WRB—July 3, 2024

“anti-romantic anti-comedy”

Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;
Like doth quit like, and ’sletter still for ’sletter.

N.B.:

The next D.C. Salon (formerly known as the WRB x Liberties salon) will take place on the evening of July 20. The topic will be “Can nonbelievers pray?” If you would like to attend, please email Chris for more information.

You can read a symposium of participants in last month’s salon, on propaganda, at Liberties.

Links:

• In The Hedgehog Review, Matt Dinan on the current state of essays:

  Another predictable device in the essayist’s self-exculpatory toolkit is to return to the beginning of the form, to blame poor Montaigne, pointing out that this genre is propaedeutic, an artful introductory exercise, not a means of definitive argument. But Montaigne was a subtle and imaginative thinker, a cautious skeptic, who truly tried to help us see old things afresh, to assemble a thoughtful compendium of things usually beneath the notice of philosophy—like smells, or thumbs.

  [Regular readers will know of my loathing for this move in essays. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Michael Hofmann on watching soccer:

  Football is a crazed bid for compensation, for escape, for some transcendent atavistic loyalty. Some howling stomping braying clannishness in the time of international capital-flows. Where the traveling Dutch fans turn anywhere they go into the inside of a food processor doing carrots for slaw. Where the uncouth English boo the other side’s anthem at the beginning and their own team at the end; where they reward their perfunctorily clapping manager with wanker-signals. (How English is that? As English as tax cuts and class warfare. As English as tea at three. As English as the obvious sideways pass played carefully and slowly.) Football is both separate from reality, and a part of reality. The great Australian poet Les Murray has a phrase for justice: “the people’s otherworld.” That’s what football is. The people’s otherworld. It’s a form of justice. Justice for half a city, a city, a region, a country, a political system, a government, a leader (Orbán). It’s “Well, we’ll always have”—not “Paris,” but “football.” 

  • Updike in “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”: “Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved.”

• In The Point, Jessie Kindig on Thoreau’s metaphors:

  Here’s the answer, and the magic trick of the transcendentalists: metaphor is both an explanatory literary device but also the most profound truth. Taking a walk is like living and also is living. If we know both, we can experience rightly (“live intentionally,” as your yoga teacher might say today). Watching the spring freshets vein and branch into Walden Pond, Thoreau observed that they moved like blood through the human body. Excited, he rolled downhill with the little streams toward his point: “Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen.” The lip, the nose, the chin, formations of a cave, the cheeks a slide down into the “valley of the face” and thus—“one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature.” Allow your fondness for metaphor to run wild: we are this hillside! We are apples, all! 

  [I was recently informed that many people from other countries find the American affection for apples weird. It had not previously occurred to me that “as American as apple pie” implies that the rest of the world is less enthused about one of the best uses of apples. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall: Julia on Anne Carson and Emily Brontë, Steve on Measure for Measure as “anti-romantic anti-comedy,” Sally Rooney, Nahuatl, Pascal, Steely Dan, “cool-girl novels,” Colette, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]