Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single Washington Review of Books, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.
N.B.:
[Good morning—we’re going to be making some changes around here. Very simply, putting together fine emails three times per week is, for myself, Steve, Julia, et al, a huge amount of work (and an occasional annoyance for Nic). We’ve concluded we need to turn the screws a little w/r/t Paid Subscriptions, about which we have hitherto been somewhat sheepish. Starting next Wednesday, the midweek newsletter will be paywalled after four links. The Saturday newsletter, and Supplements like Sarah’s Children’s Literature and Jude’s History and Classics will stay basically the same, though we might be changing the format around a bit as it suits us. It’s not a lot of money and we think you get quite a lot out of us for it. Here’s a discount on subscriptions, valid until the end of July:
Today’s post is gratis—I think it’s a pretty good one—so that you might inspect our wares. The regular What we’re reading, Poem, and Critical notes1 sections are a great deal of fun. I hope you enjoy them.
Thank you,
Chris McCaffery
Managing Editor]
Links:
In Parapraxis, Lily Scherlis on the history of “boundaries” in discussions of mental health:
It feels slick and too easy to analogize in this way. But it also feels absurd not to, because even in the present, this whole way of thinking is built on literal analogies to property and national security. In her 2022 boundaries bestseller, Melissa Urban, who is known for developing the notoriously restrictive “wellness program” Whole30 (which she claims is emphatically not a diet), offers a helpful shorthand for measuring a risk to your boundaries: the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s levels of threat. Green, yellow, and red threat levels all merit different conversational scripts; she also includes “Threat Level Fuchsia,” which “Homeland Security does not recognize but anyone who’s been in front of their ex’s current girlfriend after multiple tequila shots surely does.” Our bodies and minds are little nation-states, populations of cells and thoughts and feelings in need of defense. This is still systems-theory thinking: every system is analogous to every other system. This is the legacy boundaries will never shake: they keep a whole host of other metaphors in place; they keep us seeing our political-economic systems as modeled on ourselves, and vice versa.
Hegel (Zusätze from The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, c. 1845): “All activity of the mind is, therefore, only an apprehension of itself, and the aim of all genuine science is just this, that mind shall recognize itself in everything in heaven and on earth. There is simply no out and-out Other for the mind.”
In the upcoming issue of The Drift, Mitch Therieau on Jack Antonoff:
More than anything, Antonoff seems to view the role of the producer as a therapeutic one. In an interview with Pitchfork, he declared, “When I work with other people, I’m always trying to find out: Where can we go even further? What can we do here that is for the people putting a microscope on it? In the second verse, can you fire out a few lines about something that happened to you when you were 9?” Like Jacques Lacan’s ideal analyst, he aspires to commit partial ego-suicide and become a sort of blank screen; like a TV caricature of a therapist, he probes and excavates for hidden past traumas. A songwriting session with Jack apparently starts with the question, “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” And yet writing and producing, for Antonoff, are less methods for working through these trauma nuggets than they are ways of endlessly repeating a symptom. He has said that his own music is a way of “revisiting” two originary traumas: his sister’s death and, more obscurely, the inferiority complex he feels about being from New Jersey. One can detect something of this stuck repetition in his music. A Jack song always seems to take place in a sort of ambiently traumatic limbo where reconciliation is right around the corner, if not just out of reach. “Are we out of the woods yet? Are we out of the woods yet?” Swift whisper-sings in one song; “I wanna get better,” Antonoff yelps in another. The average Antonoff song is an unwitting pop reenactment of the final lines of Waiting for Godot—“‘Well, shall we go?’ ‘Yes, let’s go.’ (They do not move.)”—updated for the age of the trauma plot.
[Rough lines from Megan Fernandes in the same issue: “See, the logic of a couple is like a Beckett play. / Facing the end, you don’t want someone with you / for comfort. You want someone with you to blame.” —Chris] [Jack Antonoff will pay for his crimes. —Steve]
In Poetry, Julie Irigaray on Sylvia Plath’s “The Applicant”:
Plath was invited to record “The Applicant” for the BBC Radio Three Programme, and her reading included a short introduction: “In this poem, […] the speaker is an executive, a sort of exacting super-salesman. He wants to be sure the applicant for his marvelous product really needs it and will treat it right.” Plath’s introductions to her poems never revealed their full meaning, but her allusion to treating the product right recalls a father wanting the best husband for his daughter, which aligns the salesman with the father. During the wedding ceremony, the father symbolically hands his daughter over to the groom, another patriarchal tradition of property exchange that denies the woman agency over her fate.
In Commonweal, Max Pensky on the story of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus:
Why would the irreligious Paul Klee glue a century-old reproduction of a famous sixteenth-century engraving of Martin Luther (Bible in hand, eyes turned piously heavenward) behind a picture entitled Angelus Novus? What could the hidden superimposition mean?
Reviews:
In The New Statesman, Josiah Gogerty reviews a bunch of airport nonfiction-type books:
Back at the bookshop, the smart thinking section is positioned between “business and management” and “popular science”, a neat illustration of its implied function: helping businesses acquire the legitimacy of science. It’s symptomatic of an age in which degrees are marketed via their “transferable skills”, and management consultants barely out of university are parachuted into a field of business and expected to plausibly feign expertise. We’re increasingly enraptured by systems and altogether less bothered by what’s fed into them.
[The only book I’ve ever purchased in an airport was Klara and the Sun (2021)—I didn’t totally enjoy the experience. —Chris]
In the LARB, William Flesch reviews Javier Marías’s latest novel (Tomás Nevinson, 2021; trans. by Margaret Jull Costa, May):
There’s a paradox here, one that Marías and Freud share: they reject the standard view that our beliefs are less reliable than we think, that they represent wishful thinking. The problem is that beliefs are far more reliable than we want them to be. Wishful thinking plays an important but secondary role here in helping us convince ourselves that we don’t believe what we in fact do believe.
In the Sydney Review of Books, Ursula Robinson-Shaw reviews Paul Dalla Rosa’s collection of short stories (An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, 2022):
Where a novel is an argument, a short story is an axiom. It’s the minor form for a reason. A novelist may have to publish three or four times before revealing that, like the proverbial flat character, they’re essentially possessed by one idea. A short story writer is less lucky; a story lasts just long enough for some central fixation or moral ideology to crystallise before it collapses under the imperative of economy—then the gesture must be repeated. This is why short stories can be uniquely frustrating to read and to write; it’s also why they work so well when the prevailing mode is nastiness, bad people doing cruel and stupid things. The fetish figure of a typical short story collection might be the revenant, the same preoccupations returning again and again to be killed off in entertaining ways. Rather than the revenant, we might say, the fetish of An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life is the Sim.
In the TLS, Corin Thorsby reviews Lindsey Eckert’s book on the relationship between authors and their audience in the Romantic period (The Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers, 2022):
It is this slippery effect—the ever-threatening possibility that what is comforting becomes clichéd—that makes familiarity a useful concept when discussing the relationship between authors and readers in the Romantic period. In the late eighteenth century the advent of a mediated press, mechanized printing and mass literacy threatened to produce cultural alienation. Readers longed for a connection to authors. The most successful writers—Lord Byron being the most famous example, though, as Lindsey Eckert asserts in The Limits of Familiarity, there were many others—mined this appetite for intimacy by creating a sense of emotional closeness in their works. Autobiographical snippets were woven into reassuringly predictable storylines. Confessional poetry, gossipy essays and romans à clef became all the rage. While self-revelation was an easy route to commercial success and stardom, many authors quickly found that the reading public’s affections were volatile. Reveal too much and you were vilified as fame-hungry, vulgar or even dangerously immoral.
[The Managing Editors understand this struggle. —Steve] [Ahem—Tag yourself. —Chris]
N.B. (cont.):
Milan Kundera died yesterday in Paris. R.I.P.
Mr. Kundera told The Paris Review in 1983: “My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form. The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as those that we play out on the great stage of History) and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being.”
The perils of newslettering. [My life has not been ruined by having to write about Shelia Heti on Saturdays. —Chris]
- on the obituaries of The New Yorker editors: “As one might expect from New York’s toniest publication, the obituaries reveal wonderful little nuggets of blueblood drama.”
On Martin Perez, former publisher and editor in chief of The New Republic.
- : Editors used to fight duels.
- : “Threads, meanwhile, is the first new social media platform in years that Millennials have joined en masse, and it has revealed just how much the past ten years online have absolutely rotted our brains.”
For more on what’s wrong with millennials, see Critical notes.
The NYT is disbanding its sports department. [Inevitable ever since they bought The Athletic, but it still sucks. (We can talk about the business side of sports journalism another time.) The Times is at its best when it is unapologetically The New York Times, and its sports coverage was very frequently that. If nothing else, “The Giants’ and Jets’ Early Draft Gets an Unusual Reception: Praise” will always be one of the most vicious headlines I’ve ever read. —Steve]
- on American publishing history:
So what happened to Ticknor & Fields? To the offices on top of the Chipotle? What happens to all publishers, apparently: they went broke. They did in fact shepherd the “flowering of New England” into being, publishing many well-known (then) and oft-taught (now) Transcendentalists, and creating what is called the flowering of New England and the American literary renaissance. But it grew to cost more money to keep those now famous authors.
Issues:
A new issue of The Baffler: “Hell or Las Vegas”
A new issue of Parapraxis is on the way: “Repair.”
A new issue of The New Atlantis is on the way, with a symposium on A.I.2
Local:
The opening weekend for Barbie (2023) is quickly selling out at D.C. theaters.
They’re using a huge drill to drill a huge tunnel in Alexandria.
Metro has released some proposals for further phases of expansion.
We read on InsideHook: “DC Is the Best Bookstore City in the United States.” We’re very sorry—and with no prejudice to our local favorite booksellers—there is just no way that’s the case.
The Anacostia River “splash” event has been postponed until September as a result of heavy rain leading to sewage overflows into the river.
Starting with Singing in the Rain (1952) this Sunday, AFI Silver Theatre will be rolling through a series featuring the top ten films from Sight and Sound’s latest big list.
Lux Choir presents Legacy, a program celebrating the 150th birthdays of Max Reger and Sergei Rachmaninoff, performing works by Reger, Rachmaninoff, Amy Beach, and R. Nathaniel Dett. August 11, 2023 in Hyattsville, MD and August 12, 2023 in Washington, D.C. Tickets and more information available here.
The National Gallery has two Vermeers back on display in the West Building (Woman Holding a Balance and A Lady Writing).
The Dante exhibit is closing next week. [I met a friend recently for our quarterly NGA tour-and-kvetch session and we were pretty surprised that this exhibit is like, two rooms. Per sua difalta qui dimorò poco. —Chris]
The D.C. Asian Pacific American Film Festival runs from Thursday to Sunday.
Upcoming book:
July 18 | Encounter
The Novel, Who Needs It?
by Joseph Epstein
From the publisher: In this brief but highly engaging book, Joseph Epstein argues for the primacy of fiction, and specifically of the novel, among all intellectual endeavors that seek to describe the behavior of human beings. Reading superior fiction, he holds, arouses the mind in a way that nothing else quite does. He shows how the novel at its best operates above the level of ideas in favor of taking up the truths of the heart. No other form probes so deeply into that eternal mystery of mysteries, human nature, than does the novel.
The Novel, Who Needs It? takes up those current elements in the culture that militate against the production of first-rate fiction. Prominent among them are the rise of online reading, the expansion of creative writing programs, the artistically discouraging effects of political correctness, and the pervasiveness of therapeutic thinking.
As for the question posed by the title, The Novel, Who Needs It?, Joseph Epstein’s answer is that we all do.
Loyal readers may recall that Chris reviewed this back in April.
What we’re reading:
Steve read Nathaniel Philbrick’s book about the Essex, (In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, 2001) whose destruction by a whale both forced the crew to attempt a long voyage in whaleboats and inspired Moby-Dick. He is also re-reading the letters of St. Paul. [They should make a religion out of this! —Steve]
Julia’s current focus is making progress on the handful of books she’s been reading on-and-off for several months: the collection of Levis’s prose The Gazer Within, Ryan Wilson’s How to Think Like a Poet, and Western Wind: an Introduction to Poetry [I can’t remember, did I lend this to you? —Chris] [Yes, you did. I owe you one for that; it’s excellent. —Julia] by John Frederick Nims. She’s going to be starting some new poetry collections next week, but in the meantime has been flipping through Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Vol. 1, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris [which is fantastic] and The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry [which is nice if you’re into that kind of thing].
The Gazer Within features an endearingly casual, but rich, 1982 interview of Levis by the poet David Wojahn (see our Mar. 1, 2023 edition for a Wojahn poem). The interview ends with the following exchange:
Wojahn: One of the things Wallace Steven said: “No one understands that one writes poetry because one must.”
Levis: Yeah, must. Also, it’s just better than living any other way. I mean, I think it’s better. I still think poetry is healthy; it also has greater purity than anything else, if only because you can use the mind all the way up. You can exist in the liberated adulthood of poetry, totally uncompromised.
[I know that’s awfully high praise of poetry as a way of living, but I think it’s true that one of the great things about poetry is that it allows you to “use the mind all the way up.” And I really do love the idea of poetry as a “liberated adulthood;” there’s something about that conception of it that I find really refreshing. —Julia]
Chris watched Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One yesterday night. He would probably die for Tom Cruise.
Critical notes:
Months later in the magazine, the writer reiterated his point—that “Picasso’s art is a highly specialized product, an essentially private art, which is therefore not easily applied to public problems.” Ironically, this is an accurate evaluation of “Guernica,” a painting so powerful for the very reason that it is a fully private expression, a vision no one’s but Picasso’s.
“Even self-help novels have some precedent in texts such as Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist, but The School of Life may be the first publisher to own up to its intentions; A Voice of One’s Own is being billed as a “therapeutic novel” with explicitly practical purposes.”
- on Patricia Lockwood’s style [Radical pique. —Chris]:
Lockwood’s style—and the broader style it represents, that of “weird Twitter” most proximally, with cartoon and pomo precursors and from the latter back through Joyce to the metafictional tradition—is more than cleverness. Cleverness only connotes shallow and self-satisfied technical know-how, like Joyce verbally imitating a fugue. The weird style also implies a see-through-it-all precocity, a smug second foolishness that has surpassed all wisdom, but only because it has lost touch with the exigencies of experience. The Paris Review line is a formalist defamiliarization without any telos, without any Tolstoyan or Brechtian sense that the object being defamiliarized is a product or source of injustice, just that everything extant is silly, for no other reason than because it has the bad taste to be extant.
Donald Barthelme (who often reads more than anything like a “weird Twitter” poster):
Now, suppose I had been of an ironical tum of mind and wanted to make a joke about all this, some sort of joke that would convey that I had noticed the striking degree of boredom implied by the presence of all this impedimenta and one which would also serve to comment upon the particular way of struggling with boredom that these people had chosen. I might have said, for instance, that the remedy is worse than the disease. Or quoted Nietzsche to the effect that the thought of suicide is a great consolation and had helped him through many a bad night. Either of these perfectly good jokes would do to annihilate the situation of being uncomfortable in this house. The shuffleboard sticks, the barbells, balls of all kinds—my joke has, in effect, thrown them out of the world. An amazing magical power!
(“Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel,” The New Yorker, October 12, 1968. Collected in City Life, 1970, and Sixty Stories, 1981)
Mattix: “This makes the piece feel like criticism, but it’s not.”
- with more on Taylor Swift:
I put that quote from Taylor up top—“but I can’t really respond to someone saying, ‘You, as a human being, are fake’”—because I think it’s actually pretty insightful. It is an unanswerable charge . . . for everybody, not just for her. And when I write “Taylor Swift is fake,” I also don’t mean that she’s a fake person in the sense that she’s talking about in the Rolling Stone interview—cold, calculating, manipulative, and so on. I mean she’s a person with a filter. Unless she’s writing a song, that filter (probably) never comes off.
Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
Catullus:
nam castum esse decet pium poetam
ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est
A poet’s life must have no spot.
A poet’s verses—maybe not.
[Catullus translation mine. I’m resisting it now but I can feel that I’m going to end up writing about him. —Steve] [Those are good lines, Steve. —Julia]
- :
Gavras-Costa cannot resist a poignant note at the end. As the credits roll, a voiceover announces that after the events depicted in the film, a junta took over the country and banned a whole slew of things. “Long hair, mini-skirts. Sophocles, Tolstoy. Mark Twain (partially). Euripides. Aesychlus, Aristophanes. Ionesco, Sartre. The Beatles, Pinter.” The implication is that once fascism manages to fully take over a society, it will try to stamp out the sources of liberal thought and liberal values: literature, theater, music—culture as a whole.
How quaint, I thought to myself. Do we even think literature, and culture more broadly, has that kind of power any more? Our culture industry continues to claim that it does. Famous dissident writers like Azar Nafisi feed the dream of liberation through free expression, drawing inspiration from towering cultural figures who transformed politics like Vaclav Havel. And indeed, societies like Iran, China, and North Korea do still enact vigorous censorship regimes. So clearly there’s something there.
But it’s a lot harder to see when we look at our own society.
Poem:
“Meeting Ezra Pound” by Miroslav Holub, translated by Dana Hábová and Stuart Friebert
I don’t know what came first, poets or festivals.
Nevertheless, it was a festival that caused me to meet Ezra Pound.
They seated him in a chair in Spoleto and pushed me towards him. He took the hand I extended and looked with those light blue eyes right through my head, way off into the distance. That was all. He didn’t move after that. He didn’t let go of my hand, he forgot the eyes. It was a lasting grip, like a gesture of a statue. His hand was icy and stony. It was impossible to get away.
I said something. The sparrows chirruped. A spider was on the wall, tasting the stone with its forelegs. A spider understanding the language of stone.
A freight was passing through the tunnel of my head. A flagman in blue overalls waved gloomily from the last car.
It is interesting how long it takes for a freight train like that to pass by.
Then they parted us.
My hand was cold too, as if touching the Milky Way.
So that a freight train without a schedule exists. So that a spider on a stone exists. So that a hand alone and a hand per se exists. So that a meeting without meeting exists and a person without a person. So that a tunnel exists—a whole network of tunnels, empty and dark, interconnecting the living matter which is called poetry at festivals.
So that I may have met Ezra Pound, only I sort of did not exist in that moment.
[Holub was a poet and microbiologist(!) born in Plzeň. This translation from his native Czech first appeared, alongside a discussion of it by Larry Levis, in Field 49 (Fall 1993).
I love the line a spider understanding the language of stone and the repetition of the spondee so that that we get at the end of the poem. Levis notes that this repetition functions as an answer—“even though it is an answer that fails”, he adds—to the end of Pound’s “Canto I”:
Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden
Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:
In Levis’s view, Holub intentionally avoids turning this poem into “the kitsch of a delusional ars poetica,”
for it might be consoling to think that “living matter” is, categorically, poetry. But Holub is too tough for a kind of thinking that overrates all things. His qualification is searching: “the living matter which is called poetry at festivals.”
And here he is again, discussing the final line:
“Sort of” isn’t glory. “Sort of” isn’t tragedy. And that is the point. It is also the trouble. Holub’s imagination . . . delivers us from history, so that in this way, Holub’s elegy becomes a kind of birth. Everything comes rushing back into his poem but it’s all without history: a train, a tunnel, a hand per se and a hand alone. And even though it is a birth in a world that is now a vast orphanage, there’s something familiar about it, “homey” even, for it’s our vast orphanage. What would we do without it, and the irony of its ceaseless catcalls and whistles? I like to think that the poet who would write its epitaph is three hours old at this moment, only I sort of doubt it.
—Julia]
Which, I’m not sure I ever made this explicit, but Critical notes is just a section for stuff we’re self-aware enough to know is of limited general interest but which still intersects with some particular hobbyhorse or other.
Completely unrelatedly, at a party on Saturday, the topic of the WRB’s verboten topics came up: those topics which under no circumstance we will point you to an essay, especially a particularly thinky one, about. Here are a few:
René Girard
[The Decline of] The Humanities
Cancel Culture
Banned Books
“Liberalism”
Large Language Models, Generative A.I., Probability-based Digital Images, etc.
If you earnestly need information about these subjects, please look elsewhere.