Grant, O Lord, that I may not lavish away the life which Thou hast given me on useless trifles, nor waste it in vain searches after things which Thou hast hidden from me.
Enable me, by Thy Holy Spirit, so to shun sloth and negligence, that every day may discharge part of the task of managing to edit the Washington Review of Books which Thou hast allotted me.
N.B.:
This year’s first WRB Presents, featuring readings by V Efua Prince, Lisa Russ Spaar, Colette Shade, and Ryan Alexander, will take place on Wednesday, March 12 at Sudhouse D.C. at 6:30 p.m. Readings begin at 7.
March’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Saturday, March 29 to discuss the topic “Is there honor without revenge?”
The WRB’s third birthday sale is still ongoing; paid subscriptions are 20% off through the end of the month. That works out to $4/month or $40/year. [The month and the sale end Friday; the knowledge conveyed in the WRB every Wednesday and Saturday lasts forever. —Steve]
Links:
In Engelsberg Ideas, Malcolm Forbes on Charles Lamb’s essays:
Elia treasures books but places little value on money. In one of the greatest Elia essays, “The Two Races of Men,” he makes a distinction between those “races,” namely men who borrow and men who lend. Flouting logic, he mischievously declares that borrowers are the better breed, being “trusting and generous,” whereas lenders are “lean and suspicious.” We see Elia in playful mode again in “All Fool’s Day,” in which he extols ridiculous ideas, particularly those of the dunces in Jesus’ parables. Elsewhere Elia pokes fun at certain individuals’ attitudes towards manners, institutions and conventions. “Grace Before Meat” scoffs at gluttons who pray before falling on their dinners “like hogs to their troughs.” “A Bachelor’s Complaint of the Behavior of Married People” excoriates men and women who after exchanging vows and becoming husbands and wives—“married monopolists”—give short shrift to those that are single.
[As a bachelor I must say that my married friends do pretty well by me here. Forbes also quotes Lamb as saying that Candide shouldn’t be read “in the serious avenues of some cathedral.” It would not have occurred to me that a cathedral was a good place to read anything. Outside of Mass, they’re not that comfortable, and during it, what, are you going to ostentatiously read a book to show the priest what you really think of the quality of his homiletics? —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Langdon Hammer on Elizabeth Bishop’s time with her Baptist maternal grandparents in rural Nova Scotia:
Bishop would always look at belief with some mixture of resentment, envy, longing, defensiveness, and pride in her own unbelief. In 1977, at a party, she turned to Richard Wilbur, and said, “‘Oh, dear, you do go to church don’t you? Are you a Christian?’” Wilbur replied that he was. She pushed him: “Do you believe all those things? You can’t believe all those things.” She noted, Wilbur recalled, “points of Christian doctrine that she thought it intolerable to believe. ‘No, no, no. You must be honest about this, Dick. You really don’t believe all that stuff. You’re just like me. Neither of us has any philosophy. It’s all description, no philosophy.’” Then, changing course, opining that a lack of belief had weakened her poetry, she lamented “that she didn’t have a philosophic adhesive to pull an individual poem and a group of poems together.”
[Bishop’s “Sandpiper” (one of my favorites of hers) was the Poem in WRB—June 7, 2023; whether she was thinking about a beach in Nova Scotia I cannot say. (There are sandy beaches there, I checked; I come from Maine, where the shore is also mostly rocks.) I’d like to visit one day. The few Nova Scotians I’ve met have all had beautiful voices with, as Bishop says of her grandfather, “just enough [accent] to give it a Scotch flavor.” The one I met most recently sounded noticeably more Scottish when talking about Nova Scotia and her family there, which charmed me enough that I remember it the better part of a year later. —Steve]
Reviews:
In The Nation, Missouri Williams reviews a new selection of Djuna Barnes’ fiction (I Am Alien to Life, edited by Merve Emre, 2024):
Perhaps the distance between Nightwood and Barnes’ short stories simply has to do with the nature of the latter form. The intensity of feeling that spills across the pages of the novel is transformed into the wooden figures and tropes corralled into the enclosure of the short story, while the cumulative mystery of her characters’ frantic monologues becomes frustrating when reframed as stunted dialogue or coy description. Perhaps Barnes is pouring herself into too small a container: Dynamics that might have space to unfold in the novel are cut off here before they have a chance to get going. Or perhaps Barnes is playing a complex game with her favorite figures, the elderly aristocrats and dazzled ingenues forced into even narrower and ever more brightly painted settings, and so reading them requires a different state of mind, a suspended desire for character and plot, a more attentive eye for the beautiful and obscure.
At their best, the stories make a serious demand of their reader, which is something rare and special. When met with drives that seem to have no origin and actions that appear incomprehensible, you have to read between the lines, surmise, guess at meaning. There’s a line I returned to in “Aller et Retour” where the narrative voice describes “the lane of flowering trees with their perfumed cups, the moss that leaded the broken paving stones, the hot musky air, the incessant rustling wings of unseen birds––all ran together in a tangle of singing textures, light and dark.” It’s a line that makes me think of reading. It’s your job to untangle light from dark, to figure it all out. And that aside, it’s worth making the effort with this collection, even if just for the strength of certain images.
[We linked to an essay adapted from the introduction in WRB—Oct. 9, 2024.]
[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:
“Brodernism” and its discontents
Dr. Johnson (he’s just like me!)
Grace on a Poem by Mary Oliver and work
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; I appreciate it. —Steve]
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