This long winter broke up in a single moment, fairly early in my time in the District of Columbia. Spring is the inevitable image, but this was not gradual like Nature's springs. It was as if the Arctic itself, all the deep layers of secular ice, should change not in a week nor in an hour, but instantly, into a landscape of grass and primroses and orchards in bloom, deafened with bird songs and astir with running water. I can lay my hand on the very moment; there is hardly any fact I know so well, though I cannot date it. Someone must have forwarded me an email newsletter: the Washington Review of Books, perhaps. My eye fell upon a headline and a caption, carelessly, expecting nothing. A moment later, as the poet says, “The sky had turned round.”
Links:
In The Yale Review, the first installment of a new column on everyday objects that haunt the writer. Catherine Lacey:
Labels are for jars. The implication being that labels shouldn’t be for people or at least are not for the person who wears this shirt, as it’s impossible to label her, as she resists categorization, as she resists containment, refuses limits, refuses to even be a stable presence within her own life.
I noticed that my previously sane appreciation of glass jars with well-fitting lids had taken on a vexing emotional sheen.
After Mary Gardiner died, I could not help but label myself; I was a sister who was missing one of her sisters. Labels exist for other losses—orphan, widow, widower—but there is no word for losing a sibling or a child. I began to feel that no one could understand me except other people missing a brother or a sister (the man who could define me so well had lost his brother), and I clung to my label-less label, made huge choices under the semiconscious assumption that it explained me entirely.
In First Things, Bonnie Lander Johnson and Julia Meszaros on a number of female British Catholic writers, forgotten to various degrees:
Alice Thomas Ellis’s house was notorious for its parties, the dissolute kind familiar in London’s literary scene and yet strangely also a source of religious conversion for many of Ellis’s guests. She was the perfect hostess: lingering just long enough at any one shoulder to land a devastating line but more usually hovering in the kitchen cooking and chain-smoking with the least glamorous of her guests or out on the street delivering uneaten food to the local homeless. The many stories about Ellis’s parties should not overshadow the lesser-known truths: the unseen hours she spent working with young writers, often housing and feeding them, laboring unpaid on their voice and narrative tautness—especially young women with no literary connections of their own, no other way into the publishing world and no formal training. It was this quiet dedication to the talents of others that Ellis assumed to be the work of all men and women, all artists.
In NLR, Hermione Hoby on feminist correctives to the canon, rewriting canonical texts from female perspectives:
While it would be a fair generalization to say the realist novel has neglected the proletariat, the same can’t be said of women: our socio-political subjugation did not correspond to narrative sidelining. For every serious young man pursuing the Napoleonic slogan of “la carrière ouvertes aux talents,” there exists a middle-class young woman whose intelligence and desire make her a main character, and whose social unfreedom (especially to marry and divorce, and to acquire and dispose of property) provides the novel its engine of tragedy. And to the ranks of the heroines of Eliot, Gaskell, Chopin and the Brontë sisters can be added an equally credible fictive sorority—that of male-authored women trying to get free: Emma Bovary, Isabel Archer, Anna Karenina, Effi Briest, plus a constellation of Hardy heroines among them. If gender difference hasn’t resulted in the same imaginative disability as class difference, this may be explained by the fact that men and women tend to get to know each other intimately in a way that property-owners and wage-laborers don’t. So it is that Flaubert, unable to get pregnant yet able to write persuasively of maternal ambivalence, could declare “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”
[The portion on Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a novel Nic once described as more or less designed for me to hate, made me think of
’s notes we linked to in WRB—Jan. 20, 2024: “The ‘madwoman in the attic’ (as a famous feminist reading of the book has it) can be seen as a personification of Jane’s real position vis-a-vis Rochester, and of the cruel and degrading treatment she is effectively submitting in the process of being wooed by him.” —Steve]In Words Without Borders, Damion Searls on his approach to translating philosophical texts and how he translated Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922, February 27):
Overall, the language of my new translation makes more sense than the Ogden version. Such normalcy might be off-putting to anyone who knows and loves the Tractatus in English already, but this is indeed how Wittgenstein originally sounded, even the Wittgenstein of much of the Tractatus. Anyone who wants to defend the earlier translation of, for instance, the famous last line of the book—“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”—will have to defend the kinds of passive, inverted, and nominalized constructions quoted above. In German the sentence is normal, unlike “whereof” and “thereof” and “one” in today’s English. Wittgenstein first made this point even more directly in his 1916 notebooks—“What cannot be said, cannot be said!” (“Was sich nicht sagen läßt, läßt sich nicht sagen!”)—but he did revise the line to be a bit more stately as the conclusion to his book.
In Van, Sharon Su on the difficulties of performing music by neglected composers, especially regarding scores:
“One of the consequences of neglect is that the music that players are interfacing with has all these complications and mistakes, and that then creates an additional barrier on top of the prejudices and lack of recognition,” Anna Wittstruck, director of the Boston College Symphony Orchestra, told me. She described “getting stuck here and there with a lot of questions pertaining to errata” in rehearsals when she first programmed Price’s First Symphony in 2019 at the University of Puget Sound. In 2023, Elena Urioste and Tom Poster published an article on the volume of errors they found preparing works by Price and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor for recording. “In an age when so many musicians are looking to champion neglected voices, it sometimes feels as if certain publishers are not on our side,” they wrote, identifying “150 significant misprints” in their edition of Price’s Piano Quintet alone.
[I burst out laughing when a link in here took me to “Every Scarlatti Sonata, Ranked,” which ranks all 559 exactly like it says on the tin. I too have the ranking impulse. —Steve]
Reviews:
Two in The Atlantic:
Judith Shulevitz reviews Marilynne Robinson’s exegesis of Genesis (Reading Genesis, March 12):
Above all, Robinson’s God-infused theory of reality is also a theology of realistic fiction—of her brand of realistic fiction, in which the physical may suddenly be revealed as numinous and the spirit inheres in the flesh. I want to be clear: At no point in this book does Robinson talk about herself, her novels, or the novel as a form. That’s not the sort of thing she’d do. This is me reading her reading. I see Robinson in her depiction of the biblical author, who in turn sometimes seems to merge with God. What she has in common with both the writer or writers of the Bible and God, as she depicts them, is a deep tenderness toward the subjects of their concern. “The remarkable realism of the Bible,” she writes, “the voices it captures, the characterization it achieves, are products of an interest in the human that has no parallel in ancient literature.” Nor, I would add, in a great deal of modern literature. This boundless and merciful interest in the human is what distinguishes her.
[I have for some time had a theory that there are two kinds of people in the world: Genesis people and Exodus people. —Steve]
James Parker reviews Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of Ian Fleming (Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, March 12):
And he had an interesting war. The weird thing about the Bond books (it may be their secret) is that they read like the work of a gifted and faintly sociopathic fantasist-researcher—somebody with no actual experience of espionage, geopolitics, money, travel, fighting, or, indeed, humans. In fact, Fleming was worldly to a degree and, if anything, overqualified to write spy novels. From the late 1930s to 1945, he worked at the top levels of Naval Intelligence, liaising between the Admiralty and Downing Street, and was closely involved with—among other things—operational planning and target selection for two elite intelligence-gathering units: 30AU and T-Force. These were his glory days. Shakespeare uses the journalist Alan Moorehead’s line about soldiers at war to describe Fleming: “He was, for a moment of time, a complete man, and he had this sublimity in him.”
In Poetry, Daegan Miller reviews a biography of Jones Very, “peculiar footnote in the history of Transcendentalism” who at one time claimed that the Second Coming was inside him (God's Scrivener: The Madness and Meaning of Jones Very, by Clark Davis, 2023):
The impish irony in all of this is that Very’s poetry, even at its most inspired, wasn’t all that good. Even his defenders knew it—then as now. Emerson edited, arranged, marketed, and championed Very’s Essays and Poems, for which he also wrote an anonymous review. He said of Very’s poems: “There is no composition, no elaboration, no artifice in the structure of the rhyme, no variety in the imagery; in short, no pretension to literary merit, for this would be departure from his singleness, and followed by loss of insight.” Davis, too, late in God’s Scrivener, admits that “we would hardly consider his poetry remarkable without [the sonnets’] peculiar history, association with Transcendentalism, and flirtation with religious ‘madness’”—and this is where the limits of Davis’s admirable, sober vow to respect the limits of documentary evidence are most felt.
N.B.:
[Sam Kriss should follow up his most recent work by evaluating products advertised in the Washington Review of Books. —Steve] [Sam should go on a date with everyone who ever advertised in the WRB Classifieds lonelyhearts section. Maybe we’re saying the same thing. —Chris] [Yes. All at once. —Steve]
[Vampire Weekend should follow up their most recent work by minutely depicting the lives of the Managing Editors in song. —Steve] [Sorry, what do you take it they’re up to now, if not that? —Chris] [Minutely depicting the lives of guys who are very similar to the Managing Editors, but slightly less cool, in song. —Steve]
“The Twilight of the American Sommelier” [I’ll recommend and pour Allen’s Coffee Brandy for you. —Steve]
Is the title of Taylor Swift’s upcoming album grammatically correct? [Vote now on your phones! —Steve]
A defense of “cantankerous codgers” in publishing.
The merits of line editing.
The status of fiction.
The NYRB sale of up to 40% off ends Sunday, February 18 at midnight.
Local:
An excerpt from Carlos Lozada’s upcoming book on “Washington books” (The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians, February 27): “But I want to make the case for the Washington book. I believe in the Washington book.”
Notes on early Rothko.
The exhibit of Rothko paintings on paper at the National Gallery of Art ends at the end of next month.
The Rothko room at the Phillips Collection has some new paintings while the usual ones are in loan in Paris until the end of next month.
An exhibit at Hillwood about the Paris of its founder, Marjorie Merriweather Post, opens today.
The National Gallery of Art will screen The Hands of Orlac (1924) with a live accompaniment performed by Andrew Simpson on piano tomorrow, February 18 at 2 p.m.
The Topograph Issue One launch will be at the Lost Origins Gallery on Tuesday, February 27 at 7 p.m.
An exhibit of photographs from The New Thing Art & Architecture Center, which lasted from 1966 to 1972, is being shown at the American University Museum until Sunday, March 17.
Poem:
“Lou” by Anders Carlson-Wee
You don’t start at zero. You stay way below zero.
You got your gas money, admission, you grab
a dog and a beer at hit the ATM, which takes
a not-so-small fee. By the time you set eyes
on horses you’re down thirty, forty bucks
and you haven’t even placed a bet. I started coming
when my wife died. She wouldn’t marry
a gambler, so after her funeral was my first chance
in 47 years. Oh, I don’t bet a lot of money.
If you don’t bet a lot you can’t make a lot,
but you can stay in. Some guys hit the Pick 3
and the Superfecta—those guys are gods. Not me.
I just work the chalk and try to climb outta the red.
To tide me over, my wife used to let me bet
chocolate chips. We’d watch the races on TV
and place our bets in bowls. She’d tease me
for playing it safe. Loosen up! she’d say,
then she’d put it all on Here Is Happy to win.
She loved that horse. She’d lose, of course,
and go make cookies with her losses
while I worked the chalk. After 47 years of that
it’s hard to remember I’m betting real money,
losing real money. When I win I remember,
I can tell you that much. I’ll never be a god
but I’m still here. The only god I ever met in person
was my wife. No bullshit: she hit the Superfecta
one time. Filled her bowl on four horses
and named the order. The exact order:
1, 2, 3, 4. And she won. After we stopped shouting
and cussing and jumping up and down
we did a little two-step right there on the living
room rug, and at the end I even dipped her.
She had red hair for miles. It was beautiful.
[This is from Carlson-Wee’s Disease of Kings (2023), his second book of poems, which I just finished on Thursday and am totally enamored with. It’s well-worth the read.
I love Carlson-Wee’s ability to handle complex subject matter with a clarity of language and form that allow the third-dimensionality of this book to shine through. The narrative that runs throughout the collection as a whole is strong, but it was ultimately the persona poems like this one—which represent one side of conversations that the titular persona (here, Lou) had with the book’s protagonist—that really sold me. Of those poems, this one was my favorite, largely because of how sweetly and naturally the love story is nestled within it. Carlson-Wee is able to carry a speaker’s voice with such precision, and in this poem in particular that’s thanks to both the diction of the poem and Lou’s unabashed affection for his departed wife, which he can’t help but return to, repeatedly, during this conversation about horse racing: I’ll never be a god / but I’m still here. The only god I ever met in person / was my wife. And, as with so many of the poems in the collection, the pacing of the conversation-poem is just perfect; I love that we end on Lou telling the listener She had red hair for miles. It was beautiful. You can just sense Lou getting lost, however briefly, in that memory, so it feels fitting that that’s where we leave him. —Julia]
Upcoming book:
February 20 | Little, Brown, and Company
Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story
by Leslie Jamison
From the Lit Hub preview: I haven’t read a book so earth-shatteringly honest as this in a while: it brings to mind I Love You, But I’ve Chosen Darkness (2022) by Claire Vaye Watkins in its rawness, its truth. We last heard from Leslie Jamison with Make It Scream, Make It Burn (2019), a trademark book of Jamison essays that discussed, among many other things, her marriage. Here we are on the other side, after the splintering, after the marriage ended. Splinters is about divorce, and family, and motherhood, and lineage, and mainly about the stories of our life: what to do when the story no longer fits. How to put together a quest for beauty and the ugliness of a hard marriage and hard choices. How to move forward, how to forgive ourselves. The best, most bracing, powerful memoir I’ve read: set an alert for February 20th and get it as soon as you can.
Also out Tuesday:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays by Joan Acocella
From the publisher: The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays gathers twenty-four essays from the final decade and a half of Acocella’s career, as well as an introduction that frames her simple preoccupations: “life and art.” In agile, inspired prose, she moves from J. R. R. Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf to the life of Richard Pryor, from surveying profanity to untangling the book of Job. Her appetite (and reading list) knew no bounds. This collection is a joy and a revelation, a library in itself, and Acocella is our dream companion among its shelves.
W. W. Norton: Taming the Octopus: The Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation by Kyle Edward Williams
From the publisher: Recent controversies around environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing and “woke capital” evoke an old idea: the Progressive Era vision of a socially responsible corporation. By midcentury, the notion that big business should benefit society was a consensus view. But as Kyle Edward Williams’s brilliant history, Taming the Octopus, shows, the tools forged by New Deal liberals to hold business leaders accountable, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, narrowly focused on the financial interests of shareholders. This inadvertently laid the groundwork for a set of fringe views to become dominant: that market forces should rule every facet of society. Along the way, American capitalism itself was reshaped, stripping businesses to their profit-making core.
What we’re reading:
Steve read Paradise Regained.
Chris hasn’t read a blessed thing since Wednesday. [Or a cursed one. —Chris]
Critical notes:
The Son of God in Paradise Regained:
. . . However many books
Wise men have said are wearisom; who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior(And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek)
Uncertain and unsettl’d still remains,
Deep verst in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys,
And trifles for choice matters, worth a spunge;
As Children gathering pibles on the shore.
[In How Milton Works (2001) Stanley Fish works this attitude towards books (as well as attitudes expressed elsewhere in Milton’s work) into his explanation of the meaning of the Areopagitica: “books are declared to be absolutely essential to the maintenance of truth and virtue—not, however, because truth and virtue reside in books (as they were said to so many paragraphs ago), but because it is by (the indifferent) means of books that men and women can make themselves into the simulacra of what no book could ever contain.”
I wish to set aside the question of whether truth and virtue reside in books to note that this is an argument for criticism—an argument, in fact, that there is no valuable reading outside of criticism, and that the merit of books is in the afforded opportunities to exercise your critical judgment. The making of critical judgments is the only way to connect a book with life, since the book itself is inert and a critical sense requires something to work on. Without that, the Son of God argues, you might as well be memorizing trivia. (The Son of God was, apparently, unaware that memorizing trivia could be very useful for making dumb jokes in a books-and-culture email newsletter.) —Steve]
Yet a novel like Rooney’s is interesting precisely because it troubles certain received and, indeed, narcissistic ideas about what a fictional character ought to be. A character, many insist, should be an individual like us, a person whose surfaces may be encrusted with the cultural detritus of the present but whose depths are sanctified by complexity, by a sense of mystery, and by that venerable shibboleth, personality. To give up on “the odd angularities of personality,” “the fruitful fiction of personality,” “the quiddity of a character’s experience,” and “the humanizing quality” of “actual individual existence” is, according to critics, for the novel to fail the basic test of realism. “By the time we see one another again I’ll have a really amazing personality,” Alice jokes to Eileen. We can hear in her joke a skepticism or perhaps a boredom with personality as the arbiter of anything. Why should an amazing personality make a character worthy of our attention or more real? Just how amazing do any of us believe we are?
[I read Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) while stranded in an airport because it was the one somewhat interesting thing in the airport bookstore. I am not sure that this was the best way to appreciate it. —Steve]
Far from hiding or working around this depression, Joan Didion wallows in it. In the preface to Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968), she reports: “I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate.” In the lead essay of The White Album (1979), she reprints a portion of the psychological report on herself rendered when she went in to be checked for feelings she had experienced of vertigo, nausea, and fear of passing out: “Patient’s thematic productions on the Thematic Apperception Test emphasize her fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them irretrievably to conflict and failure.”
This may stand as the most incisive literary criticism of Joan Didion yet written.
[My dad says: “I’d be happy to read an Epstein piece about how I might be overrated.” —Chris]