The Washington Review of Books as a personal exercise, done by oneself and for oneself, is an art of disparate truth; more precisely, it is a way of combining the traditional authority of what has already been said, with the singularity of the truth which asserts itself in it, and the particularity of the circumstances which determine its utilization.
Links:
In The Point, Agnes Callard on apologizing:
In order to forgive me—as opposed to excusing my behavior, or brushing away the slight aside as insignificant—you have to both hold me responsible and absolve me of responsibility. Those are feats that you have to perform; I cannot perform them for you, no matter how well I apologize. Apology cannot produce the forgiveness at which it aims, which means that apology is a miracle that serves only to set the stage for a second and independent miracle. Apologizing is like trying to execute an alley-oop with a player who refuses to get anywhere near you. It’s no wonder the words stick in your throat.
In local happenings, Johannes Lichtman went to Langley to talk to the creative writing group at the CIA and wrote about it for The Paris Review:
While we waited for our food, the writer of dystopian sci-fi confirmed that if you work for the CIA, lawyers have to vet anything you publish. But they were more lenient than I would’ve guessed. She said that one of her novels had helped change how the agency viewed fiction versus nonfiction. While reading her novel, the lawyers decided that just because a character in a novel says something doesn’t mean that the author necessarily agrees, so there should be more leeway for CIA fiction writers. (Which suggests CIA lawyers are more nuanced literary critics than half of Goodreads.)
[As always, the Washington Review of Books is very open to receiving CIA funding. —Steve]
In 3 Quarks Daily, Rebecca Baumgartner on the failures of “landfill nonfiction”—“‘pop nonfiction,’ to be less mean”—and its attitudes towards its readers [Once you recognize the effect on writing of patronizing its readers you start seeing it everywhere. —Steve]:
It would be simple to dismiss these concerns by saying that some readers are just pickier (or the inevitable insult: elitist). Or if not pickier, then naive for expecting books to meet their idealistic standards and looking in all the wrong places for satisfaction. As the book critic Christian Lorentzen says, “This reader is simply bad at being a consumer. He doesn’t know how to spend his money on products that will please him. He is not in touch with his own taste and ways of satisfying it.” If there’s any duty we should be good at fulfilling by now, surely it’s being a good consumer!
In our sister publication in La La Land, Terry Nguyen on a variety of artists and writers who have dwelt on the color blue:
Blue is, by all means, a hot mess. It contradicts itself, in nature and in language. The blue of the sky is simply a trick of light: the shade we see is a result of scattered particles, bouncing off gases in the atmosphere. “Blue” foods and “blue” flowers derive their color from a bluish-purple compound called anthocyanin; they are often more purple than “true” blue. Blue, as an adjective, can represent the religious or the profane: blue stories are fairy tales, whereas blue movies are X-rated flicks. Tempting as it is to think of these blue ideas and associations as artificial inventions (how, I want to ask Gass, can fiction be blue?), stretched into a clunky, book-length metaphor for our moods and states of mind, I take solace in blue’s illusory states and its synthetic prevalence in nature. The sky “only gives our wish for blue a whet,” writes Robert Frost in the poem “Fragmentary Blue.” Fitting, then, that blue evokes “conflicting temperaments” in culture and language. The color’s fragmented mythologies have accumulated over centuries, such that blue has become saddled (or shattered, as Kristeva claims) with all sorts of meanings. “Sometimes, it seems, that everything is blue,” Mavor muses. This is, of course, untrue (the grass isn’t blue), but I suppose she meant that blueness can be ascribed to our heart’s whims.
[“Blue, blue, electric blue / That’s the color of my room / Where I will live.” —Steve]
In Interview, Mark O’Connell interviews Rachel Connolly about her debut novel (Lazy City, 2023) and being an Irish writer:
There’s not a therapy culture in Belfast, or a culture of everyone talking about their feelings and bringing up their traumas. It’s actually a very secretive and private place. So, to my mind, it would be so unrealistic to have the characters explaining stuff that happened during The Troubles or talking about their experiences because that doesn’t really happen. I wanted to have it linger in the background, because that is true to reality. To me, a novel is a space to try and explain what the social context of something looks like. How do people behave in a place that’s gone through something like that? Do they go around rotely explaining what happened, or does it change their character in a different way? The evasiveness of all of the characters in the book is very, very Belfast.
[Behind the paywall: more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, including Spinoza, an English-French phrasebook, Julia on elegy, and Steve on Charles Dana Gibson. 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.]
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Washington Review of Books to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.