Now that ain’t workin’
that’s the way you do it
You play the guitar on the WRB
To do list:
Follow us on Twitter [Or Instagram. Or Facebook.] to keep up with the Barely-Managing WRB Summer Intern for one more day of August;
Order a tote bag;
avail yourself of our world-famous classified ads, now stored on this page for non-paying readers to access, either by placing or responding to one;
and,
Links:
At Tablet, Alice Gribbin writes about the debasement of art: “The substantive feelings and insights an artwork activates in us, and which continue to resonate after we move on from it—the meanings an artwork has for us—can be dispersive, layered, paradoxical. This unsettled and abundant aspect to meaning is why we reread novels, hang prints on our walls, and return to the same museum collections again and again. Meanings are not only various but shifting. Great art reflects back at us our own mutability; what seemed sentimental or easy can, a month later, challenge and bewilder.”
N+1 has Meghan O’Gieblyn’s new introduction to Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965) from the new Dalkey Archive edition [Who had an interesting post about their struggles with the production process yesterday. —Chris]: “Few novels boast a fan base so fiercely, and perhaps needlessly, protective. Despite being hailed repeatedly as a work of genius; despite the spadework of feminist scholars who have periodically revived interest in it over the past five decades; despite the novel’s many admirers, which include writers as stylistically diverse as Sinclair Lewis, Anaïs Nin, Mari Sandoz, Djuna Barnes, Kurt Vonnegut, and Norman Mailer, it has not managed to shake its status as prohibitively difficult. The epithet that has unfortunately stuck is one that appeared in Young’s 1995 New York Times obituary, which christened Miss MacIntosh ‘one of the most widely unread books ever acclaimed.’” [Joel J. Miller had notes about unread books on his Substack this weekend. —Chris]
The MIT Press blog has an excerpt from Anca Parvulescu’s book about laughter (Laughter: Notes on a Passion, 2010) on a 16th-century anatomy of hilarity: “Laughter seems to obey reason less than any other passion. A rebel, it sneaks in and overpowers reason. We cannot control our laughs, Joubert argues, much as we cannot control our bladder. Laughter ‘bursts,’ ‘breaks,’ and ‘splits’ us.”
For Eater, Bettina Makalintal writes about Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which everyone has seen on Netflix, ten years on: “Instead of using authenticity as an objective, big-picture dictum—unfairly holding up a takeout sushi joint to the same standard as Sukiyabashi Jiro—perhaps the phrase is most useful when it’s used in terms of the integrity of a singular vision.”
In The New Atlantis, David Polansky retrospects on Neal Stephenson’s science fiction: “While his work draws heavily upon the tradition of political philosophy, and his plots make frequent dramatic use of catastrophic scenarios, he seems unable to present a serious account of politics as a venue for decision-making of the most consequential sort. And though he is attentive to the social and political tensions modern science often generates, particularly in democratic societies, his protagonists usually end up circumventing politics when faced with the kinds of disasters that set his plots in motion.”
Reviews:
More on sci-fi and politics: Reviewing Elvia Wilk’s new book of essays (Death By Landscape, July) for The Nation, Lynne Feeley: “The systems novels of Pynchon, DeLillo, and the like may undo what Amitov Ghosh calls the ‘individual moral adventure story’ by enmeshing their protagonists in larger systems, but according to Wilk they still uphold the distinction between the human realm and the ecological realm. And rather than challenging the binary between figure and ground—the binary that Wilk finds especially untenable in the era of climate crisis—systems novels ultimately reinforce this (ecologically false) distinction. ‘In books about systems, men tend to emerge from the background rather than merge into it,’ Wilk writes.”
For The New Republic, Jillian Steinhauer reviews a recent book by Alexandra Lange (Meet Me By the Fountain, June) on that great American hallway, the shopping mall: “But building your own new downtown comes with problems, too. The more you try to control the environment, the more stifling it becomes. … The more I understood the codes and rules of suburban shopping centers, the more I longed for the world outside of them.”
N.B.:
The National Book Festival will take place in D.C. this weekend. Washingtonian highlights here. Full schedule here. Liberties is hosting a panel. [We shared that Jensen essay in WRB May 11, 2022.]
Last week it was The Paris Review “Against August” (Haley Mlotek). This week it’s “I Hate Summer” from Astra (Elroy Rosenberg). There must be something in the air. [It’s specifically, in the District of Columbia, the humidity. —Chris]
This form is for local socialist book clubs coming up this Fall.
Here’s some weird little stuff [Annals of Nicholson Baker. —Chris]:
The Washington Post is bringing back its print books section starting Sept. 25.
One last shine of use for the notorious Dave Thomas Circle Wendy’s.
We don’t recommend this. [Maybe it’s fine? —Chris]
Upcoming book:
[Yesterday, City Cast DC named its top five novels set in the District of Columbia. Notably missing: the one with the scene in Panda Gourmet. Here’s another, out next week.]
September 6 | Bellevue
Voices in the Dead House
by Norman Lock
From the publisher: After the Union Army’s defeat at Fredericksburg in 1862, Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott converge on Washington to nurse the sick, wounded, and dying. Whitman was a man of many contradictions: egocentric yet compassionate, impatient with religiosity yet moved by the spiritual in all humankind, bigoted yet soon to become known as the great poet of democracy. Alcott was an intense, intellectual, independent woman, an abolitionist and suffragist, who was compelled by financial circumstance to publish saccharine magazine stories yet would go on to write the enduring and beloved Little Women. As Lock captures the musicality of their unique voices and their encounters with luminaries ranging from Lincoln to battlefield photographer Mathew Brady to reformer Dorothea Dix, he deftly renders the war’s impact on their personal and artistic development.
Inspired by Whitman’s poem “The Wound-Dresser” and Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, the ninth stand-alone book in The American Novels series is a masterful dual portrait of two iconic authors who took different paths toward chronicling a country beset by prejudice and at war with itself.
[I Sing the Bardo Electric? —Chris]
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