In point of fact, the end of human Time or History—that is, the definitive annihilation of Man properly so called or of the free and historical Individual—means quite simply the cessation of Action in the strong sense of the term. Practically, this means: the disappearance of the Washington Review of Books.
N.B.:
[I am going to describe the next week of the WRB as “tenuous”—we’ll still have a big Film Supplement for you on Monday afternoon, but I am going to be traveling, and I am not at all sure I’ll be able to publish consistently on Wednesday and Saturday mornings. I’ll do my best, and I’m sorry for the brief interruption of regular service.
I hope this issue of the WRB finds you all well. —Chris]
Links:
“Since 1982, Christian publishers have released eleven different books titled Thank God It’s Monday.” Andrew Lynn on the topic of his recent book (Saving the Protestant Ethic: Creative Class Evangelicalism and the Crisis of Work, April), “why are Protestants like that?”:
The novelty of this vision becomes more visible when we consider the particular world in which this message is promulated. The economic and social world of today is in many ways the mirror image of the Reformers’ world. Whereas the Reformers sought to sequester from an encroaching ecclesial authority a realm of “secular” work deemed worthy and good in and of itself, today’s leaders confront a mode of work-centric capitalism that makes demands of all life-spheres, including religion. In his 1964 work One Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse saw this organizing of society as not necessarily expelling religion but in fact making room for transcendent visions that ceremonially affirmed existing practices. Struggling to maintain a place in this world, however, would be religious forms not reduced to subjective states and non-interfering commitments. It is these religious forms that now vie for legitimacy in defining what constitutes a “good” and “successful” modern life.
[For “why are Catholics like that,” see What we’re reading. —Chris]
More Protestant ethic, in TAC: Peter Wood on the collapse of the NYC non-denom liberal arts startup The King’s College. [Incidentally, it strikes me that if you’re more than a decade post-rebrand and everyone still needs to say both “Campus Crusade for Christ” and “Cru” on first reference, it’s been a bit of a failure. —Chris]
“It turns out there can be poetry after Auschwitz, even if we may not like what we see.” Justin Smith at Unherd on Nick Cave, Jerome Rothenberg, primitive poetry, and excess:
The great Norman O. Brown, author of Life against Death (1959) and coiner of the term “polymorphous perversity”, was himself a famously uxorious homebody. Brown insisted in interviews that there was no contradiction here, that thanks to the liveliness of his imagination, he was able to indulge all his transgressive impulses without so much as getting up from his desk. And this is what the censorious prudes of Left and Right consistently miss about the place of violence in art: it is not a “gateway” to the real thing, nor an approval of human suffering. It is rather a lucid recognition of the fundamental violence of things — even if, per impossibile, we were to render all human beings docile, we would still be getting constantly slammed by nature — and of the deep human need to come to terms with this condition through the free play of the imagination.
[I noticed today that Unherd still has a sort of active comments section, which feels about as old-fashioned as a tape deck. —Chris]
Reviews:
Smith describes a performance by Rothenberg: “a chant he learned among the Seneca people in Upstate New York in the Seventies, with a single line uttered in trance-like Sprechgesang—‘The animals are coming’—followed by an uncannily realistic impersonation of what sounds like a bear.” More on animals: in Commonweal, Robert Rubsam considers the bird in review of two books about what animals are really up to (An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, 2022; A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey, 2021):
Umwelt suggests the full world that comes into view when several senses combine in the mind of an animal. We can observe how an animal responds to discrete stimuli, but not how those sensations are experienced, together with others. Yong tells us that songbirds have begun to alter their calls to combat urban noise, but we as readers have no idea what it is for one bird to sing to another bird, and for that other bird to hear it. Whatever the song means to them is not what it means to us, however sophisticated our instruments for recording it. That humbling gap is sometimes obscured by all the scientific research Yong has gathered in this timely book. What is it like to be a bird? We still don’t know.
[Heideggerians seeth. —Chris]
One more man becoming beast: For the TLS, Russell Williams on the new Houellebecq memoir (Quelques mois dans ma vie, May):
Houellebecq maintains an impressive inability or unwillingness to read the room in a moment attuned to sexual politics. On arriving in Amsterdam he is met by an unfriendly cameraman who refuses to shake his hand, and “for the first time in my life I felt treated, absolutely, like the subject of an animal documentary”. (I’ve written “get over it” in the margins of my copy.) Then: “at the idea that these images can be broadcast against my will, I felt for the first time, something that appears to me to be akin to what female victims of rape describe”. At this point the reader begins to wonder why this book exists at all. Why didn’t his editor, whom Houellebecq so often praises, suggest a cut? Or his publisher?
Patrick Weil’s Le président est-il devenu fou?, in a new English version out last month (The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson, May), is all told a pretty crazy story if this Atlantic review by Franklin Foer is anything to go by:
Bullitt’s anger toward Wilson was itself worthy of psychoanalysis—and, in fact, Bullitt found himself in Vienna in 1926, knocking on Freud’s door and asking if he would take him on as a patient. Bullitt’s marriage was crumbling, and he had lost his sense of professional purpose. Apparently, Freud recognized his name and agreed to admit Bullitt to what the diplomat called the “sacred couch.”
The relationship wasn’t a straightforward doctor-patient one, and their long conversations would invariably circle back to their shared animus toward Wilson and their mutual disappointment in his ineffectual leadership. The former president was the unevictable tenant squatting in Bullitt’s mind, and he used his sessions to hash out the contents of a play that he was writing about Wilson. Bullitt dedicated the script, which never made it to the stage, to “my friend Sigmund Freud.”
N.B. (cont.):
“Who makes the best butter?” [I’m open to correction on this point, but I strongly feel that on the margin, your commodity cheapest butter is going to be the spot for basically any application that isn’t room-temperature spreading. —Chris]
“Strictly speaking, it would be inaccurate to describe Shirley Hazzard as neglected.”
“The cultural changes in journalism aren’t a sign of decline; they’re a sign of persistence despite decline—wildflowers sprouting in the cracks of a fracturing industry, signs of new life amid the decay.”
Re: our opening line from Wednesday: “How are you supposed to earn the respect and admiration of America’s smartest and best-looking people if you’re at a coffee shop and they can’t see that you are reading National Review on your phone?”
Issues we’re having:
The summer issue of…
…Plough quarterly: “Money,” is now online.
…Parapraxis magazine: “Repair,” is coming soon.
…Bomb magazine is available for pre-order.
The Lamp’s Trinity 2023 issue is coming soon.
Local:
“Georgetown was kind of a dump in the early twentieth century,” said George Derek Musgrove, the co-author of the 2017 study Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital.
The old houses had largely fallen into disrepair, and the neighborhood was home to working-class Irish and African Americans. Then, with the explosion of government hiring during the New Deal, Ivy League graduates moved in. They fixed up their homes in an array of styles until the national craze for historical preservation took hold. In 1950, “Old Georgetown” was designated a federal historic district, with all the restrictions on home modification that entailed.
“By the time you get to 1960, and John Kennedy leaves his Georgetown mansion on N Street for the White House, you just couldn’t afford to get in if you wanted to,” Mr. Musgrove said.
A lot of the residents support efforts to keep things more or less the same.
Screening Thursday, June 15 at the National Portrait Gallery: I Am A Noise, “an unusually intimate psychological portrait of legendary folk singer and activist Joan Baez.”
Upcoming books:
June 6 | New Directions
Kairos
by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann
Toby Lichtig in the Journal: Ms. Erpenbeck’s latest novel, “Kairos,” now available in an agile translation by Michael Hofmann, places us squarely in the period of soldering and sundering: mostly pre-, a little post-. Politics itself stays largely in the background. Sex is our focal point, our lens. In East Berlin in 1986—four years before unification—a writer in his mid-50s, Hans (debonair, well-connected, both raffish and establishment), gets chatty with a 19-year-old student, Katharina (earnest, dreamy, pretty). “Everything was underway, there was no other possibility.” They go for coffee, then back to his place. A love affair ignites.
Robert Rubsam in the local Post: I don’t think Erpenbeck is seeking to sanitize life in an authoritarian state. At the very end of the novel, Katharina discovers something about Hans that calls his entire self, and the political role that self served, into question. The author is simply arguing for her life and the millions of lives like it, which formed and flourished in a state and a society that no longer exist.
[I thought the ND copy for this was significantly worse than usual, so here’s two reviews. To get everything in one place: Atlantic profile and n+1 excerpt from WRB—May 25, 2023; quick Guardian interview; another review, at The Millions.
Incidentally, last week I cut for time and space a Critical note about Erpenbeck and this Compact piece which Helen Andrews got a lot of flack for about nostalgia for the old order of things in former Eastern Bloc countries, metacommentary on the reception of Katja Hoyer’s new history of the DDR (Beyond the Wall, September). I don’t find this particular bickering especially interesting, but I have been thinking about this vein of nostalgia in Erpenbeck (and maybe Judith Schalansky? I did not like The Giraffe’s Neck.), and how we form our picture of what “normal” life is. —Chris]
[Recall the last Claire Messud column we linked you in WRB—May 17? Here’s the other book coming out next week from it.]
June 6 | Princeton University Press
Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History
by Peter Brown
From the publisher: The end of the ancient world was long regarded by historians as a time of decadence, decline, and fall. In his career-long engagement with this era, the widely acclaimed and pathbreaking historian Peter Brown has shown, however, that the “neglected half-millennium” now known as late antiquity was in fact crucial to the development of modern Europe and the Middle East. In Journeys of the Mind, Brown recounts his life and work, describing his efforts to recapture the spirit of an age. As he and other scholars opened up the history of the classical world in its last centuries to the wider world of Eurasia and northern Africa, they discovered previously overlooked areas of religious and cultural creativity as well as foundational institution-building. A respect for diversity and outreach to the non-European world, relatively recent concerns in other fields, have been a matter of course for decades among the leading scholars of late antiquity.
Documenting both his own intellectual development and the emergence of a new and influential field of study, Brown describes his childhood and education in Ireland, his university and academic training in England, and his extensive travels, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. He discusses fruitful interactions with the work of scholars and colleagues that include the British anthropologist Mary Douglas and the French theorist Michel Foucault, and offers fascinating snapshots of such far-flung places as colonial Sudan, midcentury Oxford, and prerevolutionary Iran. With Journeys of the Mind, Brown offers an essential account of the “grand endeavor” to reimagine a decisive historical moment.
Steve Donoghue in Open Letters Review:
But the thing that saves these unending boyhood-and-youth reminiscences also saves the rest of the book and makes it one of the most unusual academic memoirs to appear in the 21st century: Brown brings to his own life story the same enthusiastic recourse to humanity that he brought to the life of St. Augustine all those years ago.
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