The Young Man’s Best Companion, The Farrier’s Sure Guide, The Veterinary Surgeon, Paradise Lost, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Ash’s Dictionary, Walkingame’s Arithmetic, and the Washington Review of Books constituted his library; and though a limited series it was one from which he had acquired more sound information by diligent perusal than many a man of opportunities has done from yards of laden shelves.
N.B.:
The recording of this past Sunday’s WRB x Liberties salon discussion, on the question, “Should art be useful?” is now available for your leisure listening [Or I guess however you classify your commuting time. That’s between you and God. —Chris]:
The next discussion will be on April 9th. If you would like to come discuss the topic, “Is there loyalty without nationalism?” please contact Chris or Celeste Marcus.
Links:
In The Drift, David Schurman Wallace on the return of the historical novel:
The explosion of recuperative novels has been salutary for the historical novel—a whole universe of previously untapped stories—but at times one feels the limitations of this outlook when it seeks too obviously to instruct. At their least successful, they can become testimonies of punishment that tell us little that’s new. Readers project their present preoccupations backwards, collapsing the difference between time periods even as they absorb the author’s meticulous research. The result is often curiously static, and out of step with Lukács’s notion of a dynamic world that requires representation. When writers and readers start to feel present and past as basically interchangeable (in the past, conditions were worse, but human essence remained the same) the conclusions tend to thin out (progress is being made!). When a historical process unfolding is made visible, even if with just a hint, similarity and difference regain their balance: the past is often utterly unlike the present, but the breadth of a historical novel can help the reader sift through the debris and come to a more complicated understanding of change.
[I wonder to what extent the rediscovery of historical fiction is a way to get around writing characters using cell phones. (The problem is much more obvious in film, where no one has figured out a way to show a character using a smartphone with any particular aesthetic logic and some very notable directors—Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, and the Coen brothers jump to mind—who used to make films set in the present day have stopped doing so.) I mean, Sally Rooney has her 20-something characters sending each other emails, a choice more effective at giving a novel a vaguely epistolary flavor than accurately depicting modern communication. —Steve] [Sally Rooney should write a novel about 20-somethings with an email newsletter. —Chris]
Two in The New Yorker:
Maya Binyam profiles Percival Everett, author of Erasure (2001), which was recently adapted for film as American Fiction (2023):
Books, either written or read, are conventionally understood to be pathways to knowledge. But Everett claims to suffer from “work amnesia”; after publishing a book, he forgets its contents entirely.
“I hate the idea that I might know something,” he told me during lunch.
“But other people celebrate you for knowing things,” I countered, trying to justify our convergence over poached eggs and coffee.
“I know nothing,” he said. “Why are you asking me questions?”
I knew that Everett knew something, but I wasn’t sure if his insistence otherwise was a mark of false humility or the admission of an aspiration. He has often articulated his desire to write an “abstract novel,” a book that is about nothing but language in the same way that an abstract painting is about nothing but paint.
Alex Ross on Arnold Schoenberg’s time in the United States:
That radical expansion of the harmonic field had a sweeping influence on all subsequent composers, whether or not they followed Schoenberg explicitly. Hollywood composers paid particularly close attention to Schoenberg’s music, and some studied with him directly. The great man was not displeased to receive these genuflections, although he appeared to resent the idea that his non-tonal vocabulary was useful primarily as an expressive crutch for scenes of tension and terror. Years ago, David Raksin, who wrote music for Laura (1944) and other classic films, told me that he once asked Schoenberg how he should score an airplane sequence. Schoenberg archly replied, “Like big bees, only louder.”
[“Like big bees, only louder” is incredibly dismissive and also a useful reframing of the problem. Oblique Strategies-like. —Steve]
In our sister publication from Claremont, Algis Valiunas on Joyce and the project of modernism:
Henri Barbusse presents a skull with its crown removed like a soft-boiled egg; Wilfred Owen describes gas-ravaged lungs liquefying to a corrupt froth; Siegfried Sassoon depicts a dying man flapping along the ground like a beached fish. With his own hyper-sensitive instrument, Joyce registers the ghostly presence of these sacrificial victims. As the schoolteacher Stephen Dedalus observes his young students at sport, terrible images of men at more gruesome pursuits steal into his mind. “Again: a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a medley, the joust of life. . . . Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain, a shout of spearspikes baited with men’s bloodied guts.” From the playing fields of Mr. Deasy’s prep school to the hecatombs of Ypres, the Somme, and Passchendaele, Joyce maps the grim trajectory of a generation’s fate. The boys playing soccer in 1904 will be just the right age for butchering in 1914–18.
[Behind the paywall: Steve recommends Far from the Madding Crowd to 20-something women, law school, farm women, Sly Stone, olive trees, shawls in Jane Austen, Thomas Browne, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you. If you like what you see, why not subscribe, and why not consider a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]
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