WRB—July 19, 2023

There is no algorithm here

Those of us who are not in the Slack where decisions about what reputations are to be revived or made can meet the injunctions of the WRB with earnest good faith in their latest dispensations (“now is the time to read the new issue of Liberties—take Shirley Hazard away!”); with cautious, sifting, suspicion; or with outright rejection, on the grounds that what the Managing Editors link to every week almost certainly has absolutely no relation to the District of Columbia.

[Our real editorial overlords are the Criterion Collection people who decided that we’re all talking about Éric Rohmer this year. —Chris] [As editorial overlords go we could do a lot worse. —Steve]

Links:

• In The Nation, Adam Kirsch on love and the immigrant experience in the fiction of Aleksandar Hemon:

  This uncertainty made Hemon a perfect writer for the early twenty-first century, when literary fiction was turning the classic immigrant tale inside out. Stories of immigration have always acknowledged the heavy toll of forging a new American identity. In Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, the Jewish father becomes violently insane in New York City; in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, the Czech father commits suicide in Nebraska. But in these stories, whatever the price paid by the parents, the children are destined to grow up as Americans. In the novels of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Gary Shteyngart, by contrast, Americanization isn’t guaranteed or even desirable. These writers don’t draw a clear distinction between immigration, which aims at creating a new identity, and exile, which remains oriented toward the old one. That is certainly the case in Hemon’s fiction, which makes sense for a writer who became an American more by accident than by choice. In The Lazarus Project, Brik can’t help resenting his American wife, Mary, whose confidence and competence are a birthright he can never share: “I told her that to be American you have to know nothing and understand even less, and that I did not want to be American. Never, I said.”

• In Harper’s, an excerpt from Jacqueline Rose’s upcoming collection of essays about COVID (The Plague: Living Death in Our Times, August) [Recall her NYRB interview from a few months ago, from WRB May 6, 2023. —Chris]:

  Only by recognizing the frailty of our morality, the unsteady hold we have on virtue, or even our perverse capacity, our readiness to embrace the worst on offer, is there the faintest chance of moving to a better place. Nothing is more dangerous than confronting a world full of fear, arms akimbo, with a boast. Or hanging on in the face of disaster to the idea that we each, individually, are good, that our perfection, lamentably unmatched by an imperfect reality, is something into which the ills of the time—pandemic, climate catastrophe, and war—unfairly encroach. According to such a mindset, the more insecure things appear, the more confident, assertive, and controlling we need to become in order to master both the world and ourselves.

• In Antigone, T. Corey Brennan on the history of the fasces:

  Display of the fasces—both authentic ones and ceremonial simulacra—continuously and forcefully reinforced power relations between higher and lower officials, magistrates and non-magistrates, nobles and non-nobles, citizens and non-citizens, and even heightened class consciousness and distinctions among women. (Lictors were forbidden to touch ones deemed respectable.) It seems fair to say that non-Romans hated the symbol. Already in the mid-second century B.C., Polybius counts it as the height of Greece’s misfortune that its free cities were compelled to admit Roman rods and axes within their gates. It was essential to an official’s dignity that he leave the lictors who carried his fasces to do their always unpopular and sometimes bone-chilling physical work, and not personally engage himself. Conversely, when lictors saw their fasces smashed or stolen, the disgrace rebounded onto their superior—especially if they could not protect his physical person.

• Two in the NYT: 

  • John Branch on the influence of rowing on the poetry of Wang Ping:

    “You have to feel through the handle what the river is doing, how the river is running, what mood the river is in,” she said. “I really enjoy that. I started rowing when my mind was just entangled, just spinning with all kinds of troubles. But the river just—shh—calms me down.”

    Which is why, at the break of most mornings, from spring to fall, on the glassy water of a three-mile dammed section of the Mississippi River that connects Minneapolis and St. Paul, Ping is rowing.

    She is a member of the Minneapolis Rowing Club, with origins to 1877. She practices with men and women, in pairs, fours, eights. They work together, like cogs in a timepiece.

  • Elisa Gabbert on short poetry, occasioned by a new Everyman’s Library pocket anthology (Little Poems, March):

    Some of what’s in Little Poems does have a one-and-done feel. There’s plenty of silly, light verse, not that I always mind throwaway poems (potato soup!). Short poems can be facile because they are short—they’re not wasting much of your time, so get over it. I almost prefer the really inane poems, like “The Toucan,” by Shel Silverstein (“What kind of goo can / Stick you to the toucan? / Glue can”), to something like “This Is Just to Say.” The plums in the icebox have gained new life as a meme, but I don’t ever need to read the poem itself again. It’s unsatisfying in the way of all short unsatisfying poems; the end of any poem is a reward, but bad short poems satisfy too soon. There are no hidden corners, no places to get lost in and surprised. (This may be a personal failing, but I have never read any translation of Basho’s haiku about the frog jumping into the pond without thinking, So what?)

    [One of the first books of poetry I ever read was Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho’s fragments, and to this day certain ones come to mind often. One of my favorites, in the Mary Barnard translation: Must I remind you, Cleis, / that sounds of grief / are unbecoming in / a poet’s household? // and that they are not / suitable in ours? —Julia]

• In Public Books, Basak Çandar on “literatures of complicity, texts that rely on self-reflexivity to negotiate the line between literature’s potential to resist and align with sources of repression”:

  It is possible that Bilge Karasu was primarily an aesthete and Orhan Pamuk plays it too safe against the Turkish state. But their works are decidedly engaged with their milieu’s violence. They highlight indeterminacies in literature that are especially pertinent for political commitment, understood in the sense of giving voice to the oppressed. Karasu and Pamuk are committed to this project, if not to a clear political cause. Their perceived lack of commitment says less about their works and more about the binary between political commitment and aesthetic autonomy.

  But especially when writing about political and ethical responsibility, literary experimentation seems to allow for a more nuanced political commitment, rather than being antithetical to it. Like Coetzee had suggested, fictional representations of political terror can always be co-opted by the terror they expose. As such, their only hope out of the conundrum might be to represent their vulnerable, complicit position.

  [Everyone should read the Aeneid. —Steve]

Reviews:

• Also in the NYT, Francis Fukuyama on two books predicting the crises of the future (The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End by Neil Howe, July 18; and End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin, June):

  There is nothing wrong with meta-history: I myself presented a model of long-term modernization in The End of History and the Last Man, and noted something like Turchin’s cycle of institutional disintegration in Political Order and Political Decay. The problem is that even the most sophisticated meta-history is not very useful in making short-term predictions. Both authors hedge their bets, so in place of their rosy futures, they also suggest we may get catastrophic war, chaos and prolonged breakdown, or simply more of the same for another few decades.

  You pick.

  [And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far / that recent books are prophesying war! —Steve]

• In the local Post, Sarah Cypher reviews Khaled Khalifa’s new novel (No One Prayed Over Their Graves: A Novel, trans. Leri Price, July 18):

  The novel prioritizes its ideas over its characters. At stake is the act of storytelling itself: gossip, religious narrative, war photography, any narrative in which bigotry can reside. “Storytellers’ imaginations . . . weave the distant past and erase anything that impeded” them, reshaping the truth as a river sweeps away a village. The novel seems aware of its own power to shape the truth, too. Hanna’s posthumous papers end up with a peripheral yet omnipresent character, Junaid, a printer who archives them with some other accounts of the city’s events. A brief note from the author claims that the novel is assembled from those texts, which he found and adapted to this story.

• In Jewish Currents, Isabella Hammad reviews Arabesques (1986) by Anton Shammas (trans. Vivian Eden), prompted by a recent NYRB reissue [Heavens. —Chris]:

  Arabesques has never been translated into Arabic. While Shammas has joked that this is because he didn’t want his mother to read it, I suspect he felt the meaning of the work—composed in a Hebrew haunted by Arabic, the mother tongue—was too bound up in its linguistic double vision. In this passage and throughout the novel, Shammas upends the familiar enclosures of the Hebrew language, prying it open so that it might address not only those Palestinians who are physically displaced, but also Palestinian citizens of Israel who are still living on the land. For they too exist in a kind of exile, alienated from their history by a state that denies the reality of the Nakba and which, after the decades of martial law that isolated them from the rest of the Arabic-speaking world, has continued to isolate them culturally through, for instance, banning the import of books from Syria and Lebanon. Their history is sealed like the cave of Ar-Rasad, hidden in the earth beneath their feet, requiring a magic word (an Arabic one) to unseal it. It is a history that links them to the West Bank through networks of trade and family that far predate the founding of the Israeli state, as well as to Lebanon, and to other neighboring Arab countries, often named as enemies of that state. It is a history that is at once diasporic and repressed, and it inevitably returns.

• In the LARB, Camille Ralphs reviews Walter Ancarrow’s new collection of poetry (Etymologies, May):

  Both analogy and allegory find lyric form and concrete-poetic form throughout Ancarrow’s book: “dhowtus and then dauþus and then deaþ and then death and then.” That language change is representative of wider change is more plainly articulated, though, in Valzhyna Mort’s “Nocturne for a Moving Train,” which is almost a secular interpretation of Hill’s prose statement. “Radiation, an etymology of soil // directed into the future,” she writes, “prepared / a thesis on the new origins of old roots / on secret, disfiguring missions of misspellings, / on the shocking betrayal of apples, / on the uncompromised loyalty of cesium.” (See also Mary Jean Chan’s more rudimentary, but similarly sedimentary, “Wish”: “my languages are like roots / gnarled in soil, one and indivisible / except the world divides me endlessly.”)

• In The Spectator, William Leith reviews Richard Ford’s last novel in the world of Frank Bascombe (Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel, June):

  Frank is still, only just, in the real estate business. He’s well off. He’s always got money, although money doesn’t do anything for him. He still can’t find love. He wonders obsessively whether or not he’s still in love with Catherine, someone he knew many years ago. But then again maybe he’s in love with Betty Tran, an Asian-American masseuse, who might or might not be a sex worker (he hopes and thinks not). He has excruciating, cringe-making phone conversations with these people. One of his problems is that he tries to imagine that women are in love with him, but can’t bear to engage with them.

  So Frank and Paul set out on their ill-fated journey, a sort of tragic echo of the one they had more than three decades earlier. Frank has his pocket Heidegger; Paul brings along his ventriloquist’s dummy, which he can no longer use. Frank does his best, and tells us how he feels: “If three house moves are the psychic equivalent of a death, a son’s diagnosis of ALS is equal to crashing your car into a wall day after day, with the outcome always the same.”