WRB—August 12, 2023

Flâneur studies

The Managing Editors were not merely seeking wisdom with the Washington Review of Books: they were also looking for thrills, and were getting too old for other, more exciting forms of danger.

In today’s edition:

(working backwards from the bottom):

“He strove to resuscitate the dead art”...TV Tropes…mushrooms…the stuff people left in used books…processed food…paper airplanes…Augustine…

Links:

• In The New Statesman, Grazie Sophia Christie on Virginia Woolf’s diary-writing and the transformation and loss of that art:

  I think of Virginia Woolf writing daily affirmations and I laugh. Because her diaries didn’t function as exclusive receptacles for positivity. They were receptacles, often enough, for her self-doubt. So much so that her husband, Leonard Woolf, in his preface to the first published extracts of her diaries, warned readers: “Diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer” who “gets into the habit of recording one particular kind of mood—irritation or misery, say.” Duly noted! Woolf whines and suffers, grows morose, confesses herself “very jaded & tired & depressed & cross”. Writes sad metaphors: “All the lights sank; my reed bent to the ground.” She doubts her genius, calling her novel The Years “that odious rice pudding of a book”. In other words, she’s funny. She delivers catty, ugly remarks. Most importantly, her diaries are lovingly peopled, while the photogenic keeper of journals caught on video these days looks so alone, doing sit-ups in an eternal loop. Woolf has Leonard—L, so dear to her he monopolises the letter—Katherine Mansfield, Vita Sackville-West, her sister Vanessa, Lytton Strachey, her in-laws, her household help.

• Two in The Lamp: 

  • An excerpt from Peter Brown’s memoir (Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History, June) [One of the Upcoming books from June 3]:

    What struck me most about Augustine was the care that he took to make his ideas intelligible to his readers. Here was someone who had grappled, throughout his life, to express himself—to drag his thoughts into the open, “through the narrow lanes of speech.” Augustine once wrote in 399 (when he was at the height of his powers as an author) to console a deacon who was anxious about his catechism classes. The young man should not worry: “For my own way of expressing myself almost always disappoints me . . . I am saddened that my tongue cannot live up to my heart.” I found that, as a young author, I could identify my own ache to communicate with Augustine’s constant awareness of the hiatus between himself and the outside world. I knew instinctively that I myself would grow as a communicator (as well as in many other ways) by keeping close to such a person.

  • Jaspreet Singh Boparai on Ernst Jünger:

    In three hundred fifteen short numbered sections, Jünger outlines his experiences with intoxicants, including tobacco, caffeine, beer, wine—and indeed books and works of art. He associates ideas freely, suggesting that sex and crime are themselves sources of ecstatic intoxication. But not everyone seeks ecstasy: some seek dreams, sleep, isolation, and self-abnegation. Jünger has tried them all, from alcohol to narcotics to cocaine to opium to modern hallucinogens; his autobiographical reminiscences are charming and even laugh-out-loud funny from time to time.

    In Approaches Jünger found a subject ideally suited for his idiosyncratic range of abilities and expertise. His accounts of taking L.S.D. and mescaline are particularly absorbing, because for once he finds ways of breaking through his own façade and setting aside his usual manner of presenting himself without losing face. Jünger was not merely seeking wisdom with drugs: he was also looking for thrills, and was getting too old for other, more exciting forms of danger. Let it not be forgotten that he was seventy-five when he published Approaches.

• In The Baffler, Ella Quittner on the decline of the all-you-can-eat buffet in Las Vegas:

  In the five years since Block 16 opened at the Cosmopolitan, the city has seen the arrival of an Eataly at the Park MGM, the twenty-four-thousand-square-foot Famous Food Street Eats at Resorts World, and Proper Eats at the Aria, which opened late last year in the space that used to house its buffet. “It’s a tectonic shift in how people are eating; they’re paying more for a smaller caliber fashion of eating,” says Curtas. No one goes to a food hall to crack open as many crab legs as they can stomach; they go to throw down for the “Super Ninja sushi roll” with caviar, truffle, toro, and blue crab, and $14 pints of Brookies ’n Cream ice cream. It’s a shift away from the traditional Las Vegas excess of all-you-can-stomach toward The New Excess: a gratuitous display of less, for more. 

• In Popular Mechanics, Sarah Wells and Jennifer Leman on the contributions paper airplanes made and are making to the science of flight: 

  At Cornell University, in a lab run by physics professor Jane Wang, PhD, paper gliders plunge, swoop, and flutter through the air. What might look like child’s play to the untrained eye is actually part of a serious experiment conducted by Wang and her colleague Leif Ristroph, PhD, an associate professor of mathematics at New York University. Once the planes land, Wang and Ristroph analyze data from their flight and apply weights to change the balance of these gliders. They hope doing so will help them better understand how lightweight objects soar—something that could one day inform the future of miniature drones and other robotic craft.

  [If you, like me, wondered what people called “paper airplanes” prior to the invention of the airplane: “paper darts,” mostly. —Steve]

• In NLR, Anahid Nersessian on “coolness and detachment as a critical response to capital” in the work of three contemporary poets:

  For Enelow, these “cooler styles” are all but entirely detached from “the thread of resistance to and evasion of spectacular emotionality among many in today’s new generation of stars,” whose flatness “doesn’t evoke emotional detachment or indifference but rather a tortured mistrust of expression itself.” This is closer to the flatness that I identify in contemporary American poetry, in whose “ambivalence about the trustworthiness of emotional expression” we also find a denial of that affective iconography in which “everyday repression gives way, in typically predictable patterns, to outpourings of powerful feeling.” What Enelow terms acting’s Great Recession denies the logic of subtext and refuses the moral prestige of self-revelation: a negation that might be extended to a tenacious conception of lyric poetry predicated on a hydraulic model of selfhood for which authenticity lies within, to be squeezed out by salubrious technique.

  [It hardly needs to be said that for the Managing Editors, coolness and detachment are just a way of life. —Chris]

Reviews:

• In The Critic, Christopher Snowdon reviews Chris van Tulleken’s book on processed food (Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food, June):

  Every now and then, someone says the quiet part out loud. Da Costa Louzada, a Brazilian scientist who has been instrumental in driving the UPF scare, tells him: “Some products are not technically UPF, but they use the same plastics, the same marketing and development processes and they’re made by the same companies as UPF . . . They are not home-made foods” (my emphasis). Van Tulleken’s wife considers mineral water to be UPF because a mineral water company “markets it aggressively for no other reason than financial gain.”

• In TNR, Jillian Steinhauer reviews Katy Hessel’s art history that omits men (The Story of Art Without Men, May):

  Hessel does acknowledge this by including a range of artists—of different races and ethnicities, those who were self-taught, and those who worked in often disregarded media like pottery or quilting. But her constant focus on gender, which begins as a rallying cry, ends up having a kind of homogenizing effect. “The bold women of Pop fought back” against the male-dominated movement “from a distinctly female perspective” (whatever that might be). Eva Hesse’s playful reliefs with soft, curving forms “not only subverted the angular nature of Minimalism but . . . were no doubt made as a way to push through the perceived limitations of her gender.” Shirin Neshat’s series of confrontational photographs of Muslim women wearing hijabs “facilitates our understanding of the societal perceptions and expectations of women (in Neshat’s case, Muslim women in Western and non-Western countries).” Bharti Kher’s surreal sculptures of warrior women and goddesses “challenge the dominance of Eurocentric, male-led art.” None of these assertions is necessarily untrue, but with so little space devoted to each artist, they all begin to sound the same.

• Two in

  The Bulwark
  :

  • Nick Riptrazone reviews the only novel by Andre Dubus, The Lieutenant (1967), just re-released by Nonpareil Books (August 8): 

    Perhaps the true worth of The Lieutenant is the view it gives into Dubus’s way of bringing together the messy realities of life with its abiding mysteries. In his essay “Two Ghosts,” Dubus claims that he saw a ghost in September 1961 on USS Ranger. At 4 in the morning, Dubus was on his way to the bathroom when he saw a drunk-looking Naval officer walking toward him. “I stood waiting,” Dubus wrote, “and when he reached me he stopped, and we faced each other in the dark, and the dim red light. I looked at his face. When I opened my mouth to speak, he vanished.” Dubus was not afraid, not even when the apparition appeared next to his bunk after he got back in bed. He pitied the ghost, who eerily sounds like PFC Freeman from The Lieutenant: “he made me want to help him find the way to his room. He looked only young and friendly and absolutely helpless.”

    [I‘m going to be honest and say I’m exhausted just thinking about reading an entire novel by Dubus. —Chris]

  • Mark Clemens reviews two recent memoirs in which the authors reflect on how their health conditions shape their experience of the world (The Sound of Undoing: A Memoir in Essays, by Paige Towers, March; and Losing Music: A Memoir, by John Cotter, April):

    In the last chapter of each book, both authors confess to carrying a knife around. For Towers it’s a protective measure; for Cotter it was a ready means to end his life (he is speaking in the past tense). It maps almost too perfectly onto their projects: The former is at odds with a seemingly hostile world, the latter with himself. Their books are records of putting the knife down. In both cases, doing so entails a reconciliation to certain stubborn, untranscendable material facts, and an acceptance of ongoing suffering. “The most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being,” Montaigne said, meaning our bodies, including his poor stone-filled one. “With the occlusion of the body there is an anaesthesia of sensibilities,” suggests Guy Davenport, regarding Montaigne’s intimate relation to his ailment. Towers and Cotter, then, are wide awake, and their books, like Montaigne’s, make the bold and possibly offensive claim that some truths can be learned only by attending to pain. The discursive essay—the attempt to comprehend some dogged facet of the world from inside a particular, subjective mind—seems almost purpose-built for such truths, and these two books are therefore not just fine new entries in the tradition Montaigne inaugurated: They are very close to its heart.

N.B.:

• An Arkansas bookstore is creating time capsules out of stuff that people left in books they sold to it. [I don’t like this. What’s the Matter with Arkansas? —Chris] [Neither do I. What next, are you going to rip out all the pages people wrote on? —Steve] [I feel rather stongly that all the joy of finding something tucked in a used book purchase is wrapped up with the serendipity of the event—and honestly, a small feeling that one has got one over on the shopkeepers. —Chris]

• The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses has posted some jobs with its members and colleagues.

• The NYRB is hiring fall interns.

• “Years ago, when I first learned what a flâneur is—that rapacious urban wanderer—I was struck by the thought that the female equivalent is not a fellow traveler, a gender-flipped idler whiling away her time in the streets, but something more constrictive—the “girl behind the counter,” to borrow Virginia Woolf’s phrase.” [The WRB continues to be a flâneur publication. —Steve]

• A discussion with two designers who worked on covers for different releases of the same book.

• The new issue of The Adroit Journal is out. [I love that cover. —Steve] [Oh yes this is wonderful. —Chris]

• The Assumption 2023 issue of The Lamp is out. [Links to two pieces in it above. And I wrote about a subject very important to me, Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back In Town,” in it as well. —Steve] [I found Paul Hundt’s little memoir piece quite moving. —Chris]

Local:

• There’s a whole field of sunflowers in Poolesville, Maryland at McKee-Beshers Wildlife Management Area.

• The Folger Shakespeare Library’s Capitol Hill building will not reopen until 2024.

• Summer storms are responsible for an influx of mushrooms. [A reader recently had a mushroom she found in the forest on her Instagram and—wow—that thing was huge. Just some anecdota for you guys. —Chris]

Poem:

“I Thought on His Desire for Three Days” by Linda Gregg

I chose this man, consciously, deliberately.
I thought on his desire for three days
and then said yes. In return, it was summer.
We lay on the grass in the dark and he placed
his hand on my stomach while the others
sang quietly. It was prodigious to know
his eagerness. It made me smile warmly.
That was the merging of opposite powers.
He followed me everywhere, from room to room.
Every single thing was joyous: storms, meals,
the story about the face that was the world.
There was the sound of Chicago buses stopping
near my house according to winter, summer,
raining. Shadows moved across the floor
as the sun went across the sky. I was a secret
there because you were married. I am here
to tell you I did not mind. Existence
was more valuable than that. When I was
a very young woman. I wrote: A new spirit/
I have a new spirit/I made it myself/I dance
now alone before the mirror/There is a flower.
The leaves are a little sad/No light comes
out of the black part/with its five purple
dots of color/near the center/Oh, my dead thing/
I have a new spirit/I made it myself. In Chicago,
a police siren ran through my heart even though
it was not for me. I was strong, I knew where
I was. I knew what I had achieved. When the wife
called and said I was a whore, I was quiet,
but inside I said, “perhaps.” It has been raining
all night. Summer rain. The liveliness of it keeps
me awake. I am so happy to have lived.

[This poem is from Gregg’s 1994 Chosen by the Lion, her fourth collection. 

I love a poem where the second line of the poem is also the title. I have no justification for this and no other immediate examples, but this pattern of title–first line–repeated title flows so nicely.

A lot of the moments I like in this poem are little paired phrasings or moments that move the poem forward. For instance, I love how, when the speaker consents to the affair in the third line, it suddenly becomes summer: the use of the phrase In return posits the season-change as a kind of reward. Whether it’s a reward from her lover or from the world itself, having that moment so early in the poem sets up a kind of grandeur that the affair is able to bring about. It reminds me of some lines from another poem in this collection, “A Bracelet of Bright Hair About the Bone”:

I longed for your agreement and approval.
Wanted you to understand the hugeness of love…
I wanted something
to be done, some enactment to prove this secret,
this illicit love. Something too large.
I wanted it made of actual things. Dirt
and corpses even.

The speaker’s focus on death in “A Bracelet” contrasts with the simpler, more joyful images in “I Thought” (grass, singing, domestic scenes, summer rain). There’s a lot happening underneath the peaceful images of today’s poem, though, but the speaker holds onto them, and the affair, unrepentantly. I love the two sentence shift from “there” to “here” we get in I was a secret / there because you were married. I am here / to tell you I did not mind. It’s not just unrepentant, but also, suddenly, intimate. I am here. (It’s also the only time we get a “you” referred to in the poem.)

At the end of the poem, there’s another sudden shift forward in time, from the moment when her lover’s wife calls her to the present moment with its summer rain. The liveliness of it keeps / me awake, she says. It’s easy to read the “it” here as not just referring to the rain, especially considering how “liveliness” is parallel to “lived” in that final line. —Julia]