WRB—Feb. 14, 2024

“an act of choosing”

Looking back, it’s embarrassing to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know: the Washington Review of Books so I had something to say to the long-legged socialist who lived in my dorm; the Washington Review of Books for the smooth-skinned sociology major who never gave me a second look; the Washington Review of Books for the ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black. As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless; I found myself in a series of affectionate but chaste friendships.

N.B.:

The next WRB x Liberties salon will take place on Wednesday, February 21st at 6:30 p.m. at the Liberties offices. In keeping with the run of provocative questions with which we’ve been having such fun, it will be on the topic “Should love be healthy?” [Happy Valentine’s Day! —Steve]

If you are interested in attending, please contact Chris or Celeste Marcus.

Links:

• In The New Statesman, Madoc Cairns on what J. G. A. Pocock learned from coming to the United States in the late ’60s:

  Both were becoming, he feared, irrelevant. Pocock saw historians as operating a kind of two-way radio, antennae trained backwards in time to “receive and decipher a transmission from our predecessors.” Someone, he began to suspect, was jamming the frequency. Writing in 1970, he blamed the telecommunications revolution. Distilling meaning from the “uncontrollable” ambiguities of language necessitated negotiation; it requires us to recognize “others like ourselves exist.” Locating such others in the past enabled “Gutenberg man” to locate himself in time; we entered history, and discovered freedom. Books created democrats. But television exalted demagogues. And frictionless, instantaneous communication might enable “high-speed manipulators” to “disorder the whole structuring of time”—to end history, annul politics; even liquefy the self.

  [I won’t bore you with a lengthy digression on George Grant here, but the role the United States plays in non-American and non-UK Anglophone thought (Pocock was from New Zealand) in large part merely by existing is fascinating. —Steve] [I think it’s our right. —Chris]

• In Antigone, Krystyna Bartol on historical misunderstandings of Epicurean thought:

  Athenaeus is fond of criticizing the feasts of Epicurean friends, which he describes as “made up of a crowd of flatterers who praise one another.” This is an obvious distortion of the idea of friendship, which according to Epicurus is an immortal good available to noble man. Athenaeus trivializes Epicurus’ thoughts about pleasure as the supreme good. He shallows his thought and treats it superficially, citing Epicurus’ alleged words repeated by his opponents: ἀρχὴ καὶ ῥίζα παντὸς ἀγαθοῦ ἡ τῆς γαστρὸς ἡδονή, καὶ τὰ σοφὰ καὶ τὰ περιττὰ εἰς ταύτην ἔχει τὴν ἀναφοράν (“The pleasure derived from the belly is the origin and root of every good, and whatever is wise or exceptional is so by reference to it.” He also accuses Epicurus of a lack of originality, and cites excerpts from Homer’s Odyssey and Sophocles’ Antigone to confirm that he was not the first to recognise the pleasure of feasting. The portrayal of Epicurus as a kind of sybarite serves Athenaeus, an incredibly well-read man, to show off his own erudition and knowledge of the works of ancient authors. He does not care much about the credibility of repeated information and thus contributes to the dissemination of a deceitful image of the philosopher.

• In Public Books, Aidan Ryan on writing as a process by which one understands one’s own life:

  As a memoirist—which here means one who must carry life to completion, one who cannot bear to only live—Ernaux’s writing is most often contextualized among the other heavyweights of the contemporary European nonfiction or autofiction novel—most frequently Karl Ove Knausgaard. While it is as rigorously vulnerable, even abased, as Knausgaard’s six-part My Struggle, Ernaux’s body of work is a very different kind of project. Her “‘total novel’ of life,” as Jamie Hood observes in an insightful essay on the publication of Ernaux’s journals, “imparts on her reader a sense that memory, like any other knowledge system, is an infinitely changeable field, one given astonishing density by, but not reducible to, the individual experience.” She does this by revisiting the same events—her visit to a back alley faiseuse d’anges, the moment she saw her father raise a sickle above her mother as if to kill her—over and over, in a manner that changes the very nature of the memory.

  [I understand my own life through the Washington Review of Books. —Chris]

Reviews:

• In the Times, Dwight Garner reviews an oral history of The Village Voice (The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture by Tricia Romano, February 27):

  For many oddballs and lefties and malcontents out in America’s hinterlands (I was among them), finding their first copy of The Voice was more than eye-opening. Here was a dispatch from another, better planet. There was nothing else like it. It drove many to go into journalism, or to move to New York, or both. Others fed their heads as long-distance subscribers. You could count on each issue to have been scuffed up by the vicissitudes of the U.S. Postal Service. Some of the scuffing may have been half-intentional. As one art director puts it, the covers tended to look like “The New York Post on acid and run by communists.”

  [I like to think of the Washington Review of Books as a dispatch from another, better planet. Our art design doesn’t look like that, though. —Steve] [If I ever have the free time, Hannah might get me to change it. —Chris]

• In the local and free Beacon, Bonnie S. Benwick reviews the latest by Mark Kurlansky, the Cod (1998) guy (The Core of an Onion: Peeling the Rarest Common Food—Featuring More Than 100 Historical Recipes, 2023):

  Brahmins and Hindu widows circa 600 B.C. avoided onions because they contained “the quality of darkness,” leading to ignorance, lewdness, and fear in those who took a bite. Hippocrates prescribed onions to prevent pneumonia, and Olympic athletes in ancient Greece regarded onions as a superfood, pounding them by the pound. Throughout the centuries, various cultures tagged onions as sexual enhancers, cough suppressants, insomnia cures, threats to piety, scurvy inhibitors, and harbingers of the peasant class.

  [I would tell you not to use any of these recipes today, but if you’ve made it this far into an installment of the Washington Review of Books I assume you’re single—eat all the onions you like. —Steve] [“We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick: But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes.” —Chris]

[Behind the paywall: Julia on relationships between men and women in Colette, Steve recounts an unfunny non-joke about Hamlet, Dürer, Willa Cather, opium, HVAC systems, Old English, Jewish cantors, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you. 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.]