If a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books could speak, we could not understand him. [I can’t believe we’ve never done this before. —Chris]
N.B.:
The next WRB x Liberties salon will be this evening 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?”
All WRB readers are welcome; if you are interested in attending, please contact Chris or Celeste Marcus.
[I, alas, will not be there, but I encourage those interested in this question to watch My Fair Lady (1964) and Three Colors: White (1994). —Steve] [I’ve found Red more relevant, personally, but okay. —Chris] [“Should love be healthy?” and “What is it like to be a Managing Editor of the WRB?” are related but not identical questions. —Steve]
Links:
In The Nation, Vivian Gornick on Bernard Malamud:
But if ever a set of characters embodied the patience of the oppressed, it is surely his shopkeeper Jews, for whom Brooklyn or the Bronx is forever Poland, 1932. These are people who are perpetually rolling a rock up a hill: the rock of sheer survival. They neither prosper nor perish; they simply do not die. Their strength and their punishment is knowing how to cling to life under circumstances so extreme that they often seem allegorical. If you asked what they mean by “survive,” they would, in all likelihood, tell you: “Just to make a living.” If you then asked, “What kind of living?,” they might, like Morris Bober in Malamud’s early novel The Assistant (1957), reply, “What kind of living?—a living; you lived.”
In The New Yorker, Claudia Roth Pierpont on books during wartime:
Not that all his clients were sedate scholars. Among the most illustrious were men who might be called mercenary warlords, whose taste for books assuaged (or disguised) the brutality of their profession. One of the finest private libraries of the age belonged to Vespasiano’s client Federico da Montefeltro, known for his spectacular palace in Urbino, and for having led an attack on the town of Volterra so unaccountably vicious that Machiavelli cited it as proof that men are inclined to evil. Vespasiano excused his client by claiming that he’d attempted to stop his men from rampaging, even though Federico himself looted a trove of rare Hebrew manuscripts that had belonged to a Jewish victim of the onslaught. Vespasiano also noted that Federico’s study of ancient Roman historians was one of the reasons he excelled in battle.
In our sister publication on the Cuyahoga [I had a history teacher in high school who was from Cleveland and once delivered an encomium to the beauty of the Cuyahoga in response to some joke one of us made about the place. I think about this a lot. —Steve], Elizabeth Phelan attempts to interview Annie Proulx, gets six of fifteen questions submitted through her agency answered, and tries to discern the meaning of this:
But is this really cause for concern? Obviously writers can be both great and famous, and many still become famous for outstanding writing. Tawdry drivel and serious literature can coexist and always have. The broader and deeper the literary pool, the more people can swim—and we are all the richer for it. Yet snobbishness persists, as does the idea that rejecting fame will confer something of value on one’s work, be it greatness, sincerity, or something else. No one encapsulates this false dichotomy more than Proulx; in denying the frivolities of the life of a writer in a public eye, she has only rendered herself frivolous in a stranger, lonelier way.
- ’s upcoming book (On Drugs: Philosophy, Psychedelics, and the Nature of Reality, 2025):
Brian Wilson gave us, I think, the most excellent illustration of what I have previously called “capitalist transcendentalism,” with his all-too-familiar 1967 composition, “Good Vibrations.” You might think I’m joking, and if you do this will probably be because you, like me, are most acquainted with this song in the altered and derivative form in which it was deployed to sell a certain orange-flavored soft-drink that, for several years, beginning already in 1979, its marketers hoped to associate with the abstract idea of California and its several pleasures: “I’m drinking up good vibrations / Sunkist orange-soda taste sensations,” etc. But this is only, in turn, what I have previously called the “reuptake mechanism” built right into capitalist transcendentalism. That is to say that if there is ever any irruption of genius within this system, enjoy it while you can—or, if you come along too late, learn the method of “real listening” so that you can to some extent work your way back into a sense of what it had once been like—, for soon enough, it’s going to be taken from you, denatured, cheapened, used to sell stuff.
[As another guy who has spent way too much time producing theories about the Beatles: he’s right. —Steve]
[Behind the paywall: Steve again consults his high school career for a story about pasta, Julia on poems that don’t end when they should, Lady Day, failure, fictionality in general, realist fictionality, how narrative works, our cultural overlords, 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 and your support.]
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