WRB—Mar. 11, 2026
“loss of humanistic spirit”
“What do you think of the Washington Review of Books?”
“I think it would be a good idea.”
Links:
In New Left Review, Xi Ruochen on Hong Kong’s role in Chinese publishing:
Huge numbers of pirated editions, smuggled tamizdat and anonymous self-printed materials now began to circulate through flea-markets and other “secondary channels.” Although both the authorities and serious authors voiced alarm at the amorality unleashed by this tide, to which new regulations as well as scholarly debates on “the demise of Enlightenment” and “loss of humanistic spirit” (renwen jingshen) bore witness in the late 1990s, a new literary ecosystem gradually emerged between cultural entrepreneurs and their readers, both registering a certain autonomy. The state’s extensive privatizations also gave rise to an unofficial trade in primary sources for historical research, as old Party documents from shuttered factories and downsized institutions flowed onto market stalls and circulated through the networks of second-hand book sellers and private collectors. Party history has always been a highly centralized practice in the prc, where all publications—chronicles, anthologies, biographies of Party leaders—were lodged in a handful of specialized institutions, including the Bureau of Party Literature and Party History Research, whose “official historians” enjoyed privileged access to Central Archives. The expansion of the market allowed researchers to bypass official obstacles to historiographic production. Identifying themselves as minjian they began to revise the official narrative from alternative perspectives. The 1990s thus saw a diversity of approaches in the field of PRC history. In addition to domestic practitioners, these “grassroots archives” also enriched the fieldwork of foreign scholars, nurturing a body of scholarship sometimes referred to as “Sinological garbology.”
[“Sinological garbology” is an incredible phrase. —Steve]
In The New Statesman, George Monaghan interviews Will Self:
Fictional worlds are, in some sense, even more inevitable than the real one. The man who commits suicide in the new book realizes that he is a powerless fictional character. But as Self wrote, quite beautifully, in the essay “Being a Character”: “It’s precisely in fictional characters’ conviction—despite all evidence to the contrary—that they are the authors of their own lives, that they resemble us most . . . It’s precisely this shared predicament which makes them so very worthy of our compassion.” In the same essay, Self reflects that, while he initially dismissed characters in favor of ideas, “People who need people—I began to suspect—are the luckiest people in the world.” I repeat that line. He snorts.
“It’s something like a tagline from Friends or something—utterly cheesy.”
“Why did you write it, then?”
“Umm, oh no. I do believe it. I do believe it.”
[As Norm Macdonald said: “if something is true it is not sentimental.” —Steve]
Reviews:
In the Journal, Michael O’Donnell reviews Tom Junod’s book about his father (In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man: A Memoir, March 10):
The book builds on a 1996 feature that Mr. Junod wrote about his father’s fashion tips and lifestyle rules. The article’s accompanying photo of a tuxedoed Lou holding a martini and staring into the camera is extraordinary: He is Hollywood handsome, the pinnacle of manhood, virile and bold even in the September of his years. But the enterprise was a kind of sham. Mr. Junod now reveals that by that point, at age 77, Lou had abandoned his own maxims about turtlenecks (the most flattering thing a man can wear) and witch hazel (for cleaning the navel), dressing shabbily and throwing his money away. Mr. Junod says he wrote the piece to show Lou “that I am finally successful, and to make him understand I owe much of my success to him.” Yet Mr. Junod confesses that he desperately doesn’t want to be like his father.
[The feature in GQ is one of the finest magazine pieces I’ve read; I think about it whenever I put on a turtleneck, which I do with some frequency. Junod’s “style is the public face you put together in private, in secret, behind a door all your own” is as good a definition of that word as you’ll find.
That Lou had apparently “abandoned his own maxims” makes his son’s feature about him an act of printing the legend as filial piety. But in hiding the truth, it functions as critique for those who know it. For all Tom Junod’s ambivalence about his father, he insists that the man he owes much of his success to is not a broken-down old man who no longer cares to keep up appearances but a fastidious man who paid attention to style. (As in fashion, so in writing.)
But the question haunting the feature (and, to take this review’s word for it, the memoir) is what lies under all the style. When Tom asks his father when he looked his best and gets the answer “The best I ever looked? Every day of my life,” it is impossible not to admire the self-assurance; it is also impossible not to note that to give a specific answer, to tell a story, to reminisce about a moment, would reveal something about Lou, something about what he found most important, something about a defining day of his life. The answer he gives is an impenetrable surface. —Steve]
[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:
Why Zoomers listen to old music, and how to use the internet better
The targets of satire
A Poem by Thomas Wyatt, kissing, and the weather
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]
