WRB—Apr. 29, 2026
“the audience”
The Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church
Links:
Reviews:
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Clare Bucknell reviews a book about pedantry (On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All, by Arnoud S. Q. Visser, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Nov. 1, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Dec. 3, 2025.]:
The essay is full of subtle connections between the “base” concerns of those who profess learning and the shape that learning has begun to take. “The care and fees of our parents,” Montaigne observes, “aim only at furnishing our heads with knowledge”—maximally, such that it “is passed from hand to hand with only one end in view: to show it off, to put into our accounts to entertain others with it, as though it were merely counters, useful for totting up and producing statements.” Students are taught to quote for quotation’s sake, parading intellectual wares that aren’t theirs: “Do I wish to fortify myself against fear of death? Then I do it at Seneca’s expense. Do I want to console myself or somebody else? Then I borrow from Cicero.” The sting here is in the metaphors. Noblemen, it’s suggested, don’t typically worry over their accounts, tot things up, or borrow from others. The impression is of a vulgar intellectual culture, presided over by vulgar men, in which more is more and you can never have enough knowledge to wave in people’s faces. Aretino’s pedantic tutor, incapable of using one word where many are possible, falls into the same trap: to him, lists of memorized exempla are like “embroidery” or precious jewels, “so many pearls,” “sapphires,” “rubies.”
[Polonius: “Madam, I swear I use no art at all.”
Among the behaviors that have been called pedantic at one time or another are “debating aggressively in public, teaching in an obnoxious manner, neglecting one’s wife, dressing badly, quoting poetry at parties.” Having done all of these except neglect my wife (and that omission, no doubt, comes down to not having a wife to neglect), it’s a good thing for me that being the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books came along when it did. Even if Montaigne wouldn’t like all the quotations. —Steve]
In The Nation, Walker Rutter-Bowman reviews a novel about buying a theater (Seeing Further, by Esther Kinsky, translated from the German by Caroline Schmidt, 2024) [We linked to an earlier review in WRB—Nov. 13, 2024.]:
Despite the narrator’s efforts, however, a revived community of cinema is never realized. Sixteen years pass between the theater’s closing and the novel’s epilogue, in which she returns to the Alföld. The narrator has seen cinemas die all across Europe, and now she wishes to revisit her twice-dead theater. “I wanted to see the multi-seated temple of moving images in its abandoned state again,” she confesses, “to ask questions from the remove of years, either to myself or to the cinema auditorium, deserted as it was, and sound out the town’s slumped promises once again, to listen out for signs of life, for the silence.” The eulogy for the institution that once attracted and honed the attention of the people gives way to something more complicated. On the one hand, the narrator, like the Romantics, valorizes the ruins, seeing in the institution’s death another kind of art. But on the other, this leads to a sense of self-satisfaction: that she was one of the select few who could value this past. Her complaints about “the illusory convenience of continually available data” and “the feeble opinion that it’s enough to watch digitalized images flicker across any old screen” have a self-righteous, sullen tone.
[As if the Romantics didn’t also have a sense of self-satisfaction. —Steve]
In the Journal, Henry Hitchings reviews a book about translating Shakespeare (If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation, by Daniel Hahn, April 21) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 15, 2026.]:
One tenacious fallacy about Shakespeare is that his speeches are always clotted with gargantuan words; Macbeth’s “multitudinous seas incarnadine” is a classic example. Yet often it is the compactness of Shakespeare’s writing that troubles translators. Romeo’s line, “Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die,” or Lear’s verdict on Cordelia, “I know when one is dead and when one lives; / She’s dead as earth,” compress a huge amount into a string of monosyllables. Such succinctness doesn’t travel easily.
To demonstrate this, Mr. Hahn acquires copies of “My First Hundred Words” in eight languages. In English, 75 of the 100 are a single syllable. In Italian and Greek, by contrast, 99 contain at least two syllables. For translators of Shakespeare working in those languages, the challenge is immediately apparent.
[The words after “multitudinous seas incarnadine” are “making the green one red,” as if Shakespeare felt a need to gloss the gargantuan words. —Steve]
In The New Yorker, becca rothfeld reviews Wolfgang Koeppen’s “trilogy of failure” (Pigeons on the Grass, 1951, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, 2020; The Hothouse, 1953, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, 1991, May 5; and Death in Rome, 1954, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, 1992, May 5):
Siegfried is largely resigned to the departure of the old gods and the innocent past they represent. Still, every so often, Koeppen’s creations wonder whether divinity could be lurking where they least expect it. Siegfried is not religious, but he lights a candle in a church and offers it up to an “unknown saint.” Maybe this figure “is even living in our midst, maybe he’s someone we pass on the street, maybe he’s the newspaper vendor in the passage shouting out the headlines.” On the book’s first page, Koeppen asks, “And what about great Jupiter? Is he here in our midst? Could he be the fellow in the Amex office, or the rep for the German-European Travel Agency?” In one mood, it is a ridiculous conjecture, a mockery. In another, it is a fleeting and fragile but decidedly real possibility.
For the most part, the trilogy of failure casts history as an inexorable force: “water flowing through the old Roman pipes” and sweeping us along with it, a “stream . . . noisily rushing past,” a guide leading a blind man. And yet the very same characters who are most entangled in history’s meshes sometimes briefly wriggle free. In one moment in Pigeons on the Grass, the sun is setting: “The people were released from their factories and shops, and they weren’t yet caught up in the demands of their ordinary lives and the expectations of family. The world hung in the balance. For a moment, everything seemed possible.” Despite its cynicism, Koeppen’s trilogy is full of such moments, of cracks in the edifice of things, of what you might call grace.
In The American Scholar, Joseph Horowitz reviews a collection of Michael Steinberg’s music criticism (Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe, 1964–1976, edited by Susan Feder, Jacob Jahiel, and Marc Mandel, April 7):
Between the lines, Steinberg’s reviews confide increasing dissatisfaction with his job. In “The Power of Critics” (April 21, 1974), he writes to a disgruntled soprano unhappy with a review: “The critic can’t, for the sake of supporting a good cause, pretend to an enthusiasm he doesn’t feel. I wish it were otherwise. … Of course critics hope and like to persuade. We write to persuade, but even more to stimulate, to interest, to point out, to make people think. It’s a lot like teaching.” Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Koussevitzky’s birth (July 21, 1974), he peruses a career that mattered: “Koussevitzky was the first to see that an orchestra was more than a collection of players who gave concerts regularly, that it could be the nucleus of a musical university.” Steinberg took a leave of absence in 1975–76 to write a book about Elliott Carter—an unfinished project. He announced his resignation on September 19, 1976, in a low-key essay including a barbed aside: “By and large, journalistic criticism continues an irritant and a depressant.”
[Before this Horowitz quotes Steinberg:
It occurred to me that artists’ agents must be among the few people who care about keeping the review as an institution alive. It helps them sell, or they think it does. Other than that, who needs it? I submit that nobody does, really. . . . We must now question the assumption traditional to American musical journalism, the assumption that every concert—or as many as space in the paper and availability of writers permit—is followed by a review.
I shall not go to fewer concerts. . . . I do, however, want to find a new texture for these pages. . . . The traditional commitment to the review as the chief journalistic and critical form has . . . locked us into writing about many things that were not worth writing about.
Steinberg, writing in 1973, predicts much of our recent agita about book reviews with his complaint that the standard 800-word review was dead about music then. But I think it is not the review as such that “locked us into writing about many things that were not worth writing about”—the formulaic 800-word review where you can Mad Libs 750 of the words did that. As Steinberg says, we need a new texture.
But more about this in Critical notes below; can’t have too much navel-gazing too high up in the newsletter. —Steve]
N.B.:
People used to get on soapboxes in this country.
People are once again keeping score at baseball games in this country.
New issues:
Bookforum Spring 2026
The New Criterion Volume 44, Number 9 / May 2026
Poem:
“The Mower to the Glow-Worms” by Andrew Marvell
Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer night,
Her matchless songs does meditate;Ye country comets, that portend
No war nor prince’s funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass’s fall;Ye glow-worms, whose officious flame
To wand’ring mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
And after foolish fires do stray;Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
Since Juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displac’d
That I shall never find my home.
[In Julius Caesar Calpurnia says that “When beggars die there are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.” In pastoral, though, even the grasses get comets when they die.
The glow-worms turn out to be the only fixed thing in the poem. Everything else is shadowy, even violent. In this instability the poem is similar to Horace’s Odes 4.12, from which Marvell derives much of his non-glow-worm imagery. The nightingale is there, in a reference to the myth of Philomela and Procne: Ityn flebiliter gemens, / infelix avis (“the unfortunate bird, mournfully weeping ‘Itys.’”) The grasses are there; Horace mentions shepherds singing their songs in tenero gramine, “in soft grasses.” And the darkness and fire are there, combined into the nigrorum . . . ignium (literally “dark fire,” but implying the funeral pyre). —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Out April 30:
University of Chicago Press: Bramble by Susan Stewart
Graywolf Press | May 5
This Poor Book: A Poem
by Fanny Howe
From the publisher: For decades, Fanny Howe has been our great poet of spirit and conscience, dislocation and bewilderment. In This Poor Book, completed just before her death, she has gathered a selection of poems and excerpts from the last thirty years, including new and revised poems, and has arranged them into an astonishing singular poem. Across this brilliant reconfiguration of her work, we follow the poet as seeker, both faithful and foolish, searching for language and existence beyond the machines of economy, judgment, and war. Howe interrogates the contradiction and violence of the twenty-first century, the misbegotten experiences that have given rise to a culture of authority and adulthood rather than one of innocence and childhood.
These spare lyrical shards move with a jagged but persistent direction—leading us between doubt and belief and toward Howe’s enduring vision for a life of humility, justice, and imagination.
Also out Tuesday:
Astra House: Offseason: A Novel by Avigayl Sharp
OR Books: American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda by Ru Marshall
What we’re reading:
Steve read a collection of Martin Amis’ essays (The Rub of Time: Essays and Reportage, 1994–2017, February) and started on his Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002, March). He also read through large parts of St. Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana to find the passage quoted below. [It turns out that ctrl-f-ing it for “words” and “signs” doesn’t narrow it down much. —Steve]
Critical notes:
BDM on difficult books:
I guess my point here is that somebody who logs on to say they’re struggling with Toni Morrison is a billion times more valuable, to me, as a reader than somebody who is more sophisticated but cannot do the work of understanding the source of their own pleasure, instead pretending that reading Beloved is just another thing one can do that is no more demanding than any other thing. If you don’t want to be stuck having 101-level conversations about texts with newcomers, that’s your prerogative. (Neither do I.) What I see online, however, are conversations that are not even 101-level; they’re just talking shit in the hallway.
[As John F. Kennedy said:
We choose to read Beloved in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.
I complained last week about the trend of talking about “friction” as good or bad without bothering to think about what any given piece of friction does when encountered. Because slapping labels on things is easy, and thinking is hard, something similar happens with “difficulty.” The people BDM is talking about here have decided that “difficulty” is a bad word and therefore anything they like must not be difficult. Now, people use words in all kinds of ways, but I would prefer not to reduce every adjective to an elevated way of saying “good” or “bad.” This is the end result, though, of your main engagement with art coming from fighting with a person you encountered once or maybe made up in your head, as BDM says:
If I were to armchair speculate about this kind of person’s psychology—and I am doing that—I’d say that at some formative time they became defensive about their tastes, in particular over being accused of being pretentious and not really enjoying what they said they enjoyed. This defensiveness calcified over time into a feeling that reading modernist literature or watching art films can’t be difficult—rather than what I think is the more productive position of “I enjoy doing difficult things.”
To quote another president, “if you’re explaining, you’re losing.” If you’re explaining to somebody who called you pretentious on the Internet once and hasn’t thought about you ever since, you’re definitely losing. —Steve]
Adam Roberts on writerly paranoia:
The lineaments of these psychoses are writerly, or more precisely readerly-writerly. The nature of their psychoses is that they read their environments with extraordinary attention, taking random and non-deictic signifiers as personally meaningful and deictic: a decoding of the various texts that surround; and then all three write their experience into their fiction and non-fiction. Spark was always fascinated by codes and decoding, by secrets and blackmail, ciphers and spies, which occur and reoccur in her novels, and she wrote her life into her fiction repeatedly. Dick wrote “2-3-74” into his VALIS trilogy, where he himself appears under the pseudonym Horselover Fat. Waugh wrote Gillbert Pinfold. Madness as close-reading.
The point is that these psychotic breakdowns are intensifications of being a writer. I have never had a psychotic or schizoid interlude like these three, but in milder form I am certainly familiar with their shape of them, with the compulsion to “read” the world, and other texts, in immense, personalised and perhaps productive ways.
In fact, the written word is a kind of madness. It tears you out of your actual context and deposits you in a world of bodiless abstractions. Lewis Mumford called it the “general starvation of the mind,” in which actual sensuous knowledge of the world is replaced by “mere literacy, the ability to read signs.” In late medieval Europe, the printing press and the beginnings of mass literacy didn’t produce an age of sober reason, but an enormous explosion in all forms of mysticism and esotericism, astrology, divination, witchcraft, Neoplatonist sects and charismatic religious cults, some of them peaceful, some of them murderous. It’s not hard to see why. These doctrines usually centered around the idea that material facts are just an echo of mental processes; they would have made a lot of sense to people who’d just been traumatically ripped out of physical reality by the strange magic of the written word.
St. Augustine, in De doctrina Christiana (translated by James Shaw):
For among men words have obtained far and away the chief place as a means of indicating the thoughts of the mind. . . . But the countless multitude of the signs through which men express their thoughts consist of words. For I have been able to put into words all those signs, the various classes of which I have briefly touched upon, but I could by no effort express words in terms of those signs.
But because words pass away as soon as they strike upon the air, and last no longer than their sound, men have by means of letters formed signs of words. Thus the sounds of the voice are made visible to the eye, not of course as sounds, but by means of certain signs.
[Signs within signs, signs for signs. —Steve]
Robert M. Durling, in “Petrarch’s Giovene Donna Sotto un Verde Lauro”:
The image of Laura in the lover’s fantasy is an idol in a technical sense. It is an idol because he worships it instead of God, and meditates on it instead of on God; it is an idol in the technical psychological sense, and thus fashioned by the lover’s own faculties; metaphorically, it has been sculptured by his own hands; it is an idol because it is made out of wood, metal, and precious stones.
[It is also an idol made out of words, and fashioned with words, and Petrarch in turning everything into words leaves nothing of himself but what he can convey in words; as the Psalmist says of idols, “they that make them are like unto them.”
I think of Robert Browning’s bishop ordering his tomb at St. Praxed’s, creating in words both his own death and the monument supposed to endure beyond it. His corrupt idiot sons, as he knows, are going to betray him and skimp out on his monument; every dollar put towards dad’s tomb is a dollar not put towards various delights accessible to debauched princes of the Renaissance Church. All you get in the end is words, and they’d better be good ones (hence the bishop’s repeated mocking of Gandolf and his inferior Latin. He’s so owned.)
Roberts, incidentally, had a good blog post about that poem a few years back, in which he mentions that
John Ruskin later commented upon it in Modern Painters IV, praising Browning’s portrait of Renaissance Italy, “its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of The Stones of Venice put into as many lines, Browning’s being the antecedent work.”
In Modern Painters IV Ruskin doesn’t print the whole thing: “I miss fragments here and there not needed for my purpose in the passage quoted, without putting asterisks, for I weaken the poem enough by the omissions, without spoiling it also by breaks.” That’s the business of literary criticism for you—but not for Ruskin, who later wrote Browning a letter opening with
After all, you are in my debt for a letter you know, so really I am not quite so bad as I appear to myself thinking just now how I have been treating you. I was so ashamed of the way I had mangled that poem of yours that I dared not look you even by letter in the face for some time afterwards.
They don’t make guys like that anymore. —Steve]
[Speaking of Renaissance Italy, and to return to my promised commentary about Michael Steinberg’s lamenting the state of the review: one of the more depressing things I’ve read in the past few years was someone (I want to say Madoc Cairns) tweeting that during the Italian Renaissance the population of Florence was about one hundred thousand. The population of the whole of Italy was several million. These numbers are comparable to the current population of South Bend, Indiana and the whole of Indiana, respectively. The United States has many more people than Renaissance Italy; they possess material wealth and technological marvels that Lorenzo the Magnificent would never have dreamed; there has always been enough religious, political, and economic turmoil in this country to inspire new thinking and new art, and yet—how did they do it? What are we not doing?
These are the questions looming behind every worry about the end of criticism. The answer, we suspect, has something to do with “the audience,” since everything else is the same or points in the favor of the modern-day United States. I don’t mean merely in terms of number, although having more people patronize the arts is better than having fewer. (Subscribe to the WRB!) The real fear, I think, comes in when critics wonder if their work is actually doing anything at all to create, to form, to shape, to educate an audience. (Steinberg is so down on formulaic reviews of uninteresting concerts because he knows they don’t.) The best criticism is always reaching out to the reader, including them in the critic’s ongoing education, and is theoretically accessible to anyone. It wants to reach everyone. But what’s the point of teaching in an empty classroom? —Steve]