WRB—June 14, 2023
To the gradually cohering body of dissenters from the orthodoxies of American life, the Washington Review of Books was a sacred newsletter . . . despite, or because of, its hieratic esoteric irony and its reiterated note of patrician condescension. More than any other newsletter that I can remember it threw around the state of personal alienation—to use the word of a later day—the aura of high pathos.
N.B.:
[Many, many thanks to Steve and Julia for their help bringing this newsletter together during an especially hectic and distressing time in this Managing Editor’s course of life. —Chris]
Links:
In the Dublin Review of Books, Kevin Power on John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction (1978), in which he names names:
Some of the writers Gardner attacked were, like Gardner, published by Knopf. Some of them, doorstepped by journalists, took the trouble to respond. Barth: “He’s making a shrill pitch to the literary right wing that wants to repudiate all of modernism and jump back into the arms of their nineteenth-century literary grandfathers […] He’s banging his betters over the head with terminology and, when the smoke clears, nobody is left in the room but Mr. Gardner himself.” Updike: “‘Moral’ is such a moot word. Surely, morality in fiction is accuracy and truth.” Joseph Heller also weighed in: “He writes dull novels and dull carping criticism.” Gardner was unmoved: “I am absolutely sure that my ideas will prevail.”
In the Atavist, Anna Altman on Gary Settle, who has helped fellow prisoners apply for compassionate release:
By then, Price knew the man’s name: Gary Settle. He was slow to tell her much about himself, but he continued to send CorrLinks messages to FAMM as he recruited more people at Butner for the Clearinghouse. In emails he sometimes used the moniker “P/H,” for “patient/helper,” in part to protect himself from BOP censure, and in part because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. He felt that his personal story—including why he was serving 177 years in prison, along with his own cancer diagnosis—was beside the point.
Stian Westlake against malcolms:
malcolm (n.) A folksy anecdote used to begin a chapter in a popular nonfiction book, in an attempt to draw in uninterested readers. (Named for Malcolm Gladwell (b. 1963), who popularised the technique and spawned many less sure-handed emulators)
[If Malcolm Gladwell is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on, he knows that what he does is morally indefensible. —Chris]
W. H. Auden:
Alan Jacobs has shared his preface to his upcoming critical edition of The Shield of Achilles:
If in Nones Auden inaugurated his new quest to “see / Things and men in perspective,” in The Shield of Achilles he provides a powerful report on the fruits of that quest. It is the boldest and most intellectually assured work of his career, an achievement that has not been sufficiently acknowledged, in large part because its poetic techniques are not easily perceived or assessed. It is the most unified of all Auden’s collections, and indeed—once its intricate principles of organization are grasped—may be seen as the true successor of those long poems of the 1940s.
And in City Journal, Adam Kirsch on politics and religion in Auden’s poetry:
The difference between Pope’s lines and Auden’s is that, where eighteenth-century man dwells in an orderly universe, his twentieth-century counterpart sees it as his task to create order—first of all, in his own soul. But both poets use verse to explain and clarify a shared truth, rather than to discover their own original truth.
[I watched Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) a couple of days ago. More movies that are generally flat and uninspiring should try to cover up that fact by having a character recite Auden. —Steve]
In the new issue of The Lamp, Jaspreet Singh Boparai on Paul Cézanne:
When you stand far enough away from a Cézanne to see it properly, you begin to see that the blocky masses of color and seeming crudeness of how the paint is handled are not, in fact, important. Cézanne is trying to render light and color as they are experienced by someone who is standing too far away from what he is looking at to register details. Once you realize what he is trying to do, he becomes far more “realistic” than a photo-realist. His effects can be startling, but only if you look at his pictures from a distance that enables you comfortably to ignore the finer points of his technique. You are not supposed to notice the technical elements or care about them.
The painter can do no more than construct an image; he must wait for this image to come to life for other people. When it does, the work of art will have united these separate lives; it will no longer exist in only one of them like a stubborn dream or a persistent delirium, nor will it exist only in space as a colored piece of canvas. It will dwell undivided in several minds, with a claim on every possible mind like a perennial acquisition.
You also notice, a little more clearly each time, how necessary it was to go beyond love, too; it’s natural, after all, to love each of these things as one makes it: but if one shows this, one makes it less well; one judges it instead of saying it. One ceases to be impartial; and the very best—love—stays outside the work, does not enter it, is left aside, untranslated: that’s how the painting of sentiments came about (which is in no way better than the paintings of things). They’d paint: I love this here; instead of painting: here it is. In which case everyone must see for himself whether or not I loved it.
Reviews:
In the TLS, Madoc Cairns reviews M. John Harrison’s “anti-memoir” (Wish I Was Here, May):
Harrison was, he explains, doomed to this. As a child he found himself mooning at button colours or pond silt, distanced from the world by his fascination with it. At the age of four he “would lodge easily in the moment, fail to move on: by eleven I could imagine myself grown up, but only as someone who, reaching an undefined gate-level, had flipped into a completely novel state”. Harrison’s image—maturity as the activation of an electrical circuit—is typically sharp. And typically double-edged. Total reinvention isn’t possible in human lives—only in dreams, or in fantasy. Or in fiction.
In The Marginalia Review of Books, Thomas Harrison reviews Brené Brown’s attempt to understand the language we use for emotions (Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience, 2021):
Readers from other parts of the world may have more critical perspective to bring to bear on how we fall prey to these experiences in the unreflective and hostile United States, with disconnection ballooning into a national Super-Feeling and provoking the smaller feelings called out by Brown’s diagnosis, and urgently calling for others as remedies: belonging, gratitude, trust, self-trust, contentment, and so on. The epidemic of this Super-Feeling explains the presence of an epilogue in this book, devoted to what may be the single most pressing task in American social psychology today: “Cultivating Meaningful Connection.” This does not seem to be such an issue in the traditional communities of Bali, or in the family-based lifestyles of Italy. The pall of disconnectedness that looms over this atlas reminds us that psychological problems are social; and their only remedy is cultural.
In The New Yorker, Parul Sehgal reviews Lorrie Moore’s latest novel (I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, June 20):
As the pages turn, the story does not build or cohere. It degrades. Subplots and subsidiary characters fall away, like Lily’s hair from the loosening skin of her scalp. So began an odd season in my reading life, of absent-mindedness and missed subway stops, while I felt that the novel was disintegrating in my hands. It got all over everything. I am still pulling strands of it out of my pockets. One might say of Lorrie Moore what she said of Updike—that she is our greatest writer without a great novel—but how tinny “greatness” can feel when caught in the inhabiting, staining, possessing power of a work of such determined strangeness and pain. An almost violent kind of achievement: a writer knifing forward, slicing open a new terrain—slicing open conventional notions and obligations of narrative itself.
N.B. (cont.):
The publisher of the local Post is stepping down.
“The New York Times Book Review Mixes It Up” [None of these words are in the Bible. —Steve] [Should we try “Mixing it up”? —Chris]
W.W. Norton & Company celebrated their centennial recently. “Authors hung out by the bar sipping the evening’s signature cocktail, the Norton Cranthology, a mojito named after The Norton Anthology of English Literature.”
Brian Dillon on old magazines:
Old magazines are cheap time machines, archaeologies of collective desire. Find a print issue, specialist or popular, preferably more than 20 years old (though 10 may do the trick), and read it from cover to cover. You will execute no deep dive, vanish down no rabbit hole; your reading is instead a lateral slice through a culture, class or milieu.
One day in 1990, I was flown first class from Dublin to Phoenix, Arizona, to read at the Irish Cultural Centre there. Five people turned up to listen to me. None of them had read my books, and it was clear that none of them had the slightest intention of doing so. They were the sons and daughter of Irish immigrants, and were there simply to see a real, live son the Oul Sod.
You can buy an up-to-date print encyclopedia in 22 volumes. This man did.
“Enough! Enough! Enough of this nonsense;— it is time to revive the compound dash!” [Nicholson Baker heads have known this for ages. —Chris]
The Drift is accepting applications for an essays editor position through July 14. Salary range $50–70k.
Taking issue:
The Summer issue of Frieze is out now.
So too, the semiquincentennial Overland.
A new issue of The American Conservative is online: “The Vice Issue”.
As is the latest issue of Guernica
Local:
“In The Big Break, the Washington Post reporter Ben Terris sets out to chronicle this other Washington, the one full of rank opportunism, low-grade hypocrisy, and free-form clout chasing.”
Book talk:
Rachael Swarns at the Hill Center, today at 7pm, and
Jerry Saltz at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, on June 22. “All passes have been distributed for this event; however, there is always someone who doesn’t show up. If you’re unable to claim an advance pass, our walk-up line opens at 5:30pm in the Lobby. We’ll do our best to welcome everyone.”
An exhibit of Antonio Canova’s clay sketches opened this week at the National Gallery of Art, there until October.
Film:
The National Museum of Asian Art is showing Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring (1949) today at 2 pm.
The Drive-In at Union Market has three more movies to show this summer, including Clueless (1995) this Friday at 9:10 pm.
The Alamo Drafthouse in Crystal City is showing Cloak and Dagger (1984) on Sunday, June 25th at 3 pm.
The AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center is showing the films of Park Chan-wook over the next few weeks.
The DC/DOX Film Festival is this weekend,
Upcoming books:
June 20 | Hanover Square
Adult Drama: And Other Essays
by Natalie Beach
From the publisher: Natalie Beach became an internet sensation when her essay on her toxic friendship with Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway went viral. Now, for the first time, and in her own indelible voice, Beach offers a revelatory glimpse into her own life alongside a broader cultural criticism of the world today. Through stories of heartbreak, odd jobs, political activism, existential crises and low-rise jeans, Natalie Beach explores the high stakes and absurdist comedy of coming of age in a world gone mad.
Effervescent, hilarious and unflinchingly self-aware, Adult Drama marks the arrival of an electrifying new literary voice.
[Surely at least one person will squeeze an amusing review out of this. —Chris]
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