She was one of those pretty and charming girls born, as if by an error of fate, into a family of clerks. She had no dowry, no expectations, no means of becoming known, understood, loved or wedded by a man of wealth and distinction; and so she let herself be married to a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books.
N.B.:
The next WRB x Liberties salon will be on the evening of April 9. If you would like to come discuss the topic, “Is there loyalty without nationalism?”, please contact Chris or Celeste Marcus.
Links:
- on A. C. Bradley and Shakespeare’s characters:
In his Hamlet lecture, Bradley says that suppose you describe the plot of Hamlet to someone who knows nothing about it, but you don’t tell them about Hamlet’s character, just the action.
First, this person might say that with a ghost, madness, eight deaths, adultery, and a fight in a grave this play sounds like the sort of typical “blood and horror” tragedies of the time. (Wasn’t Shakespeare supposed to have risen above all that?)
Second, this person would ask, “But why in the world did not Hamlet obey the Ghost at once, and so save seven of those eight lives?”
Why indeed . . . As Bradley points out, “the whole story turns upon the peculiar character of the hero.” The other characters are small compared to Hamlet. Without him there is hardly any play at all. Hamlet is the focus of more discussion than almost anything else in literature.
Hamlet without Hamlet is hardly conceivable. He is the play.
[“This person” sounds not unlike the author of “Hamlet and His Problems.” (As I noted before, “His” and not “Its” is quite a concession.) —Steve]
In Minor Literature[s], Alina Ştefănescu interviews Garrett Strickland:
I think however porous the work can ever be is to its benefit, inviting a continuous approach, since what is encountered will always be different no matter what! You look at the membrane of what reading is and you zoom in on it and all these other world(ing)s spring up or are concomitantly created with your own noticing; you are always this station through which the noumena passes into signal. This would be true of even the crudest things—if you polish the mirror enough you can see just about anything in it. I’m sure there’s someone out there who has understood the entire universe by rewatching the same reality TV show over and over. The work I’m involved with aspires to open out the encounter in widening spirals so that its open circuit of creation has the freedom of unmediated experience, hopefully disarming all of us in increasingly beneficial ways.
In Poetry, A. V. Marraccini references a conversation with Ştefănescu:
When I finally told a friend, the poet Alina Ştefănescu, what had been happening, she in turn told me about the history and theory of pockets, because she knew it would make me feel better. She sent me links to historical pockets in museum collections. Pockets were originally more like cubes, which is to say discrete three-dimensional forms attached separately to clothing by a band at the belt. They evolved later into the two-dimensional attachment that forms the pocket on the garment. Alina understood intuitively how it felt to be flattened, like a cube that is six squares laid out. That’s how you can make a cube with paper, how Gerlovina made hers, by the reverse process, folding up the six squares into the third dimension. That’s what it feels like to finally tell someone about your love’s demise afterward, too, the snapping up the z-axis into the dimension you’re really meant to exist in, the very thing prohibited from your life in loving.
In The Yale Review, Claire Messud on the essays of Virginia Woolf that appeared in that publication:
This is not only a reprise of Woolf’s recurring insistence on “the whole” (in literature as in life), but it is also an account of the balance of constraint and freedom that constitutes the power of the common reader, to whom she grants significant agency in the creation of a literary work. As she notes, again in “Byron & Mr. Briggs,” there is both effort and pleasure involved, because “in the first place reading a great book is always an effort, often a disappointment, and sometimes a drudgery,” yet the rewards are considerable: “One must gather in beauty, subtlety, the various changes of sound and yet must subdue it, as the poet subdued [them], to some larger design, to art itself; for that perhaps is the circle round the whole. So it seems that the emotions of poetry are not our private emotions.”
In Tablet, Eddy Portnoy on “the naked vegan Tolstoy of the Lower East Side”:
Known as the “Gandhi of East Broadway,” Littauer grew out his hair and beard just before World War I and began to saunter about New York’s Jewish quarter wearing white robes and sandals, preaching the benefits of his chosen diet. With a deep interest in mysticism and Buddhism, he also had an aversion to modern technology and refused to take the subway or streetcars, and always went by foot.
But it wasn’t easy to make a living as an itinerant vegetarian preacher on the Lower East Side, so Littauer found a job managing the Progressive Vegetarian Restaurant on the corner of Norfolk and Grand streets, the motto of which was, “For humane beings, try the humane diet.” As Ben Katchor notes in his hefty tome on the history of the dairy restaurant, the owner’s name was Meyer Litheron, though Littauer, an irrepressible sort, appears to have taken it upon himself to change the name of the place in 1913 to the Pythagorean (Vegetarian) Restaurant.
[The Yiddish Book Center has a booklet that once belonged to the Pythagorean (Vegetarian) Restaurant with the restaurant’s stamp in it. It always comes back to ancient mathematicians. —Steve]
Reviews:
In TNR, Jess Bergman reviews Adelle Waldman’s new novel (Help Wanted, March 5):
Waldman has by no means renounced “the study of individual characters,” but here they are instrumentalized in service of a larger argument about the cruel way we organize work. Their personalities feel constructed to illuminate their “social conditions,” rather than reflecting them organically; they are anything but “hard to pin down.” This is partly by design: Waldman admitted to Publishers Weekly that Help Wanted is mission-driven, saying of her characters, “I wanted to just make them feel human and sympathetic and to make sure their poor earnings are seen as unfeeling as I’ve come to think they are.” The novel succeeds on some of these terms—we’re left with no doubts about the unfairness and insufficiency of Team Movement’s wages—but its humanness is ultimately circumscribed by its own good intentions.
[We linked to an earlier review in WRB—Mar. 9, 2024.]
[This review rather offhandedly comments that a decade ago the novel was “perceived to be under threat by . . . the increasingly non-narrative shape of contemporary life.” I would like to know what “the increasingly non-narrative shape of contemporary life” means—it might feel true, but feeling is a poor substitute for scrutinizing. If it means that we are exposed to thousands of things with little in common online every day and struggle to make sense of them and their connections, is this not the experience depicted in and created by The Waste Land? (Or Pound: “I cannot make it cohere.”) If it has to do with the difficulty of understanding and presenting the plot of one’s life—whatever that is—is that not seen in Tristram Shandy? Or in Samson Agonistes, where the Chorus is constantly trying to force Samson (and God) into roles and positions that allow them to understand Samson’s life and where Samson himself comes to accept uncertainty about it? And if it just means that narrative is not the most effective way to explore some aspect of human existence, lyric poetry, for example, has been around for a very long time. These are not new questions; these are not new experiences; artists had considered them prior to 2014. Kierkegaard’s statement that “it is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards” is universal at all times and to all people. There is no “shape” to life outside of how it is experienced and how it is lived, which continue to be forwards. Whatever changes are happening in contemporary life will not change that, and thinking that they will only hinders the artist from appreciating and internalizing past works that have touched on the subject. —Steve]
[I think it’s rather self-important to believe that one’s own time is the first to have invented the concept of life being confusing. The many attempts to understand life, many of which we have mentioned at one point or another in this newsletter, imply that it’s not ever been terribly obvious what the story is supposed to be. Cf. on this, Wieseltier, on Joan Didion, in last Fall’s issue of Liberties:
This, too, is a story, an invented version, a constructed tale; it is the tale of breakdown and privilege that Didion peddled, with epicene austerity, in all her writing. She made incoherence chic. Her contribution to the culture of her time was not to warn it about the seductions of story—as per her famous adage, if indeed it is a warning—but to invent a new story for it, a story of storylessness. She was not alone in this enterprise, obviously: her story is an old story. The fracture and fragmentation of experience is one of the cliches of modern culture, the failure of traditional narrative to capture a reality that has allegedly outstripped our powers of understanding and representation. She, too, told herself a story, a calming and fortifying story, in order to live. She, too, could not suffice with what a Muslim thinker once called the incoherence of the incoherence. Maybe nobody can.
—Chris]
In Modern Age, Casey Chalk reviews a book about the ancient Persians (Persians: The Age of the Great Kings, by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, 2022):
Llewellyn-Jones terms as “bizarre” Herodotus’ depictions of Xerxes, who in the Greek’s telling vacillates between vicious brutality and virtuous pathos, exhibiting traits we might today describe as indicative of manic depression. Reviewing the splendid armada he has amassed to invade Greece, we read that Xerxes “suddenly burst into tears and wept.” The great king explains: “I was suddenly overcome by pity as I considered the brevity of human life, since not one of all these people here will be alive one hundred years from now.” Even if the story is apocryphal, it’s not just Herodotus who portrays Xerxes this way: the Hebrew book of Esther also suggests the king was both powerful and volatile. As far as ancient history goes, two separate sources offering overlapping evidence presents a pretty strong case for credibility.
[“Powerful and volatile”—“Shahanshah” is most correctly translated as “Managing Editor of Managing Editors.” —Steve]
In the JSTOR blog, Katrina Gulliver on a later Persian contribution to the world, paper marbling: “It was the creativity of Tahir, a Persian Muslim émigré to India, that ‘secure[d] the vulnerable fledgling fractional reserve economies of both England and the United States during critical junctures [and] . . . safeguard[ed] the latter’s independence.’”
In The Atlantic, Sophia Stewart reviews a book by Anna Shechtman on women and crossword puzzles (The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle, March 5):
Shechtman has spent the better part of the past decade agitating for greater diversity among puzzle makers and for crosswords that reflect a more capacious sense of common knowledge, a project she expands upon and complicates in The Riddles of the Sphinx. Her advocacy first took root during her time working under Shortz (who recently announced that he is recovering from a stroke), with whom she often clashed over what was “puzzle-worthy.” In one of Shechtman’s own puzzles, for instance, he vetoed the answer MALE GAZE; they disagreed over whether the term fell within the bounds of common knowledge. In Shechtman’s estimation, Shortz likely “pictured an audience that looked like him” when it came to deciding what counted as “relevant” knowledge.
In our sister publication in Tinseltown, Josh Billings reviews a new translation of a Bulgarian historical novel (The Case of Cem, by Vera Mutafchieva, 1967, translated by Angela Rodel, January):
In the last years of the 15th century, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Mehmet II, dies while on campaign, leaving his succession in doubt and his two sons—the older tactician, Bayezid, and his mercurial younger brother, Cem—to make their bids for the throne. The period of uncertainty lasts barely a few months, as Bayezid consolidates his power with the very clerical class that his father had ousted from the government. Cem puts up a brief resistance in Syria and Egypt before finally handing himself over to the Knights Templar and the fathomless political machinations of the Catholic Church—at which point the real subject of The Case of Cem snaps into focus, and we see that the straightforward story of rebellion we thought we were reading is in fact going to be a much subtler and more somber meditation on what happens when an individual is unlucky enough to get caught up in the dehumanizing operations of History.
In our sister publication across the pond, Tom Johnson reviews a book on charm magic (Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval England, by Katherine Storm Hindley, 2023):
Hindley argues that the 14th and 15th centuries saw greater concern with the secrecy of amuletic texts, a surprising side effect of the spread of literacy: as more people came to be able to read, particularly in English, it became harder to maintain the idea that writing contained occult power. Without mystery, there could be no efficacy. Another copy of Bradmore’s spasm charm put it bluntly: the words must be “kept secretly to prevent everyone from learning the charm, in case by chance it should lose its God-given power.” Keeping medicinal knowledge mysterious was also a means of preventing folk healers from horning in on the work of physicians. In 1382, Roger Clerk was prosecuted in London for impersonating a physician, after prescribing “an old parchment . . . a leaf of some book” for fevers. Asked what was written there, he recited some Latin. But when the aldermen came to read it, none of what he said was in fact on the sheet. He was sentenced to be ridden through the city carrying the illicit tools of his trade: urine flasks, a whetstone and the amulet itself.
[Try treating your fevers with the Print Edition of the Washington Review of Books. —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
The Kiss the Boys Goodbye is a sour cocktail with sloe gin and cognac. [I’d try it. —Steve]
Objectified (2009), a documentary by Gary Hustwit about manufactured objects and their designers, is free to watch online until tomorrow, March 17.
All the questions that go into book design.
“The Great American Novels” [Finally, a big list. —Chris]
- on the Great American Collection of Short Stories.
“22 of the Funniest Novels Since Catch-22” [Finally, another, somewhat shorter, list. —Steve]
[“They’d none of ’em be missed! They’d none of ’em be missed!” —Steve]
Dirt recommends pocket poetry. [City Lights’ Pocket Poets edition of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems was one of the first poetry collections I fell in love with. —Julia] [Julia told me this the first time we ever hung out and lent me that same edition, which is a quite nice little hardback. —Chris] [Somewhere there exists a small notebook I used to carry around during college which I filled with lame Housman pastiches. I do not recommend that one. You really don’t hear about young men carrying around the old classics—A Shropshire Lad, FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat—anymore. Someone bring those back. They’re good. —Steve]
New issues:
New England Review Spring 2024
Rain Taxi Spring 2024
Shigeichi Negishi, credited with inventing karaoke, died on Friday, January 26. R.I.P.
Local:
The National Gallery of Art will host a discussion of the photography of Dorothea Lange with Wendy Ewald and RaMell Ross today at 12 p.m.
Naomi Nakanishi will play a jazz concert at the Kreeger Museum today at 3 p.m.
The Family Ballet, depicting some common family situations, will be performed at Dance Place today at 4 p.m. and tomorrow, March 17, at 4 p.m.
The Capitol Hill Chorale will perform choral works by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel at Capitol Hill Presbyterian Church today at 7:30 p.m. and tomorrow, March 17, at 4 p.m.
An exhibit of abstract art and woven textiles opens at the National Gallery of Art tomorrow, March 17.
The Academy Art Museum’s lecture series on Renaissance art begins Thursday, March 21 at 5:30 p.m.
The Academy Art Museum’s exhibit of marble sculptures by Sebastian Martorana ends on Sunday, March 24.
The National Museum of Asian Art will screen Here (dir. Bas Devos, 2024) on Saturday, March 30 at 2 p.m.
Poem:
“Sunflowers” by Emily Lee Luan
The grey night, walking home, we found
sunflowers leaning against the fence as heavy
as heads. In the morning, you held my head
in your palm, and we stared at each other down
the length of your arm. We swayed together,
if only for a little while. Then you kissed my toe
and left. I pulled the comforters out after.
You had sweat the bed; the room bloomed
with your sweetness. I thought, You can know
somebody for a long while and not know their scent.
I thought, Love, is it for me? Could anybody ruin
me? A week later, the sunflowers were gone,
overhead, just sky. In the driveway next
to the empty stalks was the family that lived
in the blue house behind the garden. A little boy
played with a fire truck. His mother and father
smiled at me as they held the de-petaled heads—
fondly, combing their soft faces. On the ground,
so many seeds! It felt like the final revelation
for a long while. We laughed together, then,
the mother, the father, and I, and the sunflowers
laughed too, because they knew the loss was not
a loss after all, and the sunflower seeds, too, joined
in, opening their pinched mouths, and all together
we were a high chorus and they sang to me
as I continued down the road, the many feet
of their voices carrying my small heartbreak.
[This is from Luan’s 回 / Return (2023), her debut collection. —Julia]
Upcoming books:
March 19 | Princeton University Press
On Gaslighting
by Kate Abramson
From the publisher: “Gaslighting” is suddenly in everyone’s vocabulary. It’s written about, talked about, tweeted about, even sung about (in “Gaslighting” by The Chicks). It’s become shorthand for being manipulated by someone who insists that up is down, hot is cold, dark is light—someone who isn’t just lying about such things, but trying to drive you crazy. The term has its origins in a 1944 film in which a husband does exactly that to his wife, his crazy-making efforts symbolized by the rise and fall of the gaslights in their home. In this timely and provocative book, Kate Abramson examines gaslighting from a philosophical perspective, investigating it as a distinctive moral phenomenon.
[Gaslight (1944) is fantastic. The whole film comes down to Ingrid Bergman, and if you have to stake it all on one actress it’s hard to do better. “Are you suggesting that this is a knife I hold in my hand?”—shudder-inducing. —Steve]
Also out Tuesday:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler
Black Cat: The Possessed by Witold Gombrowicz (1939), translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
What we’re reading:
Steve finished How Milton Works by Stanley Fish (2001). [Now other books can appear in this section. Maybe this is finally my chance to read a lot about the English Civil War. —Steve] He also read some short stories by Guy de Maupassant.
Julia started Carmela Ciurara’s Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages (2023) and Monica Youn’s poetry collection From From (2023).
Critical notes:
- and have a conversation about English meter. Skow:
Excellent, this is excellent, lots of good questions here. One is what is iambic pentameter? and at a certain level of abstraction we agree: it’s “weak-STRONG” five times, with variations allowed. A further question is which variations are allowed?; and here it might look, to the naïve reader, like our attitudes diverge. Not that we favor different answers (I don’t know the full answer!); but your vibe is more “that’s not a very important question,” while mine, maybe, is “time to wheel in some serious theoretical apparatus.”
But I doubt we’re as far apart as appearances suggest. I think that, once you’ve read enough verse, you get a feel for it, and you can read it fine without paying much attention to the meter—unless you hit a truly non-metrical line, in which case you’ll feel a jolt and pen an angry letter to the editor. It’s much like telling when a sentence is grammatical: we can all do it, well enough, even if a linguistics textbook looks, to us, like someone vomited symbols on the page.