WRB—Aug. 5, 2026

“we thought”

Please Please Please Let the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books Get What He Wants

Links:

• In The Paris Review, Leo Robson interviews Bill Buford about his book following soccer hooligans (Among the Thugs, 1990):

  Robson: Did you feel that you were a lone voyager in the hooligan world?

  Buford: Yes, sometimes, and it was a privilege. And a burden. I can cite an example. I was invited to a dinner at Mario Vargas Llosa’s apartment in London. He had all these established literary figures around his table. And I’d come straight from—I don’t know if I’d call it a riot—but a street fight after a Chelsea–Manchester United match. I showed up a little late and very sweaty because in the aftermath of the match, I fell in with the Man United brigade. And they had this strategy of zigzagging around blocks so they could surprise the Chelsea fans. But it was just street violence and I kept getting hit by beer cans. They’d just fly out of nowhere and hit me on the side of the head—fortunately, always the soft part of the beer can. Well, after midway through the dinner, I just said, “I had an interesting afternoon.” And it all came out.

  It was Germaine Greer who stopped me. Sorry, this is very name-heavy, but I was running a literary magazine and I was in this world. Germaine said I was talking about it too much. She said, “You’re just telling your story. Stop telling your story. Write your story. Every day, get up at six in the morning and I’ll send you breakfast.” She didn’t send breakfast, but I did start getting up by six in the morning.

  [I’ve never been at a dinner where somebody showed up a little late, very sweaty, and rambling about the soccer hooligans they encountered on the way there. Sounds like fun. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Anahid Nersessian reviews Jorie Graham’s latest collection of poems (Killing Spree, May) [An Upcoming book in WRB—May 20, 2026.]:

  All this is to say that Graham is a poet who consistently confounds her own self-representation, withdrawing from testimony even when she lays herself bare. Not for her the torrential unbosoming of so much contemporary lyric, with its mawkish self-regard and biographical appetites. Dramatizing the experience of one’s consciousness is only worthwhile (or, to use Wordsworth’s phrase, “really important”) if that consciousness is capable of understanding itself as operating within a shared historical condition, independent and idiosyncratic but nonetheless irreducibly in dialogue with other minds or essences. The broken line, the hard scar of the dash—these are gestures toward the uncertain and intractable distance between self and other, presence and absence, “awareness” and its loss.

• In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews a book about silence (Silence: A Literary History, by Kate McLoughlin, June):

  I may be wrong, but I don’t think that David Cameron, who led the Remain campaign, was exhumed and hanged in chains by the victorious Leavers, or that his dead head was cut off and stuck on a spike for more than twenty years—the punishment meted out in 1661 to Oliver Cromwell, or, at any rate, to his guilty corpse, after King Charles II was restored to the throne. Nor is it quite clear what this excursion into historical parallels has to do with silence. Uncoupling from social media, as McLoughlin did, may be a wise move, but to what degree does it muffle the universal racket? Never having joined Facebook, Twitter, X, Instagram, TikTok, or any of the other treats from Pandora’s app store, I’m unqualified to comment. All I know is that I have yet to attain the tough tranquillity of a Trappist.

  [We linked to an earlier review in WRB—July 29, 2026. I would advise Lane to borrow a trick from Bill Belichick and start mangling the names of the apps on purpose—“SnapFace,” “InstantChat,” things like that. —Steve]

• In Literary Review, Zoe Guttenplan reviews the new Rachel Cusk (Life of M, August 25):

  But by far the most interesting parts of Life of M are the short opening and closing sections, written from that more familiar Cusk perspective of the first-­person singular. Here we catch a glimpse of her talent for observation seen in Outline (2014), the vast and various world as filtered through the eyes of someone committed to noticing things. The narrator’s partner, in hospital when the book opens, complains about the constant interruptions of doctors doing rounds and machines beeping. “Yet it also seemed desirable to be constantly interrupted, to have the responsibility for oneself taken away,” the narrator thinks. Once they melt into M, the world flattens, becomes superficial. “I” reflects that “the removal and return of the bier-like [hospital] bed was like a rehearsal for absence”; “we,” on the other hand, “see things, we meet people. We go to parties or are offered food in people’s houses.” Cusk’s writing, often direct and unadorned, here reads like that of a child explaining what they did on their summer holidays.

N.B.:

• Bee doctors.

• Icelandic turf houses.

• The youths are playing mahjong.

• New issues:

  • Literary Review August 2026 [As linked to above.]

  • The Point Issue 37 | Summer 2026

Poem:

“Choriambics” by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Love, what ailed thee to leave life that was made lovely, we thought, with love?
What sweet visions of sleep lured thee away, down from the light above?

What strange faces of dreams, voices that called, hands that were raised to wave,
Lured or led thee, alas, out of the sun, down to the sunless grave?

Ah, thy luminous eyes! once was their light fed with the fire of day;
Now their shadowy lids cover them close, hush them and hide away.

Ah, thy snow-coloured hands! once were they chains, mighty to bind me fast;
Now no blood in them burns, mindless of love, senseless of passion past.

Ah, thy beautiful hair! so was it once braided for me, for me;
Now for death is it crowned, only for death, lover and lord of thee.

Sweet, the kisses of death set on thy lips, colder are they than mine;
Colder surely than past kisses that love poured for thy lips as wine.

Lov’st thou death? is his face fairer than love’s, brighter to look upon?
Seest thou light in his eyes, light by which love’s pales and is overshone?

Lo the roses of death, grey as the dust, chiller of leaf than snow!
Why let fall from thy hand love’s that were thine, roses that loved thee so?

Large red lilies of love, sceptral and tall, lovely for eyes to see;
Thornless blossom of love, full of the sun, fruits that were reared for thee.

Now death’s poppies alone circle thy hair, girdle thy breasts as white;
Bloodless blossoms of death, leaves that have sprung never against the light.

Nay then, sleep if thou wilt; love is content; what should he do to weep?
Sweet was love to thee once; now in thine eyes sweeter than love is sleep.

[I spend more time by far thinking about Swinburne than about any other poet I don’t really like. Some of this comes down to reading Housman’s critique of him (best line: “It is historically certain that he had seen the sea, but if it were not, it could not with certainty have been inferred from his descriptions: they might have been written by a man who had never been outside Warwickshire”) at a formative age, but the real draw, I think, is Swinburne—at least, Swinburne’s poetry—pushing a particular set of values and approach as far as it will go. Swinburne, after all, is the greatest poet of all time if you care about sound and don’t care about what words mean.

But what a sound. Housman acknowledges as much:

Among Swinburne’s technical achievements the most conspicuous, if not the greatest, was his development of anapestic verse. . . . not only did he create new meters but he recreated old; and in particular he resuscitated the heroic couplet . . . he possessed an altogether unexampled command of rhyme, the chief enrichment of modern verse.

A few years ago Adam Roberts had some notes on this poem and Swinburne’s use of a classical meter:

It breaks the flow into these swooping units, something Swinburne reinforces with his tendency towards separating clauses within the main sentence, parentheses that further deliquesce the rhythm into discretions (the “we thought” in “life that was made lovely, we thought, with love?,” the “alas” in line 4, the “for me” at the end of line 9 and so on). Above I suggest that this pulse perhaps evokes weeping or sobbing; or perhaps the sense of a catch in the throat interrupting the smoother flow of happier discourse.

That Swinburne can get such effects out of forcing what was originally a quantitative meter into English, with its stress-based accentuation, is his genius. (Compare his “Sapphics” to the average in English, which sound like somebody tripping over themselves again and again.) And whenever I get fed up with him, which is all the time, I keep coming back to that achievement. Maybe one of these days I’ll even come around on “Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Dolours),” about which I am with Housman:

There is no reason why they should begin where they do or end where they do; there is no reason why the middle should be in the middle; there is hardly a reason why, having once begun, they should ever end at all; and it would be possible to rearrange the stanzas which compose them in different orders without lessening their coherency or impairing their effect.

(The plural there is because he is also talking about “Ilicet” and “The Triumph of Time.”) But then, if you were writing a poem about complete immobility, it would go nowhere, make no progress, and have no particular reason to begin or end, wouldn’t it? It’s no accident that two of the great twentieth-century works about kinds of immobility are so indebted to it: Nabokov, always aware of the import of his references, has Swinburne’s poem in mind when choosing Lolita’s real name. And Dylan, as Christopher Ricks argues in Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2003)—very Swinburnian title, that—has it in the background of his “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” which also just keeps going, asking more questions, even though the musicians ramp themselves up as if each verse were going to be the last. —Steve]

Upcoming books:

Out Monday:

Oxford University Press: For the Dead Remember: The Life of M. R. James by Darryl Jones

Penguin Press | August 11

Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind
by Thomas Meyer, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch

From the publisher: Drawing on newly discovered archival materials and previously overlooked documents—from both Germany, where Hannah Arendt was born to a Jewish family in 1906, and the United States, where she was a citizen from 1950—Thomas Meyer tells the story of an intellectual icon whose character and ideas continue to captivate and challenge us to this day. Tracing anew Arendt’s journey from Königsberg to Paris, where she fled after being imprisoned in 1933, and finally to New York in 1941, Meyer illuminates her formative years and the development of her radical and brilliant books, as well as her lifelong philosophical debate with Martin Heidegger, whose Nazism was a permanent challenge for her. Meyer’s account centers on two pivotal phases—Arendt’s years in Paris after fleeing Nazi Germany and her time in the United States leading up to the landmark publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951—providing not only a meticulous reconstruction of her life but also a compelling invitation to rethink her legacy for our times.

At a time of acute political polarization, with liberalism in crisis and urgent debates about freedom, responsibility, and truth unfolding all around, Arendt’s writings and ideas resonate more powerfully than ever. Meyer’s account of her extraordinary life is groundbreaking and sensational, not just for his illuminating and peerless research, but also for his incisive exploration of what Arendt’s work has meant over the decades—and continues to mean for us today.

Also out Tuesday:

Basic Books: On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World by Florence Hazrat [We linked to a review in WRB—July 8, 2026.]

Knopf: Under the Falls: A Novel by Richard Russo

What we’re reading:

Steve read House of Meetings by Martin Amis (2006).

He then read The Well-Beloved by Thomas Hardy (1897). [The obvious explanation for why nobody has ever mentioned this to me is that nobody knows any Thomas Hardy novels besides the big hits—but I prefer the explanation “if we had told you that there was a Thomas Hardy novel retelling the myth of Pygmalion you would have become extremely annoying about it, so we decided not to tell you.”

The plot is very silly. Jocelyn Pierston, a sculptor, unsuccessfully courts a woman; twenty years later, he unsuccessfully courts that woman’s daughter; twenty years later still, he unsuccessfully courts that woman’s daughter, the granddaughter of his original interest. Needless to say the three women look basically identical; they also all have the name of Avice. All the while, he muses on whether his elusive feminine ideal, the titular “Well-Beloved,” has chosen to inhabit these women, how long it will stay there, and where it may be found. This devotion makes him completely thoughtless, as shown in the following turn of events. After the initial Avice fails to keep a rendezvous to “carry out Island Custom in our courting” (wink wink nudge nudge), Pierston meets another woman on the road back, with whom he almost immediately elopes despite their fathers hating each other. The delay in getting married caused by him messing up the paperwork—this is Hardy, after all—allows her father time to show up and persuade her that the whole thing was a big mistake. Having undergone all this, Pierston decides maybe the Well-Beloved did inhere in Avice after all.

As I said, the plot is silly. In a sense, this is the book’s weakness; the interrogation of Pierston’s psyche does not cohere with the funny-if-horrifying situations he keeps working himself into. But the contrast between Pierson’s immense self-seriousness and the grim comedy of his life is the point. All those notions of the Well-Beloved, and for what?

I would start recommending this to everyone, but it shouldn’t be anyone’s first Hardy novel (that should be Tess of the d’Urbervilles), or probably anyone’s second or third. It’s more effective when you can see Hardy putting his old tricks to a new purpose. —Steve]

He then read Football by Chuck Klosterman (January). [Klosterman argues that “football is the best television product ever produced”:

Providing only 11 minutes of action within the expanse of three hours is not evidence of a failed concept. As it turns out, 11 minutes of action is the ideal amount. The intermittent moments of nothingness add to the pleasure. . . . Your mind can relax without detaching from engagement.

He’s right. But this is, more broadly, how being a fan of any sport works. It’s not like the sport is always on, although the NFL is going to try its best at that. Instead, it happens intermittently. You go about your life, you watch the game, you go about your life, you watch the game. The natural rhythm of a season leaves room for you to process what just happened and prepare for what’s next. It’s like a toy version of life that way—take your mind off the real wheel of Fortune with a smaller one that spins at set times and for limited stakes. They’re big enough, though; as somebody said (I cannot find the origin of this quote), “of all the unimportant things in life, football is the most important.” (Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: my expectations of Notre Dame for this upcoming season are too high,a and this is definitely going to go great for me.) —Steve]

He then read Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan (2011). [I was going to open with something about the “old weird America,” but then I looked at the back cover and saw that Greil Marcus had blurbed it. The best essays, though, are about that—in many ways, about the work of finding and preserving and sharing it, while being aware of what exactly much of it is worth. As Sullivan says about the people who preserved 78s of the country blues:

When the music was all but unknown, they hailed it as great, invincible American art; when people (like the Rolling Stones) caught on and started blabbering about it, they rushed to remind everyone it was just a bunch of dance music for drunken field hands.

It’s both; it’s always both.

My favorite moments were those where Sullivan reminds us that he is the closest thing to Guy Davenport we have. One of the essays, about the nineteenth-century French naturalist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, a man who spent much of his life in Kentucky, is dedicated to Davenport. Even more infused with Davenport’s spirit is an essay on Native American cave art in the South:

There are no extant myths for those Woodland people, not even indirect sources. We will never know the names or characters of their gods. But what Jan and his colleagues were seeing was something deeper, something antecedent to myth, namely a spiritualized vision of the landscape. Both the caves and the aboveground sites “identified places of power, where they tied themselves spiritually to the land,” and the sites were connected.

There is something here of Davenport on the prehistoric cave paintings of Europe here:

When Breuil was copying the ceiling of bulls in the Spanish cave Altamira, a young man from Barcelona crawled in beside him and marvelled at the beauty of the painting, the energy of the designs. He would in a few years teach himself to draw with a similar energy and primal clarity, and would incorporate one of the enigmatic bulls into his largest painting, the Guernica. He was Pablo Picasso.

Something, too, of Davenport on hunting for Indian arrowheads with his family as a child:

And I learned from a whole childhood of looking in fields how the purpose of things ought perhaps to remain invisible, no more than half known. People who know exactly what they are doing seem to me to miss the vital part of any doing.

—Steve]

He then read More Than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature by Joshua Hren (May). [The subtitle here is not correct; it should be “The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of the Novel.” The nineteenth-century novel, really, with late appearances made by Proust and Joyce. And while Hren is right that this sort of artwork, inasmuch as it edifies, does so by aiming at a clarification and expansion of vision, challenging whether its readers’ perceptions can understand and interpret the world as presented in the novel, this is hardly the only approach to the matter art has taken. If anything, that novelistic approach is in part a reaction against more overtly didactic art. Horace’s Ars poetica is hardly a nineteenth-century novel:

Let what thou feign’st for pleasure’s sake be near
The truth; nor let thy fable think whate’er
It would must be; lest it alive would draw
The child, when Lamia’s dined, out of her maw.
The poems void of profit our grave men
Cast out by voices; want they pleasure, then
Our gallants give them none, but pass them by;
But he hath every suffrage can apply
Sweet mixed with sour to his reader, so
As doctrine and delight together go.

(Ben Jonson’s translation.) Nor is Pope’s Essay on Criticism:

True wit is nature to advantage dress’d,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d,
Something, whose truth convinc’d at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.

But they are certainly concerned with the moral imagination. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• More Odyssey discourse? More Odyssey discourse! [The Odyssey discourse, will, I assume, stop when Athena shows up and tells everyone to stop doing Odyssey discourse. (Previous Odyssey discourse in this fine newsletter here and here. “Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold, / And many goodly mags and critics seen,” as the man says.) —Steve]

  • Emily Wilson again, this time in The Atlantic:

    Where Virgil’s Ulysses is cruel and predatory, and his mendacious instrument, Sinon, is unambiguously a bad guy, Nolan re-creates Sinon as his film’s sinless moral center. The focus on “sin” is presumably the reason for the odd but consistent pronunciation of the name: More normally pronounced by English-speakers as Sigh-non or See-non—echoing the long i of the Latin—in Nolan’s film, it’s always Sin-none as if to reinforce the Christlike innocence of Elliot Page’s version of the classical “harmer.” Nolan’s Sinon is not a trickster but a poor innocent to whom Odysseus has lied by omission, in failing to tell him about the trick with the horse. The episode is a cautionary fable about a director who fails to trust an actor to play his part: Odysseus lies so that Sinon will give the most convincing possible performance when he falsely tells the Trojans, with his dying breath, that the horse is a gift.

    [Part of me thinks that Nolan should have adapted the Aeneid—more aligned with his preoccupations—but if he botched it I would be more upset. Virgil is probably bad for box office compared to Homer anyway. —Steve]

  • In Poetry, Robert Rubsam:

    The Odyssey has gifted us so many rich and durable metaphors—the siren’s song, the straits of Scylla and Charybdis—precisely because the fairly brief encounters described in the poem exist in a world of mythological meaning. They speak to much more than their literal selves because they partake of a larger constellation of other symbolic meanings which both predate and surpass language, much as oracular poetry predates the written world. Nolan’s film is frequently composed of mere images of mere things, signifying little beyond their own immediate spectacle. Characters are rendered passive and powerless, not by the gods on Olympus, but by the divinity in the director’s chair.

    [I assume “written world” is a typo but it’s perfect. —Steve]

  • On his Substack, Sam Kriss:

    Why does the cyclops have one eye? Well, what else has one eye? Look at pictures of Nolan on set, shoulders hunched, face vanishing into the obscene mask of his enormous roaring IMAX camera, that regards the world through a single unblinking lens. The land of the cyclopes is clearly another, even more pointed vision of our own society in the twenty-first century. Like us, the cyclopes are fantastically rich, they have a level of material wealth a Greek of the seventh century B.C. could barely dream of, but a Greek of the seventh century B.C. visiting Nolan’s neighborhood in Beachwood Canyon, Los Angeles would find it a savage place, barely even human. The same bright Ionian sunlight, but no public square, no public life, not even people greeting each other as they wander out into the streets to shit; everyone stays in their air-conditioned homes, looking at screens. Here’s how he describes it: “All the crops they require spring up unsown and untilled, wheat and barley and generous vines. The cyclopes have no assemblies for the making of laws, but live in hollow caverns, where each man is lawgiver to his own children, and nobody has the slightest interest in what his neighbors decide.” The cyclopes are also, like Nolan and the rest of them, fundamentally not interested in the gods. “We care nothing for Zeus with his aegis,” Christopher Nolan tells Odysseus, “nor for the rest of the blessed gods, for we are much stronger than they are.” Only once he’s been blinded does he start praying to the gods for revenge.

    [Aristotle says in the Politics (as translated by Benjamin Jowett) that “he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.” He might as well be glossing Odysseus’ journey as he describes it to the Phaeacians—he various beasts and gods, none of whom have any room in their lives and worlds for human beings, and when human beings act like beasts and gods they leave no room for human beings either. When the poem makes this explicit, as in Circe turning Odysseus’ men into pigs, Nolan adapts it hamfistedly; I almost wonder if, having heard the phrase “men are pigs” enough, he never considered any broader meaning of it. And when the poem approaches the subject more obliquely Nolan has no idea what to do with it. He cuts the one detail I will never forget, the last thing Odysseus’ men do before they all die:

    Meantime from man to man my tongue exclaims,

    My wrath is kindled, and my soul in flames.

    In vain! I view perform’d the direful deed,

    Beeves, slain in heaps, along the ocean bleed.

    Now heaven gave signs of wrath: along the ground

    Crept the raw hides, and with a bellowing sound

    Roar’d the dead limbs; the burning entrails groan’d.

    Six guilty days my wretched mates employ

    In impious feasting, and unhallowed joy;

    (Pope’s translation.) “Heaven gave signs of wrath” requires you to be interested in the gods, or at least accept that they influence the action of the poem, which Nolan is not and does not. But this—who eats living cattle? Predator animals, yes, but they don’t cook. The gods don’t. Beasts are beasts; the gods are the gods; human beings unable to live in society, or supposedly sufficient for themselves, become neither beasts or gods but something else, something different, something much worse. —Steve]