The thought of what America would be like
If the WRB had a wide circulation
Troubles my sleep,
N.B.:
[Since you’re reading the first issue of the WRB of a still-brand-new year, we thought it would be a good time to do some State-of-the-Newsletter talk, which is to say, first of all, that we’re all—myself, Steve, Julia (gracing us again, from her painful hiatus from the poetry desk, this weekend: see the Poem), Sarah and Grace, Hannah—so grateful for all of you, the WRB’s “loyal readers.” We’re just shy, this weekend, of three years of your biweekly emails. Especially to those of you who have been with us from the beginning—old friends or a lot of you who have become old friends by now—thank you. We’re not going to change anything, and we’re all terribly proud of what people regularly stop me on the street to call the finest books-and-culture newsletter money can buy (on which, more later). That being said, here are some announcements:
Formalizing what has been the de-facto arrangement for a long time, I’m going to be dropping off the regular byline for the newsletter and dropping the title of Managing Editor. We’re calling me “Founder and Publisher,” which is just about accurate—I’ll still be organizing and hosting all our events in D.C. and New York, I’ll still be the one to talk to about the WRB, I’ll still very occasionally drop in on the ’sletter. But I think it’s better to have your biweekly literacy updates officially and completely in Steve’s able, irritable, mannered hands. I don’t have to say anything like I’m sure he’ll do a great job—we know he will, just as he has been for a very long time. A better and more capably Managing Editor than I ever was.
Formalizing another de-facto arrangement, the WRB is now going to be published by Liberties and the Liberties Journal Foundation. This won’t mean anything for you, the readers, but it will give us an institutional home at a nonprofit, and so it means a great deal for me, the one with the administrative headaches. We’ve been partnered with Liberties for over a year now on our events, and I took a day job with them in October; now it’s official.
Events: Michael, Lauren, and I are planning the next season of WRB Presents—I’m letting you know now so that you can begin to prepare yourselves, store up your excitement, and look for our announcement of the first reading of the Spring in the coming weeks. If you are in D.C., within spitting distance of the District, have fond memories of a school trip here, whatever is it: we’re excited to see you in-person for some wonderful evenings.
More events: We’ll also still be holding the D.C. Salon every month—the recording of December’s, “Can people change?” will be online soon. This month’s topic is “Can we learn to be alone?” and we’ll announce the date soon. Everyone who comes to the salon is happy they did; why would the same not apply to you?
Events far and wide: And the next New York Salon (“Salon in New York”? “D.C. Salon in N.Y.”? “Acela Corridor Chat”? I admit I’m at a dead end with the house style for this) will be on February 7. If the closest you can get to the life of culture is living up north on the Hudson (Watch it. That’s where I live. —Steve), we’d love to see you there. Email me for details.
That’s about all I have for you at the moment; organizational updates, like becoming literate, shouldn't take your entire day. Thank you—and that comes from me, personally, from the depths; I can only be grateful that so many people read and love the WRB. —Chris]
[Wait, one more thing: Pay for a subscription. This is your guilt-trip. The WRB isn’t anyone’s full-time job, and we take in vanishingly little cash, almost all of which goes to subscribing, as we do, to everything under the sun and the incidental expenses for our D.C. and N.Y. events—we’re extremely bound in what we’re able to do, and what I’m able to do for my team here, because of it. Our goal this year is to change all that and make this not only a noble but a sensible thing for us to spend our time doing. Since Substack gives us all sorts of basic tracking numbers, I know there are thousands of you who read the WRB every week, presumably, I can guess, not to your displeasure. Until the CIA funding comes through for us, we really do need an awful lot more help sustaining this project than we’ve so far received; I suggest here that, if you’ve been edified or entertained by us over the months or years, you ought to consider yourself a part of that help. —Chris]
Links:
- on style and authority:
Writing—even critical writing of the kind I usually do, which I often (though neutrally!) describe as “parasitical”—creates a world of sorts. You can imagine this metaphorically in various ways: as a house, as a theme park ride, as a dance, as a series of time lapse photos, and so on. Pieces have a tempo, they have drama, they have plot. You, the writer, are the master of ceremonies. You decide what happens, what goes where, when people see it, and how. Nobody else is in charge. It is just you. When you read a piece of writing that is genuinely great (or even simply, good), that is what you sense: that the person behind this has accepted their authority and the responsibility that comes with it. If the windows leak, if the time lapse is out of order, if the ride leaves people stuck at the top of the Ferris Wheel—that is one person’s fault. Yours.
Really excellent non-fiction writing is often collaborative—that is, the writer has a trusted reader or critic or editor with whom they work. You do not build the house alone. Nevertheless, the buck has to stop with somebody. It ought to stop with you.
[Normally I would stick this down in Critical notes, but in the state-of-the-union mood I want to say a few words about what I’m trying to do here. The buck does stop with me, after all (although, as Chris says, my hands are too able, irritable, and mannered for my writing to lack a sense of authority, and I’m too much of a crank to willingly give it up).
The WRB, like any roundup, is a sort of utility—we’re all busy, every day there are many new things to read, and it would be useful if someone pointed us to what’s good (or at least interesting) and gave us a flavor of what’s going on. And so I hope the WRB saves you time as you go about your day, if nothing else. I don’t mean to belittle the importance of that; our lives are finite, and whatever small contributions I may make to the sum of human happiness are far outweighed by those of the inventor of the washing machine.
As any roundup will, the WRB has taken on much of the personality, interests, and tastes of the person putting it together, and mine are no secret to the regular reader. (As I not infrequently quote from Eliot: “Only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” But he didn’t know that you could channel them into a twice-a-week email newsletter.) If I have learned one thing from the modernists it is this: the solution to cultural stasis is never immediately apparent, and so we have to be willing to look everywhere and at everything. We do not know what the past has for us until we find it, and we will not find it unless we look.
As BDM says, complaining that things are bad now is easy and cheap. How can we make them better? I don’t know. But I do know that we can, and finding out how will require us to continue exploring, and learning, and thinking. My commentary is, I hope, an example of that process taking place out in the open, and I also hope that the content of the WRB points you in potential directions for your own exploration. Like the intellectual life, the WRB is a collaboration and a labor of love. —Steve]
In Engelsberg Ideas, Malcolm Forbes on the 300th anniversary of the first volume of Defoe’s A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain:
One of the Tour’s strengths is the way Defoe candidly and succinctly (in his words, “no blusters, no rhodomontadoes”) described cities and towns. Harwich, he writes, is “a town of hurry and business, not much of gaiety and pleasure.” Lincoln is “an ancient, ragged, decayed, and still decaying city.” Maidstone is a pleasant place where “a man of letters, and of manners, will always find suitable society, both to divert and improve himself.” Plymouth is “a town of consideration.” Gloucester a “middling city, tolerably built, but not fine.” Poor old Darlington “has nothing remarkable but dirt, and a high stone bridge over little or no water.”
Some descriptions allow us to trace great changes over the centuries. There are cities that have become shadows of their former selves. “I believe there is more business done in Hull than in any town of its bigness in Europe,” Defoe declares. Then there are cities like Bath—today quiet and genteel but for Defoe a bustling, vibrant pleasure resort, “taken up in raffling, gaming, visiting, and in a word, all sorts of gallantry and levity.” (Moll Flanders echoes this, but is also more scathing when she calls it “a place of gallantry enough; expensive, and full of snares.”)
[We linked to a review of a collection of essays about Defoe in WRB—Sept. 28, 2024. I like to think of the WRB as a pleasant newsletter where a man of letters, and of manners, will always find suitable links and commentary, both to divert and improve himself. —Steve]
In The Irish Times, Tim Fanning on Pierce Egan, a Regency-era boxing writer:
While Egan’s prose reveled in the technical aspects of the sport—it was he who referred to boxing as a “science,” thus giving Liebling the title of his book—his blow-by-blow reportage of the then marathon, bare-knuckled bouts testify to its primeval violence. Egan introduced countless slang terms into his reports, thus gifting the sport with its own terminology and earning him one of his many monikers: “The Lexicographer of the Ring.”
Liebling once described Egan as the “Blind Raftery of the London prize ring.” In fact, the Irishman was a kind of Regency-era Jimmy Breslin—his very presence ringside lending a certain literary kudos to prize fights and other popular entertainments of the age, such as cock-fighting and bull-baiting, cudgelling and wrestling.
Prefiguring a later generation of British sportswriters, Egan understood the power of patriotic flag-waving. In his introduction to the first volume of Boxiana, he contended that boxing represented the “manly” characteristics of the British race. As Egan saw it, Johnny Foreigner always picked up a weapon to resolve a dispute. The Dutch were too quick to turn to the long knife; scarcely any person in Italy was without a stiletto; and the French and the Germans often used sticks and stones to seek revenge. In England, “the Fist only is used.”
[As always, if I could have anything I wanted this newsletter would be about college football. It’s a shame that sportswriters no longer really aim at literary merit or have a sense of sociological interest; the fans and readers deserve better. (When most sportswriters do attempt a prose style, they come up with purple prose and some of the most stunning mixed metaphors you’ll ever see.) And I’m still waiting on the great college football book that will explain America. (Am I going to have to write it one of these days?) —Steve]
Reviews:
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Peter Brooks reviews a new translation of a novel by Balzac (The Lily in the Valley, translated by Peter Bush, 2024):
This gives the novel a tumultuous, unsettled background in urgent emotions that always threaten to spill out (the image is suggested by Félix) but must be dammed up. It’s preeminently the novel of passion denied but always threatening a return of the repressed. As Freud liked to quote from Horace, naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret: you can drive out nature with a forked stick (like a snake), but it will always return. In The Lily in the Valley, eros is always there, in a rhetoric that displays all the clichés of romantic passion yet at the same time lets us hear an ironic countervoice. The very structure of the novel, in fact, represents a kind of disciplining of its passionate content. Félix’s narrative of his all-consuming youthful love for Henriette is told in the form of a letter to his new love interest, Natalie de Manerville. She has asked him to explain his moodiness. His very first words—in Peter Bush’s new translation—are “I will bow to your wishes”: I will tell you why I am still dominated by the ghost of my past love. That tones down a bit the words “Je cède à ton désir”: I give in to your desire to possess my past life. And Félix ends this prefatory note to his confessional narrative with a plea: “don’t punish me” for giving in to your demand. We will see by the end how ineffectual a plea that is.
[We linked to earlier reviews in WRB—July 24, 2024 and WRB—July 31, 2024. In my experience if a woman says something to you like “How can one so young know such things? Were you a woman once?” the only real response is to produce some inanity and move on. —Steve]
In the Journal, Elizabeth Lowry reviews a book about Jane Austen’s endings (Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, by Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey, 2024):
Austen’s antiromantic darts are perhaps most keen in the confusions of Emma. Emma herself is engaged for much of the book in plotting a supposedly happy ending for her protégée, Harriet Smith, by getting her to refuse the unflashy farmer who has made her a heartfelt offer of marriage and to set her sights on Mr. Elton, a vain, upwardly mobile clergyman. Her scheme fails miserably, but not before Mr. Elton has mistaken Emma’s patronage for romantic interest and Emma has convinced herself that the man she belatedly realizes she loves, her mentor, Mr. Knightley—who has been quietly trying to correct her crazier notions—is about to propose to Harriet instead. As Ms. Brodey observes, the novel is really about the “temptations of authorship.” Emma’s baroque plotting, ridiculous as it is, seems no more absurd than Richardson’s or Radcliffe’s in the novels they wrote. Mr. Knightley’s proposal to her, when it finally comes, is unlike her fantasies: It is “plain, unaffected, gentleman-like”—a lot like his advice. In Emma, language, narrative perspective and a philosophy of life are indistinguishable.
[There were some links and notes on Austen’s free indirect discourse in WRB—Dec. 13, 2023. Emma especially has two layers to Austen’s commentary on this attempt to impose novelistic conventions on life. Her attempts to plot everyone else’s life out fail, but they also make her worse at understanding her own life and what she wants. And this gives power to those moments when reality punctures the smooth self-satisfaction of the free indirect discourse—and it never pierces it all the way through until the end. (The piece by John Mullan linked in that earlier WRB is especially good on this.) —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
An unaired BBC interview from 1976 with C. L. R. James.
The youths are reading Dostoyevsky. [“I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my posting thumbs hurt.” —Steve]
Against “honesty” in popular music. [Honesty in pop music is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Cf. John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970). —Steve]
“The Unstoppable Rise of the State Symbol” [Always happy to see Moxie mentioned. —Steve]
Bumper stickers are all weird jokes now. [While back in Maine for the holidays I saw an “I’d rather be eating hot dogs” bumper sticker three times, which tells me that either I saw the same car a lot or that the people of Maine are increasingly consumed by a ravenous hankering for hot dogs. (Red snappers only, please. If you boil them the water should turn fire-engine red. That’s a test of quality.) —Steve]
Tips for sneaking into company holiday parties.
The Musical Times is shutting down.
Barry Malzberg died on Thursday, December 19. R.I.P.
Rickey Henderson died on Friday, December 20. R.I.P. [I had some notes about the deaths of great baseball players, occasioned by that of Willie Mays, in WRB—June 19, 2024. —Steve]
David Lodge died on Wednesday, January 1. R.I.P.
Poem:
“Night Road” by Laura Newbern
“Tristan,” she said, when I asked her
the name of the cat she’d been
talking about, the one
who was so needy, who needed
always to be in her lap,
who would wail like a child
when he was not. We were driving—
sometimes there is nothing to do
but drive—we were speeding along
On the road by the water,
the silent water, which, at night,
is invisible. Almost invisible—
calm, glassy, a slice of moon
flashing it for us here and there,
letting us know where we were,
though we knew well
the body of water and even better
the strip of land running beside it—
sparse houses, single stars,
the dark board of the straight road
and the white clapboard church that
heaves itself, up
out of the ground—”Tragic,”
I said, which came out a bit
as funny, but real, but meant.
By day that body of water is
deeply blue; by night it is black,
as a charm. By day King Mark
in his paper crown stood on the
shore and wondered who
had taken his love . . . by night, he knew.
[This poem is from Newbern’s 2024 A Night in the Country, her second collection. A Night in the Country is easily one of my favorite collections I’ve read in the past several months, so it felt right to start off the year with it. It’s a gorgeous book; the poems weave together beauty, grandeur, and moments that—in hands less skilled than Newbern’s—would be unremarkable ones, and the end result is a book full of striking, musical poems. It’s a collection worth reading in full.
Throughout the book, we get descriptions that are both lovely and unexpected without ever losing either the compelling syntax or the subtlety of voice that holds the poems together. In the titular poem, for instance, string lights over a party become the so many moons / on their invisible strings, and in the same unexpected way, there are moments of such a wonderfully brutal voice, as in the poem “Starry Night,” which starts:
My great-grandfather was an astronomer.
I never saw him.
These winter nights, I do not know
what is out there.
It was hard, really, to pick just one poem from A Night in the Country to feature. I ended up picking “Night Road,” because it embodies one of my favorite things about the collection: the speaker’s way of expressing her familiarity with the subjects of the poems: the places, the people, the emotions.
It’s not a demonstrative kind of familiarity, but something quieter. This is the intimacy that allows for the unspoken; walking through a house in the dark, a conversation made up solely of eye contact, the “love you” where the “I” is dropped because the phrase is so well-worn but still meant. That’s what comes across in these poems for me. I think of it in contrast with, say, Jack Gilbert’s poems of Pittsburgh (which I love deeply) where Gilbert is explaining Pittsburgh to a less-familiar reader, or using Pittsburgh in a more symbolic function. These poems don’t explain, or distance the subject; they’re present, almost reverential.
Newbern brings that sentiment to the forefront in this poem, when the speaker says that she and her friend in the car don’t require the light of the moon to let them know where we were, because
we knew well
the body of water and even better
the strip of land running beside it—
This is clearly a speaker who knows well the landscapes she brings the reader into, whether it’s a painting by Bellini, an old asylum, or an email from her father. And yet for all that intimacy, it isn’t a sentimental or gentle collection. The deftness, strength of voice, and craft of the poems, really do keep it exciting—again, the word brutal comes to mind. To read these poems is to be cut open, in no small part because of Newbern’s skill with poem endings. I have to highlight the closure of this poem, of course, which is just so lovely. We move so quickly from the speaker’s earnestness after she says “Tragic,” into the image of the water (I love both the unusual syntax and the simile that we get when Newbern says that the water turns from blue to black as a charm), and then into that final image of King Mark in his paper crown standing on the shore, moving from unsettled wondering into a more terrible knowledge. The poem that starts off with a conversation about a cat, by its end, carries so much more weight: intimacy as source of comfort, knowledge as burden, and the way that landscapes, which neither speak nor change, bear their quiet witness to our mundanities and our catastrophes alike. —Julia]
Upcoming books:
University of Chicago Press | January 8
On Close Reading
by John Guillory, with an annotated biography by Scott Newstok
From the publisher: At a time of debate about the future of “English” as a discipline and the fundamental methods of literary study, few terms appear more frequently than “close reading,” now widely regarded as the core practice of literary study. But what exactly is close reading, and where did it come from? Here John Guillory, author of the acclaimed Professing Criticism (2022), takes up two puzzles. First, why did the New Critics—who supposedly made close reading central to literary study—so seldom use the term? And second, why have scholars not been better able to define close reading?
For Guillory, these puzzles are intertwined. The literary critics of the interwar period, he argues, weren’t aiming to devise a method of reading at all. These critics were most urgently concerned with establishing the judgment of literature on more rigorous grounds than previously obtained in criticism. Guillory understands close reading as a technique, a particular kind of methodical procedure that can be described but not prescribed, and that is transmitted largely by demonstration and imitation.
[We linked to a review in WRB—Dec. 14, 2024.]
Out Tuesday:
Columbia University Press: George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director by Joseph McBride
What we’re reading:
Steve’s holiday break was also a break from reading, and so he didn’t read anything besides a few more pages of A Lover’s Discourse. He did watch a lot of Christmas movies, though. [Mostly established favorites, although I did finally get around to Love Actually (2003) and would like the appeal of it explained to me. What’s the point of a romantic comedy in which the leads don’t spend the whole movie talking to each other? And when each of the billion storylines gets its two minutes all they do is talk about love. Barthes:
The amorous subject’s propensity to talk copiously, with repressed feeling, to the loved being, about his love for that being, for himself, for them: the declaration does not bear upon the avowal of love, but upon the endlessly glossed form of the amorous relation.
The old screwball comedies had the sense to make them talk about everything else. —Steve]
Julia, after the many months she was away working on her thesis, is still reading Gravity’s Rainbow, and is now re-reading Heloise and Abelard’s letters again [ . . . for the thesis —Julia]. But last week she read Lisa Jewell’s novel None of This is True (2023) and Raye Hendrix’s debut poetry collection What Good Is Heaven (2024). Other books as of late include Czeslaw Milosz’s poetry collection Second Space (2004) [which is excellent] and Carlie Hoffman’s second poetry collection When There Was Light (2023) [also great. Hoffman’s third collection, One More World Like This World, is coming out this year through Four Way Books, and I’m really looking forward to it. —Julia]
Critical notes:
- Moul on Housman: “Housman is easy to pastiche, but ignore the snobs who think it’s clever to sneer.” [In a piece for the 30th anniversary of Pulp Fiction (1994) (which we linked to in WRB—Nov. 2024 Film Supplement) Joseph Joyce described “the cinephile hero’s journey” as follows: “You like Star Wars (1977), you pretend to dislike Star Wars, you actually dislike Star Wars, and, finally, you like Star Wars again but this time from a place of refinement.” This sort of progression in taste happens with many artists and works of art whose surface-level obviousness initially obscures their mastery of style and their more subtle effects. Housman is a great example of this. (Another champion of this category is Lynyrd Skynyrd.) It’s a kind of unintentional magic trick: the thudding obviousness distracts from the real charm.
The best Housman parody I know is by Hugh Kingsmill:
What—still alive at twenty-two,
A clean, upstanding chap like you?
Sure, if your throat is hard to slit,
Slit your girl’s, and swing for it.
Like enough you won’t be glad,When they come to hang you, lad:
But bacon’s not the only thing
That’s cured by hanging from a string.
So, when the spilt ink of the nightSpreads o’er the blotting-pad of light,
Lads whose job is still to do
Shall whet their knives, and think of you.
Pound’s I find disappointing; but Pound hated Housman, and this sort of parody requires love. It also confuses “hung” and “hanged,” but if I can forgive that in My Fair Lady (1964) I can forgive it here. —Steve]
- on daffodils in Homer and Wordsworth:
This seems at odds with the most famous daffodil poem, Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (written 1804, published 1815), whose asphodels seem to embody stellar joy, dancing by the lake, the memory of which sustains the poet through his life filling his heart with pleasure. This is to invoke the flower in a way that runs counter to its traditional associations—although we can read Wordsworth’s lyric, as it were, against the grain: as a poem about death, the poet wandering like a psyche, a spirit—a cloud—through an Elysian landscape. Perhaps the last stanza of this poem, Wordsworth lying “on his couch” in “vacant or pensive mood” is him lying dead, vacant as the “silly, thoughtless dead” of Homer’s afterlife: and in that state he returns to the asphodels of the underworld, who dance beside the Hadean lake.
[I’ve always thought the daffodil looked stupid, as if some animator of children’s cartoons decided first that there should be a flower that made a klaxon sound, and second that it should also look like a klaxon. Whenever I see a bunch of them I cannot escape the feeling that I am about to be subjected to a chorus of AOOGA. —Steve]