For issues of the Washington Review of Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
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
. Doors at 6 p.m., readings at 7 p.m. Sign up to attend here.Links:
In Boston Review, Eli Zeger on the end of Pitchfork and the future of music criticism:
The style was most apparent around the concluding paragraphs of reviews, where writers attempted to suggest some tenuous connection between the music and what it said about the world we live in: burnout, late-stage capitalism, life under Trump, whatever got the word count over five hundred. In each instance, it’s as if the writer is saying, “I don’t want to do this review. This vaguely profound theme feels more interesting, so I will try to relate it to this album.” Of course, these half-baked formulas didn’t drive view counts. Instead, letting writers briefly muse on abstract topics only vaguely connected to the album itself was a way to afford this engagement bait a modicum of critical shrewdness. This was emblematic of the delusion the site had locked itself into: that careful, considered insight could be cranked out at the rate of, well, GQ. In the bid to get traffic, Pitchfork’s editors couldn’t afford to put the editorial calendar on hold and face the fact that shrewdness does not grow on a content farm; the conditions are inhospitable for that kind of crop.
In The Baffler, Hubert Adjei-Kontoh on the state of house and techno criticism:
A music critic friend told me recently that the way today’s music writers speak about the liberatory powers of house and techno is similar to the way that boomer critics talk about the world-changing powers of Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, or the Beatles. At least the boomers can claim to have some possession over the musicians they turned into saints. Our millennial writers are simply trying to create a story that benefits our moment of political stasis. It’s not dissimilar to when someone like Jann Wenner says, “I don’t think rock ’n’ roll overturned segregation or the war in Vietnam, but we played huge parts in it.” When NPR has a roundtable on the “revolutionary fun” of Beyoncé’s album, there is a similar tendency to speak in sample-bait.
[I’ve commented before in this newsletter about a lack of ability to discuss music as music, whether due to a lack of conceptual tools or lack of vocabulary, leading to music reviews about everything but the music. (Not that any currently existing publication would, or should, adopt the inimitable approach of Mark Prindle, but his reviews are evidence that you can talk about everything but the music, and at great length, as long as you also talk about the music.) That’s how we’ve ended up with all this “sample-bait.” I don’t have a solution. “Beg Alex Ross’ editor to make him do pop music criticism more often” won’t cut it. To be honest, I suspect that this is an audience problem. A while ago I remember Slate running a few pieces with the conceit that, unlike other reviews, these applied music theory to the analysis of pop songs. What are we doing when such a thing needs to be specified? Do we specify that reviews of pop music analyze the lyrics? Are we going to start specifying that some reviews of literature use literary theory to analyze the texts under consideration? (Don’t answer that.)
All this is to say: make your children learn to play the piano. —Steve]
Also in The Baffler, Sam Adler-Bell on Adam Phillips [Author of the Upcoming book in WRB—Mar. 20, 2024.], his approach to analysis, and giving up:
Phillips, in his impish way, wants us to rethink the death drive as a “giving-up instinct,” a move which simultaneously raises and lowers the stakes of giving up. “One of the reasons giving up has such a bad press—we never say ‘she is really good at giving up’ or ‘giving up is good for you’—is that the giving up that occurs regularly in everyday life is felt to be an ominous foreshadowing of, or reminder of, the ultimate giving up that is suicide,” he writes. It’s as if there is a slippery slope from a child quitting her piano lessons, or giving away her favorite toy, to dying by her own hand. “As though wanting to give up is the worst sign, and the wish to give up is something we should be extremely wary of in ourselves. As though it is like a virus, or a contagion.”
In The Yale Review, Jennifer Grotz on her mother’s coma and metaphor in poetry:
Eliot’s simile also would have likely seemed either inaccurate or too-surreal: in what way could a sunset resemble a patient? Perhaps that they are both horizontal, perhaps that they are both short-lived. But rather than elucidating a sunset, the etherized patient is a more revelatory proxy for the state of mind of the poem’s speaker, and indeed of society’s disease as a whole, and Europe’s in particular, at the end of World War I. Within two years of Eliot’s walking the streets of London and penning his opening to “Prufrock,” Guillaume Apollinaire would end his own poem “Zone,” about walking the streets of Paris, with an image of the sunrise as a beheaded neck: “Soleil cou coupé.” Surely it was something in the zeitgeist. I wanted to understand why, more than a century later, these existential metaphors had come to haunt me, as I stood on the edge of France in dread and panic over what was literal and what was figurative, as I felt like I was falling, as a man parachuted off a cliff, as a sunset spread out against the sky, as my mother lay in a coma.
[On such occasions one quotes C. S. Lewis:
For twenty years I’ve stared my level best
To see if evening—any evening—would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn’t able.
A failure of imagination on his part, if a funny one. —Steve]
In The Brooklyn Rail, Alice Notley on the experience of writing a poem:
I never had the experience again; I forgot for a couple of decades that the poem had happened in this way, though it was one of my favorite poems of mine. But now it seems to me that that experience is a template of what writing a poem is “like”—it was an archetypal experience. The poem is already there. Or there is something or someone or ones there who will tell it to you. Or it feels like it’s yourself telling it to you, as if that part of yourself knows exactly what to say. My sense of this location of the poem inside me, location of words or voices, keeps evolving. When I wrote “Your Dailiness” I had earned a longer work, but it had to tell itself to me. I didn’t know how to sit down and write it. Now I know how to sit down and write one, usually over many successive days, even months, but I still have to be “told it” as I go.
In n+1, Colin Vanderburg remembers Lyn Hejinian, who died on Saturday, February 24. R.I.P.
The mystifications of easy metaphors, or of bourgeois lyric’s possessive, isolate “I,” were for these writers urgent and self-evident targets: Hejinian once scorned “the coercive, epiphanic mode in some contemporary lyric poetry” for “its smug pretension to universality.” In 1983, amid the tide of Reaganite reaction, she called for a writing that “rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus . . . the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies.” The rebels themselves later looked back on these hopes with some ambivalence. “I might have said, at one time, that my writing aimed to make the reader more alert, more suspicious even,” Armantrout reflected in a conversation with Hejinian in 2001. “But the American people are very suspicious now. . . . It’s not really possible to say, ‘I’ll wake ’em up with my startling ambiguities’ anymore.”
[We linked to an earlier remembrance in WRB—Mar. 9, 2024. Because everything old is new again (and as I noted there) these targets—“the mystifications of easy metaphors,” “bourgeois lyric’s possessive, isolate ‘I’”—are the targets of “Lycidas,” which piles up stock devices and images to create obvious incongruities and whose “possessive, isolate ‘I’” gets overrun by the poem itself, and, when it tries to reassert itself before its final silence, can only talk about flowers. The universality and unity lies in “all the Saints above, / In solemn troops, and sweet societies, / That sing” and not in anything the lyric voice possesses. As for the poet’s ability (or lack thereof) to affect political and cultural change—Milton knew that as well as anyone. —Steve]
Two in The Lamp:
Jude on the connections between Epicureanism and Christianity:
The towering isolation that enshrouds Lucretius is odd. From Asia Minor to Naples (and doubtlessly Rome herself), Epicureans organized in communities much like those of the Christians to discuss the teachings of the Master and his successors and to celebrate the peculiar quasi-religious memorials of an atheistic sect—dinners on the twentieth of the month, annual festivals to commemorate the birthdays of Epicurus and Metrodorus, his successor as the leader of the Garden. The poet appears to have been something of a fundamentalist, a lone genius who discovered the writings of a master and convinced himself of their truth. In this respect, he seems very modern.
Jaspreet Singh Boparai on Céline:
Some readers might try to paint Bagatelles as a convincing depiction of a nervous, sensitive man’s descent into paranoia and conspiracy theories. The reason Céline is so convincing is that this isn’t a parody: it’s the real thing. For all the wildness, jokiness, and unstable tone, there is a hard core of earnest, obsessive hatred that makes much of Bagatelles exhausting and depressing to read. Not even Céline’s impressive linguistic virtuosity can hold the reader’s attention throughout this tirade. Readers who are masochistic enough to persist through the rest of Bagatelles without skipping pages will be rewarded by a few extended passages of exceptional writing, as when Céline temporary relaxes his mania to launch into an account of his visit to the Soviet Union. There are also shrewd insights here and there into French society, bourgeois culture, the decline of literary and intellectual life, and the decadence that is accelerated by drunkenness and mass media. But Céline is in the grip of a far more intoxicating addiction: the nihilism that fuels his rage.
In Engelsberg Ideas, Josh McLoughlin on “the forgotten art of memory”:
In Australia, indigenous Aboriginal history and culture survived for more than 50,000 years without written alphabetic transmission. One recent study suggests that “location-based” Aboriginal mnemotechnics might be more effective than the Greek “loci” tradition. Indigenous Australians weave information about navigation, food and water sources and tribal territories into topographical and chorographical “Songline” stories. These ancient sung and danced narratives “exhibit little variation over long periods of time, and are carefully learned and guarded by the Elders who are its custodians.” New stories are created by “incorporat[ing] aspects of the flora, fauna, and physical geography of the local area” with “numerical, spatial, and temporal relationships.” Music and melody, of course, have always been an effective aid to memory, from the songs children use to learn alphabets to impossible-to-forget earworms.
Reviews:
In the Journal, Sam Sacks reviews a reissue of U.S.A. by John Dos Passos (U.S.A.: The Complete Trilogy [The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money], 1930–1936, February):
The darkness of Charley’s demise is neither a surprise nor an anomaly. What makes U.S.A. challenging is not its length or literary devices but the unrelieved bitterness of its outlook. Dos Passos viewed his project as being analogous to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. American society, Dos Passos thought, was hopelessly in the thrall of the interests of capital, which had grown powerful enough to lead the country into World War I, in spite of President Wilson’s election promises to the contrary. War is “good growing weather for the House of Morgan,” Dos Passos acidly writes in a minibiography of the banker J. P. Morgan. The characters become trapped in the unthinking stampede for profit. They believe their frantic motion is advancement, but in fact they are headed steeply downhill.
N.B. (cont.):
Passover is late this year, but supermarkets got all the Passover food at the usual time.
Some news about a North Atlantic fishery. [Just for me. —Steve] The news is bad. [It usually is. —Steve]
The clients of Small Press Distribution are seeking a new distributor after it shut down.
A guide to used bookstores.
The evolution of commonplace books into anthologies.
A repository of links to “(in)famous internet essays.”
A new magazine intended to resist doomscrolling. [I would recommend the WRB, but, if it being on a screen is too much for you, have you tried books? —Steve]
New issues:
The Brooklyn Rail April 2024 [As linked to above.]
The Baffler no. 73—Consolation Prizes [As linked to above.]
The Lamp Issue 22 Easter 2024 [As linked to above.]
Local:
Five film festivals in and around Washington this spring.
An exhibit of woodblock prints and engravings by Albrecht Dürer opens at the Academy Art Museum today.
Webster’s Bitch, a play by Jacqueline Bircher, will run at the Keegan Theatre from today through Sunday, May 5.
David Gariff will give a lecture on japonisme at the National Gallery of Art today at noon.
The Washington School of Ballet will perform an abridged version of Don Quixote today at 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. and tomorrow, April 7, at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.
The National Gallery of Art will screen Kinuyo Tanaka’s The Wandering Princess (1960) today at 2 p.m.
The Twenty-First Century Consort will perform music by Lukas Foss, Jessie Montgomery, and Olivier Messaien at the Hirshhorn today at 5 p.m.
Jalynn Harris, Cynthia Manick, and Rasheed Copeland will read their work at People’s Book tomorrow, April 7, at 5 p.m.
Poem:
“My Life With a Gardener” by Bob Hicok
The screen door firecrackers closed.
I find her at the sundry drawer
prowling for twine. I’m nothing
she sees. There’s a tornado
in her hair, her face is streaked
with dirt like markings applied
before the rituals of drums.
I’ve watched her shadow break free
and tend the next row of corn.
I understand this eagerness
as fully as I can speak for the ocean.
I say water is behind everything,
a blue dictator, say waves
are obsessed with their one word
but have no idea what that word is.
Her hands enter soil like needles
making the promise of a dress
from cloth. In December she begins
smelling lilacs, by February
she sees the holes
peppers burn through snow. I see her,
she’s the last green thing I need.
When finally she’s pushed inside
by the rude hands of dusk,
I set down my life for her skin,
taught all day how to smell
like the sun, and the hundred
directions of her hair, and eyes
that look through me to flowers
that only open their mouths
to speak with the moon.
[This is from Hicok’s 2004 Insomnia Diary, his fifth of ten collections.
I love how sharp the images in this poem are: the screen door that firecrackers open, the rude hands of dusk, the wife’s skin smelling like the sun. The whole poem is so fun and vivid. And I love, too, when the speaker says I can . . . say waves / are obsessed / with their one word / but have no idea what that word is. There’s so much playful, tender affection here in the speaker’s confessed inability to understand his wife’s love for gardening. And there’s a tenderness, to, in his acceptance of the way her eyes / that look through [him] / to flowers / that only open their mouths / to speak with the moon. —Julia]
Upcoming book:
April 9 | Alice James Books
Light Me Down: The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine
From the publisher: The new poems acknowledge the inevitability of death while tenderly musing on what remains from a world left behind. The poems have an intricate balance between the sadness of a life lived and illuminating how the remaining love is steadfast, irreversible, and abiding even as we transcend from this earth.
In her later years, Jean would write poems on napkins, random scraps of paper, and even on a typewriter, and those close to her would collect these writings and transcribe them into a Word document so they wouldn't be lost. Even Jean's therapist transcribed a poem that she spoke in one of their sessions—a poem that can be found in this new work. Jean was always writing poetry wherever inspiration struck her, even through the struggle of her declining health. It was Jean's wish that her work landed back at her first home, Alice James Books—back to her origin point as a writer, coming full circle.
What we’re reading:
Steve read more of Portnoy’s Complaint.
Julia started Joanna Biggs’ A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again (2023). [It's excellent. —Julia]
Critical notes:
In Radway’s treatment, the mass-market romance is an entirely compensatory literature. The readers that Radway spoke to used romance to “resist their situation as women by enabling them to cope with the features of the situation that oppress them.” Readers themselves described their activity as an “escape . . . denying the present,” and to name the “somewhat vague but nonetheless intense sense of relief they experience by identifying with a heroine whose life does not resemble their own.” Reading, Radway argued, removed them from “the psychologically demanding and emotionally draining task of attending to the physical and affective needs of their families.” Via identification with a heroine who is cared for by an intimate partner, “they vicariously attend to their own requirements as independent individuals who require emotional sustenance and solicitude.” Despite the ideological scripts justifying their relegation to the home, counseling them that caring for family should fulfill and sustain them, other desires prevailed. The structure of the suburban household is incongruent with women’s deepest wishes, and compulsive romance reading is a symptom of this incongruence and a means of wish fulfillment.