WRB—Apr. 3, 2024

“You can eat pork and beans”

Reading an excerpt in the Washington Review of Books bears the same relation to reading an entire essay as kissing a Managing Editor does to marrying him.

N.B.:

The next WRB x Liberties salon will be on the evening of April 9. If you would like to come discuss the topic, “Is there loyalty without nationalism?” please contact Chris or Celeste Marcus.

The first WRB Presents event will be held the following evening, April 10, at Sudhouse DC and feature readings by Ryan Ruby, Zain Khalid, Austyn Wohlers, and

Twitter’s Audrey Horne

. Doors at 6 p.m., readings at 7 p.m. Sign up to attend here.

Links:

• In BOMB, Kelsey McKinney interviews Alexandra Tanner about her new novel (Worry, March 26):

  Tanner: I think right now I’m writing to eradicate shame about the most embarrassing or painful things in my life, little things that I ruminate on—I’m writing them down to move through them and feel less alone in them. Or to try to do that for the people I love in my life: to render them lovingly, to show how their worst moments were moments in which I loved them still, completely.

  McKinney: That’s beautiful.

  Tanner: I just totally shocked myself by saying that, I didn’t know I felt that. But that’s what I love about this work, so much of it moves through you unconsciously until one moment it’s right there at the top.

• In The New Yorker, Leslie Jamison on gaslighting and identifying it:

  The question of the gaslighter’s motivation often becomes a chicken-or-egg dilemma: whether their impulse to destabilize another person’s sense of reality stems primarily from wanting to harm that person or from wanting to corroborate their own truth. Think of the college boyfriend who convinces his girlfriend that all sex involves violence—is his fundamental investment in controlling her or in somehow justifying his own desires? Abramson writes that both goals can be at play simultaneously, such that a gaslighter may be “trying to radically undermine his target” and also, “in a perfectly ordinary way, trying to tell himself a story about why there’s nothing that happened with which he needs to deal.” (Indeed, as she points out, gaslighters “are often not consciously trying to drive their targets crazy,” so they may not always be self-aware enough to distinguish between these reasons.) If the need to affirm one’s own version of reality is pretty much universal, it makes sense that a desire to attack someone else’s competing version is universal, too. Yet, in the popular discourse, it can seem as if everyone has been gaslit but no one will admit to doing the gaslighting.

  [A book on the subject was one of the Upcoming books in WRB—Mar. 16, 2024. As for this, well—ah, ha, another societal problem turns out to be about the illegibility of desire, another banner day for the WRB. I used to get worked up about “gaslight creep” but I’ve made my peace with it. As long as it gets people to watch Gaslight (1944). —Steve]

• Henry Oliver
  on why Penelope Fitzgerald started writing novels so late in life:

  Similarly, Penelope haunts The Bookshop (1978), rather like the poltergeist that lurks in that novel. In the opening, when deciding what to do with an inheritance from her husband, Florence “had recently come to wonder whether she hadn’t a duty to make it clear to herself, and possibly to others, that she existed in her own right.” This isn’t literally Penelope—but she too was a recent widow and had reason to understand and write about such people. Here again she evokes a lost England, and something of a lost self: Müllers, a bookshop on Wigmore Street, closes after many years, which Florence takes “as a personal attack on her memories.” Penelope, too, had worked in a bookshop. And Florence has changed her life mid-way on the wave, just as Penelope was doing. “It is a peculiar thing to take a step forward in middle age, but having done it I don’t intend to retreat.” Indeed, the whole novel is about being a late bloomer, about “that precious sense of beginning again which she could not expect too often at her age.”

  [I find this sort of thing comforting now that the age at which Keats died—25 years, 115 days—is only about three months away for me. Keats was never a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books, though. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall: Chris and Steve read Heidegger and congratulate each other on it, Tu Fu, Louisa May Alcott, aliens, translation, the blues, Pitchfork, Ian Fleming, prosody, 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.]