WRB—Mar. 18, 2026
“banal conversation”
This is the reason why I affirm that the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it.
Links:
In The Dial, an excerpt from a chapbook by Jan Steyn (Jig, January) about gout and the language used to describe it:
Just as my own Afrikaans version follows Du Toit’s effort, so La Fontaine’s fable follows Petrarch, who paired Spider and Gout 300 years earlier. Petrarch also wrote about gout more generally, for instance in De remediis utriusque fortunae (Remedies for Fortunes) where he recounts the case of a nobleman who lavishes more attention on his sick horse than on his own afflicted body. Confined to bed by gout, the man commissions doctors to tend to the horse, has it laid on silk sheets with a golden pillow, and grieves as if he has lost a child when it dies. The anecdote is true, Petrarch insists, and widely known. The target is not the disease itself, but the grotesque distortions of care it exposes, and all for a malady he considered preventable. He is especially caustic toward those who forsake walking, out of ease or vanity. “Did they come into the world on horseback?” he scoffs (in Susannah Dobson’s delightful Englishing of the Latin done in 1791). “Will they so ride out of it?” He calls it madness to exchange the use of one’s own feet for the anxious labor of maintaining a horse. For horsemen, he writes, nothing would be more fitting than “the rich gout”—a punishment that renders the feet useless and ensures that a retinue of horses must be kept.
[I like the James Gillray print that portrays gout as a little scorpion-demon creature. Unfortunately this did not give rise to any nicknames for gout—not as if “disease of kings” can be improved upon. (I also appreciate the Met providing the context at that link that “eighteenth-century Britons enjoyed roast beef, beer and port.” I’m not a doctor, but I think that’ll do it. The representative of “British Slavery” in Gillray’s “French Liberty—British Slavery” is single-handedly eating an entire roast while complaining that the “damn’d Taxes” are “Starving us to Death,” which will absolutely do it.) —Steve]
Reviews:
In Portico, Randy Boyagoda reviews Kiran Desai’s new novel (The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Sept. 20, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Oct. 4, 2025.]:
Sincerely rendered moments of transformative connection between two people are more acceptable (whether to enjoy or criticize) if they come to us from the distant and exclusively Western literary past—Dante seeing Beatrice for the first time, Romeo with Juliet, Milton’s Adam marveling at Eve, or the feelings between Ladislaw and Dorothea in Middlemarch, never mind between Anna and Vronsky in Anna Karenina. Even the cynical and melancholic narrator of Graham Greene’s The Human Factor observes, “Love was a total risk. Literature had always so proclaimed it.”
But to reach the heights of literature, to match the total risk that is love, you can’t go in for irony. You can’t assure the reader that this is a cliché moment constructed to conceal the psychosomatic and historical materialist determinations at play in two privileged, cisgender, able-bodied heterosexuals responding to each other’s biomarkers and selective-school BAs—and isn’t this all just the author’s critical comment on failing Indian infrastructure (the blackout just before they meet)?
[Great literature sometimes ironizes the “total risk” that is love; think of Emma Bovary entranced by Roldophe’s flattery at the fair while a man gives a speech about manure.
But the problem is more fundamental than this. Roland Barthes:
Every amorous episode can be, of course, endowed with a meaning: it is generated, develops, and dies; it follows a path which it is always possible to interpret according to a causality or a finality—even, if need be, which can be moralized (“I was out of my mind, I’m over it now” “Love is a trap which must be avoided from now on” etc.): this is the love story, subjugated to the great narrative Other, to that general opinion which disparages any excessive force and wants the subject himself to reduce the great imaginary current, the orderless, endless stream which is passing through him, to a painful, morbid crisis of which he must be cured, which he must “get over” (“It develops, grows, causes suffering, and passes away” in the fashion of some Hippocratic disease): the love story (the “episode,” the “adventure”) is the tribute the lover must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it.
Once you start telling “a love story” you’re already in the domain of irony, forcing the ineffable to obey a narrative logic. And, whatever the problems with heterosexuals who have BAs from selective schools, we have a word for things “literature has always so proclaimed”: cliché. The power of a love story is not in escape from cliché but in wallowing in it. This can be done with perfect sincerity, but it must be done nevertheless.
As Boyagoda says, when we read a love story we think about Dante and Shakespeare and Milton. We think of many other works of art as well, and we also think about our own lives. When we come to a work of art about love we are not impressed by its sincerity—probably all of us have been in love before and are therefore aware that love can sincerely express itself dully and stupidly. We want it to approach the subject with something new, a new variation on the oldest theme. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Thames, Nicholas Spice reviews a book about lieder (Lyrical Diary: Lieder from Franz Schubert to Wolfgang Rihm, by Christian Gerhaher, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside, 2025 in the UK):
In his 1912 essay “The Relationship to the Text,” Arnold Schoenberg implicitly acknowledged the tendency of great songs to ingest and metabolize the poems they set when he explained that for years he had enjoyed Schubert’s lieder without ever taking in what they were about, and that, when he did bother to look at the words, they were no surprise to him, since he had intuited them all along. Leaving aside the daffiness of this last claim, the point he was making about the relative importance of music and words in the lied is surely correct, at any rate from the listener’s perspective: many of the most memorable lieder live in our imaginations as pieces of music, not as intoned poetry. We are so used to thinking of the process of songwriting (not, that is, the songwriting of a singer-songwriter—an altogether different thing) as setting a poem to music, the song in some sense an interpretation of the poem, that we fail to see how, in many instances, the process reverses itself and the poem becomes just one possible interpretation of the music rather than its progenitor. As an example, in the transition from Heine’s poem “Am Meer” to Schubert’s song, we move from one powerful semantic field to another so distinctive—as music—that the poem is left behind, cast off like the shell of a previous instar. Indeed, Schubert’s song is no longer concerned with the poem that inspired it but opens itself to all the yet unwritten poems it might engender, all the poems that might set its music to words. And just as there are any number of possible musical settings for a given poem, so there are any number of possible poetic settings for a given song.
[Since I don’t know German this is how I feel about basically all lieder; even when I know what the text is about and have looked at translations that’s not enough to give the words an independent existence from the music. The lieder I probably think about most, Schumann’s “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” attained that status because I know of no better portrayal of what it feels like to say something vulnerable and then wait the seeming eternity for the other person to respond. This idea is, sort of, in the text; that the whole song should be an expansion of that moment into a minute and a half is not, and this moment of waiting exists in situations besides confessions of love. —Steve]
In Now Voyager, Ryan Ruby reviews Christian Bök’s books about encoding poetry into bacterial DNA (The Xenotext: Book 1, 2015; The Xenotext: Book 2, 2025):
Just so: The thirty-six unique words that make up “Orpheus” and “Eurydice” are unlikely to be found next to Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” Rimbaud’s “Voyelles,” or one of Rilke’s sonnets to Orpheus in a future anthology. In that sense, Bök’s experiment, like Fitzcarraldo’s opera house—or indeed, Orpheus’ trip to the underworld—could be regarded as a failure. But the idea and the process that Bök documents in the other poems of The Xenotext have all the grandeur, virtuosity, and strangeness that, to me, are the hallmarks of great works of art, especially those whose achievement requires time to acknowledge. If, as critic Guy Davenport has argued, one of the characteristic features of high modernism is the merger of the cutting edge and the positively archaic, these are but a parenthesis to the cosmic time scale of The Xenotext. “The job of the avant-garde,” Bök said in a recent interview, “is to show up for the future on time, because the future is coming fast.” And in that sense, The Xenotext is an outstanding, even alarming success.
[In an essay on Ronald Johnson Davenport comments “Someday someone will explain why the Romantics wanted to rewrite Paradise Lost and the moderns to rewrite the Odyssey.” (Unlike Davenport to leave this as an exercise for the reader instead of explaining it in a brilliant two-sentence digression.) In other words, you can define an age and identify its central concerns by its artistic touchstones. As Ruby notes, many different artistic movements and mediums have rewritten and retold the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the three reasons Ruby gives for this—it being the “mythmaker’s myth,” it being paradigmatic for the “immortality project,” and Orpheus failing—are universal concerns for artists, no matter their other commitments. Everyone wonders what their art could really achieve, and the myth gives the satisfyingly unsatisfying answer “everything and nothing.” —Steve]
In Modern Age, Jude Russo reviews Megadoc (2025), a documentary about the making of Megalopolis (2024):
Megadoc invites comparison to Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), another movie about an Italian director, Guido, struggling to make an epic movie—stuffed to the gills with quasi-classical erudition, sentimental personal motifs, and ill-defined futurism—despite the on-set chaos, the skepticism of the press and some of the director’s own notional collaborators, and the huge expense.
Inevitably, the production of the unnamed movie ends in disaster. Guido’s friend and script collaborator, the pretentious critic Daumier, with a sublime indifference to the director’s feelings of failure, congratulates him for maintaining his artistic integrity by not producing a flawed film: “Believe me, you should feel neither nostalgia nor remorse. It’s better to destroy than create when you’re not creating those few things that are truly necessary. And finally, in this world of ours, is there anything so just and true that it has the right to survive? For [the producer], a bad film is only a fiscal event. But for you, at this point in your life, it could have been the end.”
That all sounds good, as far as it goes—but Guido and Coppola both know it’s really bunk. As Daumier’s monologue drags on, he sneers at the idea that Guido wished “to leave behind . . . a complete film, just like a cripple who leaves behind his crooked footprint,” the director, hanging his head under the onslaught of words, begins to see in his mind a fantasy of his characters gathering together for a grand dance. “But all this confusion—it’s me, myself,” he thinks to himself. The difference is that Coppola was his own producer, and he got to make the movie.
[Longtime readers of the WRB will know that I regard Megalopolis as one of the essential artistic works of the past few years.
Before embarking on Megalopolis Coppola had already made a masterpiece of nearly-incoherent references to the canon all shoved into the present day: Apocalypse Now (1979). (And like Megalopolis it was the subject of a documentary detailing its disastrous production.) This exchange between Willard (Martin Sheen) and Kurtz (Marlon Brando) might as well be about Coppola himself:
“They told me that you had gone totally insane. And that your methods were unsound.”
“Are my methods unsound?”
“I don’t see any method at all, sir.”
Where Megalopolis surpasses Apocalypse Now is in its integration of the personal strain of 8½. The confusions of Apocalypse Now are the material getting the better of Coppola, but the confusions of Megalopolis, like Guido says, simply are Coppola. —Steve]
N.B.:
“In America, the maneuver is known as an Irish exit or an Irish Goodbye. But it has existed under different names in other cultures, too—in England it’s the “French leave,” in France a “filer a l’anglaise.” In Germany, it’s attributed to the Polish.” [The various names for it in different languages attributing it to places all over the world connect leaving a party without saying goodbye to the turkey, currently, and syphilis, historically. —Steve]
John Steinbeck, source of ecological data.
New issues:
Now Voyager Issue 01 [As linked to above.]
The Paris Review No. 255 | Spring 2026
Portico Number 1 | Spring 2026 [As linked to above.]
The Yale Review Volume 114, No. 1 | Spring 2026
[Both the new magazines here are great and have plenty of interesting pieces in them besides the two I linked. Particularly happy to see Micah Mattix in charge of a magazine; discovering Prufrock at thirteen or so was important for me, and I like to see good things happen to my fellow workers in the books-and-culture roundup newsletter mines. —Steve]
Len Deighton died on Sunday, March 15. R.I.P.
Poem:
“Caribou” by Karen Solie
Why, after so many years, is she with me now?
We who were not close in life
walk among the caribou lichenwhose coral-like low forms, white against the mosses
and wild blueberry in its red phase,
seem to give off light.She has escaped
through the window of the body’s house of harm
into the freedom of a truth that will never be recognized.And indeed they do give off light, fungi and algae
in a collaboration that obscures
the individual collaboratorswho’ve taken it entirely off-spectrum,
reflecting every wavelength and phosphorescing under the UV
intensely where appearing most delicateas though, as has been written, the best metaphor for stillness
is constant motion. Out of weakness
are made strong, I guess.A cold-hardy, slow-growing, clean-air species.
The fog makes surprising
what it does not conceal, and what is concealed reminds usthat an excess of surprise should be avoided, if one can help it.
Listen to the sea, she says,
surprising again and again the rock of the shore.
[Since first reading the poem, I’ve been thinking about the idea of the body as a “house of harm” and implicit relief of escape. The next line, and the word “freedom,” is almost superfluous. But what a forgiving way to acknowledge the pain of someone for whom selfhood is not simple. In a poem dense with ideas and images, there is still a sense of organization and moments of easy delight. “[C]ollaboration that obscures / the individual collaborators” is the language of indictment that has been transposed to a new context. Solie briefly interjects cliché—stillness and motion, weakness and strength—to bolster the light’s claim to delicacy. I also love the contradictory repetition of surprise in the final section, just short, it would appear, of the excess that should be avoided. —K. T.]
Upcoming books:
Mariner Books | March 24
Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry
by David Streitfeld
From the publisher: Before Larry McMurtry became one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century, he worked on his family’s ranch in rural Texas. At night he heard vivid stories of his cowboy uncles driving herds of cattle across the plains where there once were bison and Native Americans. “McMurtry Means Beef,” as one ranching magazine put it. By the time he died in 2021, McMurtry had published forty books, won a Pulitzer for Lonesome Dove and an Oscar for his cowritten adaptation of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, and seen his work made into such classic films as Hud and Terms of Endearment. Now, McMurtry means great stories.
For all his fame, McMurtry was an elusive figure. He loved women but was married to his typewriter; he was wary of critics and distrustful of other men—except David Streitfeld. When McMurtry gave the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist the keys to his past, Streitfeld dug into every archive and interviewed everyone who would talk. He found that, even as McMurtry’s work criticized the old cowboy myths, he loved making up stories about himself.
Western Star reveals the real and complicated life of a storyteller who was both an icon and critic of Texas, the favorite of presidents, confidant to movie stars like Diane Keaton and Cybill Shepherd, friend to Ken Kesey and husband to his widow Faye, an obsessive bookseller, and the most enduring voice of the American West.
Also out Tuesday:
Columbia University Press: The Melville Effect: A Literary Afterlife Across the Arts by Joseph Allen Boone
Harper: Python’s Kiss: Stories by Louise Erdrich
What we’re reading:
Steve read more of The Recognitions.
Critical notes:
In the Times, Ryan Francis Bradley on “sync music”:
Sync, it’s called. Once it was known as library music; sometimes it’s called production music. It’s not really a genre. It’s a category, defined by its function: This is music that exists to be paired—synced—with video. That’s why it’s so ubiquitous. Modern American life is absolutely steeped in video, which follows us, at every hour, from TV screens to smartphones to laptops, from movies to social media rants to workplace anti-harassment training modules. The soundtrack to most of it is some form of sync. This is partly because sync tends to be the cheapest and easiest option. But it’s also because sync is specifically crafted to be cut to video—and in a time when more and more of human communication involves editing video, this stuff is rapidly becoming our dominant form of music.
Erik Satie, most contemporary of composers:
One might nonetheless create a musique d’ameublement [furniture music], that is to say, a music that would be a part of the ambient noise and take account of it. I imagine it to be melodic, softening the noise of knives and forks without dominating, without imposing. It would fill the sometimes awkward silences between guests. It would spare them from banal conversation. At the same time, it would neutralize the noises of the street, which enter without discretion.
Will Tavlin, in a piece about Netflix for n+1 last year:
Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”
[From trends in culture I can only conclude that the most beatific state attainable in this life is half-watching TV. Or perhaps technology has shifted the supply curve of art all the way to the right. —Steve]
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