Young people are led by curiosity to read the Washington Review of Books, and losing all chastity of mind enter upon a progressive corruption of life. It would be best if they could be kept wholly from such email newsletters; but there is a good deal in them of genuine profit and literary merit, which makes it difficult to keep them wholly out of the hands of youth.
Links:
In Poetry, Ryan Ruby on Frank O’Hara’s “Biotherm”:
A childhood memory, a disciplinary training, an attentional practice, a poetic practice: these coordinates combine to allow Dolven to notice and attribute significance to the lines of Wyatt quoted in “Biotherm” and their use as a potential title. Noticing is often described as a skill, which it is; arguably, it is the essential skill for a critic to have. With a textual object as complex and various as “Biotherm,” where every other line seems to raise the question of what the words in it are doing there, the reasons a critic chooses to bring this detail rather than that detail to the reader’s attention has to do with something aside from training, and something deeper than taste. It has to do with the critic’s personal interests, commitments, moods, desires, and dispositions, to be sure, but it also has to do with all the chance occurrences that make up a life and a personality. It has to do with the way these combine at the particular moment and in the particular place that noticing happens. It has to do, in short, with the critic’s style. What the critic notices, and what the critic wants to do with what they notice, make the critic just as surely as style is said to make the man.
[In some sense this is a piece about Jeff Dolven—inspired by O’Hara writing poetry to and about his friends, Ruby applies the model to criticism. I think of something T. S. Eliot said in “The Function of Criticism”:
The critic, one would suppose, if he is to justify his existence, should endeavor to discipline his personal prejudices and cranks—tares to which we are all subject—and compose his differences with as many of his fellows as possible, in the common pursuit of true judgment. When we find that quite the opposite prevails, we begin to suspect that the critic owes his livelihood to the violence and extremity of his opposition to other critics, or else to some trifling oddities of his own with which he contrives to season the opinions which men already hold, and which out of vanity or sloth they prefer to maintain.
This is a field that appeals to angry cranks—I should know—but, if we are serious about “the common pursuit of true judgment,” we should pay more attention to the “common” part. —Steve]
Reviews:
In The Bulwark, Henry Begler reviews Eve Babitz’s letters (Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were), edited by Lili Anolik, June) [An Upcoming book in WRB—May 6, 2026.]:
Yes!, you think. There she is! Our Eve! It’s inspiring to see her suddenly become herself, like watching a favorite baseball player break out of a slump. It makes you marvel at how someone can appear initially so minor—just another L.A. scenester—and yet all the while she is simmering, simmering, simmering until she boils. To see her metamorphose in real time nearly makes the slog of the first 200 pages worth it.
The letters also provide a valuable opportunity to learn more about Babitz’s literary influences, and the picture that emerges is of someone who reveres the Anglophone novel of manners: Woolf, Forster, Henry James, Anthony Powell, and all those other magi of the drawing room. (How charming to think of her leafing through The Ambassadors or At Lady Molly’s in the soft light of morning following some raucous bender in the hills.) I still don’t think Too L.A. is as good as Woolf, but you can at least start to see why Anolik reached for the comparison. Babitz takes the drawing-room wit and the mixture of bohemian daring and Victorian propriety that defined the Bloomsbury set, applies it to her own environs, and gives it a California makeover: looser and groovier, with hotter people and better music.
[I should perhaps begin by saying that I am from New England and therefore hate and fear California. (I once heard of a Bostonian movie audience that responded to a trailer in which Los Angeles was destroyed with laughing and cheering and clapping.) Our Puritan dream was stillborn; they put it through a funhouse mirror and are having much more success with it. “We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us,” John Winthrop said. The Californian culture industry, through its motion pictures, has very literally put itself before the eyes of all people and spread itself and its idea of the good life all over the earth. The Puritan dream was a literate commonwealth, and, while the movies were a good first step in undermining that, the Californians have come back with social media to really finish it off. The Puritans worked out their salvation with intense self-scrutiny. The Californians apply that self-scrutiny to their equivalent: being cool. And they regard being uncool with the same horror that the Puritans regarded being predestined by God to eternal damnation. Speaking of God—I hear that, since the Californians are unsatisfied with the one who sufficed for Puritan New England, they’re building a new one in San Francisco.
Anyway. In Begler’s first paragraph:
The dominant tone in literary nonfiction was a mix of indignant hectoring and handwringing solipsism. Neuroticism and uncertainty ruled the day. Is it okay to get on an airplane in the age of climate change? Am I adequately reckoning with my privilege when I eat this Sweetgreen salad? Is it suspect to enjoy Tolstoy or Picasso or Phil Spector or any of history’s other monster-geniuses? Am I saved or damned? Am I a Good Person?
The striking thing about so much of this literature is its complete lack of moral seriousness. “Am I saved or damned?” and “Am I a good person?” are actual questions that demand answers; “Am I adequately reckoning with my privilege when I eat this Sweetgreen salad?” is not, but you can answer it and pretend you’re answering the real questions. While consumer choices are by no means devoid of morality, to find so much of goodness bound up in them is a failure to understand the full extent of the moral life, one that makes it less important than it really is. If morality is about consumer choices, it’s not about our relationships with ourselves and with each other as human beings.
The magi of the drawing room never made this mistake; they knew we were playing for stakes, as it were, in those drawing-room conversations. And any deep and serious engagement with their work leaves that sense with the reader. Babitz at her best is not a “serious” writer in the way that literary nonfiction of the 2010s was “serious,” but it did not take the world seriously, and she did. —Steve]
In The Atlantic, Hilary Kelly reviews a documentary about Mary Oliver (Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, 2026):
Oliver’s poetry was not an act of ease; instead, she rebelled against the way that life presses our head down, away from the wonders of the world. Her advice, for all of its lucidity, is not uncomplicated or effortless. It’s to do something so difficult that most people don’t even attempt it: to notice when we’ve wandered away from how we want to live and to nudge ourselves back. “There are things you cannot reach. But,” she writes, “you can reach out to them, and all day long.” And for that, I’m grateful to have Mary Oliver’s words floating around my Pinterest page. I’d rather live the questioning life of an Oliver acolyte than the certain life of her critics.
[“The questioning life of an Oliver acolyte”—would that this questioning were in the poetry. “You do not have to be good” seems pretty certain to me, as does “You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.” Also opposed to questioning is Oliver’s habit of concluding poems with banal statements of theme, as in:
Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.
or
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Those last lines are Rilke’s “you must change your life” rendered in the language of self-help. Oliver’s apparent questioning never goes anywhere because she never actually lets it. Keats says that negative capability is “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”; Oliver never achieves this. Whenever a poem of hers gets close the poem then announces that it is in uncertainties and thereby stops being uncertain. —Steve]
[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:
Whether ancient Greece is alien to us, and if so in what way
Criminals as students of depictions of criminals in pop culture
A Poem by James Wright and football season
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.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. 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 WRB with other people. —Steve]
