WRB—July 29, 2026
“the wrong thing”
Tell me about a complicated Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books.
[Richard Roundtree would have made a great Odysseus. —Steve]
Links:
In LitHub, Max Lawton on writing making you sick:
I like Céline’s notion that writing in a certain way destroys the coronary arteries, but perhaps we can sublate Céline’s notion into something that smacks less of medieval physiology: writing in a way that so totally abnegates the world, that is unconcerned with its rhythms, its realities, writing so gnostically, so inwardly, must sooner or later take its toll on the body.
As I was working on Songs of Chaos, the second volume in his Games of Eternity trilogy, Moresco also wrote to me about the blood-pressure crises he was subject to during its composition: “When I started writing Songs of Chaos, I fell ill; I began to feel sharp stabs of pain in my heart. Then, after about a hundred pages, when the pain and stabbing sensations grew more intense, I was forced to go to the nearest emergency room. At the end of the examination, the doctor told me: ‘I don’t know you, and I don’t know what you do for a living, but whatever it is—stop it immediately, for a month!’” Antonio’s blood pressure was simply too high and he had to take a break from his masterpiece.
[What’s wrong with medieval physiology? Seems like it’s correct in this case, heart attacks frequently being caused by diseases of the coronary arteries. (Subscribe to the WRB for the latest in medical science.) —Steve]
In The American Scholar, Jane Bernstein on Lore Segal:
Lore always asked whether I was still writing; when I started to teach, she was eager to know what my students were reading. Once, back at her apartment, we tried to reconstruct our seminar from decades back, and I did my best to fill her in on who had published a story or book and who had turned to other endeavors. She was a serious reader of literature, but life interested her just as much: She watched The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, fascinated by the mores of these women on TV. Her delight in language and in all that a sentence might contain was such that she liked it when a stranger in the airplane seat beside her struck up a conversation. Even on international flights? I remember asking in horror.
Even then.
Reviews:
Two in the TLS: first, Daniel Karlin reviews a book about silence (Silence: A Literary History, by Kate McLoughlin, June):
These instances of probing and sensitive criticism are intermittent, though, and they come at a high, sometimes silly, cost. Thomas Traherne was “[b]rought up in seventeenth-century Royalist Hereford—a culture which had absolutism in common with Soviet Russia.” Bolingbroke in Richard II “operates rather like a lethal submarine,” and so on. Then there are the many mistakes, solecisms and misreadings. McLoughlin does not know the difference between “recurrent” and “recurring,” “use” and “usage” or “deceptive” and “deceitful.” Actual misreadings include one of the oddest observations I have ever read on Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” whose speaker, according to McLoughlin, “sees from on high but is too far away to hear ‘A host of golden daffodils / . . . / All dancing in the breeze.’” Never mind that the second line is misquoted; it’s the phrase from on high that’s so disconcerting, as though the first line of the poem were not a simile but a literal indication of the poet’s vantage point. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in her sonnet “Grief”, writes of “men incredulous of despair, / Half-taught in anguish”—a metaphor about emotional intelligence that is read here as a class-based insult: “the loudest grievers are uneducated.”
[“Characters in Shakespeare most like lethal submarines” is a rejected McSweeney’s pitch. —Steve]
[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:
Round two of Odyssey discourse inspires another fire sermon (to mix traditions) from me
What if Augustan Rome was mid-century America?
A Poem by Bei Dao and flowers
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.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. 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 sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]
