But is the Washington Review of Books like the old Playboy magazine? You have essays there by the modern-day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.?
N.B.:
This month’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Friday, January 24 to discuss the topic “Can we learn to be alone?” If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In the Times, Elisa Gabbert on allusions in poetry:
According to the scholar Earl Miner, “The test for [allusion] is that it is a phenomenon some reader or readers may fail to observe.” He does not say allusion itself is a test, but the misread floats over the sentence like an optical illusion. I remember, as a student, it felt like a test, when I was reading or more properly looking at modernist poetry and understanding nothing, because I didn’t know what it would mean to understand a text like The Waste Land without constant recourse to the endnotes; they were annoyingly irresistible. Rather, Miner is making a distinction about intent. Allusion is, unlike intertextuality, deliberate, and, unlike plagiarism, meant to be recognized. It presumes “a community of knowledge,” a phrase I like for its fellow feeling. I like to think that people who have read the same poems—my A may be your B—are friends of a kind, across any distance, before and after death.
[One of the more important moments in my education was being assigned The Waste Land in English class my sophomore year of high school. (Ms. Mahar, if you’re reading this, thank you.) I had a conversation about it years later with another high school teacher of mine, in which I wondered what the point was of assigning such an allusive text to a bunch of us who had no idea what was being alluded to. Wouldn’t it make more sense, I asked, if we were first exposed to the things being alluded to throughout our four years of English classes before encountering The Waste Land? He responded, I think rightly, that you do not assign The Waste Land to high schoolers because you expect them to get the references; you assign it because maybe the parts they get will draw them in, and once they’re drawn in they’ll realize that they haven’t read anything and don’t know anything. In other words, the community Gabbert mentions is out there, and you can join it, and you should—but you have to work for it. No one can give it to you. Education is a collaborative process, but it also involves a lot of time alone, reading, because that’s still the best way to know what’s in a book. —Steve]
- on working with Craig Raine:
We finally settled on J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, from 1973, Craig predictably rebuffing my idea that I wrote more widely on “post-colonial” winners. “I’d rather your piece was about Farrell’s book than about the Booker’s judges’ complicity with imperialism.” (It was unlikely to claim that: work characterised as post-colonial tends, of course, to be anti-imperial.) “I want to establish—if possible—how many of the winning novels were any good and whether the prize has any aesthetic credibility.” I accepted the brief and, perhaps to show just how on-side I’d become, got in touch to ask if he knew the book was so turgid. “I thought it might be one of the good ones,” he wrote, “but they’re all turning out to be shit.”
I filed the piece, even later than the previous time (one email just read, “Good morning. A-hem . . . ”), and Craig sent back an edited version, with the ambiguous verdict: “Reads well now.” I had a number of quibbles, among them a request to excise the French and Latin words he’d added. Craig’s entire reply read, “Does that mean you vote UKIP?” Later in the back-and-forth, he expressed his amusement that I “think passe is French and viz. is Latin. You mean like tour de force or succes d’estime and e.g. and etc.?” Yes, just like those. I said that I might use “magnum opus” and “maybe tour de force ironically.” “Leo,” he advised, “these are now English words.”
In Engelsberg Ideas, Josh Mcloughlin on English chorography:
The introduction to the Benedictine monk Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon (c. 1340), for example, combined both time and place, albeit on the vast cosmological and global scale typical of medieval “universal chronicles.” Higden offered descriptions of towns, roads, rivers, ecclesiastical jurisdictions, dialects, flora and fauna of Britain, drawn from Bede, Gerald of Wales and Geoffrey of Monmouth. In the sixteenth century, English lay scholars fused humanist methods of source criticism with an increasingly sophisticated sense of anachronism and the emergent techniques of material and philological antiquarianism, revitalizing chorography as an erudite yet literary form.
Richard Helgerson writes in Forms of Nationhood (1992) that “Chorography [ . . . ] is the genre devoted to place, as chronicle is the genre devoted to time.” In practice, however, it was often difficult to separate history from geography and chorography. The royalist polemicist and historian Peter Heylyn wrote in Microcosmus (1621) that: “as Geography without History, hath life and motion, but at randome, and vnstable; so History without Geography, like a dead carkasse hath neither life nor motion at all.” Chorography, then, was not quite history, yet could not help verging onto the historical, because it dealt with the remains of the past—natural and human—that endured in the present, whether preserved intact or as ruins, ghosts, folk tales or the indexes of environmental change, such as erosion, clearance, reclamation and drainage.
[I’ve always had a soft spot for the chorography of Sicily in De rerum natura, in which Lucretius, by describing Sicily as a combination of the four elements—water (the sea around it), fire (Mount Etna), air (where Etna sends its lightning), and earth (the land)—hints that Empedocles came up with his theory of the elements due to his surroundings. This is chorography as biographical criticism. (He also describes Sicily as a triangle, which is very important to do. It was the ancient equivalent of describing France as a hexagon.) —Steve]
[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:
The problems with being the most beautiful woman in the world
Plato Atticizing the First (or Second, depending on how you number) Commandment and banishing the poets
Grace on a Poem in which Dr. Johnson recommends getting some Vitamin D from the sun
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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