WRB—Aug. 3, 2024
Welcome to the D.C. week
Oh, I know it don’t thrill you
I hope it don’t kill you
N.B.:
The monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “May we despair?”, will take place on the evening of August 17. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In The Yale Review, Jack Hanson interviews Eliot Weinberger:
Hanson: Some of your books include extensive and deeply researched bibliographies, though your essays have very few citations of the kind we might see in a work of scholarship or criticism. Is it right to say that this is because your priority is in your own encounter with what you’re uncovering, almost like a record of your reading? How do you understand your relationship to your source materials? To scholarship?
Weinberger: I only included bibliographies in two books, in an attempt to demonstrate that they were not fiction. This has apparently not succeeded. One reviewer even said that my claim that I don’t invent anything is so obviously untrue that it must itself be a meta-joke. I am not an academic; I don’t do any original research; these are far from scholarly articles. So I don’t see the need for citations. What I do is forage in academic books and articles for bits of information that I can try to transform into literary texts. It’s like staring at a mountain and then writing a poem about a mountain, with observational details.
A “record of my reading” has never occurred to me, but I suppose it is that. I never think about potential readers, if any, beyond the vague hope that what I write will be of interest to them. More exactly, commissioned essays (reviews, introductions, etc.) are naturally written with the requirements in mind. But I write the literary essays for myself, simply because that’s what I like to do, as others play the piano or bake or build a table. It does no harm.
[He really is a member of the “fantastic facts” school. And he’s in good company here with the accusations of invention; at one point it was believed that Jane Austen made up the names of the “horrid” novels in Northanger Abbey. —Steve]
In Public Books, Aidan Ryan on writing nonfiction about the beloved and the dead:
I have designated a shelf near my desk for what I consider to be the canonical works of this nameless genre. I begin with Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception (1979), then his younger brother Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life (1989). Then Maggie Nelson’s Jane (2005); Patti Smith’s Just Kids (2010); Molly Brodak’s Bandit (2016); T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls (2019). Although they do not center “loved ones,” exactly, I also count Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (2020) and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (2020). The most recent entry in the genre is Butler’s Molly (2023), a text entwined with Brodak’s own Bandit. In each of these texts, biography acts as a Trojan horse for memoir, or memoir acts as a Trojan horse for biography, requiring the author to take on the unique perspectives and responsibilities of each tradition simultaneously. All present both the author and a secondary figure as twin subjects, like two black holes in orbit. Together they comprise an extraordinary accounting of the limits of love and knowability. The mutual unknowability between the author and that second subject is the unique tension—the wound—that makes these works sing. It is also what makes these books uniquely dangerous—dangerous, that is, to the author, who is compelled by love and loss to write them, but proceeds against the unshakeable fear of being wrong. The stakes are higher in this genre than in journalism: here, “wrong” is not a matter of accuracy but of how well the writer really knew the one they loved. And love without knowledge is merely affection. Love itself is on the line.
In minor literature[s], an excerpt from Paul Stubbs’ new book (The Carbonized Earth: A Study on Arthur Rimbaud, April):
If Cioran was correct, and that Shakespeare and Hölderlin had indeed bypassed Christianity, what pagan mythologies were left for a poet like Rimbaud? Hölderlin yielded only to the seduction of a polytheist attitude, not faith, and thus attempted to rewrite the myths of his own gods. Rimbaud was not content only to be Rimbaud when writing, and this was an impenetrable misnomer, his one integral weakness; he never knew just what to revert himself back into. And having no memory of these other lives he so passionately wished he lived, Rimbaud was left only with an infinite nostalgia for a time when he could never have lived. Thus, this poet had no choice but to seek out other satisfactions, something akin to using his imagination as a womb, a pre-establishing vacuum in which all got sucked; for everything disinterested him, even God, and therefore, the only answer was to attempt to become him, that or take a short cut to him by humanizing his absolute perfection, and/or by exhausting the infinite possibilities of his imagination by thinking for him.
Rimbaud:
But to explore the invisible and to hear the unheard are very different from reviving the dead: Baudelaire is therefore first among seers, the king of poets, a true God.
Dylan [Certainly Rimbaud’s most important admirer of the past few decades. —Steve]:
I’ll take the Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando
Mix ’em up in a tank and get a robot commando
If I do it upright and put the head on straight
I’ll be saved by the creature that I create
I get blood from a cactus, gunpowder from ice
I don’t gamble with cards, and I don’t shoot no dice
Can you look in my face with your sightless eye?
Can you cross your heart and hope to die?
I’ll bring someone to life, someone for real
Someone who feels the way that I feel
In Sidecar (the NLR blog), Louis Rogers on Helen Garner:
As a writer “actively nourished by everyday life,” she is open about drawing on these kinds of day-to-day trouvailles. Monkey Grip (1977) was based directly on her diaries: she carried them volume by volume to the Melbourne public library, transcribed them, cut out “the boring bits,” changed the names, and “sent it to a publisher.” The Children’s Bach (1984), on the other hand, is a work of imagination incorporating smaller fragments of observed life. In her diaries from the time of writing that novel, Garner thrills at both the flow of invention and her use of small details stored elsewhere in the diary: “I cobble that scene together out of elements so disparate that only a compulsive notetaker like me could have had the raw material at her disposal.”
Yet more than displaying the “raw material” Garner made her fiction from, or even taking us behind the scenes of her process, the diaries’ style and ethos illuminate those of Garner’s oeuvre as a whole. In one of many telegraphic reflections on her vocation, she notes her “determination to write only what is personally urgent to me,” and her wide-ranging body of work—from her rawest journals to her most accomplished fiction—glows with that urgency. It’s not simply that everyday life is Garner’s elected subject; her writing seems to spring authentically from it, as a direct response to living. “How sentences are made is of vital importance to me,” she has said, and yet “a person who can’t write but who has a story that’s burning to be told can sometimes have a gravitas that shames a critic.” Garner at her best, which is almost all of the time, has it both ways: finely wrought, startling sentences that scorch with their unmistakable necessity.
[We linked to a piece on Monkey Grip and The Children’s Bach in WRB—Apr. 13, 2024.]
Reviews:
In Compact, Valerie Stivers reviews Joy Williams’ new book (Concerning the Future of Souls, July) [An Upcoming book in WRB—June 29, 2024.]:
In one, a character named Alph (“as in: Alph the sacred river ran . . . ”) is arbitrarily turned down for a job—a judgment of a kind, and a darkly funny passage. Still another is about a gratuitous dolphin-slaughter that is a real yearly event in the Faroe Islands and bears the caption “Sentience.” The fragment immediately following it is end-titled: “May the judgment not be too heavy upon us,” and the text itself is two words: “Why not?” The very last entry is one word, “Dugong.” The end-title is also “Dugong.” A dugong is an endangered marine mammal, last of a family whose other branches have been hunted to extinction. If it’s the fate of the dugong on which we’re being judged, the book suggests, we’ve done very badly, despite the fragments of Chopin and many traces of artists and art we leave behind. (The arts are one of the volume’s many pleasurable thematic rabbit holes: The first entry is captioned “Kitsch,” and it seems Williams is suggesting that all human creation is kitsch from God’s point of view. Also funny.)
[I was once at the house of a friend with a small child, and as she was unloading the dishwasher her son was occasionally “helping” her by handing her something to put away. She told me that in moments like this she gets a sense of how God must feel about human efforts; they’re cartoonishly inept, and not actually helpful, and mostly get in the way, and if God wanted He could tell the human beings to leave it to Him and get it done much faster and better. But He doesn’t, because it makes Him happy they’re trying to help. I suspect He especially feels this way about human art—one of the points made in the speech from the whirlwind in Job is that God has made a lot of cool stuff no human artist could hope to match. —Steve]
In UnHerd, John Maier reviews Cory Leadbeater’s memoir of his time with Joan Didion (The Uptown Local: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion: A Memoir, June):
The Uptown Local is a staggeringly tedious book. Nauseatingly self-involved, it inflicts an enormous punishment on the reader lured in on the understanding they were going to find something out about Joan Didion. It must be conceded, though, that in its way the book is oddly representative of the maddeningly over-produced genre of highly literary first-personal non-fiction, which publishers seem never to tire of inflicting on what remains of the contemporary reading public.
It is no small irony, of course, that the alienated, inward-looking style Leadbeater adopts is one Didion did so much to popularize. In the wrong hands, as Leadbeater proves, it is a truly dangerous inspiration. Consider the scene after Didion’s death on December 23: “I took down her Christmas tree through tears. The tears were because the metaphor was so obvious that it was just the kind of thing we would have laughed about.” Note, this is a man who cries not about people, but about the obviousness of metaphors. In fact, none of life’s revelations are equal to disarming Leadbeater’s unerring instinct for pretension. In another scene, his wife tells him she is pregnant; “I made her stand in front of the giant Auden portrait in my office and hold the test up, and I took a photo.”
In short, Swinburne was perpetually talking shop: the bookish spirit in which he looked on nature and mankind, with his head full of his own trade, is essentially the same as the spirit in which The Tailor and Cutter annually criticizes the portraits in the Royal Academy, interested, not in the artist, not in the subject, but in the cut of the subject’s clothes.
[It’s all very good for life to make you think of books, but books have to make you think of life. —Steve]
In the local Post,
reviews Elias Canetti’s notes against death (The Book Against Death, translated by Peter Filkins, August 6) [The Upcoming book in WRB—May 8, 2024; we linked to an earlier review, an essay adapted from Joshua Cohen’s introduction, and an excerpt from the text itself in WRB—Apr. 27, 2024.]:How is it to be preserved? “Would it be at all possible to love more?” Canetti wondered. “To revive a dead person through more love, has no one ever loved enough?” In one of his recurring fantasies, we succeed in abolishing the word for death, thereby the idea of it, and thereby the thing itself. (For Canetti, a writer to his core, naming was talismanic.) “Can any language be made viable that does not know the word ‘death’?” he asked. The ideal society, he proposed later, would be one “in which people suddenly disappear, but no one knows that they are dead, as there is no death, there is not even a word for it.”
Of course, Canetti could not abolish the word “death” any more than he could abolish the phenomenon: It occurs hundreds of times in the very document in which he dreamed of its abolition. In 1971, he admitted: “It could indeed come to pass that someday I may yield to death. I ask anyone who might hear of it for forgiveness.” Twenty-three years later, he suffered defeat at the hands of his nemesis, but I don’t think he yielded.
In our sister publication on the Cuyahoga, Connor Harrison reviews a reissue of John Berger’s essay on his cataracts (Cataract, with drawings by Selcuk Demirel, 2012, 2023):
It is in this sense of opportunity, of a writer essaying to describe their relationship with ailing sight, that Cataract shares much with Borges’ “On Blindness.” Borges’ loss of sight was of course of a much more permanent kind, although one he refers to as “modest” because he retained partial sight in one eye. Blindness being as varied and subjective as a writer’s prose, Borges’s attitude toward the condition vacillates. When recalling the moment he became too blind to see the printed word, he declares it “pathetic,” chalking up the loss particularly to the modes of “reader’s and writer’s sight.” Later in the same essay, however, he comes to what seems to be the original impetus for writing it—the opportunity it offered to discover a new sight. In his case, this led to an education in Anglo-Saxon language and poetry. “I owe to the darkness some gifts,” he writes. Like Berger, his attitude towards blindness is as an experiment, an adaptation, or as he memorably puts it, “one of the styles of living.” One of the ways of seeing.
[One of the sadder things I’ve read recently was in a biography of Milton: the authors gathered up everything that could help determine what his condition was and sent it to an ophthalmologist, who told them that it would be easily treatable today. —Steve]
Two in Literary Review:
Andrew McMillan reviews a biography of Thom Gunn (Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life, by Michael Nott, June):
Nott opens his biography with one of the central episodes of Gunn’s life, his mother’s suicide, which readers encountered in his haunting late poem “The Gas-poker.” In the early pages of the book, we move through “Beginnings,” “Itinerancy” and “Hampstead,” which provide insights into the makings of Gunn, both familial and cultural. The sheer amount of detail Nott is able to hang on the Gunn family tree is remarkable, with information about houses and streets and different relations giving a more vivid sense of Gunn than we’ve ever had before. We travel with him to Cambridge, where he met his lifelong partner, Mike Kitay, and then to Stanford, San Antonio, Berkeley and San Francisco, the place with which so much of his later poetry would be associated. Nott never loses sight of Gunn the poet, showing us the drafting of the poem he dedicated to his Stanford teacher Yvor Winters on a long train journey from Stanford to San Antonio in 1955 and the emergence of “Sweet Things” during a period of three months’ solid writing, which followed a difficult time of writer’s block. Nott characterizes “Sweet Things” as a “street-life poem about running into an old trick and knowing ‘delay makes pleasure great.’” Gunn’s own thoughts on his poems, both when they were written and later, are combined with details about their composition and Gunn’s wider life.
Stephen Walsh reviews a new biography of Tchaikovsky (Tchaikovsky’s Empire: A New Life of Russia’s Greatest Composer, by Simon Morrison, August 27):
The central point here is that Tchaikovsky, so often condescended to as a composer whom we love in spite of his technical defects and errors of taste, was in fact a craftsman whose works have simply been judged by the wrong criteria. Morrison does not draw a complete veil over these issues. He can be critical of Tchaikovsky’s judgment in, for instance, allowing the intrusion of the motto theme of the Fifth Symphony into its slow movement, which he likens to “a tranquil ending to a beautiful evening [being] interrupted by a former lover.” Yet overall Morrison does not belong to the school of “towering masterpieces.” “Symphonies,” he insists, “inhabit structures of all sorts of sizes, and it’s another form of exclusionary bias to ascribe worth to mansions but not the tumbledown and ramshackle edifices that most non-German-Romantic symphonies inhabit.”
[The Germans! They’re at it again! —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
Amtrak ridership is up.
How to photograph buildings.
Becoming better at tennis through self-help books.
A history of bookcases.
Readers prefer simple headlines. [The WRB prefers mysterious and enticing email subheads. —Steve]
New issue: Literary Review August 2024 [As linked to above.]
Poem:
“Problems with Windows” by James Hoch
Leave them closed, clear of curtains,
inevitably a sparrow ends itselfon the glass. You must imagine
how sudden everything isfor the sparrow keening away from a jay:
There’s somewhere to go,rectangle of light, glint, reflection,
then nothing. The birddoesn’t hear the thud of its skull,
twitch of its neck; that’s for the air.*
Leave them open long enough,
sparrows simply fly in. This onemust’ve tired of the heat beneath
the elms where young couplesgrope in the shade under each
other’s shirts before it shuttledthrough the museum window hexed
with iron bars, and perched ona light above Caravaggio’s boy
holding a fruit basket, the way he looksalone, almost burdened.
*
We had windows like that in a kitchen
I onced worked, above a tablewhere we boned and skinned cases
of chickens that bobbed and thawedin a sink, floating there, headless, wingless,
as if the birds had never been birds.Shit can fly in, Franky would say, closing
the window, heat, and chickens in on us,*
Franky, who was skinny but dangerous
and lived by the river, had a knack for itand, like Caravaggio, a penchant for blades.
You see, you had to break them open,yank out the sternum, knife between
rib and tendon, leave no shard, then malletthe meat until you could make out
the grain of wood beneath.*
Nothing catastrophic happened.
The sparrow didn’t crap on the paintingnor try to end itself in the shaft of light
behind the boy’s head. It shuttledroom to room, passed Bernini’s Apollo,
above the armless statues in the portico,and out a window at the other end,
though such a rush, it felt torn;which is to say, it filled me with memory.
*
Sometimes I look at a painting and forget
what to live for: the historiesperpetuated in the face of the boy,
or for the aloneness, the jitteringly nervoussuspension of the bird. And I don’t know
if Franky ended the way everyone thought.The thing I remember is his eyes:
if they looked at you, shit was going down,and if he stood still long enough,
they trembled like two dark pools.*
And I imagine if you looked in the eye
of that sparrow, you would see the sameand a window of blue reflected
and curved and vulnerableover its surface. Of course, to do so,
you’d first have to capture it, learn how tohold a thing without crushing it.
[This is from Hoch’s Miscreants (2007), his second collection. —Julia]
Upcoming books:
Viking | August 6
The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore
by Evan Friss
From the publisher: Evan Friss’ history of the bookshop draws on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers to offer a fascinating look at this institution beloved by so many. The story begins with Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore in Philadelphia and takes us to a range of booksellers including the Strand, Chicago’s Marshall Field & Company, the Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus. The Bookshop is also a history of the leading figures in American bookselling, often impassioned eccentrics, and a history of how books have been marketed and sold over the course of more than two centuries—including, for example, a 3,000-pound elephant who signed books at Marshall Field’s in 1944.
The Bookshop is a love letter to bookstores, a charming chronicle for anyone who cherishes these sanctuaries of literature, and essential reading to understand how these vital institutions have shaped American life—and why we still need them.
What we’re reading:
Steve started reading Dracula. [I have nothing new to add to the unending conversation about this book at this time. —Steve] He also started reading Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (by Charles Mackay, 1841).
Julia read more of Dud Avocado and Gravity’s Rainbow.
Critical notes:
- on love songs:
Music critics are especially ashamed of love songs. Ninety percent of pop songs are about love, as critic Dave Hickey pointed out, but critics prefer to write about the other ten percent.
The ultra-hip critics will tell you that love songs are wimpy. But, of course, they know these songs, too—and can also sing along with all the words.
There are many reasons for this shame. But the biggest one, I believe, is that love songs remind us of our vulnerability—especially sad love songs. They are incompatible with macho stances or ultra-hip poses.
[Writing one of the saddest love songs anyone’s ever written is not, however, inconsistent with the willful perversity of naming it “Hot Burrito #1.” (I prefer the Elvis Costello cover, but I wish he had kept the name.) —Steve]