WRB—June 8, 2024
Perhaps it is but another instance of the Managing Editors’ egoism that they reserve their most vicious kicks for themselves.
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 The Paris Review, Lucy Schiller on the tone and voice of essays these days:
Amidst the tone of graven importance the writers of these essays, maybe there’s not much to say that feels new—or if there is, we are often side-stepping it. In her book Hole Studies (2022), Hilary Plum points out how contemporary essayists, she says, write “I’ve been thinking a lot about . . .” and “then just virtuously mention a subject, not saying one thing of substance about it, moving on before we have to do any work.” On the flip side, there is the feigned overconfidence of aphorism, which supplies contemporary writers with what Adam Gopnik calls a “neat if slightly dubious finality.” Memory is a tantrum. Setting isn’t just place but time. Dying can be easy. These days, it’s harder to learn how to live. Aphorisms of this kind don’t always feel particularly exciting or convincing—they feel, instead, fairly rote, and like assertions the writer makes to establish a sense of authority when they don’t necessarily feel one.
[The sting about the end about “essay meaning ‘to try’” as lazy aphorism is after my own heart. —Steve] [ on writing: “If you’d like to write essays and you’re having trouble starting, that already means you’re getting one important part of this whole thing right. It means that your ambitions are what they should be: you would like to make, at a minimum, something good enough that it won’t waste some reader’s time.” See also on voice: “Readers right now crave voice, to an extreme degree—thus the popularity of newsletters driven by a single writer. This may seem blindingly obvious, but if your articles, or whatever pieces of content you produce, are just like everyone else’s, no one will care about them. Voice is the difference.” —Chris]
In The New Yorker, Merve Emre on writing about Freud:
But it would be wrong to end on such unremitting pessimism. No matter his private grief, Freud always allowed the analytic pendulum to swing in the opposite direction. The smallest but brightest entry among the Freud biographies is Writing on the Wall, a 1944 tribute by the modernist poet H. D., who was treated by Freud in the thirties. Dedicated to “Sigmund Freud, blameless physician,” its chapters flit between H. D.’s memories of her sessions with “the Professor” and memories of her father and mother, her stillborn child, and her flight to Greece under a gathering mist of madness. The poetic spirit that animates psychoanalysis—the subterranean glow of fiction, of fantasy, of useless pleasure—finds its apotheosis in H. D.’s free-associative style. She had evidently watched Freud listening just as carefully as he had listened to her speaking. He was “like a curator in a museum, surrounded by his priceless collection of Greek, Egyptian, and Chinese treasures,” she wrote. She found him withdrawn, “quiet, a little wistful.” When he grew annoyed with her, he beat his hand on the headpiece of his famous couch. Re-creating Freud as a mixture of myth and reality, H. D. offered the reader a singularly intimate account of the method of a man who claimed intimacy with everyone but seemed to offer it to no one.
Art Kavanagh on the lineage of Tess Durbeyfield:
It’s another (perhaps the most noticeable) example of something he does several times in the novel: he is putting her in two incompatible time periods or positions at once, so that she seems to combine elements of both. On the threshing machine, she spans the divide between the preindustrial age and the industrial one. Similarly, when she goes to work at Crick’s dairy farm, she becomes a “dairymaid,” though not a maid. (It is Groby’s averment—accurate though impertinent—that she is “no maid” that earns him a punch from Angel Clare.) She slips easily between being an uneducated peasant girl and the descendant of decayed aristocrats, with firm opinions and a determined will. Having first been the victim of Alec d’Urberville’s seduction, she becomes the agent who argues him out of his spurious conversion.
[“Seduction”—I will not litigate whether it was consensual here, but I will say that a text that shaped my reading of Alec d’Urberville is a tweet reading “behind every girl is a story where a man drove extremely fast and recklessly to scare the living shit out of her.” —Steve]
Reviews:
In The Lamp, Joseph Bottum reviews a new edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second book of short stories (Tales from the Jazz Age, 1922, edited by Anne Margaret Daniel, 2023):
This Side of Paradise (1920) had made Fitzgerald a national star for “the countless flappers and college kids who think I am a sort of oracle,” he told Perkins. But he understood that the Jazz Age, whose name he had popularized, was coming to an end. The first section of Tales of the Jazz Age was labeled “My Last Flappers” for a reason. In 1931 Fitzgerald would write in an essay called “Echoes of the Jazz Age” that the word jazz “in its progress toward respectability, has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines of a war. To many English the War still goes on because all the forces that menace them are still active—Wherefore eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. But different causes had now brought about a corresponding state in America—though there were entire classes (people over fifty, for example) who spent a whole decade denying its existence even when its puckish face peered into the family circle.”
[This Side of Paradise is a truly demented novel. (I mean this lovingly. It’s a great novel; it’s also a gigantic mess held together only by every bit of it being stupendously messy.) I refuse to go back and read The Great Gatsby—I last read it sophomore year of high school, and as high school boys are wont to do I thought it was perfect. I am sure I would not find it perfect now, so I simply refuse to have my illusion spoiled. (Isn’t this Fitzgeraldian? I learned from him—he said something similar before seeing Ginevra King for the first (and last) time in years near the end of his life.) So now, when I feel the desire to reread Gatsby, I reread This Side of Paradise. Or “Winter Dreams.” —Steve]
In Poetry, J. Howard Rosier reviews Callie Siskel’s debut collection of poetry (Two Minds, April), which reflects on the death of her father Gene:
Perhaps the greatest strength of Two Minds is that mentioning this fact feels like a violation—not because we have run afoul of an unwritten rule, but because the entire point of Siskel’s book is to wrestle with the private, interior nature of grief. Does it matter that Siskel went to Yale, like her father? Only inasmuch as that, in “Emissary,” the “familiar silhouette obscuring the clock face” is an apparition—spawned by the legend of her father climbing trees dressed as Batman while an undergrad—and that she dug up books written by his mentor, the writer John Hersey, “thinking what if he held what I am holding now.” Another famous fact about Gene Siskel is that he purchased the white disco suit John Travolta wore in Saturday Night Fever (1977) (one of the critic’s favorite films) at a charity auction. When considered next to the image of Callie Siskel “burying [her] face inside / his jackets” in “Transparent Man,” and her opening the garment bag that holds the suit to imagine “a different actor, one // who seemed to play [her] father,” the knowledge becomes so sad, so intimate, that you almost wish you didn’t know it.
[In Ebert’s review of Saturday Night Fever for his “Great Movies” series (it isn’t, not even close, but let that pass) he mentions Siskel’s love for it and his purchase of the suit throughout:
But I suspect that Saturday Night Fever had another kind of appeal to Siskel, one that reflects the way the movies sometimes complete the unfinished corners of our lives. In a way, Tony Manero (Travolta) represented the kind of adolescence Gene didn’t have, just as Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), the hero of La Dolce Vita (1960), led the kind of life I once lusted for. . . .
Gene bought the famous white suit at a charity auction. I got to inspect it once. It came with a shirt that buttoned under the crotch, so it would still look neat after a night on the dance floor. I asked Gene if he’d ever tried it on. It was too small, he said. But it wasn’t the size that mattered. It was the idea of the suit.
“It was the idea of the suit” becomes even more weighted here. —Steve]
In The Baffler, Madeleine Crum reviews Miranda July’s latest novel (All Fours, May):
These early scenes are full of awkward, often funny evasions, of failures to connect. They’re also full of vague musings. “What the hell were we all doing? What the hell was going on here on earth?” July writes. And soon after: “Who made the stars? Why is there life on earth?” She decides: “Nobody knows what’s going on. We are thrown across our lives by winds that started blowing millions of years ago.” July may be lightly satirizing her character’s shower thoughts here; still, these are platitudinal even as stoned revelations go. But twee tends not to try to instill wonder so much as describe it directly, and the resulting insights are necessarily broad.
[We linked to an interview with July in WRB—May 15, 2024.]
In our sister publication across the pond, Hal Foster reviews a reappreciation of Surrealism (Why Surrealism Matters, by Mark Polizzotti, January):
Surrealism also persisted in literature, clearly in magical realism and less obviously in other forms. The French celebration of écriture in the 1960s recalled, in its assertion that language is its own motive force, the Surrealist experiment with automatic writing, whether the association was desired or not. And in the Anglophone world a connection might be made between the “paranoid-critical method” of Dalí, defined as the “systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations,” and the crazy-enough-to-be-true projections of Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard (who wrote incisively about Surrealism). The afterlife of Surrealism is more active in poetry, as in the New York School of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others: “We all ‘grew up Surrealist,’” Ashbery once remarked, “without even being aware of it.” Surrealist directives—to suspend rational control as much as possible, to let language dictate, to hold to the first thought as the best thought—often guided these poets. Yet the juxtapositions of an Ashbery poem are not produced to shock; often the affect is more fluid or flat than charged. It is a Surrealism without the unconscious (if that still qualifies), or perhaps an unconscious that is now seen to be loose in the world (which is the way Ballard conceived his version of Surrealism).
[We linked to a previous review in WRB—May 11, 2024.]
In the Times, Leah Reich reviews a book about Louis Wain, illustrator of cats (Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania, by Kathryn Hughes, June 4):
How much did Wain actually influence the new cat aesthetic? Despite the author’s claims to the contrary, his work seems less a propellant than a reflection of the zeitgeist—as seen through his own increasingly eccentric perspective.
Indeed, Catland is populated by other characters who, in the author’s own telling, were at least as deeply involved in shaping the emerging cat world. There’s Harrison Weir, who organized the first Crystal Palace cat show in 1871, and “kick-started the modern cat-fancy,” and the clergyman’s daughter Frances Simpson, who had enormous influence on cat culture. Alongside her involvement in breeding, showing and judging, she became an authority whose feline-adjacent endorsements, pronouncements and opinions appeared in countless publications and in a column called “Practical Pussyology” (a lost Prince B-side if ever there were one).
N.B. (cont.):
“Why shouldn’t books also feature an ending credits page where we could call out the Best Boy of books, whoever that is? The industry is so much deeper and robust than simply publisher and editor and agent (hell, it took this long to give translators cover credit).”
Paying for book promotion.
Elections in novels.
The University of Pennsylvania Press is having a 40% off sale on all available books through Friday, June 14.
New issue: The Lamp Issue 23 | Trinity 2024 [As linked to above.]
Local:
An exhibit of “the art of the ocean” opens at Hillwood today.
The Folger Shakespeare Library reopens on Friday, June 21.
It’s finally happening: the Anacostia River Splash will take place on Saturday, June 29.
Step Afrika!’s The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence runs at the Kreeger Theater until Sunday, July 14.
Funny Girl will run at the Kennedy Center from Tuesday, June 25 through Sunday, July 14.
Poem:
“Treatise on Fallen Fruit” by Keith S. Wilson
Sleep. And that’s all we did.
We perfected a way of leaning
like beams on the verge
of ambulance. Slept in the shared carriage of the couch,
the television orange as a deer’s mouth,
A missing student,white noise from falling cities, and our lips over-
poured with salt: tomorrow
will work itself out. The world
sways between the quiet and guided
disasters. Like fireworks. Like the heart. Then smokein the night. We always found the paths back
into each other’s arms. On my way home to you,
the carpool passed the overcast of Lake Michigan
and I could tell by the color in the water
that we had bombed Syria. However this started,
it is also about drones making light of men.Like this does. Whether or not we mean for it,
the car glides under the bridge where brown lives.I am coming back to curl next to you, for sleep to dangle
like playthings from our arms. In good yearslike this we buy flowers.
I might wake by the fire first
and look for your word
and whatever you are saying in your sleep
couldn’t possibly be. Imagine we are a canoe
in movement. I drag my thoughts behind me like an arm in the water
or a fuse. You know the throat of the world, too, is brown.If there is a God, some secret weekend exists
where He sleeps with his legs stretched
like this upon an impossible couch.
Neither do we distinguish between love
and hush. Did I tell youthey stopped reporting after the very first day?
I looked every night. On the one hand we test the limits of passion
and on the other, the limits of history.This afternoon they found the black boy’s arms
and legs in the lake. After that, the children playedin the water. Then it got to be late. The police ask again
for us to leave. We pack our things into the smalls
of our backs. We move hellishly slow, the light from an explosion.
[This poem is from the Winter 2018 issue of the Indiana Review.
This past weekend, taking a glance at my list of to-read poetry collections, I was reminded of Wilson’s first poetry collection, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (2019), and ended up reading some of his online journal publications. I’m glad I did, to say the least—they’re beautiful. (His “letter begun to my future niece” is also an incredible poem; it was hard to pick between the two.)
Wilson’s language here is just stunning—I love the moments of strangeness we get in phrases like on the verge / of ambulance and our lips over- / poured with salt. But beyond moments like that, there’s a consistent quietude in the poem’s voice that’s so striking:
The world
sways between the quiet and guided
disasters. Like fireworks. Like the heart.
That language builds up to intertwine the interpersonal intimacy of the poem with the collective pain and injustice that’s also centered here. The poem’s intimacy doesn’t just come through in explicitly tender lines like On my way home to you, or the scene where the speaker wakes by the fire to the sound of his lover’s speaking in her sleep, but in the immediacy of the mix of direct address and plural first-person that’s present throughout the whole poem: Did I tell you / they stopped reporting after the very first day? or
I am coming back to curl next to you, for sleep to dangle
like playthings from our arms. In good years
like this we buy flowers.
And that tenderness of voice, I think, reveals the depth of the speaker’s attention to the world’s cruelties, as well as the way the speaker recognizes both the imperative to bear witness and his—our—helplessness in the face of all this pain:
However this started,
it is also about drones making light of men.
Like this does. Whether or not we mean for it . . .
Those final two stanzas constitute a brutal, painful closing gesture, one that we’re brought into so suddenly with the first sentence of the penultimate stanza. The physicality of the last two sentences is a large part of what makes it such a resonant ending as the lovers pack our things into the smalls / of our backs and then move away from the scene of violence hellishly slow, transformed into the light from an explosion. We pack our things into the smalls / of our backs. What a poem. —Julia]
Upcoming books:
June 11 | FSG Originals
Any Person Is the Only Self: Essays
by Elisa Gabbert
From the publisher: Who are we when we read? When we journal? Are we more ourselves alone or with friends? Right now or in memory? How does time transform us and the art we love?
In sixteen dazzling, expansive essays, the acclaimed essayist and poet Elisa Gabbert explores a life lived alongside books of all kinds: dog-eared and destroyed, cherished and discarded, classic and clichéd, familiar and profoundly new. She turns her witty, searching mind to the writers she admires, from Plath to Proust, and the themes that bind them—chance, freedom, envy, ambition, nostalgia, and happiness. She takes us to the strange edges of art and culture, from hair metal to surf movies to party fiction. Any Person Is the Only Self is a love letter to literature and to life, inviting us to think alongside one of our most thrilling and versatile critics.
[We linked to a review in WRB—June 1, 2024.]
Also out Tuesday:
Dey Street Books: Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers
Penguin Press: The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne
Ten Speed Press: The Bartender’s Pantry: A Beverage Handbook for the Universal Bar by Jim Meehan and Bart Sasso, with Emma Janzen
What we’re reading:
Steve finished the book of Beerbohm essays. [Back to seventeenth-century England we go. —Steve]
Julia read more of The Impossible Craft and The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. She also reread Song of Songs and started Barbara Newman’s Making Love in the Twelve Century: “Letters of Two Lovers” in Context (2016).
Critical notes:
A footnote from
:People who don’t realize it’s a difficult question are offering Joyce and Beckett, against Gwyn, as obvious examples of the political artist. Yes, Beckett fought in the French Resistance—but he also longed to free literature, as music and painting had been freed before it, from the burden of representation and therefore of social engagement. Yes, Joyce wrote against the British Empire—but he also wrote against Irish nationalism’s instrumentalization of culture for political ends and wrote to his brother, on the eve of the Second World War, “For God’s sake don’t talk politics. I’m not interested in politics. The only thing that interests me is style.” No one was more political than Percy Bysshe Shelley, but his final work concluded that there was no political solution to the problems of human life, that “God made irreconcilable / good and the means of good.” Mary Shelley, meanwhile, invented science fiction to warn against Promethean politics, to defend the private life. Like Blake before them, the Shelleys understood that a political revolution without an apolitical spiritual revolution of the kind only art could effect would empower no one but the Napoleons and the Stalins of this world. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf: each in their way advocated for the circulation of a consciousness and an affect transcending the merely political if the political itself was ever really to be reformed.
[The leftists trying to score a point against the liberals in this debate tend not to mention the best examples of “the political artist” because they were, generally, sympathetic to fascism. Maybe Joyce and Beckett are obvious examples; Pound is a much more obvious one, but invoking Pound is not useful if the actual goal of the argument is demonstrating that the liberal commitment to neutrality leads to failures in reading—specifically, a failure to embrace the left-leaning politics of certain works because the approach to the text made those politics invisible. And, since that is the goal, Joyce gets mentioned and Pound does not. —Steve]
- on Antony and Cleopatra:
Shakespeare is a way of seeing patterns. Reading Shakespeare is like reviewing the greatest chess games ever played. You get to see how all of these personalities, starting from fixed positions, played their way into a checkmate. So you get to learn how you’ve played yourself into checkmate.
In Shakespeare, kingdoms are lost and won. Heroes are killed or they kill themselves. We don’t go that far, and obviously we can’t. But at our own scale, the stakes are the same. The pattern matches. The psychological movements are the same.
- on fragments of Kafka:
So much of Kafka scholarship leans into his letters and diaries and it would be unwise to not make use of these resources. An example: allow me to grab a book at random from my small collection of texts on Kafka, Pascale Casanova’s Kafka, Angry Poet (2015). I haven’t read this one yet, but it looks promising. I’ll open it to a random page: 290 on my left, 291 on my right (this is how books work). On my left, a page dedicated to analyzing Kafka’s infamous letter to his father. On the right the analysis of the infamous letter ends, and we pivot immediately to Kafka’s diaries. Casanova leans on these sources to add evidence to the central claim of her study: Kafka was a radical social critic. The materials of course help adjudicate this claim, but political readings of Kafka are possible and evident from his texts alone, mysterious as they are.
The point of this little experiment is not to shame Casanova who strikes me as an able and worthwhile critic. Rather it is meant to be indicative of a certain state of both Kafka studies and literary analysis in general. We want the confessional materials, we want the archive, we want the hypograph. We want to close the door in a definitive manner. The great frustration of Kafka is his “ironic precision.” His novels deliver scenes but they do not deliver judgments. They build a world of such oppression, but it is such a human oppression that we do not know if we should read them as personal or social tales. His works have the power of fairy tales—I have often thought Kafka would be quite appropriate for young children—whose morals expand in an incredible number of directions. We would like to squash this and show that our reading is alone the best one.