WRB—Apr. 30, 2025

“I know what you mean.”

This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books. The eyes of the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books are hazel and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high.

N.B.:

May’s WRB Presents, featuring readings by Carlo Massimo, ​Molly McCloskey,​ Kelly Sather, and ​Ena Selimović, will take place on Wednesday, May 7 at 6:30 p.m. at Sudhouse DC. Readings begin at 7.

Links:

• In our sister publication in Hollywood, Maddalena Poli on Oxford University Press’ Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature:

  The series includes volumes of poetry, philosophy, and tales. For example, An Anthology of Poetry by Buddhist Nuns of Late Imperial China (2023) is the first complete translation of a collection of poems and writings by Buddhist female masters from the seventeenth century. These poems bring modern readers closer to their lives and religious experiences. One of my favorite poems is a reflection by Xingkong, a woman from a wealthy family who was not too thrilled with becoming a nun: “I’ve left the world and entered the convent. / My body is pure, but my heart is not. / During the night the gusts of wind and rain / Sound like someone knocking at the door!” In the collection, she is presented as a negative example, someone who fights the monastic lifestyle. To me, the poem speaks of a relatable tension between conforming to social structure and following one’s desires.

  [I would be interested to see Chinese poetry translated into English that escapes the idea of “Chinese poetry” established by Cathay (and seen in the lines quoted above). But—and I think I’ve told this story in here before—I once bought an anthology of Chinese poetry featuring the work of several translators and then flipped through it; whenever one of the translations was substantially better as poetry than the rest of the collection, it was, every single time, one of Pound’s. —Steve]

• In The Paris Review, Geoffrey Mak on Ryunosuke Akutagawa.

  Akutagawa’s transgression is the act of writing itself, writing that takes suffering as its subject. Akutagawa allegorizes the sadomasochistic desire to tell stories about pain in his masterpiece “Hell Screen.” It tells the story of a Heian painter who can paint only from life. To paint a scene of people burned alive, the emperor arranges to have someone burned in front of the artist’s eyes. The painter agrees, but it is only during the burning when the emperor, smiling, shocks the painter by sending the artist’s own daughter, bound to a carriage, burning in flames. He watches in horror, then radiance—“the radiance of religious ecstasy.” His finished painting, the hell screen, is lauded by critics. The artist hangs himself.

  The painter reaches his breaking point at the moment when he confuses his life’s realities with art’s imaginaries. This is a common theme in Akutagawa’s I-novel writing. In the posthumously published “Spinning Gears” (1927), the narrator, Mr. A., becomes convinced that pages from The Brothers Karamazov have been stitched into the middle of a copy of Crime and Punishment—presumably a hallucination. In his field of vision, he begins to see semitransparent wheels, spinning and multiplying, like the eyes or wings of the angel in the book of Ezekiel. “I opened my eyes, and shut them once again once I had confirmed that no such image existed on the ceiling,” he writes.

  [“The radiance of religious ecstasy” puts the story in the lineage of either various stories of human sacrifice or martyrdoms by fire without matching with any of them that I can recall. (Even the aestheticization of something like the martyrdom of St. Sebastian was added in later. The Romans were just shooting arrows.) The religion is art and nothing else. —Steve]

• In The Point, Martin Dolan on Andrew Lipstein:

  Something Rotten (January) is different in that it gives its domestic dysfunction drama a name and a face, letting readers encounter the mess on both sides. If Lipstein’s early fiction grappled with masculinity, it did so obliquely, showing its entanglement with ambition and ego in a specific social context. Something Rotten hits many of these same themes, but for the first time, masculinity is explicitly at the forefront. Yet importantly, its prominence is neither apologized for (as in the “sad girl” novels) nor celebrated for its messiness (as advocated for by culture warriors like Alex Perez). Instead, Something Rotten exemplifies a third way that contemporary novels can think about masculinity: letting it be ugly without reducing that ugliness to the book’s entire point.

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• Turkeys and Ralph Lauren

• Lobsters and T. S. Eliot

• Grace on a Poem by Yeats and children playing

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the newsletter with a friend. —Steve]