As long as the Washington Review of Books is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, the Washington Review of Books tends to take its place.
N.B.:
The next WRB x Liberties Salon, on Sunday, March 10, will address the question “Can art be useful?” All WRB readers are welcome; if you are interested in attending, please contact Chris or Celeste Marcus.
Links:
In Commonweal, Helen Rouner on a chance meeting with a nun and the role of death and absence in Auden’s poetry:
It was this conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical that prompted Auden to return to the Church in 1940. It became his late work’s great subject, and the subject of his greatest work, “The Sea and the Mirror.” This commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest explores the poet’s deep identification with Prospero, who ultimately chooses not to seek revenge upon his treacherous brother but rather to relinquish his powers of sorcery—including his ability to revive the dead. In so doing, Prospero defies the tragic force, by definition inevitable, that ought to bring the play careening to a bloody close. The choice to “drown [his] book” of spells is famously a moral renunciation of violence. But for Auden, it also introduces a new tragedy: Prospero’s moral choice is also necessarily an aesthetic renunciation—of magical language, of art.
[Prospero’s aesthetic renunciation is itself an aestheticized act, one that revels in the power he is renouncing. In a private context this attitude gets you turned into a pillar of salt, but Prospero’s renunciation must be a public act—he needs to let the elves of hills and everyone else know that he will no longer require their services. And there is no way to communicate an idea to other people free from making aesthetic decisions. —Steve]
In Tablet, Edward Serotta travels through Ukraine in search of the world of Joseph Roth, author of The Radetzky March (1932):
As the sun began to set, a white-orangish light flooded the bus from the west, and I watched a tall, thin soldier take his rucksack down and stand next to the driver. His uniform was spotless and perfectly ironed. He was clean-shaven. He stood there until we pulled over, and then sprang off the bus and sprinted toward a farmhouse a couple of hundred yards off.
Come on, driver, don’t go just yet, let me please see the kid get to the front door! Since the windows of the bus were so mud-splattered, I didn’t bother pulling out my camera, but it didn’t matter. The roar of the old diesel engine growled and strained and we were back on the two-lane blacktop as the sun sank over the horizon.
[In this I learn that Michel Hoffman wrote “Stefan Zweig just tastes fake. He’s the Pepsi of Austrian writing.” Devastating. What can you say in response to the accusation that you are the Pepsi of your field? (I know that Pepsi drinkers must be out there, somewhere, and yet—who are they? What are they like? Where are they hiding? How is it that they inhabit the same world that I do?) —Steve]
In The London Magazine, Pacifica Goddard on the preservation of beauty and its conflict with usefulness in the wilds of California and in her son’s cancerous eye:
According to studies, while attractive faces are subconsciously associated with positive character traits and social skills, people with facial disfigurements or noticeable asymmetry are often assumed to have negative personality traits. Not only are they seen as less attractive and less desirable as romantic partners, but they are often treated poorly in social interactions, due to the subconscious biases against their atypical appearance.
I want to protect Zephyr from this fate. I’d prefer he stand out for his personality, not his asymmetry.
But is this truly why I’ve fought for the eye? Or is it for a more shallow reason?
If I am honest, I feel some primal, animal instinct to preserve it that goes beyond reason or utility. I just want to keep my child’s beautiful face.
Reviews:
Two in our sister publication “near where the charter’d Thames does flow” [As always, quotation is not endorsement. —Steve]:
Adam Smyth reviews Brian Cummings’ history of the book (Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book, 2022):
Cummings takes “book” in its widest sense—clay tablet, paperback, smartphone, codex, scroll. What is defining about the book is not a particular physical form, but rather the idea, as Cummings nicely puts it, “of a text with limits, which can be divided into organized contents.” This inclusivity enables Bibliophobia’s signature trait, which is its rapid vaulting across centuries of mark-making. Take the short span between pages 28 and 35. Cummings notes that in the Heroides, Ovid’s rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope writes Ulysses a letter, saying don’t write back, just come. This relationship between writing and presence takes us from the web of Penelope to the web of Tim Berners-Lee and Shoshana Zuboff’s theory of the “two texts” of digital media: the search we type in on Google produces a mirror image in the form of a record of the searcher.
[When I rewrite the Odyssey Penelope will write a newsletter. —Steve]
Nicholas Spice reviews a collection of stories by J. M. Coetzee (in the United States The Pole (2023) was published without the stories appended to the UK edition):
For Coetzee, the idea that we have a stable self—that we can account for ourselves consistently across time—is unsustainable in the light of the fragmentary and unreliable nature of memory. Most of our existence is dark to us: we have forgotten it. Indeed, the thought of what we have forgotten fascinates and haunts him. Since we cannot live with the reality of our radically interrupted and discontinuous selfhood, we make up stories about ourselves that paper over the innumerable cracks and lacunae in our experience of being. We choose our relationships based on stories that we make up about other people. Within this economy, love relationships depend for their success on the degree of congruity between the mutual fictions we tell one another: “When the fictions interlock well, the relation works or seems to work (I am not sure that there is a difference between the two). When they don’t interlock, conflict or disengagement follow.” Since self-invention is inescapable, writing novels is, by definition, a metafictional activity: stories about people making up stories.
In 4Columns, Jack Hanson reviews Jessi Jezewska Stevens’ third book (Ghost Pains, March 5) [One of today’s Upcoming books.]:
In the opening story, the narrator, a character typical of Stevens’ work—an educated young woman, usually American, with little to do, preoccupied by a certain unnameable lack, about the contours of which she is nevertheless quite articulate—decides to throw a party. She does so while lounging around her Berlin apartment in lingerie she cannot afford, smoking cigarettes and considering the basil plant on her veranda, indications of a lifestyle that makes ample room for oscillating between indulgence and regret. Our protagonist seems at once utterly at home with herself and constantly compelled to offer explanations, even excuses: “I am a wraith, inhuman, alone in my room in chiffon hemmed with lace. I’m behind on my rent. Though it’s worth pointing out that while a robe costing one month’s habitation is an expensive robe indeed, rent in Berlin, if you know where to look, is extremely cheap.”
In the Journal, Brooke Allen reviews Mary V. Dearborn’s biography of Carson McCullers (Carson McCullers: A Life, February):
McCullers’s life story is rife with drama, or perhaps one should say melodrama, and Ms. Dearborn relates it all with real narrative skill; I found the book hard to put down. But her task could not have been easy. McCullers’s “difference” and her crippling health problems inspire sympathy, while her talent remains as striking as it was when she first appeared on the scene. But her rancid narcissism flows like a stream of poison through the tale, and many readers will be repelled, as so many of her acquaintances were during her lifetime. The even-handed Ms. Dearborn, though, manages to strike a fine emotional balance, giving modern readers insight into the reasons McCullers was able to create “what may be American literature’s most detailed, carefully observed picture of what it means to be an outsider.”
In our sister publication in the Big Apple, J. Hoberman reviews two books about Harry Smith, editor of the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) (Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith, by John Szwed, 2023; Sounding for Harry Smith: Early Pacific Northwest Influences, by Bret Lunsford, 2021):
His tantrums rival the more purposeful acts of the 1960s movement known as Destruction Art. When denied a request for money or otherwise thwarted, Smith ripped up his drawings or trashed his rare books. He once unspooled a 16mm film on which he had labored for years down the middle of Broadway. Most famously, in 1965 he hurled the special projector he created for Heaven and Earth Magic out the fourth-story window of the Film-Makers’ Coop. At once creator and destroyer of his own personal cosmos, Smith was inseparable from his work. As noted by Susan Sontag in her 1966 essay “Film and Theatre,” he made “each projection an unrepeatable performance.”
N.B. (cont.):
It’s coming. Sally Rooney’s next novel is coming. [Say it with me: The novel is the art form about how the bourgeoisie handle marriage and money. —Steve]
Shouts & Murmurs devotes itself to the question of what blurbs really mean. [Blurbs are a tale, idiot, sound, fury, &c. —Steve]
Against doing op-eds to sell books.
Our sister publication in Cleveland is seeking pitches.
An attempt to determine which publications have the best books coverage.
A second attempt in response to the first. [That the second one has our sister publication in London second, while the first one has it tied for thirty-first, says a lot about which is better. —Steve]
A plea to stop rescuing forgotten authors.
A plea in response to rescue forgotten authors.
- on a fight between David Goggins, former Navy SEAL, and Amazon about third-party counterfeit editions of his books. [It’s sort of crazy how bad this is. —Chris]
In praise of leeks. [Perennially underrated. —Chris]
Local:
Naomi Nakanishi and her band will perform at Jazz at The Kreeger on Saturday, March 16 at 3 p.m.
Poem:
“Dead” by Sarah C. Harwell
The way my daughter sleeps it’s as if she’s talking
to the dead. Now she is one. I watch her eyes roll
backwards in her head, her senses foldone by one, and then her breathing quiets to a beat.
Every night she fights this silent way of being
with all the whining ammunition that she has.She wins a tired story, a smothered song, the small
and willful links to life that carry her away.
Welcome to the Egyptian burial. She’s gone to Hadeswith her stuffed animals. When she wakes,
the sad circles disappeared, she blinks
before she knows me. I have listenedto one million breaths of her. And every night
my body seizes when she leaves to go
where I am not, and yet every night I urge her, go.
[This is from the joint collection Three New Poets (2006). —Julia]
Upcoming books:
March 5 | W. W. Norton
Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin
by Andre Dubus III
From the Lit Hub preview: A decade after his essential memoir Townie (2011), Dubus delivers a career-defining suite of essays about working hard, growing up, and growing older. The book includes “If I Owned a Gun,” his powerful interrogation of guns and masculinity and why he ultimately gave up owning a weapon.
Also out Tuesday:
And Other Stories: Ghost Pains, by Jessi Jezewska Stevens
From the publisher: Stevens’ women throw disastrous parties in the post-party era, flirt through landscapes of terror and war, and find themselves unrecognizable after waking up with old flames in new cities. They navigate the labyrinths of history, love, and ethics in a fractured American present, seeing first-hand how history influences the ways in which we care for—or neglect—one another.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Change, by Édouard Louis, translated by John Lambert
From the Lit Hub preview: Thirty-one-year-old Édouard Louis writes some of the best nonfiction published today, full stop. I can’t wait to read his latest, billed as an autobiographical novel, in which “Eddy” becomes Édouard, leaving behind his violent, working-class hometown for Paris, a life of the mind, and the relentless pursuit of becoming someone else (which is, of course, another kind of violence).
What we’re reading:
Steve read Milton’s translations of psalms. [His Psalm 3 opens:
Lord, how many are my foes
How many those
That in arms against me rise
Many are they
The feel of these opening lines—distractingly like “The Hollow Men,” with each repetition and rephrasing, none of which quite make it to the end of the thought, getting its own line—has stuck with me. —Steve]
Julia started Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry (2016). [It’s excellent. When I was trying to articulate my thoughts on the failure inherent to elegy on Wednesday, I remembered a dear friend and reader telling me about how Lerner discusses, in this book, the concept of poetic failure. Said friend lent his copy to me later that day, and I’ve really been enjoying Lerner’s thoughts on the subject:
. . . As soon as you move from [the transcendent impulse to write] to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time, your words can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can’t be represented . . . but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.
Thus the poet is a tragic figure. The poem is always a record of failure. . . . Actual poems are structurally foredoomed by a “bitter logic” that cannot be overcome by any level of virtuosity: Poetry isn’t hard, it’s impossible.
This passage is also great. —Julia]
Critical notes:
- on ritual:
Memes are rituals drained of transcendence. They pathetically imitate the essential elements of ritual—repetition, symbol, shared meaning—but at the lowest possible level, namely that of a joke.
The largest companies today are obsessed with generating content in a completely de-ritualized context. But content always exists in tension with form. Ritual is the form we have abandoned in our relentless quest for content.