WRB—Dec. 3, 2025

“water weeds”

How to Become a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books and Influence People

Links:

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Philip Clark on Steely Dan:

  This sort of parallel reality was par for the course for Steely Dan. The sleeve notes Becker and Fagen didn’t want anyone to know they’d written themselves singled out Victor Feldman’s “coy pianistics” on “I Got The News,” although it was a tremendous pity, they said, that his efforts had been “undermined by Walter Becker’s odd, Djangoesque guitar and pointlessly obscene lyric.” Tics and fixations reappeared in lyrics between albums in different guises. In “The Boston Rag,” from Countdown to Ecstasy (1973), the narrator thinks that the idealism of his younger self has now withered into bitterness, and the bleakness of his present life makes him leave town. “My Old School,” from the same album, recounts a drug bust at Bard as the narrator thinks back to a period of carefree rebellion. “Sign in Stranger,” from The Royal Scam (1976), references a short story by the sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein exploring the “bootstrap paradox”—a quirk of time travel in which people who are sent back in time cause their own existence. Steely Dan songs trapped people in time, at a fixed point far from where they usually wanted to be—somewhere, or indeed someone, else.

  [For a while I’ve told anyone who would listen that the artists most like Steely Dan in combining jazz-influenced music that goes down easy with lyrics about truly miserable people are Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The miserable lyrics in Bacharach/David dealing with being “trapped . . . in time” are usually about being hung up on a past relationship, though (even if they did write a great suburban malaise tune with “Hasbrook Heights” and a great tune about failing to make it in show business with “Do You Know the Way to San Jose”); the innovation of the Dan was to expand the range of lyrical subjects considerably. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In Literary Review, John Mullan reviews a book about pedantry (On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All, by Arnoud S. Q. Visser, November) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Nov. 1, 2025.]:

  Berowne, in Shakespeare’s most wordy and rhetorical play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, declares to Rosaline that in his future wooing he will renounce “Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, / Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, / Figures pedantical.” Henceforth he will rely on simple expressions of his true feelings. Yet this is the promise of one who has been addicted to amorous rhetoric, with its intricate, showy arrangements of words. The earliest indubitable use of “pedantry” is credited to John Donne, in his “Second Anniversarie”: “When wilt thou shake off this Pedantery, / Of being taught by sense, and Fantasy?” Donne, with his logic-squeezing conceits, might be thought of as a delightfully pedantic poet. It is a paradox of pedantry that those who scorn it are those who recognize it, often because they sometimes enjoy practicing it themselves.

  Unsurprisingly, Montaigne, that great Renaissance exposer of the self-torments of learning, dedicated one of his Essays (Du pédantisme) to this habit of those addicted to bookish knowledge. Better to spend your time playing tennis than acquiring the kind of learning that can only be traded with other learned men, Montaigne suggests. Yet, as Visser notes, Montaigne jokes about his own “copious use of learning in his Essays.” You have to be learned to understand the heady delusions of learning. The inspiration for Montaigne’s essay appears to have been his boyhood familiarity with Italian comic drama of the early sixteenth century, in which pedants had become stock characters. Yet el pedante was a pretentious fool rather than the connoisseur of minute particulars whom we now call a pedant. Like many of the butts of satire against learned pretensions, he was a ridiculous show-off rather than an attentive fault-finder.

  [Who among us has not been addicted to amorous rhetoric? Who among us has not read good love poetry and thought “I wish I’d come up with that”?

  And surely it is possible to be both a pretentious fool and a connoisseur of minute particulars. Polonius fits both categories, and he’s in a pretty famous play. —Steve]

• In our sister publication Down Under, Roslyn Jolly reviews an Australian mining novel (Hollow Air, by Verity Borthwick, August in Australia):

  This is the territory of myth, that territory where the Golems of Jewish folklore rub shoulders with the Green Man of medieval Britain and Ovid’s metamorphosed women (Niobe a stone, Daphne a tree), all symbolising the dissolution of boundaries between human beings and the natural, elemental world. Such mythopoeic impulses may seem a far cry from the social realism that has tended to dominate Australian mining fiction, at least until this century; but even as Borthwick’s deployment of the trope of metamorphosis is, to my knowledge, unique within this tradition, earlier examples do tend, similarly, to attribute sentience and volition to the mined earth, as well as monstrous power. The astonishing “Proem” to Richardson’s Australia Felix (1917) ends with a comparison of the violated country to a “primeval monster” holding its invaders in inescapable psychological thrall.

  [Later in the review Jolly compares going down into the mines to katabasis, which is something so obvious I wonder how I never thought of it before. (I felt especially bad because one of the first things the demons in Paradise Lost do in Hell is start mining the place.) —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• Performative reading and feel-good cultural criticism

• The uses of aphorisms

• A fall Poem by E. E. Cummings

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]