Though it be an irksom labour to write with industrie and judicious paines that which neither waigh’d, nor well read, shall be judg’d without industry or the paines of well judging, by Faction and the easy literature of custom and opinion, it shall be ventur’d yet, and the Washington Review of Books not smother’d, but sent abroad, in the native confidence of her single self, to earn, how she can, her entertainment in the world, and to finde out her own readers; few perhaps, but those few, of such value and substantial worth, as truth and wisdom, not respecting numbers and bigg names, have bin ever wont in all ages to be contented with.
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.
The first WRB Presents event will be held the following evening, April 10, at Sudhouse DC and feature readings by Ryan Ruby, Zain Khalid, Austyn Wohlers, and
. Doors at 6 p.m., readings at 7 p.m. Sign up to attend here.Links:
In Engelsberg Ideas, Christopher Harding on Indian literature and philosophy as found by some employees of the East India Company and brought to the West:
Jones’ initial plan in India echoed those of his younger, less classy compatriots: make some quick money, and return home to Britain with financial and career prospects much improved. His friend Benjamin Franklin—with whose revolutionary politics Jones shared a certain sympathy—drily expressed the hope that Jones would “return from that corrupting Country with a great deal of Money honestly acquir’d—and with full as much Virtue as you carry out [there] with you.” Jones was much taken with the culture that he encountered in and around Calcutta, and in 1784 he succeeded in establishing an “Asiatick Society,” whose members would be dedicated to the study of Asian languages, culture, architecture and sciences.
To this end, Jones managed to find someone willing to teach him Sanskrit. Regarded by many Indians as the language of the gods, it was not to be taught to any old person who came calling. It was said that Jones’ teacher, a man named Rāmalocana, insisted on tutoring him in a marble-floored room, so that water from the Ganges could be easily applied to it after each lesson, cleansing the place of Jones’ polluting presence.
[I’m sure all language teachers would do this if they felt they could get away with it; a friend of mine who teaches high school Spanish agrees. —Steve]
In First Things, Joseph Epstein on writing his autobiography:
I like to think of myself as a shy pornographer, or, perhaps better, a sly pornographer. By this I mean that in my fiction and where necessary in my essays I do not shy away from the subject of sex, only from the need to describe it in any of its lurid details. So I have done in my autobiography. On the subject of sex in my first marriage (of two), for example, I say merely, “I did not want my money back.” But, then, all sex, if one comes to think about it, is essentially comic, except of course one’s own.
On the inclusion-exclusion question, the next subject I had to consider was money, or my personal finances. Financially I have nothing to brag about. In my autobiography I do, though, occasionally give the exact salaries—none of them spectacular—of the jobs I’ve held. With some hesitation (lest it seem boasting) I mention that a book I wrote on the subject of snobbery earned, with its paperback sale, roughly half-a-million dollars. I fail to mention those of my books that earned paltry royalties, or, as I came to think of them, peasantries. In my autobiography, I contented myself with noting my good fortune in being able to earn enough money doing pretty much what I wished to do and ending up having acquired enough money not to worry overmuch about financial matters. Like the man said, a lucky life.
[There are two keys to autobiographical writing. The first, from Augustine’s (translated by Edward Bouverie Pusey):
Yet suffer me to speak unto Thy mercy, me, dust and ashes. Yet suffer me to speak, since I speak to Thy mercy, and not to scornful man. Thou too, perhaps, despisest me, yet wilt Thou return and have compassion upon me. For what would I say, O Lord my God, but that I know not whence I came into this dying life (shall I call it?) or living death.
The second, from the narrator of The Fall (1956) by Camus (translated by Justin O’Brien):
Anyway, I have ceased to like anything but confessions, and authors of confessions write especially to avoid confessing, to tell nothing of what they know. When they claim to get to the painful admissions, you have to watch out, for they are about to dress the corpse. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.
In other words, who are you really talking to about this dying life, this living death of yours? And why? —Steve]
In 3 Quarks Daily, Brooks Riley on the elevated point of view in art and precursors of “the drone aesthetic”:
Bruegel’s genius was just beginning to emerge as he commandeered the vertigo view from the birds, the bats and the flies, to produce works that also included bucolic landscapes. Many of his paintings were small-town urban and densely populated. When he painted outside town walls, he brought the same folk to populate the landscapes. And he was always above it all, elevated to greater or lesser degrees. Even when he seems to have dropped down to ground level, there’s always a slight elevation that gives him the advantage of revealing subjects hidden in the background.
In The Easel, Morgan Meis on snapshot photography and the photography of Lee Friedlander:
Maybe, in the end, that’s the best explanation of why Lee Friedlander is such a good photographer. He knows how to look when something interesting is happening. He trusts himself to point the camera and click. Why is he so much better at doing this than most of us? It’s impossible to say. But the pictures are not great because of any particular technical skill or brilliant idea. Friedlander has stated in interview after interview that he isn’t especially bright and has no ideas. He is being coy, of course. But we can take him more or less at his word. He isn’t driven by thoughts or concepts or formal principles. He isn’t claiming the ability to do something that anyone else with a camera in the street couldn’t do. If he trusts in anything, it’s in his physical body, which knows just how to step into the right spot at the right moment and then let the camera do the rest.
In Reactor, Anthony Aycock on Ambrose Bierce and “The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”:
You can see this focus on interiority at the sentence level. Bierce was a writer of his time, often using sesquipedalian words and long, winding sentences. This story, however, largely eschews that rococo style. The critic David Mason writes, “There is not a wasted detail here, including the opening description of the hanging rope: ‘It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees.’” In part III, Bierce seems to relapse, crafting lines such as, “Keen, poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every fiber of his body and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along well defined lines of ramification and to beat with an inconceivably rapid periodicity.” Why the switch? To show the reader Farquhar’s mind at work. To immerse us in the loss of lucidity and flights of fancy that come with death—his death, anyway, for Farquhar is the center of his own universe (as most of us are). And so in this moment, Bierce employs the heightened language and dramatic sensibilities of a man who sees himself as worthy of distinction and a greater destiny (“No service was too humble for him to perform in the aid of the South, no adventure too perilous . . . ,” etc.).
[The first Bierce I encountered, as far as I can recall, was “The Day of Wrath.” I think I encountered it before I encountered the thing it parodies. —Steve]
Two in The New Criterion: first, John Steele Gordon on E. E. Barnard, “the last astronomer to discover a planetary satellite by direct observation and the first to discover a comet by means of photography”:
In 1881, Barnard, using his five-inch telescope, discovered a comet and found out that a patent-medicine magnate in Rochester, New York, was offering two hundred dollars (at least four thousand in today’s money) for every such find. Barnard used the money as a down payment on a house for himself, his new wife, and his mother. He found ten comets before leaving Nashville in 1888, the early ones often coming just as he needed money to service the note on his house. And while Barnard went on to study far more integral aspects of astronomy, he never lost his interest in finding comets, which is still largely the work of amateur astronomers. In 1886–87 he found four new comets in a period of only seven months, a record that still stands. In 1891 he discovered every comet that was found that year.
Reviews:
Second, Amit Majmudar reviews a 400th anniversary edition of the First Folio (Shakespeare’s First Folio: 400th Anniversary Facsimile Edition: Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, Published According to the Original Copies, 1623, 2023):
Positive or negative, what you say about Shakespeare reveals what occupies your mind. If you are a writer yourself, it reveals what you seek to learn from him, and how you place your work in relationship to his. If I were a dramatist, I might have focused on how efficiently he portrays characters and tells stories. A historian might have studied how he transfigured Plutarch and Holinshed—or perhaps mapped the role of the British Empire in the global spread of Shakespeare’s reputation. Instead, because I am a practicing poet, I have focused on his use of language and his audience’s reception of it—all tinged with some anxiety about his work’s becoming incomprehensible in the future. Those choices are telling; inferences about me, mostly correct ones, can be made from them. He holds the mirror up to each one of us. Maybe that comparison with God was justifiable after all. Your reflections on Shakespeare, too, are a reflection of you.
In our sister publication in the Forest City, Margarita Diaz reviews a new translation of a Clarice Lispector novel (The Apple in the Dark, 1961, translated by Benjamin Moser, 2023):
Through Martim’s journey, Clarice also offers the first of the novel’s many subversions of the darkness to light motif. She doesn’t assign light and dark to the conventional binaries of good and evil, peace and war, confusion and order. In the darkness of the jungle, Martim can move around with cover, savoring “the strange music” that is “the delicate friction of silence up against silence.” Meanwhile, the light exposes Martim’s capacity for transgression as he grapples with his perversions and inner demons. In the light, he’s “hollow with thirst” and hungry, not just for food but for something else, something bigger. In this instance, the concept of a “pilgrimage from darkness to light” as an attainment of peace, freedom and order is a false choice, the incorrect construction. While Ike and his contemporaries saw an imperative for society to pull away from the darkness and the encroaching shadows of the night, for Martim—for Clarice—it’s central to an attainment of self-understanding.
In Eater, Aimee Levitt reviews Marcella Hazan’s Italian cookbook (Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, 1992):
Published in 1992, her now-classic Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is full of opinions. Black squid ink pasta is “deplorable.” Romano cheese appeals only to “the singular palate.” Pasta extruders are “awful devices”: “What emerges is a mucilaginous and totally contemptible product.” Premade noodles in a lasagne are an aberration, as is coffee cake. (Why is it called coffee cake if it doesn’t taste like coffee?) And don’t even get her started on the crap Americans call “balsamic vinegar.”
But when Hazan loved something, well. One of the delights of Essentials is seeing how hard she tries not to overpraise the food of her home region of Romagna and how quickly she gives up (page 3) because, after all, it does have the best food in Italy, especially hand-rolled pasta.
I personally find this refreshing. Some of us need to be told what tastes best (if only so we can disagree later).
N.B. (cont.):
The deadline to submit work for Plough’s Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award is March 30.
More from the world of writing letters. [I like writing letters as much as anyone, but some of the things people say about it make me wonder: do they text their friends, or call their friends, or even talk to their friends? “Maybe it’s the mix of the banal, the deep—and all that is omitted—that makes letters distinct.” Right. Actually all conversation is like that. —Steve]
Some writers take a long time. [The Aeneid was written three lines a day. Can’t argue with results. —Steve]
- on the London Book Fair and the Times’ coverage thereof.
Jeff Zucker is trying to buy a British newspaper.
McClatchy newspapers will stop using the Associated Press for news.
“Deadspin Is Becoming a Gambling Referral Site” [In a couple years everything associated with sports will be gambling referral. It will be awful. —Steve]
Broadcast has a new essay series out about Adderall. [As linked to in Critical notes below.]
New issues:
atmospheric 1.1 spring 2024 [A new magazine. Welcome to the world. —Steve]
THE HTML REVIEW ISSUE 03
The New Criterion Vol. 42, No. 8 / April 2024 [As linked to above.]
The Paris Review No. 247 Spring 2024
Local:
Lauren Oyler will discuss her new essay collection (No Judgment, March 19) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Mar. 13, 2024.] at Politics and Prose on Thursday, March 28 at 7 p.m.
Poem:
“Poem with a Smoke Cloud Hanging in It” by Jackson Holbert
Today I will sit
in the grass and smell
the sunlight. I will leave
the pills in their bottles,
I will leave the bottles
by my bed. I will walk
to the insane river. I will let
the crazy wind cut and curve
around me. I will close
my eyes and dream
of medical sewage
poisoning the river a hundred
miles upstream. And somewhere
in all that trash is a little hit
of morphine. I will think
if nothing ever leaves
then the wind is full
of all the smoke I ever blew.
And if nothing ever leaves
does that mean I’m still
dopesick at fifteen, telling
my parents the flu is going around?
If I am then so what.
I am also walking through the cemetery
at dawn, friends
on both sides of me—our little
drunken army marching
out of the night.
If I am, then so what. I am also
lying in my bed at twenty-two staring
so deeply at the bark-beetle-riddled trees
that I don’t notice
the vacant light lessening then
leaving entirely. I don’t notice
when the night climbs into my bed
like a terrified brother and the wind
slams the door.
[This is from Holbert’s debut collection, Winter Stranger, out last year. Reading Winter Stranger was the first time in a few weeks I haven’t had to, essentially, force myself to sit down and read poetry; as soon as I read the first poem in the collection, all I wanted to do was read the next one, and the next. I read the whole book in almost one sitting. It’s a beautiful, lonely, accomplished debut.
Mentioning the loneliness that runs through the collection brings me to what I can’t help but think of as a lonely image in this poem: somewhere / in all that trash is a little hit / of morphine. It’s an unexpected inversion on the idea of a bright spot surrounded by darkness: the surrounding medical waste / poisoning the river, and in it, a little hit / of morphine, poisonous in its own right, something the speaker still can’t help but look for, as complicated as that gaze toward it is. The contradiction in the sentence I will close / my eyes and dream / of medical sewage / poisoning the river a hundred / miles upstream is so striking—how we move from dream to poison creates such a quick turn in the poem. I can’t stop thinking of how distance functions in that sentence, too; the speaker is a hundred / miles away from that poison, but there’s so much immediacy to the image. These are things shaping the landscape and life of the speaker and those he loves. A hundred miles, here, collapses quickly into nothing.
I love the care that Holbert gives to enjambment in this poem. Look at the repeated enjambment pattern that happens in the first half of the poem: I will sit . . . . I will leave . . . . I will walk . . . . I will let . . . . I will close . . . . I will think. The speaker’s determination becomes clear through this repetition, but what also becomes clear, in these lines, is the fact that this determination is not something that can be happened upon once and achieved. It’s not easy. The speaker has to say to himself, again and again, what he will do. It’s the kind of strength that emerges only through an acknowledgement of one’s weakness. I have to say it over and over again, all these things I will do, because there’s no guarantee that doing them will be easy, or accomplished in the first go. I will, I will, I will.
The same way physical distance collapses earlier in the poem, toward the end there’s a collapse of the distance of time: if nothing ever leaves / does that mean I’m still / dopesick at fifteen . . . ? / If I am then so what. I am also walking through the cemetery / at dawn. The coexistence of all these selves is a kind of intimacy between the speaker as he currently is and his younger selves. It’s an intimacy he simultaneously admits the reader into—by showing those brief scenes—and refuses to allow the reader’s judgment on: If I am then so what. It’s not a question as much as it is a closed door. And that coexistence of intimacy and the shut door return, in a literal way, with that beautiful final image: the night climbs into my bed / like a terrified brother and the wind / slams the door. —Julia]
Upcoming book:
March 26 | Princeton Architectural Press
Beautiful Rocks and How to Find Them: A Modern Rockhound’s Guide
by Alison Jean Cole
From the publisher: Do you love rocks and gems? Are you a geology enthusiast? This informative guidebook by professional lapidary artist and outdoor recreation guide Alison Jean Cole shows you that beautiful rocks can be found anywhere. You’ll be expertly guided through the practice of rockhounding (looking for rocks) while learning how to be gentle on the earth.
Unlike traditional rock guides, which take readers to well-trodden locations in each state, this book can be used anywhere in the United States or Canada. You’ll be guided through the process of becoming an adept rockhound, including:
How to read geologic maps and way-find
How to consider the ethics of rock collecting
Developing your personal tastes in rocks and building a collection
What we’re reading:
Steve read Eikonoklastes. [The moment when Milton, after excoriating Charles (or his ghostwriter) at some length for lifting a prayer from some pastoral romance on the grounds that this is offensive to God, adds in passing that it is also a violation of copyright killed me. Funniest thing I’ve read in a while. Also worth a chuckle is every time Milton responds to a prayer in the Eikon Basilike like “If I have purposed any violence or oppression against the Innocent: or if there were any such wickednes in my thoughts. Then let the enemy persecute my soul, and tread my life to the ground, and lay mine Honour in the dust” with the equivalent of “Looks like God answered your prayer, Charles! Why are you complaining?” It’s fun to be reminded that the argumentative style I associate with the blogs of the aughts—attacking the opponent’s reply page by page, sentence by sentence, mixed with furious condemnations of their understanding and character throughout—has a long and noble literary history. But as an inveterate hater I have a high tolerance for that kind of thing. —Steve]
Julia started Jenny Molberg’s poetry collection The Court of No Record (2023) and Paisley Rekdal’s Appropriate: A Provocation (2021), and read Winter Strangers by Jackson Holbert [as mentioned above —Julia].
Critical notes:
- on pretension:
So while “taste serving a social function” has always been true, and used to operate in much crueler ways, I do sometimes feel like taste has been so linked, for so many people my age, into trying to represent yourself as some unknown person’s ideal person, that it’s not surprising people are particularly insane about being judged for their tastes. It’s not the whole story but it’s maybe thirty percent of the story.
- on a related phenomenon:
The Person-Guy is the type of person you never want to be. The Person-Guy is a collection of embarrassing traits and lacks the self-knowledge to know it. And crucially, the Person-Guy is by dint of being a Person-Guy someone who is not subject to the same rules of universal charity and kindness that the rest of us are. A Person-Guy essay is about defining a type of person—usually a type of person really only familiar to well-educated and culturally-savvy urbanites who spend way too much time online—but more important is about how you’re allowed to hate that type of person. Without pity.
- on a related phenomenon:
From
’s archives, an interview with Rich Blint about James Baldwin. Blint:It’s not romantic love. Baldwin says, “Love has never been a popular movement and no one has ever really wanted to be free.” Our common understanding of freedom in America is only through its absence, only through its negation—captivity—right? So when he says “free” in that moment, it goes back to the founding: conquest, settlement, and enslavement. But the freedom is to be free from all of the categories that are limiting what we inherit and Baldwin had an expansive proposition about how, again, to fashion oneself down here below: In this place.
By then, language itself was beginning to take on the qualities of a tweaker project. In 2000, literary critic James Wood dubbed an emerging genre of novel “hysterical realism.” It was meant to describe what he saw as a new type of fiction that resorted to paroxysms of erratic and baroque detail in order to veil the lack at its core—the lack being attention at the human scale. “An endless web is all they need for meaning,” wrote Wood, although he might as well have said these novels were, in contemporaneous slang, “so random.” David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011) led the way, with its Obetrol-riddled protagonist. At least half of the novel Book of Numbers (2015) was written on “a variety of psychostimulants both legal and illegal,” Joshua Cohen confessed. “I have been reading everything and not sleeping,” says a character on Adderall in 10:04 (2014), a novel Ben Lerner wrote after a post-college stint in which he convinced a Californian think tank they could “win” the “culture war” by paying him handsomely to make thousands upon thousands of interlinked Wikipedia pages. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? Everything is Illuminated? Tell me you’re tweaking without telling me you’re tweaking.