It was unusual for boys to sit behind a Managing Editor grandfather, and to read over his head the tablet in memory of a Managing Editor great-grandfather, who had “pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor” to secure the independence of the Washington Review of Books and so forth; but boys naturally supposed, without much reasoning, that other boys had the equivalent of Managing Editor grandfathers, and that churches would always go on, with the bald-headed leading citizens on the main aisle, and Managing Editors or their equivalents on the walls.
N.B.:
[Reiterating a personal note: I am looking for a new job. Besides being the Managing Editor of this fine newsletter in my spare time, I’ve worked in data governance for the past few years, mostly overseeing the construction and management of a data catalog. I also have experience in journalism and majored in math and classics at Notre Dame. (All this to say that I’ve done a variety of things and am open to just about anything.) I live in New York City but am open to moving elsewhere. If you are interested in hiring me or know anyone who might be, please reach out. Thank you. —Steve]
March’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of this Saturday, March 29, to discuss the topic “Is there honor without revenge?”
April’s WRB Presents, featuring readings by Diana Brown, Owen Paul Edwards, Celeste Marcus, Will Snider, and Kelly Xio, will take place on Wednesday, April 9 at Sudhouse D.C. at 6:30 p.m. Readings begin at 7.
April’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Tuesday, April 22 to discuss the question “Is curiosity dangerous?”
And the N.Y.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Friday, April 25 to discuss the same question.
Links:
In ,
on the quest to get William T. Vollmann’s A Table for Fortune published:Plus they’d been together thirty years, him and Viking, and of course they were there through everything he’d just been through: with the cancer, with Lisa, his whole trek through this novel . . .
But Viking, in their defense, might lean on the case that, if writing novels is an art, making books is a business, and if Vollmann’s job is the latter then theirs is the former.
So for instance: A Table for Fortune employs a number of different fonts to signify different speakers, memoranda, newsprint.
Well, Viking doesn’t own those fonts. And they’re not free.
Vollmann is serious about turning his novels into beautiful books, almost tangible works of art, and if you fan through any of his recent tomes you’ll see it’s never static. Paragraphs go for pages but if you look at the sentences they’re these long serpentine things and then they’re not. They’re short. Clipped. The prose generally chatty and peppered with exclamation points and the typeface often changes and there’s some ALL CAPS writing and then a photo. A drawing. A chart.
Using the specific fonts that he wants in A Table for Fortune, as opposed to some of Viking’s in-house alternatives, would raise the price of each printed copy by “two cents,” as Vollmann claims in a recent appearance on the TrueAnon podcast.
Likely exaggerating.
In our sister publication in Hollywood, David Amsden attempts to reenact John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” in the pools of Los Angeles:
I knew this was coming. Knew “The Swimmer” to be a revision of the myth of Narcissus, a kind of inverted precursor to the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime” (“And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife / And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’”). In my twenties, though, I appreciated the story primarily as a middle finger elegantly extended in the direction of suburban conformity, which dovetailed nicely with my own worldview and an era when Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998) and Richard Linklater’s SubUrbia (1996) were movies you referenced when you wanted to sound cool. Stir in the seductive glitter of Cheever’s prose and it was easy to ignore how the “The Swimmer,” at its core, is an excoriating cautionary tale, about a man being the architect of his own demise—about a man’s demise being a symptom of a larger sickness.
But now I am in my forties, around Neddy’s age, and under the circumstances had to ask why I’d been so quick to romanticize his journey, so giddy at the prospect of emulating it.
[I was assigned “The Enormous Radio” in my sophomore year of high school and had forgotten all about it until Amsden mentioned it. Returning to it after a decade, I was surprised that I remembered basically everything; it apparently stuck with me more than I would have expected. It’s a good pick for “high schooler’s first literary analysis” because the move is so obvious—first the magic radio lets Jim and Irene feel superior to their neighbors, then the effect of the radio on their marriage reveals to them that they’re just as bad, if not worse. And this we call irony. But it’s also a story about the importance of paying attention and thinking about things (something I was very bad at, at the time)—everything Jim yells at Irene at the end must have been known to both of them for a long time, and the problems arise because they have both refused to reckon with it. And “The Swimmer” is about that failure to reckon with facts as well, just more phantasmagorically. —Steve]
Two in Engelsberg Ideas; first, Muriel Zagha on a map of love from seventeenth-century France:
The land of Tender features three rivers called Esteem, Inclination and Gratitude, a lake named Indifference and numerous small villages, including Sincerity, Respect and Generosity, but also Negligence, Indiscretion and Perfidy, and, high up on a hilltop, Pride. To the north lies the Dangerous Sea; to the east the Sea of Aversion. Distance is measured in leagues of friendship. In Madeleine de Scudéry’s romance, the heroine, Clélie, makes up the map as a jeu d’esprit—a kind of sentimental Snakes and Ladders—to entertain herself and her friends. The idea is to start at the bottom of the map in the city of Nouvelle-Amitié (New Friendship), where you have made an interesting initial encounter, and then attempt to reach one of three capital cities near the top of the map—Tender-upon-Inclination, Tender-upon-Esteem and Tender-upon-Gratitude. The quickest way, heading straight to the north of the country, leads to disaster, as the river Inclination flows into the Dangerous Sea. Some more considered pathways on either side of Inclination are preferable and lead to longer-lasting, more established feelings. But there are pitfalls all over the land of Tender.
[The real breakdown of gender roles here is a woman creating an elaborate map of a place that doesn’t exist. The invented geography of Pilgrim’s Progress merely abstracts away the actual geography on which medieval mappae mundi were built to make the meaning clearer; Madeleine de Scudéry’s map, although it also depicts internal states, is something new. —Steve]
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
I blame Aerosmith for my inability to quote a poem by Yeats correctly
Three New England icons: Henry Adams, Donald Hall, and Ted Williams
Hannah on a Poem by Carol Muske-Dukes about a sparrow
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much; I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? We depend on the good will of our readers, and we depend on their word of mouth to grow; nothing is as effective at bringing new readers into the fold as a recommendation from a friend.
—Steve]
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