Thou shalt not live within thy means
Nor on plain water and raw greens.
If thou must choose
Between the chances, choose the odd;
Read the Washington Review of Books, trust in God;
And take short views.
N.B.:
The recording of Wednesday evening’s WRB x Liberties salon—“Should love be healthy?”—is now available:
Links:
In The Paris Review, Valerie Stivers makes some of the food that appears in Kafka’s work:
One element of the brilliance and ongoing power of Kafka’s work is the intensely packed and folded layers of its symbolism. No symbol is ever just one thing; the fruitcake of “Description of a Struggle” is a lure to taste the fruits of corruption; the apple in the sophisticated later work is both fruit of the family’s participation in the machine and a placeholder suggesting the absent nourishment that Gregor longs for. I wondered what would happen if I made these foods—would they be doubly delicious, both alluring and sustaining, or as grotesque as the rotten food spread and as absent of flavor as the fruitcake?
[We must imagine that the hunger artist found food he liked. —Steve]
In The Point, Kieran Setiya on the practical wisdom of philosophy and its connection to self-help:
When contemporary writers treat ancient philosophy as self-help, they tend to minimize its metaphysical presumptions. But the Stoic injunction to let go of what is out of your control—“If you kiss your child or your wife, say to yourself that it is a human being that you’re kissing; and then, if one of them should die, you won’t be upset”—tends to ring hollow without a Stoic faith in providence. And it’s distorting when contemporary readers, like the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, extract from Aristotle a pedestrian vision of the good life as “one where you develop your strengths, realize your potential, and become what it is in your nature to become.” For Aristotle, the nature you should perfect is not your individual potential, but an objective human nature whose ideal expression lies in theoretical contemplation of the cosmos.
Two from The New Criterion:
David Dubal on going to the Steinway basement to select a piano for his classical music radio station’s studio:
As I went back to the others, it seemed that the tactful Franz had disappeared. I was actually suffering. Each was special; one was more orchestral, another had a certain sweetness; one had a cello sound, while on the lighted piano there was a nasal oboe pouting. All of them had Steinway’s celebrated ringing, bell-like bass. I was in a muddle, a fog: easier action, harder, lighter touch, less treble—all this and much more. “Franz,” I blurted out, “I don’t know what to do.” Franz walked to CD 361 and said, “I remember three hours ago it was this one that readily spoke to you, David.” He continued, “Yes, there is passion in this piano.” Yes, the lighter instrument will be easier, perhaps more fun to play, perhaps better for Debussy. But now Franz softly struck a bass A flat several times on CD 361, comparing it to the others. “This,” Franz said, “will hold up better to the rigors of a studio, and will record better.” And Franz looked me in the eye, saying, “You are right. CD 361 has the Steinway sound as I like it.” I said, “Franz, that’s it, there can be no other endorsement,” and in minutes I feverishly signed the papers for delivery to its new home.
John P. Rossi on the history of baseball’s history:
In the 1940s, Seymour was studying for his Ph.D. in history at Cornell University and proposed as his thesis topic the history of baseball, particularly the development of the game in the nineteenth century. The proposal was initially rejected on the grounds that it lacked scholarly significance. Seymour convinced the thesis committee that, on the contrary, there was considerable primary material on the history of the game, and developments in baseball had mirrored what was happening in the nation, particularly the efforts of middle-class workers to find a sporting outlet in which they could participate.
In The New Yorker, Simon Parkin on how a bartender and go-go dancer got Jack Hilton’s Caliban Shrieks (1935) republished:
On a gray Sunday morning, Chadwick took the train to Oldham and began a pub crawl. In each bar near Hilton’s home, he hung posters with his phone number and the headline “Do you remember Jack Hilton?” The posters featured the only photograph Chadwick could find of Hilton, an image published in a Middlesex University journal, from 1985, to mark the writer’s death.
In the Sportsman’s Arms, the pub closest to Hilton’s home, Chadwick was explaining his quest to the landlord when an elderly lady approached from behind. “I think she had been eavesdropping,” Chadwick said. The woman said that she remembered Hilton, and that he often drank at the pub with a friend. “She looked around as if she was searching for them,” Chadwick said. “Then, from memory, she recalled the friend’s name: Brian Hassall.”
Two from our sister publication on the Hudson. [The Hudson River School? —Steve] First, David A. Bell on learning about the life of his mother, Pearl Kazin Bell, before his birth by going through old letters from her and others, and what he learned, including about her affair with Dylan Thomas:
But the affair soon hit an obstacle. My mother left for France to visit a friend, and during her absence Caitlin discovered the affair and felt, in her words, “absolutely mad with rage.” She then wrote the letter my mother told me about in 1994. Thomas, meanwhile, fell ill with pleurisy and then pneumonia, and asked one of his patrons—Margaret Taylor, wife of a prominent historian—to fetch his correspondence at his club, where he had asked my mother to write him. Taylor did so, but rather than delivering my mother’s letters from France she destroyed them, undoubtedly to protect Thomas from a woman she saw as unsuitable, at a time when divorce still carried a heavy stigma in Britain. My mother only discovered the truth later, calling what had happened (in a letter to Brinnin) a “lurid Jacobean-drama saga” and describing Taylor coming to see her “laden with her flowers and dulcet doom.” Despondent, she left for Sicily, where she wrote to Brinnin to thank him for sending snapshots he had taken of her and Thomas. “But that’s the end of it now,” she added, “with all its soap-opera bubbles broken, finally.”
[The Dylan Thomas seen here, with his undeniable appeal to women and shambolic management of his affairs, is the Dylan Thomas seen in a fuller picture in Donald Hall’s Old Poets (Hall updated it during his life and it has been reissued under different titles several times; my copy is the 2021 reissue), in which he recounts his time with several titans of the first half of the twentieth century. It is one of those books that I recommend to anyone with the slightest interest in the topic. —Steve]
Reviews:
Second, Tim Flannery reviews a book about volcanoes (Mountains of Fire: The Menace, Meaning, and Magic of Volcanoes, by Clive Oppenheimer, 2023):
Even after the lava starts flowing, actions can be taken to avert tragedy, and Mountains of Fire includes heroic examples of people protecting themselves from volcanism. In 1669 the people of Catania, Sicily, wrapped themselves in water-soaked hides and hacked away at the wall of a lava flow to divert it from their village. Astonishingly, they succeeded, but then a much larger and very angry group of people from the town of Paternò showed up—the lava was now heading toward their houses. The breach dug by the villagers healed itself before conflict broke out, and the lava continued on its prior course, causing only minor damage before the volcano was exhausted. Nevertheless, the authorities were alarmed enough to issue an edict stating that anyone interfering with lava flows would be liable for the subsequent damage.
In Slate, Dan Kois reviews the most recent offering from Michiko Kakutani’s turn from book critic to commentator on current events (The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider, February 20):
It’s all a gloss, that is to say, names cherry-picked to support trend-piece-level arguments about the evolution of culture. “Around the same time that graphic novels and manga were going mainstream, there was a surge of interest in fantasy and science fiction,” she writes confidently, tossing out, as examples, the very obviously unrelated phenomena of Star Wars (1977) and Maus (1991). Any number of critics I know would be surprised to read her conclusion that unlike the metafictional novelists of the 1970s or the miniaturists of the 1980s, “the twenty-first century’s most influential artists tend to look outward toward the world at large and the unfurling vistas of history.” Yes, I thought, nodding—that’s why they call the most notable literary movement of the past 10 years autofiction, because it’s looking autward.
[In the process of finding and copying the link for the book I learned that Walter Isaacson called it “dazzling” and “brilliant.” Well then. —Steve]
In the Journal, Edward Kosner reviews two books bringing back voices from New York City journalism’s past (Jimmy Breslin: Essential Writings, February 27; 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):
Breslin had no bleeding heart for criminals, and he detested crooked and brutal cops. One of his best columns is about a black youth wrongly suspected in a drug bust, who was handcuffed in a Queens station house and tortured with an electric cattle prod by two of New York’s finest.
For all his affection for traditional pols, Breslin’s B.S.-detector was infallible. A favorite target was Hugh Carey, the New York governor, who merited a classic Breslin nickname. When Carey made a taxpayer-funded grand tour of Southeast Asia, Breslin wrote: “Other states have governors who slobber around state fairs and supermarket openings. Our governor . . . is different. Our governor is Society Carey. . . . The object of the trip is to let Society Carey see the Orient, which he never has, and to let the Orient see Society Carey, which it never has.” The name stuck.
[We previously linked to a review of Romano’s book in WRB—Feb. 14, 2024.]
N.B. (cont.):
The future of lox in a world with scarcer salmon.
- defends the adverb.
[Font Review Journal does what it says on the tin. —Chris] [For your sake I’m happy this is out there. —Steve]
The legacy of “The Most Dangerous Game.”
- on “the English class canon” it belongs to: “The funny thing about ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ in any form, including the original story, is that it takes a story that by rights is a straight-up nightmare and turns it into a bloodless adventure story.”
New issues:
The New Criterion Vol. 42, No. 7 / March 2024 [As linked to above.]
American Compass is hiring a deputy editor.
First Things is hiring junior fellows.
Vice Media is no longer publishing on vice.com and is cutting hundreds of jobs.
[In preparation for the inevitable disappearance of the website I have archived a piece from there that shaped me more than anything else I’ve read: “I Played ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ on a Bar Jukebox Until I Got Kicked Out.” —Steve]
- on the “digital dark age” [Coming soon to an Internet near you. —Steve]: “It feels like I do a job with no past and no future. It gets you down, or gets me down.”
Local:
The local Post has moved away from editorials about local issues.
Karen Wilkin reviews “Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper” at the National Gallery of Art: “Moving through the installation, we discover that, as is always true of Rothko’s mature paintings on paper, the variations in paint application he devised, from ineffable transparencies to fierce swipes, become integral to the mood and affect of the works.”
Sacred Alaska (2024), a documentary about Orthodoxy in Native Alaskan culture, will be shown at the Avalon Theatre on Tuesday, February 27 at 5:30 p.m.
Poem:
“Perhaps It’s as You Say” by Peter Everwine
Perhaps it’s as you say
That nothing stays lost foreverHow many times have I said No No
There is a darkness in the cellAnd opened my hands to cup emptiness
Tasting its bitten faceI do not know if our loves survive us
Waiting through the long night for our stepOr if they will know us then
Entering our flesh with the old sighI do not know
But I think of fields that stretch away flatBeneath the stars their dry grasses
Gathering a light of honeyThe few houses wink and go out
Across the fields an asphalt road darkensAnd disappears among the cottonwoods by the dry creek
It is so quiet so quietMeet me there
[This poem was first published in Everwine’s 1973 Collecting the Animals, his second collection. I found it in the Pitt Poetry Series’ anthology American Poetry Now (2007). —Julia]
Upcoming books:
February 27 | Simon & Schuster
The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians
by Carlos Lozada
From an essay adapted from the book: Of course, there are some wretched Washington books. I’ve encountered plenty. But I want to make the case for the Washington book. I believe in the Washington book. And that’s because, no matter how carefully politicians sanitize their experiences and records, no matter how diligently they present themselves in the most electable or confirmable light, they always end up revealing themselves. They may not want to, but they can’t help it. In these books, they tell us who they are; they expose their fears, self-perceptions and unresolved contradictions.
It might be a throwaway line here, a recurring phrase there, or a single paragraph in the acknowledgments—but it’s in there somewhere. And that means that even these supposedly terrible books can be illuminating and essential.
You don’t need to rely on the Washington read. You just need to know how to read the Washington book.
Also out Tuesday:
University of Pennsylvania Press, in paperback: The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships by Barbara Newman
What we’re reading:
Steve continued reading Stanley Fish’s How Milton Works (2001) and, because he came to the section on “Lycidas”, reread “Lycidas” seven or eight times as well. [I don’t remember the last time I had before starting on 2024 Year of Milton; it’s weirder than I remembered. Fish’s read: “The tension that emerges at the end of the preceding chapter—between the desire to lose oneself in a union with deity, and the desire either to defer the moment of union or to master it by intellectualizing it—is a feature of the poetry as early as the Nativity Ode. In ‘Lycidas’ it is a master theme: and once it is steadily seen as such, it provides a vantage point from which we can make a kind of narrative sense of the poem’s many and surprising twists and turns.” It’s as good as any other attempt to answer that great question of the last 386 years—“What is ‘Lycidas’ about?”—and it certainly explains the impersonal pastoral cliches of the last eight lines better than most. —Steve]
Julia is reading the Fall 1961 issue of Robert Bly’s literary journal the Sixties, which features an anthology of French poets. [I’ve been thinking about Bly a fair amount recently, and reading the Sixties has been helpful in understanding both his influence as a translator and his general . . . antagonism toward the poetry community at the time. At one point, the editors recommend a book on French poetry, then add “It is typical of our determined isolationism that this book was not published by any literary press or poetry group.” This issue also includes what I understand was a recurring column in the journal, “The Award of the Blue Toad,” which is basically a column where the editors made fun of a particular poet or critic whose work they thought was bad for poetry as a whole. —Julia] [Julia, if you want an equivalent of “The Award of the Blue Toad” in the WRB we can talk about it. —Steve] [“Bly did it, so we can do it” seems a quick route toward getting in trouble. —Julia] She also picked up the Colette biography again.
Critical notes:
- Taylor on moral worldbuilding:
Everything is about a set of people grappling with a desperation for meaning in a world that deprives them of it, except in the contemporary world, the authors deprive their characters even of God or country or creed. The contemporary fictional every person is a millennial hunched over a computer doing extractive labor and having the products of that labor alienated from them, and thus alienated, they move through a series of dim, but beautifully described tableaux. And toward what end? It feels unstylish to even ask that question, but I ask it just the same. Toward what end? What is the point of this genre of novel? If we’re all just asking, in a world where God is dead and the Money God is dying and there only other God is the Attention God, why does anything I do matter? The endless recursive scroll of the contemporary novel has turned concerns about racism, patriarchy, the evils of consumption, and more, into a set of scripts and modes and faddish gestures all meant to signal rather than to address directly. We cannot address things directly because we are taught that directness is didacticism and didacticism is bad. Shoddy. Preachy. Moral in the bad way.
- on long sentences:
So why can we not resurrect old techniques in order to create works that are, perhaps, less immediate but more perceptive and alive? And the simple, tedious answer is that you can, but the book won’t sell.
Whenever I give that answer, people are like, “But is there any other reason why we can’t do it?” And the answer is no, there is no stylistic or artistic reason why you can’t write like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Willa Cather or Charles Dickens or Samuel Johnson.
Perhaps some think it would be ludicrous to write about modern life using the syntax of early-modern times—they might say that the pace of modern life and the character of our relationships can only be communicated using limited point of view, close narration, lots of sense detail and/or shorter scenes. I do think many editors, agents and critics believe that to be the case. If you give them something written in a more mannered style, they think it is “old-fashioned,” by which they mean unsuited for the modern era.
[One of these days I’m going to open that 1300-page Penguin Classics Clarissa sitting in a pile of books on my desk and make it past page 30 or so. —Steve]