WRB—Aug. 28, 2024

“naturally indulgent”

On a D.C. mornin’ sidewalk
I’m wishin’, Lord, that I was stoned
’Cause there’s somethin’ in this city
That makes a body feel alone
And there’s nothin’ short of dyin’
That’s half as lonesome as the sound
Of a sleepin’ D.C. sidewalk
And D.C. mornin’ comin’ down

N.B.:

WRB Presents will return in September with an evening featuring readings from Helen Chandler, K.T. Mills, Samuel Kimbriel, and Kayla Jean on Tuesday, September 17 at Sudhouse DC. The Managing Editors have graciously excerpted, as always, samples of their writing so you will know the quality of our guests. Being convinced of this, you will join us by signing up at the link below:

The next monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “Can we choose our beliefs?”, will take place on September 28. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.

Links:

• In The Paris Review, an excerpt from an upcoming collection of Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene’s letters (Expatriates of No Country: The Letters of Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene, edited by Brigitta Olubas, October 22). Keene:

  Shortly after my return to Tokyo I had a telephone call from Kazuo Nakajima, the friend of Bill Weaver. He was to return to Italy in a couple of days, but we arranged a meeting and spent a most agreeable two or three hours in conversation. Just imagine teaching Japanese in Venice! Why didn’t I think of that? I have visited Venice several times, briefly each time, but it just becomes more and more beautiful in my memory. It occurs to me that this is just the opposite of Proust’s experience; his Venice was above all the Venice he could not visit, and the impossibility of going there made it seem so incomparably beautiful. But my Venice is one above all of silence, broken only by the occasional vaporetto, a city of human beings rather than of means of transportation.

  Speaking of Proust, I have slowly been making my way through the new translation by Terrence Kilmartin. I find it quite wonderful, much better than my recollections of Scott Moncrieff, and really not very different from my recollections of reading the original. But, naturally, even more than the ease and grace of the translation it is the book itself that overwhelms me. Each page brings a new discovery—and I thought I knew Proust well.

  [I don’t know if Keene is right that Villette is “perhaps the most effective portrayal of desperate loneliness,” but there’s no reason for it to be as neglected as it is compared to Jane Eyre. —Steve]

• In Lit Hub, an excerpt from Katherine Bucknell’s biography of Christopher Isherwood (Christopher Isherwood Inside Out, August 27) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Aug. 24, 2024.]:

  The coming blindside of Hitler was to repeat and amplify the disaster of World War I that Isherwood had experienced in the destruction of his happy childhood life. It was the unprepared, the gullible, the dreamers, the fantasists, the young who moved him. For all her knowing talk of sex, Sally Bowles is one of them, easily tricked. “‘You know, Sally,’ I said, ‘what I really like about you is that you’re awfully easy to take in. People who never get taken in are awfully dreary.’” But Isherwood himself was on the alert, bearing witness to the unfolding disaster. He was not taken in, nor did he run away as the realities began to mount up. Instead, in his work, he focused more and more on the power of illusion in all arenas of Berlin life and on the hard line between real and imagined—in love as well as in politics. He was to last in Berlin until May 1933.

• In Café Américain, David Polansky on listening to Joni Mitchell while male:

  As she gets into her wilder mid-70s period, males seem to drop more out of the picture, and her femininity becomes increasingly self-sufficient, if not solipsistic. But despite being shorn of nearly all conventional female singer-songwriter trappings, Hejira (1976) remains a deeply feminine work. Mitchell remains a searcher, but her object of desire has become more obscure. Supported by Jaco Pastorious’ multitracked fretless bass, she reproduces one of popular music’s great—historically male—themes on songs like “Amelia” and “Coyote”: the wanderer who cannot be tied down by domestic comforts.

  [As a man who listens to Joni Mitchell, I think my favorite song of hers is “Edith and the Kingpin.” The whole album it’s on, The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975), is part of Mitchell’s initial move away from the more personal lyrics of her earlier work; the lyrics tend to imagine hypothetical women in hypothetical situations. “Edith and the Kingpin” is the most anesthetized; its characters are too drugged-out to feel (“snowblind,” to use Mitchell’s word) and the song provides barely any interiority. We hear only of the doings of the two titular characters as they come into contact and struggle with each other. Mitchell’s voice has no warmth, and neither does the music. The titular characters are feeling each other out; rarely does Mitchell present a relationship that is so explicitly a power struggle.

  My second-favorite Joni Mitchell song is probably “Coyote.” I am not beating the charges that I like the ones about men. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall: Steve on Camus and autofiction, Julia on physical language, Forster, kanshi poetry, eating, war poetry, high modernism, “the literati,” 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.]