You talk of making a twice-a-week books and culture newsletter; it is little short of madness to think of it at this day.
Links:
In The New Yorker, Katy Waldman on zombies:
We are bad at letting go. We recoil from sadness and we want to forget how to mourn. So many of our desires can be gratified, and so seamlessly, that maybe we’ve grown hypersensitive to the sensation of lack, willing to embrace any counterfeit that might insulate us. In such an environment, zombies elucidate the dangers of clinging to the past. One translation of Aaaaughhhh is “There’s a difference between not dying and being alive.” A summary of Gyyyyyuaaack might be “Things can grow so corrupted or damaged that it’s better not to have them anymore.” In this nostalgic moment, zombie stories expose a toxic side of loss aversion, cautioning us not to settle for brainless facsimiles, for shoddy reproductions, for shambling reanimated corpses of what we once loved.
[In many cases Aaaaughhhh deserves an even stronger translation than that. It is not a philosophical statement but a cry for help. The Cumaean Sibyl, who like the zombies is trapped in an unnaturally extended life but unlike them retains the ability to speak, says not anything general about death but “I want to die.” And her situation points to the real question underlying zombie stories—not “how can they be killed,” which is a plot mechanic, but “why didn’t they die in the first place?” —Steve]
In Lit Hub, an excerpt from a new biography of Constantine Cavafy (Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography, by Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys, August 12) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Aug. 6, 2025.]:
Contemporaries often reported his near fixation on matters of diction, punctuation, and even spacing in his verses. For instance, when he and a group of young men were discussing a nineteenth-century English poet, Constantine began a meandering passage through the “labyrinth of metrical subtleties.” At one point, one of the visitors intervened: “Certainly, maître, all of these are details,” to which Constantine responded vehemently, “What else is art but details.” As he said in his poem “Of Colored Glass,” “I am much moved by a detail.” The editor, critic, and friend Giorgos Papoutsakis claimed that, although Constantine had crafted his own innovative poetry, he never abandoned his “devotion to the choice of words.”
Indeed, Papoutsakis remembers him saying around 1931 that the “majority of Greek poets have not given sufficient attention in their work to the issue of lexical exactness [kyriolexia].” To achieve this expressive precision, Constantine carefully worked on poems, polishing each and every word sometimes for close to fifteen years before sending them to the printers. He began “Orophernis,” for instance, in 1904 and kept working on it until 1916.
[He’s right, but at the same time you can’t go around saying things like “I am much moved by a detail.” Imagine talking to the guy next to you at the bar and he says that. I don’t know why he’s saying it—insisting on the importance of his choice in whiskey, perhaps?—but I shudder to think of it. —Steve]
Reviews:
In UnHerd, Jonathan Meades reviews Nabokov’s Transparent Things (1972):
I can still summon the puzzlement of half a century ago. It was with delight that I realized I had been had. The sensation was electric. I had been Cruyffed by a double-take after a few sentences of Transparent Things. The septuagenarian author was heading apace into his Late Space, which had remained fallow since childhood and was now ready to be cultivated. This marvelous novella, a proxy amulet of a mere 100 pages, was the work of an old man impersonating the young man he once had been, a young man looking forward to being an old writer yet bereft of the old man’s achronic knack of whizzing forward and back though Time. Yet page after page proclaimed a lack of bereavement. And with it a mastery of legerdemain. Although he shared the name of the writer of the greatest novels of the century, this was a previously mute Vladimir Nabokov whose choice of Late Style was unfamiliar, may not even have been a choice . . . This was Late Style not just as reheated leitmotifs but as entire divergence from the great accumulated oeuvre which was now shed. The burdens of genius and high expectation could be abandoned without reference to them. In his and the century’s late Seventies it appeared that he was reinventing himself, almost provenantlessly, taking as his model without prior example the contemporary French writer he most admired, a generation his junior. He was all of a sudden dressed as Alain Robbe-Grillet. This was evidently a popular choice: Muriel Spark was kindredly togged at the same moment for The Driver’s Seat (1970). Had they listened too attentively to their critics: Émigré purple . . . Lush and arid . . .
[Cf. Anne Carson on late style, as linked to in WRB—Aug. 10, 2024. Cf. also an essay by in Commonweal on the late style of Dana Gioia and other artists of his generation, which discusses how “these artists and intellectuals feel the situation is dire enough to spend their final years promoting cultural literacy.” Since my time as an adult has basically only featured this kind of late style, I think it would be interesting to see other kinds make a comeback. (But then at 26 I’m already promoting cultural literacy; I can hardly imagine what I might be doing in 50 years.) —Steve]
[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:
A travelogue of upstate New York, featuring, among other things, the events on which Theodore Dreiser based An American Tragedy
Fighting? About the canon?
A Poem in which Ben Jonson reminds me of Yeats
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 telling your friends about us. —Steve]
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