a state of chastity. After all, their friendship ought to satisfy me. But this was tantamount to giving up gambling. Without desire, women bored me beyond all expectation, and obviously I bored them too.
No more gambling and no more theater—I was probably in the realm of truth. But truth, cher ami, is a colossal bore.
Now this is sour grapes, but the progression of “dissatisfaction, frustration, even rage” is there. And that same progression motivates the fox. He was bored with trying to get the grapes too. (I’m finally going to read Proust one of these days; that’s why he isn’t in here. My apologies. If you want to tell me to get on that go right ahead.) —Steve]
In The Nation, Rose D’Amora interviews Jessi Jezewska Stevens about her new collection of short stories (Ghost Pains, March) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Mar. 2, 2024; we linked to a review there as well.]:
In a way, I think that technology removes enough friction that it also just does very interesting things to fiction in the way that we think of drama. I’m thinking of Mrs. Dalloway, how at the beginning of that novel she decides to buy the flowers herself and how today she would just order them, and that really changes the way that you dramatize things. Dramatization becomes more and more interior and more and more psychological because the basic friction between you and fulfilling a desire has eroded.
[“My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is the name of a new dating app?” —Steve]
Reviews:
In The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik reviews a biography of Judith Jones, who, among other things, helped shape the cookbook as we know it (The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America, by Sara B. Franklin, May 28):
It is a delicate bridge to cross, and perhaps a bridge too far, but there is surely some connection between Judith’s publishing of Anne Frank and her publishing of all those cooks. She understood the power of a personality to make an otherwise abstract conception lucid. It is one thing to be told a general truth about anything; only firsthand engagement makes that truth real. The Nazi persecution of helpless Jews was an abstraction hard for outsiders to grasp until, for tens of millions of readers, it came alive as one brave and intelligent girl locked in an attic. Albeit at an incomparably lower level of threat or importance, cooking can also feel abstract or merely quantitative—a matter of weights, temperatures, durations—until someone brings it to life. It is not just from starstruck pathos that foodies refer to a “Marcella” recipe or say, “I learned it from Julia”; potent teachers, even vicarious ones, are exactly what we need to advance in mastery. Being made to feel the particulars of a general proposition by a compelling writer is exactly what literature of every kind is for.
In The Baffler, Bailey Trela reviews a collection of Christina Campo’s work (The Unforgivable: And Other Writings, translated by Alex Andriesse, February):
There’s something a touch tautological about all of this. As Campo writes in an essay on the Arabian Nights, “nothing that cannot be read in many ways is capable of holding our attention for very long.” Unsurprisingly, her prose is speckled with alchemical metaphors, mystical aporias, and paradoxes. She writes, for instance, of a “double movement” required of the fairy-tale protagonist: that “he must forget all his limits when he contends with the impossible and pay constant attention to these limits when he performs the impossible.” Don’t worry if this feels difficult to wrap your head around—as with most mystical writing, you’ve simply got to push through, a fact Campo herself is more than willing to acknowledge. “The inexorable, inexhaustible moral of the fairy tale is thus victory over the law of necessity, the constant transition to a new order of relationships,” she writes in another essay.
[There’s a paragraph later in here that made me think of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a series of fairy tales—there’s something very Ovidian about the frog being turned into a prince with a kiss, call it reverse Pygmalion—which now that I see it is kind of obvious, but it had never occurred to me before. —Steve]
In The New Statesman, Jared Marcel Pollen reviews Elias Canetti’s confrontation with death (The Book Against Death, translated by Peter Filkins, May 14):
Canetti expressed the ambition to write what he called a “life work”––a book into which he could put “everything.” This brings to mind the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who famously declared that “everything in the world exists to end up in a book.” Crowds and Power (1960), century-encapsulating in its scope, was the first attempt at this. But it was in some ways a dress rehearsal for The Book Against Death, which Canetti described as “my lifelong undertaking” and “The only book that I was born to write”. It was a text that existed only in potentia: the manuscript that became The Book Against Death was actually the preparatory material for the book Canetti planned to write. “It is already almost impossible to write . . .” he notes in a later entry, “for you simply do not know where to begin. It’s as if you were given the task to write everything, meaning everything about everything.”
[“The Book Against Death” is a funny echo of the book of life, in the context of which Mallarmé’s declaration takes on a new urgency. —Steve]
The Paris Review has a piece adapted from Joshua Cohen’s introduction:
This is Canetti’s core heuristic—he has no plan or program, but he has a heuristic—which is implied in the book’s very title. The Book Against Death, like so much having to do with resting in peace, has its eeriest meaning obscured by the Latin tradition and its plethora of libri contra, such as Augustine’s Contra Academicos and Aquinas’s Contra Errores Graecorum and Summa contra Gentiles. Those works are apologetics, correctives whose contrariety—whose “againstness”—is a matter of rhetoric or polemic: The Emperor Julian writes contra the Galileans because he’s sure the Galileans are wrong; their Christianity is merely apostate Judaism, and they should return to the old ways of the pagan imperium. Cyril of Alexandria writes contra Julian, in response, and calls him the apostate, and so on. Canetti’s liber contra mortem is different: it is not just “against” death in the sense that it regards death as incorrect (“But no death is natural”); it is also “against” death in the sense that it seeks to “defeat death,” to magically, mystically, apotropaically make death die purely through the force of its sentences, presenting its wordings as warding spells to annul the reaper or at least dull his scythe.
A couple years ago The Paris Review also ran an excerpt from the text itself.
In Engelsberg Ideas, Mathew Lyons reviews a book about the creation of the Matisse chapel (The Spiritual Adventure of Henri Matisse: Vence's Chapel of the Rosary, by Charles Miller, April 30) and, in connection with it, a book about stained glass (The Illuminated Window: Stories Across Time, by Virginia Chieffo Raguin, February):
The chapel echoes the structure of Jazz (1947): luminous biomorphic color in the tall, elegant almost-claustral stained-glass windows opposing white-tiled walls carrying monochrome images of the Madonna and Child, of Saint Dominic and of the Passion. The latter are unlike anything else in Matisse’s work: intensely simple, rawly hieratic, brutally direct. The effect, Miller writes, is of “presences more than depictions,” a phrase that echoes Wassily Kandinsky’s distinction between images that are merely representational and those that make a spiritual reality present.
In Americas Quarterly, Nick Burns reviews Nicolás Medina Mora’s debut novel (América del Norte, May 7):
In previous generations Mexico’s elite had looked to France, disdaining the U.S. as uncivilized. But then, as one character puts it, NAFTA “made rich Mexicans want to become Americans—and not just any kind of American . . . the sort of people they met on their Easter trips to Disneyworld.”
Sebastián wants to become American too, only a more sophisticated kind. But he is irritated at the way he is encouraged to exoticize his own background in his writing, by people who don’t realize how privileged his upbringing was. In his failed bid for a visa, Sebastián discovers the limits of U.S.–Mexico exchange. Goods and services may be able to move freely across the border, but he can’t.
In the Journal, Allan Massie reviews a book about traveling in medieval Europe (A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes, by Anthony Bale, April 23):
Part of the appeal of A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages is its tendency to ramble, like more than a few of the journeys it records. Mr. Bale, a professor of medieval studies at the University of London, moves to and fro in time as well as in geographical space. He dips into the accounts of a wide range of travelers whose adventures are often compelling but whose reliability can’t always be counted on. Someone calling himself Sir John Mandeville, in the late fourteenth century, produced The Travels of John Mandeville, a popular chronicle written with assumed authority about cities and countries he had never visited. It is a repository of wonderful stories, Mr. Bale concedes, though they defy credulity. “The main place from which he departed,” Mr. Bale observes of Mandeville, “was the realm of truth.”
[Free novel idea there for someone. —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
The “invented language” in All’s Well That Ends Well sounds like Basque. [Neat! —Chris]
Vivian Gornick on Café Loup.
Ralph Nader’s thoughts on pens.
“Exotic as this tropical gathering of book lovers might have been, it’s just one example of a fast-growing business trend: literary-themed travel.” [Isn’t the point of books that you don’t have to travel? That you can sit at home and read them? —Steve]
Dallas is becoming a literary city.
An exhortation for freelancers to organize.
G/O Media sold The Onion to a new firm created by four people in media, one of whom is Ben Collins; they named the firm Global Tetrahedron.
New issues:
Commonweal May 2024 [The Spring Books issue.]
Granta 167: Extraction [As linked to above.]
The New Atlantis No. 76—Spring 2024
Local:
“No one in this town goes out to dinner the way they used to.”
A review of The Lehman Brothers, recently staged by the Shakespeare Theatre Company.
Solid State Books is doing some events for Independent Bookstore Day, which is today.
Poem:
“Coming Home” by Tess Gallagher
As usual, I was desperate.
I went through your house as if I owned it.
I said, “I need This, This and This.”
But contrary to all I know of you,
you did not answer, only looked after me.I’ve never seen the house so empty, mother.
Even the rugs felt it, how little
they covered. And what have you done
with the plants? How thankfully
we thought their green replaced us.You were keeping something like a light.
I had seen it before, a place you’d never been
or never came back from. It was a special way
your eyes looked out over the water. Whitecaps
lifted the bay and you said, “He should be here
by now.”How he always came back; the drinking,
the fishing at night, all
the ruthless ships he unloaded.
That was the miracle of our lives. Even now
he won’t stay out of what I have
to say to you.But they worry me, those boxes
of clothes I left in your basement. Sometimes
I think of home as a storehouse, the more
we leave behind, the less
you say. The last time
I couldn’t take anything.So I’m always coming back like tonight,
in a temper, brushing the azaleas
on the doorstep. What did you mean
by it, this tenderness
that is a whip, a longing?
[This is from Gallagher’s first collection Instructions to the Double (1976) (I was wrong, on Wednesday, when I called it her second collection; it was her first full-length collection, but her second published book of poems. Mea culpa.)
I knew I wanted to feature a poem from the first section of the book, but was torn about which one—they’re all so good. I ended up going with “Coming Home,” even though it’s my least favorite among them (the subject of this poem just doesn’t capture me as much as the other poems do) because I think it features many of the elements that make these poems so strong. One of those elements is Gallagher’s tender and skillful use of second person in these poems that are so rooted in memory. The second-person poem can be a strange thing: here’s the speaker, and there’s the you, but the reader stands there, too. Sometimes, reading a second-person poem, I can’t shake the sense that the speaker isn’t, so to speak, turned toward the you at all, as though in facing the reader the poet has turned his or her back on the actual supposed addressee, the you. That’s not the case with these poems of Gallagher’s, though. The voice in these poems feels so true to itself, without sacrificing poetic authority: What did you mean / by it, this tenderness / that is a whip, a longing? That’s a moment that feels so honest in its wondering, and also contains so much beauty.
That accomplished second-person address comes back in another poem I love, “The Coats,” an elegant address to the speaker’s grandmother. Both “The Coats” and “Coming Home” showcase Gallagher’s attentiveness to ordinary, physical objects—the boxes of clothes, the azaleas the speaker brushes against, the titular coats—as well as how she can see the sacred, and the intimate, slip out of the cracks of these ordinary physical realities:
Shut in the closet, your coats
were a family of witnesses
who could not remember you.. . . That year
the winter came over the ground
like a rich white pelt.
I thought of you accepting it,
something chosen, a comfort
that had sought you out
in the cold of the land.
I could go on about these lines for so long. There’s such a musicality all through these poems, too, and something so solitary in the voice. You were keeping something like a light. That line has a beautiful sound, and seems to hold in itself all the distance between the speaker and her mother. I love the way that musicality reoccurs in the ending of another poem, “The Woman Who Raised Goats:”
All this is nothing to you.
You have eaten my only dress, and the town
drifts every day now
toward the harbor. But always,
above the town, above
the harbor, there is the town,
the harbor, the caves and hollows
when the cargo of lights
is gone.
I love Instructions to the Double for moments like that, where Gallagher slips into this almost-surrealism that’s more like mysticism: The town and harbor that persist above the town, above / the harbor. I love how she holds moments of greatness like that alongside moments of such simplicity. Part of the reason that works, I think, is the tight Anglo-Saxon diction that runs through all of these poems. —Julia]
Upcoming books:
May 7 | The Dial Press
First Love: Essays on Friendship
by Lilly Dancyger
From the Lit Hub preview: Any work that treats friendship as a weighty and valued thing, rather than second fiddle to romantic relationships, will always be on my TBR pile. The concept of this new book reminds me of the beautiful Atlantic article on best friendship from 2020 that felt revelatory and radical in its centering of female friendships over any other kind of relationship. Lilly Dancyger gives the proper due to each of her primary female friendships, each essay dissecting a certain friendship, as well as braiding in literary and cultural analysis. Every book and article like this shows me that we’re on a path to understanding friendship in a new light, and I know I’m only grateful to witness the carving of that path, thanks to people like Lilly Dancyger.
What we’re reading:
Steve finished Commonwealth to Protectorate by Austin Woolrych (1981) (and in connection with it read Cromwell’s speech at the opening of Barebone’s Parliament) and read Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America by Leila Philip (2022). [I was deceived by the subtitle into thinking it would be a history of the fur trade; it’s not, although it does devote a chapter to John Jacob Astor and a few to modern trappers and traders. It was more like The Once and Future World (2013) (a book Chris and I have discussed, and praised, before) in its helping the reader to see how the streams and rivers of North America looked and acted before the arrival of Europeans, when, instead of the few million beavers there are now, there were between 60 and 400 million, and they altered just about every waterway on the continent for their own purposes. Much of the second half of the book discusses contributions beavers and their dams can make in water storage, flood control, and sediment removal (since the slow-moving water in a beaver pond allows the sediment it carries to fall to the bottom). Fascinating stuff. —Steve]
He also read several essays by Helen Vendler; her assertion in “The Waste Land Revisited,” which was one of the best things he’s read recently [Read it and then read Ryan Ruby’s piece for the centennial, which deals much more with its reception and legacy. —Steve], that “of all American poems, The Waste Land is deliberately the least American” sent him searching for something he once read about The Waste Land as a reworking of material from “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” [About as American as a poem can be. —Steve], but he couldn’t find it.
Julia started Richard Fariña’s novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me (1966) on Thursday and since starting it has been trying to talk various friends into reading it so she has someone to talk to about it. [The prose is unruly, and ambitious, and fascinating—I’ve never read anything quite like this—and the protagonist is just awful. So far it’s just been him sulking around, being rude to people and doing drugs and saying the worst things possible about every woman he meets. It’s all very ’60s. With the way it’s written, though, I can’t put it down. —Julia] She also finally finished the last couple pages of Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry (2016).
Critical notes:
- on self-editing:
What to leave in? What to leave out?—Those are the curatorial editor’s guiding questions. They imply that leaving everything in—putting everything out for the public to consume—isn’t always, or even usually, better. Less can be more. The clay needs to be sculpted. The fat trimmed. Distinctions made. Decisions rendered.
Alan Jacobs’ three-strike system for reading contemporary fiction:
The book is set in Brooklyn: Three strikes, you’re out.
The author lives in Brooklyn: Three strikes, you’re out.
The book is set anywhere else in New York City: Two strikes.
The book is set in San Francisco: Two strikes.
The book’s protagonist is a writer or artist or would-be writer or would-be artist: Two strikes.
The author attended an Ivy League or Ivy-adjacent university or college: Two strikes.
The book is set in Los Angeles: One strike.
The author lives in San Francisco: One strike.
The author has an MFA: One strike.
The book is set in the present day: One strike.