WRB—Dec. 20, 2023

“bizarre” “not funny” “outdated”

In Washington did Kubla Khan
A new review of books decree

[Damn Steve, that’s good. Can I add: “Where the Potomac River ran / past Georgetown and Rossyln, / down to the Chesapeake.”? If you hic the meter a bit? —Chris]

N.B.:

The recorded audio from the first WRB x Liberties Salon, in which Chris and Celeste Marcus, who manages to edit Liberties [A Journal of Culture and Politics, but not, certainly, a book. —Chris], aided by friends [And (including, if we’re being technical), I want to note, Steve, Julia, and Nic. —Chris], discuss whether or why books are good, worthwhile, and dangerous, is now online.

[A while ago, a few months before the WRB existed,

BDM

linked to an essay by

becca rothfeld

in an early issue of Liberties, and I thought, “That’s wild, that there’s such a great journal, and based in the District of Columbia”—or something like that. I sent it to Nic with some excitement. The past two years have been a blur. 23 months or so into WRB, I’m proud of what we’ve done and excited for the next year. Anything else I could say is sap; just imagine an immensity of warm feeling where I could fill another few inches of your inbox.

—Chris]

[A brief scheduling note: Chris and I need a break, so this will be the last edition of the WRB in 2023. The next edition will come out on Wednesday, January 3. The Jan. 2024 Film Supplement will come out on January 8, the second Monday of the month, since the first Monday is New Year’s Day. 

It’s been a great year for the WRB, I think, and not just because I became part of it and introduced the Film Supplement. What was already here is still wonderful—Julia’s poems, the CLS from Sarah and Grace, everything Chris has done to make this a reality. And so is what’s new. We finally had an event, as mentioned above, and it will hopefully be the first of many. There are new colors and styles of WRB tote bags. I’m proud of what we have here, and I’m grateful to each and every one of you—you read, you subscribe, you talk about it, you share it, you tell us what you like (Rarely. —Chris), you look so fashionable out there in the great wide world with your WRB tote bags, you pay us. You do all of it, and you have no idea how encouraging it is and how supportive you are. We put the WRB together for you, after all. Enjoy your holidays, and here’s hoping 2024 is even better.

—Steve]

Links:

• Two from the new issue of The Point: 

  • James Redfield on sharing a name with James Redfield, author of The Celestine Prophecy (1993), envy, and how the combination led him to attend a conference in Italy whose organizers thought, at first, that he was the other James Redfield:

    I also got a revised program, with both James Redfields on it. Hillary Clinton was not coming; Christiaan Barnard would be there, and the centerpiece was to be Deepak Chopra, who was to receive a medal, speak on one of the panels and also give a full-scale evening presentation of his own. Sixteen medals were to be presented at the ceremony on live Italian television, and an additional gold medal was being given one evening to Luciano Pavarotti “for his humanitarian work.” One morning was to be devoted to the question of urban transport: Rimini was in the process of creating a light railway and apparently the mayor wanted to talk about it with a couple of light-railway people from Strasbourg. One evening was given over to a lecture about a triptych by Giuliano da Rimini (a contemporary of Giotto’s). Otherwise the main focus of the conference was health care and entitlements. About 80 percent of the participants were to be Italian—none of them (except Pavarotti) people I had heard of. I got the sense that this was a conversation within the Italian technocratic community, to which certain outsiders had been invited to add diversity, that the outsiders had been chosen primarily for their celebrity, and that our focus (since I had been swept up with the other James Redfield) was to be a New Age take on health. That was as much as I could see so far into the contents of the black box. The new Newsweek, which I brought with me on the plane to Italy, had Deepak Chopra on the cover.

  • Rob Madole reports back from the Venice Architecture Biennale:

    If there was a unifying thread at the Biennale, it was the theme of utopia. A well-received exhibit by the Brooklyn-based practitioner Olalekan Jeyifous—winner of the Silver Lion prize for a promising young Biennale participant, awarded by a Lokko-appointed jury—took the form of a spacious, colorfully furnished waiting lounge for an “All-Africa Protoport” that, in a fictional, speculative past, has harnessed “Indigenous knowledge systems” to facilitate emissions-free transit by air, land or sea to any affiliated Protoport in the world. (How this miracle has been accomplished, eliminating in one fell stroke the massive carbon footprint of the transit and shipping industries, isn’t specified.) Inside the Finnish Pavilion, a tongue-in-cheek mockumentary from 2043 presents a “toilet of the future” that has miraculously solved the world’s water and fertilizer crises. (It’s actually just a traditional Finnish outhouse.) In a similarly vaporous alternate universe, the Belgian Pavilion proposes “making an alliance with mushrooms,” invoking a future where fungi have been harnessed to build fully organic and sustainable structures. The curators demo how this might work with a structure made of dried mycelium bricks, which glow attractively under a skylight like limestone. But the bricks are non-load-bearing and held up by a wooden superstructure, meaning they’re useless as a construction material.

• Two from our sister publication in the city so nice they named it twice [A reader delivered some high praise of this bit to me over the weekend. Cities should have more nicknames so I can keep it from getting stale. —Steve] [I’m getting confused: are you referring to the City of Big Shoulders and the Player with Railroads? —Chris]:

  • Christopher Benfey on Bela Bartók’s few months in Asheville, North Carolina, during the Second World War, and what he might have heard:

    And then there were the North Carolina birds. “The birds have become completely drunk with the spring,” Bartók wrote, “and are putting on concerts the like of which I’ve never heard.”

    Bartók’s biographer David Cooper detects “a trace of birdsong” in “Melodia,” the haunting third movement of the Solo Sonata. Sitting by the window, the Blue Ridge marking the horizon, Bartók transcribed a pair of eighth notes in a descending fifth, B to F, then four sixteenth notes back on B. The rufous-sided towhee.

  • Daniel M. Lavery on the cultural legacies of Jean Shepherd, whose In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash (1966) was the source material for A Christmas Story (1983):

    From 1955 to 1977, with a short break in 1956 when he was fired and quickly reinstated after a listener write-in campaign, Shepherd hosted a show on WOR AM radio in New York City in which he staged hoaxes, instructed listeners not to vote, and pretended to lock himself out of the office. In a regular segment called “Hurling Invectives,” he would order listeners to “put your radio on the windowsill…the loudspeaker pointed out towards the neighborhood…. This voice will carry your sentiments, your repressions, your aggressions, into the darkness out there.” Then he would shout accusations like “You don’t think for a moment you’re fooling anyone, do you?!” or “You filthy pragmatist!”

[Behind the paywall: more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, including Krampus runs, “underground zombie streams,” a poem by Charles Simic, and Steve getting riled up about a line in a Times book review. If you like what you see, why not subscribe, and why not consider a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and we couldn’t do it without you.]