WRB—July 26, 2025

“retract/rephrase/remix”

Educated Washingtonian Managing Editors favorably compared their own native paganism with that of ancient Rome.

Links:

• In The American Scholar, Max Byrd on similes:

  Consider, then, what the presence of like or as does in a simile. It announces, self-consciously, that something good is coming. The simile is a rhetorical magic trick, like a pun pulled out of a hat. A metaphor, however, feels not clever but true. Take away the announcement of like, and we read and write on a much less sophisticated level, on a level that has been called primitive, because it recalls the staggering ancient power of words as curses, as spells to transform someone into a frog, a stag, a satanic serpent.

  A better term might be childlike. Psychologists know that very young children understand the metamorphosing power of words. To a child of three or four, writes Howard Gardner, the properties of a new word “may be inextricably fused with the new object: at such a time the pencil may become a rocket ship.” Older children and adults know that this isn’t so. But for most of us, and certainly for most writers I know, the childhood core of magical language play is not lost. It exists at the center and is only surrounded by adult awareness, as the rings encircle the heart of the tree.

  [I had some notes on “Juliet is the sun” in WRB—July 2, 2025. Metaphors are about as close as we can get to those children of three or four, and that “like” or “as” is an impediment to slamming the words on top of each other. —Steve]

• In the TLS, Edward Mendelson on Virginia Woolf correcting proofs of The Waves:

  One striking detail about the omitted passage: it uses a word, “vagulous,” that Woolf invented by translating a Latin diminutive in Hadrian’s “Animula vagula blandula,” his address to his wandering, charming little soul. (The masculine form is vagulus.) When she used the word in Mrs Dalloway—about “that wandering will-o’-the-wisp, that vagulous phosphorescence, old Mrs. Hilbery”—someone at the printers, R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh, miscorrected it in proof to “vagous,” which duly appeared in the British edition. The American edition correctly retained “vagulous” from the proofs that Virginia Woolf sent to New York to be used in typesetting that edition. There are two incidents in which she uses the word in her diary. She also invented the verb “vagulate,” which she used four times in her diary and letters, and the noun “circumvagulation,” which she used once in a letter. Woolf admired and emulated Shakespeare’s word-coining powers.

  [“Vagulous” I like the sound of—very wispy; “vagulate” is awful. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In The New Statesman, Michael Prodger reviews David Gentleman’s advice for artists (Lessons for Young Artists, July 10):

  So the guidance here comes from a long-lived and engaged mind. What Gentleman offers is the antidote to swathes of contemporary art-think and -speak. There is no talk in his book about “meaning” or “profundity,” much less the willful obfuscation and vapidity of much contemporary and conceptual art. Instead he proffers modest advice that in less authentic hands would be mere cracker-barrel slogans. Start with a pencil, he counsels, and draw quickly and then you’ll get the essentials without being distracted by detail; sketch whatever is to hand; embrace the accidents of watercolor; return to motifs in different weathers and times of day; choose unlikely angles; look up. Attention, attention, attention.

  [“Profound” is up there with “vital” and “luminous” on the list of words that appear in useless book reviews. —Steve]

[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:

• Poetry on Twitter

• Are MFAs corny?

• K. T. on a Poem by Janice N. Harrington and beauty

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]