WRB—June 12, 2024

Criticism. It’s what’s for dinner.

Could I revive within me
The WRB,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with ’sletters long and free,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

N.B.:

The next WRB x Liberties salon will take place on the evening of June 15th. If you would like to come discuss the topic “Propaganda: do you know it when you see it?” please contact Chris or Celeste Marcus.

Links:

• In Noema, Henry Wismayer on the desire to climb tall mountains:

  Based on his own extensive writings, it is clear that Mallory was bewitched by the mountains because he wanted to be first, and because they made him feel alive. “What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy,” he once wrote. “And joy is, after all, the end of life.” But it seems fair to suppose that he may also have been a fugitive from reality. Like Maurice Wilson, Mallory had fought in the First World War, serving as an artillery officer during the carnage of the Somme. In Into the Silence (2011), Wade Davis concluded that the horrors they’d witnessed on the Western Front imbued the 1920s climbers with a special intensity, and perhaps also a desire to flee the lowland world that had so betrayed their generation. For them, Everest had become “a symbol of continuity in a world gone mad.”

  [Cf. Exodus:

  And be ready against the third day: for the third day the LORD will come down in the sight of all the people upon mount Sinai.

  And thou shalt set bounds unto the people round about, saying, Take heed to yourselves, that ye go not up into the mount, or touch the border of it: whosoever toucheth the mount shall be surely put to death:

  There shall not an hand touch it, but he shall surely be stoned, or shot through; whether it be beast or man, it shall not live . . .

  Romanticism in the creation of mountaineering aside, people have always wanted to touch the mountain. —Steve] [I was just hiking up the Catoctin Mountain on Saturday. Highly recommend. —Julia]

• In The Paris Review, Joanna Kavenna on interruptions:

  Since then, the Person from Porlock has become a symbol of unwanted interruptions, poetic genius demolished by tawdry reality, the dangers of answering the front door, and so on. Nonetheless, a few people have questioned Coleridge’s story. In a short poem, “The Person from Porlock,” Robert Graves suggests that if anything we could do with an army of such persons hammering on doors and interrupting solipsistic writers, as a form of quality control. The poet Stevie Smith also presents her views on Porlockgate in “Thoughts about the Person from Porlock.” For a start, asks Smith, why did Coleridge rush to answer the door? Why didn’t he just hide like any self-respecting misanthropic author? Smith concludes that Coleridge was already stuck, “weeping and wailing” over his poem, “hungry to be interrupted.” The advent of the Porlock Person was, in fact, a huge relief.

  [If you have any complaints about this (or any) installment of the WRB, know that I would have addressed them if I were not so rudely interrupted by a person from New Hampshire. I was shocked to learn, reading this, that anyone took the Porlock story as having any connection to anything that actually happened to Coleridge and not something he made up because it sounds cool. If I had written “Kubla Khan,” I would also want people to think that I were capable of sustaining that caliber of verse for much longer and that only the odious demands of business prevented me from doing so. (Subscribe to the WRB!) —Steve] 

• In Slate, an essay adapted from Justin Heckert’s afterword to a collection of interviews conducted by Matt Tullis (Stories Can Save Us: America’s Best Narrative Journalists Explain How, June 1):

  He wanted to know about writers. He wanted to know about where they worked and what the view was like, if they had a window; what brand of pens they used; what shape of notebook. He wanted to know if they were habitual or had superstitions. He was in search of peculiarities that might’ve aided them in what they wrote. Matt was an attentive listener, his students in the feature writing classes he taught through the years remembered, so he was perfect for a project like the podcast, the book—and though he was a journalist with his own ambitions and ideas about method or craft, he took down notes and absorbed the advice other writers offered without any kind of disagreement or pretensions. So many journalists opened up to him with a thousand tips and tactics that it was difficult for him to digest, to remember it all or whittle it saliently into parts of his own process, which he’d actually learned firsthand through experience as a newspaper reporter and professor and adviser and eventually longform writer of nonfiction and memoir. These interviews, these anecdotes—a way to preserve not just the authors here, and their ideas, but his own life story as well.

[Behind the paywall: Steve on Oliver Cromwell sounding like Bob Dylan, the immortal dialectical science of criticism, psychological warfare, French fashion, cheeseburgers, spring and summer flowers, brows, 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.]