Whatever she read, including the Washington Review of Books, it was against her better judgment.
N.B.:
[Something new for you, our readers: I am proud to introduce a new regular contributor to our Poem section, K. T. Mills. She lives in Washington, D.C. (important to have some D.C. representation in these pages), and her poetry has appeared in The Rialto, The Meadow, and Oyster River Pages. So that everyone can read her inaugural installment, today’s edition of the WRB is free to read. If you like what you see, please subscribe; the WRB (if I may borrow) is made possible by readers like you. —Steve]
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:
Two from
:On Thackeray:
Above all, I have always found resistible Thackeray’s knowingness, the way he repeatedly deploys a kind of strategic disillusionment, the whole “you may believe in human goodness and virtue, you may be an idealist, a starry-eyed innocent, but I know better: human beings are selfish, venal, unreliable, often nasty. I shall tell the truth about people, sir!” This is also in Waugh (another unlikeable, satiric writer with a superb style) and it’s comprehensible, as a vision of the word. Thackeray’s characters are never—I think—fully evil, or monstrous, but they almost always tend to egoism, to self-delusion and selfishness, to weakness and inconsistency, they often fall away from the standards they set themselves and fail to live up to society’s expectations. We can call this “being more realistic” than the heroes-and-villains of Dickens, but realism isn’t really what Thackeray is doing. He is no Zola, or Gissing. He inhabits the forms of Victorian domestic fiction in order to satirize its conventions. Which is fine, although I don’t consider it “more grown up” or mature (than, say, Dickens). Indeed, it strikes me as a pretty adolescent perspective on human affairs. “To describe love-making,” he says, meaning courtship, flirting, the start of a relationship “is immoral and immodest, you know it is.” Do I? “To describe love as it really is, or would appear to you and me as lookers-on, would be to describe the most dreary farce, to chronicle the most tautological twaddle.” Would it, though?
[The author seeing the reader as a co-conspirator in perpetrating a joke against the characters in the book is rarely a promising pose. Buddy, it’s a novel! You invented everything in it! If you feel so superior to your material, whose fault is that? At a certain point the joke is not on the characters but on the reader. —Steve]
On Gerard Manley Hopkins’ inscape:
When I first read this poem it bothered me that kingfishers aren’t red-and-orange, as one might expect a bird “catching fire” in flight might be—though of course, there are various kinds of flame, and it’s very possible that Hopkins is thinking of Pater’s “hard gemlike flame,” burning blue from its orange core. But the more important thing is that there is a fire at the heart of things, an inscape fire, as burns in the temple, or the hearth. The ἐντόπιος is belonging, not hermeticism: not a sealing oneself or a thing’s self away; but on the contrary a ground from which beauty is flared forth, sung forth (as with “bell’s bow” of pond-adjacent flowers, Christ’s self shining through the bodies and faces of people, in themselves not Christ, and yet connected all to each in Christ). This, we might say, homeliness of inscape, this house of being, all of us and everything “being indoors” in the dwelling in which “each one dwells,” is also the place from which we deal outward, flaming out, ringing out, being out. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” Hopkins insists: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” That’s where it lives, where it dwells.
[Like the man says, “And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.” (Also, can’t Google use the vast amount of data it has about me to understand that, when I search for a Bible verse, what I want to see is the Bible and not the New International Version?) —Steve]
In Public Books, Charlotte Rogers on aphasia:
Aphasia can change people in the most profound ways, at times for the better. As Emerson’s verbal and cognitive capacities declined, the problematic social Darwinism at the heart of his “Self-Reliance” faded, leading him to state toward the end of his lecturing era that “there is no pure originality” and that “all minds quote.” In Austral (2023), as the doctors explain the inner workings of aphasia to Aliza, she intuits that “only someone who has lost the immediacy and transparency of language is capable of finally seeing it in all its opacity: stubborn, exact, hard as a rock.”
Aphasia has changed me, too. Every conversation I have with my mother matters more to me now than it used to; I no longer multitask when I’m around her, because her words require—and merit—my singular focus. I often wonder: What should I ask her right now, while she can still speak? Might she be harboring some secret that, if left unsaid, could haunt us for years?
[Worth quoting even more of that Emerson passage, I think:
Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest or private addition so rare and insignificant—and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing—that, in a large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation.
And to that list add language itself, which we all receive, which we all shape ever so slightly by using it, and which very few of us add any new words to. —Steve]
- on James Fenimore Cooper:
The fact that there’s no broader, easily-digestible, glib message about colonization and settlement? That's exactly why Cooper’s work is good.
Cooper’s work is difficult in the best possible way. It’s easy to read, but hard to digest. You read the story, you’re so entertained, but at the end, you’re like, “What was this trying to say? So . . . were the Indians good or bad? Was settlement good or bad?” There’s no easy answer in the text.
Most American writers just ignore this problem. Mark Twain did a hatchet job on Cooper by saying his work is poorly-written and unbelievable. The specific things he says against these books are unbelievably unfair. He hardly discusses The Last of the Mohicans, which is the best of the books. Reading his essay, I honestly don’t even recognize the portrait he’s painted of Cooper's novels. They do not hinge on twigs snapping, for instance—that is not a major or frequent plot point. It's just a lazy caricature of his style, characterization, and plotting.
In The Paris Review, an interview with Emily Osborne about her translation of some skaldic poetry:
Egill opens his poem with an image of struggling to lift up “poem-beams” in order to “drag” poetry out of his mind. The difficulty of constructing an elegy becomes a recurring theme in the work. In the Norse “mead of poetry myth,” an elaborate etiological story referenced in “Cruel Loss of Sons” and other medieval Icelandic sources, Odin gives humans and gods the ability to compose poetry by stealing a fermented, “inspirational” liquid from the supernatural race of the jötnar. I was struck by how Egill mentions Odin’s risky journey to steal this mead so lightly and quickly while spending far more words on his personal difficulties in composing a poem about his dead sons. Composing this poem was grueling for Egill, and I think any translator would feel a sympathetic burden. Translating someone else’s suffering should feel like heavy labor, even across centuries and cultures.
[This newsletter was composed by stealing Yuengling Traditional Lager from the supernatural race of the Pennsylvanians. —Steve]
In The Point, John Palattella on James Longenbach:
“We remembered, we anticipated a peacock, and we find a peony,” wrote Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past. He was thinking of how coming to know another person is a continuous process of surprise, transition and adjustment. I knew Longenbach for more than three decades, first as his student and then as his editor and friend, and I am still discovering peonies in his poems where I thought there would be peacocks. For Longenbach, Proust’s visceral sense of the incremental passage of time could have been a description of lyric poetry: how during the process of writing or reading a poem, the logical and the arbitrary can seem to converge, coloring each other, changing each other in unforeseen ways. It is “foreign to my thought, Firmament to Fin,” Dickinson told her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson after he had suggested that she postpone publication of her poems until they had been purged of unruly rhythms and rhymes. Lyric poetry, which always threatens to be unruly or restrained, offers us a way to feel intimate with what we do not comprehend. To remember or to look at one thing is to think of another; to write one word is to transition to another. We are in two places at once, and in that moment the fruitful tension between flawed words and stubborn sounds is a linguistic achievement and a mysterious power. Or then something else, thinking taken to distraction, small talk shared over toast and tea.
In Engelsberg Ideas, Mathew Lyons on the 50th anniversary of Blood on the Tracks (1975):
When Blood on the Tracks was finally released, the critical reception was uncertain. It “would only sound like a great album for a while,” Jon Landau wrote in Rolling Stone. The public, more right than the critics, as before, took it to number one. Fifty years on, for all that its acoustic instrumentation looks back to Dylan’s earlier work, it still stands apart in his catalog: it doesn’t quite belong to any of the distinct periods which mark his output. In its conception and concerns, it is Dylan at his most self-consciously artful, but that artfulness is in the service of the rawest and most unprotected writing of his career. For all the dazzling shifts of perspective, it’s the sound of an artist bereft of any defenses but his art. And if the album’s title seems to beg the questions, whose blood, whose tracks, the answers ultimately come in the compromises and defeats, the defiant woundedness and persistence of the songs: all of ours, in time.
[It’s a great album, but I’ve never been able to escape the feeling that Blood on the Tracks is Dylan making himself legible as a ’70s singer-songwriter, Dylan for people who don’t really like Dylan. It has none of the faux-Rimbaud and thin wild mercury of Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966), none of the uncompromising sense that every song on it could be a hundred years old of John Wesley Harding (1967), none of the voice from another age shoring fragments against ruins of Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). (Here I have named every Dylan album I think is better than Blood.) But at the end of the day there’s a lot of great songs on it, and that’s the whole point. —Steve]
Reviews:
In our sister publication in Hollywood, Annie Lou Martin reviews Anna Moschovakis’ new novel (An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, 2024):
An Earthquake is both intricate and familiar, a hallucinatory dance between the narrator’s inner experience and the external world, her self-perception and the perception of others. It’s no small trick that Moschovakis’ first-person narrator is a Method actor. The techniques of “the Method”—which can include everything from reliving intense emotional experiences in order to conjure up an emotion to swapping out one’s soap for a brand their character might use—aim to thin the membrane between the life of the actor and the life of the character, activating conscious processes in order to influence subconscious behavior. Konstantin Stanislavski, the father of Method acting, distinguishes between the “art of representation” and the “art of experiencing.” External embodiment becomes internal experience; in this way, the actor aligns conscious desire with subconscious desire.
[R.I.P. David Lynch. (Much more on him coming in next month’s Film Supplement.) —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
“Cattle Gallstones, Worth Twice as Much as Gold, Drive a Global Smuggling Frenzy” [Why am I working on a books-and-culture email newsletter when I could be in the cattle gallstone business? —Steve]
- on mentions of Mishima in National Review.
An oral history of “Both Sides Now.”
Men are bad at texting. [I’m great at texting. Sorry to other men but I’m built different. —Steve]
American fast food chains in other countries.
The University of Chicago Press is having its annual sale.
Garth Hudson died on Tuesday, January 21. R.I.P. [The obituary says as much, but the organ really was what made The Band The Band. And even before they were The Band the organ was essential to the power and fury of Dylan’s ’66 tour and the feeling that the basement tapes are a kind of solemn carnival, a revenant attempt to explore American folk tradition that is also a bunch of guys goofing off. If this is merely the wide range of connotations the organ has, he made the most of them. —Steve]
Poem:
“Study of Two Figures (Orpheus / Eurydice)” by Monica Youn
was it that / that glance / backward
downward / so evidently / an afterthoughtthe body / enacting / its relentless
perpendiculars / as if to say / this placewhere you / abide / this is not
a place / I can abide / this isa hell to me / the exit / trajectory
of the body / the declension / of the headcongruent / to tenderness / congruent
to condescension / as if to say / you mustkeep up / I will not / stay
the eyelids / half-shuttered / the gazeaslant / as if to say / askance
was it that / that glancing / that angledglance / that pinned you / to your
eventuality / the body / an exitstaircase / aimed upward / at the grief
light / the glaring / sky
[I first read this poem in Monica Youn’s collection, From From (2023). In print, the poem is more clearly structured as what I believe is called a contrapuntal poem, engaging page space, rather than slashes, to separate each line into three. Online, one loses the capacity to so easily read the (potential) poem(s) as separate, entwined works, but on the other hand, there is increased energy and propulsion to the digital version.
I’ve often enjoyed work that recontextualizes myths, which I mean broadly—myths as social narratives undergirding the way we produce ourselves and our societies—but also, in this case, literally. I read a lot of Greek and Roman mythology as a child and I was more inclined to the myth of Cupid and Psyche than that of Orpheus and Eurydice. I think I found Orpheus and Eurydice nonsensical, having at the time no concept of lost faith. I must now admit that I have read neither Virgil’s nor Ovid’s rendition of this myth—I can only reflect on the ways in which Youn’s work interrupts my own half-remembered, child’s interpretation of the story, as well as those which have filtered into my consciousness through allusion and reference in other writing.
Youn herself appears to take an expansive view of myth. In an interview with TinHouse, Youn formulates her interpolation of Greek myths into the larger project in this way: “ . . . a lot of Greekness starts to become defined in opposition to an Asian other and the myths become somewhat obsessed with thinking about this idea of Asia.” What I find interesting about this quote is the idea that myths themselves could attain a status of subjectivity. While this poem that I’ve selected is not entirely representative of the collection from which it is drawn, which has been described in reviews as including “devastating meditations on the sadism of whiteness and the abjection of racial containment,” it is in conversation with others in Youn’s Study of Two Figures series. In the same interview, Youn describes the doubleness of the Two Figures device as “becom[ing] the space of complication.”
One possible complication that arises in this poem is the repositioning of the characters in their relationship to one another. The reinterpretation of literary mainstays via a resituating of perspective is not an especially rare practice. Hermione Hoby discussed this tendency last year in her essay “Feminist Correctives,” in which she cautions against reinterpretive efforts solely dedicated to the antagonism or valorization of the original works. Instead, she argues, reinterpretations like Percival Everett’s James (2024) and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) are more successful, serving as “critical complement[s]” to the originals.
In my view, Youn’s poem also falls into this latter category, where the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice is preserved and yet recast as conversation, the lens narrowing to view only the intimate. Where in my recollection of the myth their love is total and unending, in the poem it is stinging and contaminated. In the book, published four years after this version appeared in The Paris Review, the ending is once more altered—again reinterpreted—and calls forth a sharper heartbreak:
. . . that angled
glance / that pinned / you to your
eventuality / your body this / extension
ladder / reaching up / to my unwalled
claim / o my irrevocable / dawn.
—K. T.]
Upcoming book:
Oxford University Press | January 23
Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism
by Randall Fuller
From the publisher: In November 1839, a group of young women in Boston formed a conversation society “to answer the great questions” of special importance to women: “What are we born to do? How shall we do it?” The lives and works of the five women who discussed these questions are at the center of Bright Circle, a group biography of remarkable thinkers and artists who played pathbreaking roles in the transcendentalist movement.
. . .
Bright Circle is intended to reorient our understanding of transcendentalism: to help us see the movement as a far more collaborative and interactive project between women and men than is commonly understood. It recounts the lives of Mary Moody Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Lydia Jackson Emerson, and Margaret Fuller as they developed crucial ideas about the self, nature, and feeling even as they pushed their male counterparts to consider the rights of enslaved people of color and women.
What we’re reading:
Steve read more of Petrarch’s lyric poems (translated by Robert M. Durling). He also finished off Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon by Ernest B. Gilman (1986) [Excellent, especially in its treatment of Milton. —Steve] and read A Whole New Game: Economics, Politics, and the Transformation of the Business of Hockey in Canada by Neil Longley (2024). [This last one I read as part of a project of figuring out college football by comparing it to other sports that have “sold out” (as they say). This one was only so useful for that—when a Canadian says “sold out” it’s almost always implicitly followed by “to the United States of America,” which is not really a relevant concern for college football. There is something to it, though, if you take college football as a confederation of regional sports that became one national sport under the influence of TV (especially cable) and the internet; once it becomes clear that there’s far more money to be made in being a national sport the existing regionality is seen as a hindrance to its broader appeal. —Steve]
Critical notes:
- on pop girls in early middle age:
Rising is a poisoned compliment. In theory it says only that you are new and have a lot of potential, and that’s better than being new and having no potential. What you will find, however, is that there aren’t a lot of risen peers that one can aspire to become, particularly if you come from a demographic where youth is maybe disproportionately prized (like “women”). What’s next? Well, the void.
[I’ve been old my whole life. —Steve]
The Chinese word for “fiction” (xiaoshuo, 小說) literally means “small talk” or “small sayings.” Chinese literary culture had a rigid hierarchy of discourses, with Confucian classics and official histories at the top of the pyramid, while imaginative narrative texts like xiaoshuo were placed at the bottom. However, it would be misleading to say that xiaoshuo was denigrated because it was imaginative, whereas philosophical texts and histories were elevated because they were “real.” Since Chinese metaphysics didn’t posit a fixed, transcendent reality, reality was understood to be an ever-changing process, and so the categories themselves couldn’t be based on inherent, necessary or fixed essences but on functions and behavioural tendencies. The difference between discourses labelled “xiaoshuo” and “great learning” (Confucian classics and histories) wasn’t that one is unreal or imagined while the other is real. All discourse was understood as an account of the world, and the difference between “small talk” and “great learning” was the extent to which it was adopted to organize how people lived. Xiaoshuo wasn’t understood in contrast to reality, and it wasn’t metaphysically second class. It was at the bottom of the discourse hierarchy because its function wasn’t as grand as the classics’.
[Here at the WRB we aim to provide both small talk and great learning. —Steve]