WRB—Aug. 31, 2024
Both McCaffery and Larkin wrote articles about the isolation of the modern Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books, an isolation they felt had increased even more since the time of their masters in the previous generation. (Who among them could look forward to having a patroness like Lady Gregory?)
N.B.:
WRB Presents will return in September with an evening featuring readings from Helen Chandler, K. T. Mills, Samuel Kimbriel, and Kayla Jean. 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 Words Without Borders, Małgorzata Gorczyńska (translated by Mira Rosenthal) on reading like a Central European:
Ours, but which one is that? Things seem to be confused again. I’m writing this text with American readers in mind, trying to adjust to knowledge, experiences, and sensibilities different from my own and, at the same time, say something about myself, about us. So, I move like a pendulum between the Central European “we” and its more heterogenous version, between the original and its translation. And it may indeed happen, dear Reader, that even just for a moment, by mistake or on purpose, you cast yourself inside the role of a “we” or an “us” or an “ours.” If, by the way, you manage to catch sight of a golem, it’s possible he’s not entirely Central European but in fact a bit of your own golem you’ve not recognized till now or have chosen to ignore. “When will we begin to read like Westerners?” has an inverse: “When will we stop reading like Westerners?” “Clay” invites us to try both. It’s a utopia, of course, but the effort to make it a reality can be a liberating experience.
[Kundera says of Central Europe that “its borders are imaginary and must be drawn and redrawn with each new historical situation,” but in the current historical situation (and in this essay) it appears to mean “historically Catholic or Protestant regions that were behind the Iron Curtain.” Saying that Estonia is in Central Europe and Austria is not is a kind of liberation from geography, but the point of all these geographic categories is to correspond to states of mind. Where, after all, is the American Midwest but in the minds of the people willing to fight about its borders? —Steve]
Two in Commonweal; first, Jared Marcel Pollen on David Jones and In Parenthesis:
This continuity of historical time, central to modernism—by which the past interpenetrates the present—is key to taking in the poem in its fullness. The war, like modernism itself, represented a rupture in history, in which a reconstitution of the literary and historical imagination was needed for an entirely new field of human experience. Any poetry about the war that failed to do this was somewhat deficient. As John H. Johnston argues in “The Heroic Vision: David Jones” (which Jones himself much admired): “This lack of historical perspective seriously weakened the moral and artistic qualities of the poetry written during the war; any event, no matter how deeply it affects the sensibilities, ceases to be morally or even physically significant when it is isolated from all other events.” In Parenthesis, which succeeds in finding the hidden continuities within obvious dissonances, is quintessentially a work of modernism for this very reason, and one that could only have come out of its own parenthetical epoch.
Reviews:
Second, Morten Høi Jensen reviews a collection of Christopher Hitchens essays (A Hitch in Time: Reflections Ready for Reconsideration, January):
But perhaps what is most striking about many of these essays is how ahead of their time they were when first published. In “The Oklahoma Bombing,” Hitchens warns of “the militarization of a wing of the American right” and bemoans the Democrats’ feeble response to it: “If the best the Democrats can do is to ask people to be grateful for all that the state does for them, then they will repeat exactly the condescending errors that cost them the Congress in 1994 and may lose them the White House.” (Sound familiar?) In a long, onion-peeling portrait of Isaiah Berlin, Hitchens, zeroing in on the Russian-British philosopher’s political quietude, accuses him of always striving “to find a high liberal justification either for the status quo or for the immediate needs of the conservative authorities,” not least when it came to Vietnam. “A Hard Dog to Keep on the Porch,” an essay on Bill Clinton, becomes a penetrating—and much too timely—analysis of the cliché of “the lesser evil.”
Indeed, the idea that America could bring democracy to the Middle East by force of arms and the idea that the decline of Western monotheism would enlighten and radically improve late-modern civilization were, in hindsight, two of the wrongest ideas of the early-to-mid 2000s. And not all that many people held to both of them at once, which meant that Hitchens effectively achieved what you might call the reverse Orwell: Being so boldly independent of ideological faction that you get more important things terribly wrong than the more ordinary sort of scribbler.
In this sense the aspect of his career that Ganesh emphasizes, the search for causes and enemies worthy of his romantic and crusading spirit, illustrates what in The Decadent Society (2020) I describe as the dangers of anti-decadence—the way that the desire for a great war or a Great Enemy can supply a “cure” for decadence that makes the world more interesting but also makes it worse.
[The invocation of Guy Crouchback is so breathtakingly vicious that I remember reading this for the first time and being surprised that Ross Douthat had it in him. Beautiful. —Steve]
In The Nation, Hannah Gold reviews Garth Greenwell’s new novel (Small Rain, September 3) [An Upcoming book today.]:
Greenwell pushes his narrator’s prodigious analytic gifts and humanist sympathies to their limits in a rhapsodic—and sometimes ridiculous—passage about that most humble of American products, the potato chip. His younger sister G gives him a bag of chips toward the end of his hospital stay, his first taste of noninstitutional food after days of medically mandated fasting. Eating one, he refers to the chip as “a miracle of engineering, a kind of transubstantiation of a root vegetable.” For several pages, he lingers on the chip and the vital associations it brings forth, from the chemists who formulated it to the agricultural workers who excavated its raw materials. The chip is also taken to task for social malfeasance: “one of the manipulations of capitalism, a deformation of our natural response designed for addiction . . . really it symbolized in miniature the utter decadence of all genuine value, the fall of a culture, absolute bliss.” This is one complex carbohydrate.
In our sister publication in Tinseltown, Leo Lasdun reviews two debut novels (Brat, by Gabriel Smith, June; and Let Me Try Again, by Matthew Davis, August 13):
Davis’ writing is timid too. He won’t commit to Ross as a character the way Roth committed to Portnoy or Bellow to Herzog. Novels like these—which follow F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous dictum that “character is plot, plot is character”—serve as Davis’ model. But he doesn’t have a strong-enough sense of who Ross is. His likes (Lora, dietary supplements, etc.) and dislikes (online dating, weed, etc.) are about as far as we get. It’s like a sense of interiority would be embarrassing, would be too unseemly a thing for Davis to offer. Ross’ final moment of self-discovery, the soul-saving climax, feels rushed and removed too. After stalking Lora to a date with her new boyfriend, Ross realizes that he has gone too far. In a few sentences, he gets over Lora and the book is effectively finished. He bids farewell “to this idea of Lora Liamant, the mission of Lora Liamant, Lora Liamant my White Whale, etc, etc.” Davis is aware that his ending disappoints, and so he turns it into a joke: once his very short transcendence is complete, Ross buys a “low-glycemic lemonade,” which, he says, “failed to deliver a satisfying ending . . . I mean . . . taste.” It’s funny, and there are many moments like it in Let Me Try Again, where Davis (often quite nimbly) turns the book’s shortcomings into humor, but, just like Brat, it’s a bleak proposition for a novel. Here, character is not plot, plot isn’t character, and we are left wishing for a bit more of both.
[We linked to an earlier review of Brat in WRB—July 27, 2024.]
In our sister publication on Lake Erie, Christian Wessels reviews three books of poetry from Changes Press (A Night in the Country, by Laura Newbern, March; Not Us Now, by Zoë Hitzig, June; and OSSIA, by Jimin Seo, September 1):
Across the book, with poems like “Richard Asks Me for a Poem,” and “Richard Tries to Set Me Up” and “Richard Has Trouble Sleeping,” the lingering presence that guides OSSIA is the late poet Richard Howard. Friend, teacher, guide: “So use me while I’m useful,” Seo writes, “it’s the reason / we met, your poems from your hands into mine.” The utility in this rendition of “Richard” extends the book’s guiding structure: another alternative, Seo’s vocal counterpart in Howard. As experience between two languages begets translation, OSSIA considers other types of material and figurative transactions: poems for a kind of impossible usefulness, “when making good is making good money,” as Seo writes in another Richard poem. The promise of poetry lacquered by its fiscal hollowness, OSSIA wills itself towards an unlikely optimism, playful and funny, not something I would describe as hope.
[Changes rocks. —Julia]
Two in our sister publication on the Hudson:
Anahid Nersessian reviews Rachel Kush’s new novel (Creation Lake, September 3) [An Upcoming book today.]:
Spy and detective novels, like all forms of genre fiction, thrive on the opacity of their characters, who are always more type than individual. What do we know about James Bond other than his small arsenal of flat habits (martinis, promiscuity, quips)? As Dashiell Hammett said of Sam Spade, he “had no original” but is rather “a dream man” reduced almost entirely to two things: being “a hard and shifty fellow” and a prolific drinker. Of Philip Marlowe, another lush, Raymond Chandler said he “just grew out of the pulps. He was no one person.”
Sadie Smith is also no one person. She is, in a sense, no person at all. Her name is made up, and she likes to tell people that she’s from a place called Priest Valley, a real place in California with a population (she says) of zero. She’s in the habit of hinting to the reader that her breasts are fake, a piece of information that becomes a synecdoche for her sexuality. Whether she’s honey-trapping Lucien or falling into bed with the loutish René, one of the Moulinards, Sadie’s desires are always simulated, a means to an end and not a source of pleasure or joy. What she does like, however, is booze, and the more-than-occasional benzo. “I am a better driver after a few drinks,” she insists, “more focused.”
Jed Perl reviews an exhibit at the Guggenheim (Jenny Holzer: Light Line) and two books related to spectacle in art (Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle, by Jonathan Crary, 2023; and The Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917–1935, by Sjeng Scheijen, May):
Holzer was expressing something like embarrassment or discomfort—it’s difficult to say—as she conversed with Buchloh about the relationship between the artist and the wider world. Their exchange, focused for a time on art and spectacle, was part of a larger discussion about the place of culture in a democratic society that’s been going on for more than a hundred years. There always seem to be more questions than answers as artists and intellectuals twist themselves into all kinds of uncomfortable positions, attempting to align themselves with a public that they don’t really know and probably don’t really like. In thinking about all of this, especially in relation to Holzer, I’ve found myself looking back to Dwight Macdonald’s long essay “Masscult and Midcult” (1960), at least in part because Macdonald’s definition of midcult, a bastardized art that imitates high culture while attracting a mass audience, seems to perfectly describe Holzer’s word salad as it creeps up the rotunda of the Guggenheim. Macdonald’s observation that midcult “exploits the discoveries of the avant-garde” and uses them “in the service of the banal” can easily double as a description of what Holzer has been up to for decades now.
[Lamenting the uses to which the middlebrows are putting the discoveries of the highbrows prompts the alliance described here by Alan Jacobs (linked to in WRB—June 12, 2024):
It is characteristic of highbrows’ use of these distinctions—see the Woolf letter quoted above and T. S. Eliot’s encomium to the music-hall entertainer Marie Lloyd, which employs the related socio-economic terms “aristocrat,” “middle-class,” and “worker”—that they articulate some alliance of themselves and the lowbrows against the middlebrow.
Lowbrow readers do not know, and if they knew would not care, about this supposed alliance.
This is one attempt of the intellectuals to “align themselves with a public that they don’t really know and probably don’t really like.” It doesn’t really work because it tends to amount to “you might like the same thing as me but I like it in a far deeper and more intellectual way than you ever will.” Somewhat more successful at aligning intellectuals with the masses is the “guilty pleasure” approach, which permits enjoyment of the thing without feeling the need to intellectualize it. But enjoying guilty pleasures requires a new justification. And it ends up being an accusation against other intellectuals; what seems like an accusation of the self (look what I waste my time with) is actually an accusation of the other (I am more in touch with the real world and the real people in it than you in your ivory tower and am therefore better than you). It is also unsustainable. At that point, why not just jettison all the intellectualism? And this already happens. As (linked to in WRB—Mar. 23, 2024) notes:
Though probably my other problem is that “people” “online” “like this” (who? I don’t know) don’t actually seem to engage much with things I might consider genuinely high or niche interests. They don’t listen to classical music, they listen to stuff that gets reviewed by Pitchfork. They don’t drink fine wine, they drink craft beer. They don’t watch silent film, they watch popular movies that are slightly less popular than the other popular movies. I am not calling them “middlebrow” by the way. I’m middlebrow. I think I’m accusing them of stolen valor.
(The same basic principle animates various negative reviews of Lauren Oyler’s most recent book.) Eliot’s attempted alliance with the music hall may be silly, but at least it’s not pernicious. He does not view it as a triumph over the cultural elites who would look down on him. But when everything’s a guilty pleasure nothing is, and in the rush to condemn a nonexistent cultural elite everyone forgets about standards.
(I’m going to save a few people the trouble of texting me “Steve, what about you and college football?” I feel no guilt about that; I have thoroughly intellectualized it; I do regard it as one of the best ways to understand the United States of America; but when Notre Dame is playing I am as atavistic as anyone else.) —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
Hegel and American Spirits.
Buying things on laptops, buying things on phones.
Francine Prose on the National Book Awards in the 2000s.
Journalists are leaving the northeast and living in the rest of the United States.
Commonweal is hiring fall interns.
Local:
Lux Choir is celebrating its first ten years with concerts featuring the music of Eric Whitacre, Amy Beach, and others on Saturday, September 21 (at the Church of the Ascension and St. Agnes at 7 p.m.) and Sunday, September 22 (at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church at 3 p.m.).
Poem:
“Regression Analysis” by Gabriel Costello
We stared at the eclipse
disappointed to see the inside of our eyes
papered over with help wanted ads.The vault of heaven recently installed a time delay safe.
I buy shoe laces on credit.Watching myself pass through
a convenience store safety mirror.A cop car circles the lot with its light on, no siren.
A warning of a warning still to come.Let another year pass.
Birds dream of a windowless world.The outage map was incomplete. Dependent on those in the dark, to report as much.
The sky became a mirror after the storm, the restoration of service.Late in the calendar. Past due,
seasons arrive without warning.Summers punctuate themselves in an outparcel of sky
above a neighbor’s inground pool.Exit ramps sung with rain. An atrophied sun
overlooks men moving torn up carpets to the dumpster after foreclosure.After we couldn’t pay the trash bill I’d drive the garbage to the park after work
and leave it next to the locked dumpsters.Evenings still triaged in the brush.
Dogs dream in rabbit spines.In the morning, my pores sing
once the razor crosses the line
of fog in the travel sized mirror.Fluorescent blurbs. Inside the wire, a kind of language goes unheard. Efficiently staving off
shadowed corners. The last one out gets the lights.
[This poem was published in Quarterly West’s most recent edition, Issue 112.
The images in this poem are just so sharp—evocative and precise. Exits ramps sung with rain (I love that verb there), the help wanted signs papering the backs of eyelids. It’s all beautiful and telling, and at the same time there’s an impressive control in the way those images stack on top of each other while the syntax doesn’t waste a single word. I also love the delicacy with which Costello introduces the first-person pronouns, moving between we and I. Those moments, where the focus becomes more personal, are brief, but each one does so much for the poem:
After we couldn’t pay the trash bill I’d drive the garbage to the park after work
and leave it next to the locked dumpsters.
Speaking of moments of the I, I especially love the image of the speaker shaving, looking in the mirror that has the shower-steam only partially washed off, watching the razor disappear from view and feeling their pores sting—or sing, as Costello says.
The ending sentence is so striking, too, in how its diction invokes community, and intimacy, in such a familiar way: the shared responsibility to make sure someone turns the lights off. It reminded me a little of the short final poem from Jackson Holbert’s Winter Stranger, “Moth”:
it would be nice to hear you say
that maybe the microphones have been on the whole time,
that the rooms we walked through
years ago picked up our conversations,
that not everything was lost just after it was said.
They’re so different, but something about the finality in tone of both of those moments, and the way they’re both located in physical rooms, creates such a compelling ending gesture. In Costello’s poem, particularly, I can’t help but see that final line—The last one out gets the lights—as a merging of the poem and the physical room: a hand reaches out and the lights of the poem wink out. —Julia]
Upcoming books:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | September 3
From the publisher: A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind.
This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value—art, memory, poetry, music, care—are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Small Rain surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.
Also out Tuesday:
Mercer University Press: Dana Gioia: Poet and Critic edited by John Zheng and Jon Parrish Peede
Scribner: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
What we’re reading:
Steve read The Lost Majority: Why the Future of Government Is Up for Grabs—and Who Will Take It by Sean Trende (2012). [It holds up surprisingly well for a book that ends with some predictions about the 2012 presidential election; I have a bunch of other thoughts about it that this is not the place for. —Steve] He started reading Poets in Their Youth by Eileen Simpson (1982). [There are worse guides to reading than “do what Julia tells you to.” —Steve] [Thank you, thank you. —Julia]
Julia has returned to reading The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (2013).
Critical notes:
- Moul on Amanda Gorman and Horace:
I think the most obvious point is that it is an occasional poem, and a public one: a piece written for a particular audience at a particular event, with a particular rhetorical aim in mind, and (of necessity) designed to be followed and appreciated live, during the course of a single performance. (Actually, of course, almost all contemporary English poetry is, in practice, also written for a highly specific audience, indeed one vastly tinier than the delegates at the Democratic National Convention, but the majority of contemporary poems are not written primarily for performance, and many indeed rely partly on visual features which cannot be appreciated aurally.)
Gorman’s poem is also unlike most contemporary poetry because it is not written in the familiar first-person often described (a bit oddly, from a classicist’s point of view) as the “lyric voice.” It’s not dealing with the sensitive probing of a personal experience. Gorman speaks as the vates, the poet-prophet, the poet who speaks both for and to the people. (The “people,” in this case, being primarily Democrats.) It is declarative rather than exploratory . . . .
Historically I suspect the vast majority of poems are versifications of a set message of one kind or another, and the beauty and satisfaction of the best of them derives in large part from recognition and agreement, rather than a sense of discovery; from hearing, as Pope put it, “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”
[I suspect that the story about why Frost recited “The Gift Outright” instead of the poem he wrote specifically for JFK’s inauguration—because the glare of the sun prevented him from reading the text—is something he made up. I think he got up there, realized that he was not looking at “the glory of a next Augustan age” and that this tradition of poetry was basically dead, and decided to do something else. —Steve]