WRB—Jan. 21, 2026
“curated for his interlocutor”
Please don’t shoot the Managing Editor; he’s doing the best he can.
Links:
In our sister publication in Tinseltown, Nyuol Lueth Tong on László Krasznahorkai’s sentences:
In a White Review interview, Krasznahorkai reflected that a continuous sentence permits what we might call—lacking a better term—the exactness of hesitation. The remark sounds paradoxical, yet it turns out to be true. The unbroken sentence becomes a grammar of scruple. It traces the mental footwork by which assertion shades into doubt and returns as a more provisional assertion, giving the reader not only room to inhabit thought but also time to recognize what thinking actually feels like. These sentences do not aspire to opacity; they aspire to accuracy. These are sentences that reject the consolation of manageability, that press against the reader’s instinct for reduction and instead ask for narrative stamina—an openness to experience rendered at its actual scale.
[Krasznahorkai doesn’t mention him in that interview, but when I read something like this I think of Henry James. Then again I suppose Henry James isn’t the kind of writer I would expect Krasznahorkai to mention. The commitment to accuracy creates its own opacity. So much of everyday thought and perception is an opaque and impressionistic (I mean both to compare it to capital-I Impressionism and to describe it literally as a series of impressions), and to record it accurately as it is, as it feels in the moment, is to depict everything through a haze of endless contextualization and recontextualization.
The long sentence as described here, with its hesitations and loops back and modifications and clarifications all accumulating, has more in common with speech than with “writing” as we have tended to understand it. This appears to be the result of compositional technique; Krasznahorkai isn’t quite clear in the White Review interview, but he makes it seem as though his method involves talking to himself until he has a good sentence and only then writing anything down, and James’ novels most associated with this approach to the sentence were dictated. It’s “narrative stamina,” but narratives exist in forms beyond writing. —Steve]
Two in our sister publication on the sweet Thames: first, Colm Tóibín on Auden and Eliot reckoning with the death of Yeats:
“Of course, I had met Yeats many times,” Eliot wrote to the poet Donald Hall. “Yeats was always very gracious when one met him and had the art of treating younger writers as if they were his equals and contemporaries.” In his Abbey lecture, Eliot teased out this idea of Yeats as a poet for the young: “For the young can see him as a poet who in his work remained in the best sense always young, who even in one sense became young as he aged.” Now, two years after his death, Yeats, or some version of him, speaks to Eliot, almost a quarter of a century his junior. The address is direct, intimate and alert to the ideas of shame and regret that Yeats deals with in “The Man and the Echo” and “Vacillation.” The ghost speaks of “the rending pain of re-enactment.” Eliot wrote about these lines to Hayward: “I mean not simply something not questioned but something consciously approved.” He wished to blame himself for what he had done at a time when he presumed, erroneously, that he was right.
[The modernists were lucky that Yeats (and also Ford Madox Ford) was so gracious and supportive.
The early Yeats I think of as a poet for the young, although I admit that by “the young” I might mean merely “Steve Larkin at eighteen.” There’s a simple freshness to it. And the older Yeats, in the poem he opens with “That is no country for old men,” is aware of his age and aware that he is no longer young. If his age has allowed him not to “neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect,” it has also revealed to him that the thing he seeks is the same that the young seek in the first stanza. The poem opens with a juxtaposition of “The young / In one another’s arms, birds in the trees” both “at their song” and ends with the poet describing himself as “set upon a golden bough to sing.” What sings on a bough? A bird. In age the poet returns to youth. —Steve]
Reviews:
Second, Michael Kulikowski reviews a book about Cicero (Cicero: The Man and His Works, by Andrew R. Dyck, 2025):
For a Roman statesman, Cicero’s aversion to provincial command and military glory was almost unseemly; he was only happy when his finger was on the pulse of life at Rome. Away from it, he was desolate, and to Atticus he confessed contemplating suicide. Trying to psychoanalyze historical figures is rarely productive, but Cicero was a type we can all recognize. He had a huge but exceedingly brittle ego which could seesaw from self-regard to self-loathing, and from elation to despondency, with alarming speed. We know this because so much of his correspondence has survived that it is at times possible to watch his mood, and with it his political calculus, change day by day, or even within the same day. (It is of course true that Cicero curated even his most intimate seeming letters, but they were curated for his interlocutor, not for posterity, and they humanize their author in a way that few ancient texts do.) When his recall was engineered in 57, he rebounded from despair, landing at Brindisi to mass adulation and conducting his slow progress back to Rome as if it were a triumphal procession. A vote of the Senate restored his properties and ordered that reparations be made for his losses. The father of his country gloried in the prospect of reclaiming his position at the center of affairs.
In The New Statesman, Jonathan Bate on Hamnet (2025) and past inclusions of Shakespeare as a character:
The problem is not that Shakespeare is assumed to have felt grief—of course he did—but that Hamnet reduces him to grief, as though a single emotional note could account for the riotous variety of 38 plays. Here genius is something that happens to Shakespeare, not something he actively does. The film flatters our desire for emotional uplift while evacuating the sharp intelligence, irony, and sheer mischief that pulse through the work. One of the greatest readers of the plays, Dr. Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century, believed that Shakespeare’s natural disposition led him to comedy, not tragedy.
[If Anne finds Hamlet moving because it is a play about her dead son, I have to wonder—did she notice that Hamlet’s mother is a character in the play? And that its portrayal of her is not positive? Especially when compared to Hamlet’s father. —Steve]
In New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry, Atreyee Majumder reviews a collection of modern Hindi poetry (Perennial: The Red River Book of Twenty-First Century Hindi Poetry, edited by Sourav Roy and Tuhin Bhowal, 2025):
The poet who left the deepest mark on me was Ramashankar Yadav Vidrohi (translated by Abhimanyu Kumar). Vidrohi’s poems are burning in a cauldron of rage. In the poem “New Harvest,” he writes: “If god could grow on earth, / surely, paddy can take root in the sky.”
These lines serve as commentary on the commodified form of faith in India today. But they speak contemporary, relevant political matters with a poet’s subtle weaponry. Vidrohi manages in an agrarian imagery of “paddy”—one that draws out some primary quality of a timeless India wherein, suddenly, he springs amid a whimsical poem about a paddy—a scathing line about faith and religion. Men for whom this rage poem is written, are not interpellated, their deeds are taken for granted—as though he were saying, “we live in a world where manipulation of gods on earth is a regular, mundane affair.” Credit is, of course, due to the translator for letting Vidrohi roar out into the contours of the English language. I can’t help, as a reader of Bangla, but think of the connections with the Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam whose poem “Vidrohi” is most famous.
In the local Post, Mark Athitakis reviews Chuck Klosterman’s book about football (Football, January 20) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Jan. 13, 2026.]:
The strategy has its virtues. Klosterman knows a lot about the game, and his command of esoterica generally serves the meatier questions that football engenders—about race, greatness, obsession, risk. And the pages are infused with a sense that the game is profoundly odd, starting with a name that suggests it privileges kicking over running and passing. “There are many, many things that could serve as bell cow of the U.S. monoculture,” he writes. “Why has society coalesced around a sport that wrecks people’s brains?”
The strongest essay is an attempt to explain why football is so popular, concluding that the game fits television like a nest in a tree—its action, its lulls, its militaristic but not overtly violent nature. Indeed, Klosterman suggests that the extreme athleticism of the game in recent years—see quarterback Patrick Mahomes or running back Christian McCaffrey—is evidence of a game striving to catch up with its video game version, instead of the other way around.
[As someone who once tried to write about the appeal of football, I can tell you that it’s hard. (“Of all the unimportant things in life, writing about football is the most important.”) The suitability of the game for television is an aspect I hadn’t considered, but it’s definitely there—the shift from baseball to football as the nation’s most popular sport is probably the shift from radio to TV as the dominant in-home entertainment medium by another name.
Calling football the “bell cow of the U.S. monoculture” isn’t really right, though; it’s just the only piece of the monoculture left, and its status looks all the more impressive since its competitors have more or less disappeared. Monday Night Football was putting up Nielsen ratings in the 1970s and 1980s better than Sunday Night Football is now (the process by which the NFL’s “game of the week” switched from Monday to Sunday is beyond the scope of this newsletter), but those ratings only made Monday Night Football a top-25 TV program then. The NFL has made a lot of money off every other way to advertise to so many people at once going away, but not even it is immune to broader cultural trends. (More about the monoculture in Critical notes below.) —Steve]
N.B.:
The time Ronald Knox did a radio hoax.
A new restoration of Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly (1929).
The world of oboe manufacturing. [Some quotes: “a fare put a knife to his throat,” “the damn instrument was invented by a sadist,” “you sound like a wild duck for at least the first three years, “the International Double Reed Society, also known as the International Double Nerd Society,” “a high school band director whose distaste for authority led to frequent relocations and a nervous breakdown.” As someone who—I can’t really say “played the oboe” so I will say “I’m pretty sure there is still an oboe in my parents’ basement somewhere”—all of this seems accurate. —Steve]
Black bears and fire tower lookouts. [I thought that was the coolest possible job as a kid. I kind of still do. —Steve]
Poem:
“An End” by Chet’la Sebree
I once told a love they only loved
the beginnings of things, and I wonder
now, years after our end, if that was
a reflection, projection, for I love
the slip and grip of an unfamiliar
pen in my hand, the crisp white or
pale beige of a new notebook page,
the first key flip in an apartment
ready to be smudged, ready for a new
configuration of my altar—singing bowl
and sandstone, selenite incense holder
to honor my fresh dead; for I am
intrigued when a centrifuge spins
my blood 3,000 revolutions per minute
to render me perhaps anew to me again—
better able to feed me the correct
concoction of controlled toxins to
reregulate, so my heart lumps my throat
for the right reasons when there is
a swell of cells becoming spinal filaments
spindle-stringing themselves;
for I know I’ll be eager-eared for
your first yelp before I am keen to
your cues and calls for help; for
in the beginning, I can be calm
like a buoyant body floating
in gentle wind-roiled water
push-pulling me away and toward
the shore of knowing what is
to come—which pressure
causes metamorphoses,
protostar pre-nucleosynthesis,
and which pressure produces fissures,
fault-lining matrix-lodged turquoise and jade
for there’s knowledge I don’t want
so I scramble search my way
back to the water, the garden, the egg.
[This poem is as lively as it is introspective, full of movement—“a buoyant body floating / in gentle wind-roiled water / push-pulling me away and toward” and sudden, still clarity—“there’s knowledge I don’t want.” In this poem too, there are flashes of alliteration and interior rhyme that drive the poem forward, “singing bowl / and sandstone, selenite incense holder” and lend it musicality, “I’ll be eager-eared for / your first yelp before I am keen to / your cues and calls for help.” This poem also happens to close Sebree’s collection, Blue Opening, which contemplates motherhood and health, subjects extremely susceptible to optimization creep. I sensed none of that here, blessedly. In an effort to embrace imperfection along different lines, Sebree has said she “desired an ending that didn’t feel weighted with finality, craved one that felt expansive, like a beginning, an opening,” and I think she has largely succeeded. —K. T.]
Upcoming books:
Random House | January 27
Vigil: A Novel
by George Saunders
From the publisher: Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.
She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?
Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s postdeath future.
With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time—the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress—and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.
Also out Tuesday:
Liveright: After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace by Robert Polito
New York Review Books: Trilce by César Vallejo, translated from the Spanish and with glosses by William Rowe and Helen Dimos
What we’re reading:
Steve read a little bit more of The Recognitions. He also read some of Béla Bartók’s essays. [More about that in Critical notes below. —Steve]
Critical notes:
[I had intended to mention Richard Lovelace’s “La Bella Bona-Roba” (a poem that keeps getting mentioned in the WRB) in connection with K. T.’s notes on last week’s Poem about comparing the female body to edible animal tissue, but I forgot. —Steve]
In the Journal, Ben Fritz on the rise and fall of American monoculture:
The growth of the American monoculture was, like so much of our nation’s history, a product of geopolitics, economics and technology.
Until the early 1900s, the U.S. was relatively poor, geographically dispersed, and without the technological means to share media with everyone. Newspapers and pamphlets have been a part of the country since our founding, but because each copy had to be physically created and then transported to be read by at most a few people, they reached only a fraction of the populace.
To see anyone act, you literally had to be in the room where it happened.
[A lot of discussion of the end of the monoculture (I’m not picking a bone with Fritz; he just made me think about it) and the return to something fractured and variegated makes the same mistake that commentary about the end of a literate culture and the return to an oral culture does: not understanding that the dying culture destroyed the traditional resources associated with the culture we’re supposedly returning to. No one now has memorized the Iliad; no one now has three thousand proverbs and a thousand and five songs. In the same way, what is replacing—has replaced, really—the monoculture will not be able to fall back on the traditional expectation that most art and music you actually experienced would be made by people in your community, including yourself. The gentry needed their daughters to play the piano because record players didn’t exist yet, for example. Communal singing, which used to be a common form of music-making, is basically extinct except at a few churches. Art can’t just be something you experience on a screen. It has to be something you support and participate in and help create. (Subscribe to the Washington Review of Books!) —Steve]
In the Times, Evan Shinners on introducing people to classical music:
In the 1980s, Neil Postman argued that Sesame Street wasn’t teaching kids to love math, only to love television. Whatever you think of Big Bird, Postman’s thinking applies just as well to the modern approach to classical music. When symphonies entice new audiences with concerts full of popular film music, the audience may rediscover their love for the films but they won’t magically develop a love for Beethoven. An audience that’s lured in to sit through an abridged version of an opera has not learned how to listen to an opera. These tactics might bring new audiences to see the symphony, but they don’t bring them to the music.
For classical music to endure, we need to demonstrate to a new audience that the form is not similar to modern music but actually very different in important and—once you acquire a taste for it—enjoyable ways. In execution, this theory works very simply: Don’t change the music; change the way you deliver it. Do the opposite of what institutions are doing when they offer radically shortened operas or watered-down symphonies.
[Postman was right about Sesame Street. The tactics Shinners describes reveal that the people using them have no confidence in the music itself. —Steve]
Béla Bartók (in “Liszt Problems”):
How did Liszt fit these contradictory elements into a unified whole? First of all, it must be said that whatever Liszt touched, whether it was Hungarian art song, folk song, Italian aria or anything else, he so transformed and so stamped with his own individuality that it became like something of his own. What he created from these foreign elements became unmistakably Liszt’s music. Still more important, however, is the fact that he mixed with these foreign elements so many more that were genuinely drawn from himself that there is no work in which we can doubt the greatness of his creative power. We can say that he was eclectic in the best sense of the word; one who took from all foreign sources, but gave still more from himself.
[Wild essay. Bartók goes on to argue that Liszt was more influential on the development of music than Wagner because Wagner solved every problem he set himself, leaving room for nothing but inferior imitation, while Liszt “touched upon so many new possibilities in his works, without being able to exhaust them utterly.” (I suppose that if you asked me what Liszt’s main influence on culture was, I would say something about music, and if you asked me about Wagner’s, I would say something about the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. So maybe Bartok has a point.) He also says that Liszt has more in common with the French composers of his time than the German, which is either an interesting reexamination of the “war of the Romantics” or a way of saying that Liszt wasn’t extremely self-serious in his work.
I excerpt this paragraph, though, because I hope to be described this way one day. —Steve]
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