The smallest of D.C. neighborhoods contains major poets, and all other kinds of artists.
N.B.:
This year’s first WRB Presents, featuring readings by V Efua Prince, Lisa Russ Spaar, Colette Shade, and Ryan Alexander, will take place today, March 12 at Sudhouse D.C. at 6:30 p.m. Readings begin at 7.
March’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Saturday, March 29 to discuss the topic “Is there honor without revenge?”
Links:
Reviews:
In our sister publication in Hollywood, Sumana Roy reviews Michel Chaouli’s book on criticism (Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins, 2024):
“Instinctively I want someone to catch my overflow of pleasure,” Virginia Woolf writes in her diary. Rabindranath Tagore, writing on a different continent and in a different language and genre, captures the same neediness of the creative practitioner: “The singer alone does not make a song, there has to be someone who hears [ . . . ] Where there is no love, where listeners are dumb, there never can be song.” Both Woolf and Tagore are writing about “someone” without knowing their passport details. And that is part of the problem Chaouli engages with. I’ve thought of this “someone” with affection and unease: if Robinson Crusoe were a singer or a novelist, would he feel as desperately homeless as Tagore, for not having an audience at all? And yet Crusoe begins with the need to share—in his case, almost as if he were speaking to an immigration officer: “I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York . . . ” Whom does one share with? Whom can one share with? In choosing to quote Woolf and Tagore, writers whose poetic criticism isn’t as well known as their fiction and poetry, I want to emphasize the question of language. To “share,” one must have a shared language. What language of criticism would allow for widespread sharing?
[We linked to an earlier review in WRB—June 12, 2024 and an interview with Chaouli in WRB—Sept. 21, 2024. The solution to Crusoe’s problem, of course, is to start an email newsletter. Personally, I think a way to create a little of the shared language (as the WRB will attest) is to include long quotations so that readers can see and get a sense of the objects being discussed. As argued a little while ago:
Elongated quotations add bulk, and there is a merit in concision. But online that doesn’t apply. And here I think the merit goes the other way: long quotations give a better flavor of the text you are discussing, and make it harder to cherry-pick quotations in a distorting way. And texts (most texts) are long, and are not well represented by brief snippet-y quotations. Reading a single Proustian sentence does not at all give you the sense of what it’s like actually to read Proust. Nor does it cost in terms of readerly patience or time (pixels do not cost as paper does), for the reader can skim, or if she prefers wholly skip, the quotation. As we move increasingly to e-publication and online, couldn’t we regularize lengthy quotations?
(See, there’s another example.) —Steve]
In ,
reviews “a volume of experimental prose/poetry written about, and by, the internet” (Agonist, by Udith Dematagoda, 2024):One could argue that this is intentional irony, but I won’t. Here’s why: though the book claims to be “Accumulations from the Void” (the book’s subtitle) it reads as mimetic, except it is missing the rich ironies that mimeses can contain, and appears (sorry) largely like vomit on the page. This sounds harsh, but in fact it is supposedly what Dematagoda is going for. He states as much, writing in his epigraph that he has “drank of [the internet’s] poison, consumed all its sins, and vomited them upon the page.” What is one to do, then, with the uncomplicated fact that one is reading exactly what one expects to read on the internet, and that one is doing so in a novel that declares itself a regurgitation of the internet? The ratio is a bit one to one. The mimesis is almost too pure. There is no real challenge, there is no real insight offered up. The cover blurb states that the novel is a “fragmented discourse” upon the internet’s “banal diabolical passions”—but in fact it is precisely this discourse that is missing.
[Well, you know, it’s like Baudelaire says: Hypocrite poaster,—mon semblable,—mon frère! It’s also like Solomon says: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.” No additional points are awarded for knowing it’s vomit and returning anyway. —Steve]
In The New Statesman, Rowan Williams reviews a book about the Divine Comedy (Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, by Joseph Luzzi, 2024):
Unfortunately, it is quite clear that this wonderful speech is there to illustrate just why (from Dante’s point of view) Ulysses is in Hell. His passion for endless adventure at all costs results in betrayals of his duties and the death of his friends. Luzzi has a fascinating discussion of the creative misunderstanding that Dante somehow endorses Ulysses’ pride and folly, showing how it pervades Madame de Staël’s great Romantic novel Corinne and is reflected, rather more startlingly, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—though, as Luzzi rightly notes, Shelley has grasped “the formidable ironies of Ulysses’ speech” as Dante frames it, the rhetorical elevation that conceals a raging Faustian pride, indifferent to the suffering of others. And yet, as a later chapter shows us, there is a further depth of irony to be plumbed. Primo Levi describes how, in Auschwitz, recalling the same speech of Ulysses, he experienced “a flash of disassociation, taking brief flight from his living hell,” a reminder of human dignity and solidarity. Paradoxically, Ulysses’ empty but stirring words, illustrating just why he is condemned to Hell for his arrogance, serve for a moment to release someone else from a hell of humiliation and isolation.
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
I answer a question from Guy Davenport: why did the Romantics want to rewrite Paradise Lost and the moderns want to rewrite the Odyssey?
The superiority complexes writers in the ’50s got away with
Grace on a Poem by Elizabeth Madox Roberts about a woodpecker
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 below.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much; I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? We depend on the good will of our readers, and we depend on their word of mouth to grow; nothing is as effective at bringing new readers into the fold as a recommendation from a friend.
—Steve]
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