WRB—July 12, 2025

“sanitized selection”

You can be scrolling online and see the WRB, and you can know that the President reads the WRB, Liz Taylor reads the WRB, and just think, you can read the WRB, too. The WRB is the WRB and no amount of money can get you a better WRB than the one the bum on the corner is reading. All the WRBs are the same and all the WRBs are good.

Links:

Reviews:

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Nicholas Morton reviews a biography of Boccaccio (Boccaccio: A Biography, by Marco Santagata, 2019, translated from the Italian by Emlyn Eisenach, May):

  Taken overall, Santagata’s portrait of Boccaccio leaves the lasting impression of a rather unhappy man. After his death, as was common for many senior intellectuals, stories emerged claiming that Boccaccio possessed mystical powers; the legend even circulated that demons bore him to his lover in Naples. But I can’t help thinking that Boccaccio’s life didn’t need such lurid embellishments—he had demons enough of his own. A difficult relationship with his father, an uneasy home life, no knowledge of his mother, a constant fear of rejection by his readers, and a curious and seemingly obsessive fixation with women: he wrote a book drawing attention to famous women’s lives (De mulieribus claris), yet later condemned the entire gender as consumed by vice. He was a complex and troubled individual. One contemporary labelled him as a “man of glass” and certainly his acute sensitivity frequently makes its presence felt; for a time he fell into a deep depression when, in 1361, a dying monk issued a warning casting doubt on his chances of salvation.

  [We linked to an earlier review in WRB—July 2, 2025. You don’t hear much about senior intellectuals possessing mystical powers anymore. But then I suppose having demons transport you isn’t particularly interesting—it’s a long way off from Virgil’s magic egg. No wonder the Renaissance was so obsessed with rediscovering ancient Rome. If you were an intellectual, wouldn’t you want the magic egg? —Steve]

• In Liberties, Jared Marcel Pollen reviews Peter Weiss’ The Aesthetics of Resistance, the last volume of which was translated earlier this year (The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume III, 1981, translated from the German by Joel Scott, March) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Mar. 22, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Mar. 29, 2025.]:

  Weiss’ characters don’t have the means to arrange a gap year or wanderjahr for themselves. Instead, they have to steal their education out from under the drudgery of factory life and state oppression, meeting in secret, in kitchens, basements, and factory floors to discuss classical art, Dante, or Rimbaud. Their auto-didacticism is promethean: “[O]ur most important goal was to conquer an education,” the narrator says early on in Volume I, “a skill in every field of research, by using any means, cunning and strength of mind. From the very outset, our studying was rebellion. We gathered material to defend ourselves and prepare a conquest.” Ultimately the question that preoccupies The Aesthetics of Resistance is the same question that preoccupies any bildungsroman: how does education—in this case, aesthetic education—provide the moral coordinates that prepare one for the (often harsh) realities of political life? Could a bildungsroman that takes place under the buckle and boot of fascism look otherwise?

  [Pollen then mentions the importance of politics to the likes of The Red and the Black, Sentimental Education, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but I am struck by how purposeful the narrator’s statement here is compared to the almost accidental educations of the protagonists in those other novels. (And even further on the other side is something like Barry Lyndon, in which politics are even less important to the protagonist, who learns absolutely nothing.) The situation in The Aesthetics of Resistance forces them to seek an education. —Steve]

• In The Nation, Evan Kindley reviews a biography of James Schuyler (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, by Nathan Kernan, August 5):

  “Merely to say, to see and say, things / as they are”: This was how Schuyler defined his aspiration as a poet. It sounds humble, but for Schuyler this commitment to empiricism entailed a whole philosophy of form. Schuyler was close with the painter Fairfield Porter, who shared his unflagging devotion to the quotidian. “The truest order is what you find already there, or that will be given if you don’t try for it,” Porter once wrote. “When you arrange, you fail.” Schuyler’s subjects, like Porter’s, were unspectacular—nature, the weather, the quiddities and comforts of domestic life—and his poems, like Porter’s paintings, elegant yet effortless. They home in on things like the way “level light plunges / among the layering boughs of a balsam fir / and enflames its trunk,” or how “air . . . billows like bedsheets / on a clothesline and the clouds / hang in a traffic jam.” Reading Schuyler, you get the sense of an attentive mind occupying an atmosphere of rare serenity. Little seems to disturb these cozy idylls; the closest we get to dramatic incident is when the poet chases a hornet out of his room or gets up to fix himself more toast.

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• I apply Football Scouting Methods to literary criticism

• Evaluating Byron’s juvenilia

• K. T. on a Poem by Aaron Smith and grief

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by telling your friends about us. —Steve]