WRB—August 19, 2023

“They want to live forever”

A philosophy of the meaning of life… the most lucid and touching prose the Managing Editors have ever written.

In today’s edition:

(working backwards from the bottom):

Book summaries…BTS…love song…book publicity…the Internet and desire…consumerism and desire…Nabokov…lifestyle

Links:

• In Dirt, Daisy Alioto with a new introduction to her essay “What Is Lifestyle”?

  Storage was a crucial piece of this story in the four major movements of lifestyle that I observed. I didn’t call them movements in the piece, but this is roughly how I imagined them: 

  MOVEMENT ONE: The Industrial Revolution. More stuff in the world, more things to accumulate. An industry develops to accommodate this: storage. 

  MOVEMENT TWO: The word lifestyle. The beginning of mass marketing and focus groups that rely on individual memories to induce people to buy into brands and stuff. Magazines like LlFE that depict the American lifestyle in aggregate.

  MOVEMENT THREE: The proliferation of individual photography. Culture becomes more bottom up. People perform their lifestyles on personal social media feeds. Magazines can't compete. Things become images of themselves. 

  MOVEMENT FOUR: People prefer the image to the thing. They collect images like they once collected things. They still store them, but digitally. They want to live forever.

  • The original essay from 2020:

    Contemporary lifestyle is a cycle of creation, consumption and curation. A thing is created when we ascribe meaning to it. It is consumed when we assign a value to it. It is curated when we tell a story about it. This semiotic loop also applies to the performance of lifestyle itself. A lifestyle is created when it is described. It is consumed when it is shared. It is curated when it is received.

• For

  Book Post
  , Edward Mendelson writes about a number of recent books in the bible space (The Gospels: A New Translation, Sarah Ruden, 2021; The Word: How We Translate the Bible―and Why It Matters, John Barton, May; The Bible and Poetry, Michael Edwards [trans. Stephen Lewis, August; a recent Upcoming book) (in two parts!). [How do I get Nicholson Baker to paint me? —Chris]

• In the NYRB, Eric Naiman on Nabokov’s correspondence with Katharine and E. B. White:

  For just a couple of paragraphs Nabokov has muted the self-consciousness of his prose, suggesting Pnin’s eventual escape from the narrator. I had always understood this passage as a shift into the language of a fairy tale, even a children’s story. (The original version of this passage appeared in The New Yorker three years after Charlotte’s Web, which Nabokov had read and enthusiastically praised in a letter to Katharine, was published. There, Zuckerman’s barn, where “nothing bad could happen ever again in the world,” appears to be echoed meaningfully after Pnin puts the bowl safely up on its high shelf: a “sense of its security there communicated itself to his own state of mind, and he felt that ‘losing one’s job’ dwindled to a meaningless echo in the rich, round inner world where none could really hurt him.”) But against the backdrop of Nabokov’s editorial correspondence with the Whites, the almost childish language of Pnin’s resistance to the narrator becomes a parody of the advice Nabokov had been receiving from The New Yorker for years.

• In Plough, Zena Hitz on the use of time, being busy, and leisure:

  We are not only distracted from leisure by conflicting desires for social advancement. We also fear it and resist it from inside. Our resistance to it is both powerful and devious. We can see this in the deterioration of professions or vocations strictly dedicated to leisure. For example, one could join a monastery and live obsessed with high liturgical achievements such as the perfect performance of the best music. Or one could try to work one’s way up whatever social hierarchy may exist there – to be choir director, cellarer, abbot. Or one could try to be a monk or nun for the world, dedicating one’s time to winning new vocations or publicity for religious life. None of these objectives is bad in itself, but their pursuit can eat away at one’s humanity. A person can live in a monastery, under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and still nurture the heart of a politician or social climber.

• In NLR, Mario Tronti (who died on the 7th, R.I.P.) pulls together Kafka, Agamben, and Lenin to reflect on being a communist in the 20th century (trans. Rees Nicolas): 

  No one should think of relating these two sides to the left and the right that we nowadays discuss in the bar or between which we decide at the ballot box. This is a very serious matter. If even unto the Last Judgement there is a Church of Christ and a Church of the Antichrist, let alone in history a State of the righteous and a State of the wicked, then the good and the bad must exist not just in the same body politic, but in the very body of the Political. As Hegel said before Marx, whosoever wants die Weltändern, to transform life, must first of all come to terms with that ineliminable and irresolvable mysterium iniquitatis of the human condition and, with peace in their heart, struggle without hope of a definitive revelatio at the end of days.

Reviews:

• In The Baffler, Jamie Hood reviews Rachel Ingalls’ 1987 novella In The Act, reissued this July:

  This ideological sensibility becomes clearer in Ingalls’s critique of consumerism. In a system designed by and for men, woman is herself envisaged as a perfectible technology. Bryan Forbes’s cinematic adaptation of The Stepford Wives renders this process visually legible through the horrifyingly blank eyes and visibly inflating breasts of Joanna Eberhart 2.0. Both Ingalls and Stepford suggest that, if the future is female, this is only to the extent that “the female” might be reengineered as a pleasing and on-demand receptacle through which heteropatriarchal blueprints of progress will be passed.

  Ingalls pushes just a little further, though. While Edgar’s desires are vain, piggish, and one-dimensional, Helen’s entrepreneurial transformation in the wake of her discovery of Dolly situates her solidly on the side of capitalist extraction, making her an eager handmaiden to economic opportunism. Dismayed by Auto, Helen instead considers the “great possibilities” of commodifying Edgar’s vision as a ruthless business venture. “No emotions, no strings attached . . . it might make millions.” Women, Ingalls reminds us, are often equal and active collaborators in the recapitulation of institutional misogyny—needless to say, patriarchy’s pockets are deeper.

• In The Atlantic, Amy Weiss-Meyer reviews Lydia Kiesling’s latest novel (Mobility, August 1):

  That liberal reader might in fact be Kiesling’s target audience. This book is the first to be released under an imprint created by Crooked Media, the wildly popular Trump-era resistance-podcast franchise. (The publisher, Zando, also has an Atlantic line of books.) A tagline on the new imprint’s website—“Reading: it’s not just for tweets anymore”—doesn’t inspire much confidence. You’d be forgiven for wondering if Mobility is more political screed than art.

  Kiesling, however, has pulled off a rare feat: a deeply serious, deeply political novel that is, quite often, fun to read. It’s a coming-of-age story full of delicious detail, keen satire, and complex humanity. It’s informative without being didactic, thoughtfully confronting subjects such as climate change and American imperialism and gender inequality and white flight without taking itself too seriously. Kiesling is not in the business of preaching to the already converted—she’s here to hold up a mirror to her readers, and to make anyone who cracks this book open squirm a little.

• In The Nation, Lily Meyer reviews Colin Winnette’s latest novel (Users, February):

  At this point in the novel, the Egg becomes a proxy for the Internet: a technology that can not only fulfill any curiosity or desire you may have but can also implant new and alarming ones. Yet Users is not only anxious about the Internet’s capacity to change our desires. It also worries over the question—which Winnette leaves intentionally dangling—of whether a horrible fantasy was in fact lurking in Miles’s mind all along. Did it come from his obsessive online reading about the civil rights leader sexting teens? From the Egg? Or was it always his own? Before Miles or the reader can answer these questions, or decide whether the answer matters, his bosses access the record of what happened in the Egg, and Miles is out of a job. 

  [Meyer writes: “It will not be news to many readers that handing your imagination over to capitalist powers tends to lead to destruction and unhappiness.” We encourage you instead to hand your imagination over to the managing editors of the Washington Review of Books. —Steve]

N.B.:

• What happens when you make it on Granta’s Best Young Novelists list? 

• Kathleen Schmidt
  explains book publicity.

• [I can’t do any better than the headline here, so I’m going to quote the headline. “How Many Former Vanity Fair Employees Does It Take to Build a Roof?” —Steve]

• Notes on the history and spread of preppy style.

• John Wilson asks: “Why isn’t there any comparable publication covering the world of books and publishing from a perspective quite different from that of PW, one that would offer another angle on books and authors and publishing more generally, not supplanting the venerable trade mag but supplementing it, and serving as a gadfly now and then?” [“‘The world of books is essentially disinterested,’ Jane said. She always referred to the publishing business as ‘The world of books’. She was always hard up, so presumably ill paid.” —Chris]

• Christopher Carduff, a former contributing editor at the LOA and books editor at the Journal, died Monday. R.I.P. 

Local:

• The last day of the D.C. Black Film Festival is today in-person (films are being shown at the Miracle Theatre), but it runs until the 30th virtually. 

• The best of the District’s goods and services.

• The Summer 2023 issue of Struggle magazine is launching Saturday, August 26 with a party in Georgetown.

Poem:

“Love Song” by Carol Muske-Dukes

Love comes hungry to anyone’s hand.
I found the newborn sparrow next to
the tumbled nest on the grass. Bravely

opening its beak. Cats circled, squirrels.
I tried to set the nest right but the wild
birds had fled. The knot of pin feathers

sat in my hand and spoke. Just because
I’ve raised it by touch, doesn’t mean it
Follows. All day it pecks at the tin image of

a faceless bird. It refuses to fly,
though I’ve opened the door. What
sends us to each other? He and I

had a blue landscape, a village street,
some poems, bread on a plate. Love
was a camera in a doorway, love was

a script, a tin bird. Love was faceless,
even when we memorized each other’s
lines. Love was hungry, love was faceless

the sparrow sings, famishes, in my hand.

[This poem is from Poetry’s Oct–Nov 2002 edition. 

There’s a lovely, simple musicality in the poem, especially in that first line. “Song” feels very appropriate here. I love, in that second and third stanza, the description of the baby bird as a knot of pin feathers, and the word choice of “spoke”. Throughout the poem, there’s all these moments where the bird—and, by extension, love—is shown to be hungry, yearning, in this way that becomes difficult, implacable: the bird won’t fly or follow, and though the speaker and her lover “had” all these things she lists, there still remained something unfulfilled and stiff in their love (love was / a script, a tin bird . . . faceless). Speaking of the lover, look at the stanza enjambment that happens right when the poem shifts to He and I. It’s interesting because it’s such a quick transition from discussion of the bird. Having He and I in that fourth stanza, rather than pushed down to the fifth, where it might more logically belong, lends ambiguity to those pronouns (theoretically, if you stopped reading at the fourth stanza, you might read “he” as the bird), but more importantly it makes the sentence before it ambiguous and transitory—the “us” can easily be the speaker and the baby sparrow or the speaker and her lover. The final stanza enjambment plays an interesting role, too: it reframes Love was hungry, love was faceless to be the words of the singing baby sparrow. —Julia]