It was so deeply embedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was the Washington Review of Books in disguise.
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 The New Statesman, Robert Colls on the decline of Methodism and the world built around it in England:
On Saturday evenings, my parents danced in a club to old-time and modern-sequence records in the downstairs hall. In the break you got a home-made supper that proved the parable of the loaves and the fishes. At 10 p.m., Mam would walk home with her mates while Dad would whip off for a very non-Methodist pint. When dance leaders Clive and Lesley went to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen, they invited HRH to the club. She didn’t make it, though they believed her when she said she’d try. To his credit, David Miliband, the MP, did make it, to an ordinary dance night, where he spoke about Tony Blair to a generation who had beat fascism and built social democracy. What to make of that? My father replied saying (to Miliband’s clear relief) that his generation had never had it so good. For reasons thankfully lost in time, I sang “The Lonely Goatherd” in the upstairs hall to an audience who knew where I lived.
Westoe Methodist Church was not just a gothic full stop at the top of a long and winding road. It was a world within a world.
In our sister publication on the Thames,
Taylor on the naturalism of Zola in Les Rougon-Macquart:I’m starting to think that the Sebaldian turn in contemporary literature, which people keep trying to justify as a loss of faith in storytelling convention, in its falseness or whatever, really just reflects the feeling that their lives have been determined by forces outside their scope. The effort of imagining a person sufficiently free to exercise agency within a traditional plot is beyond their powers to such an extent that they’ve resorted to dramatizing the act of imagination itself. How does one write about race, class, gender, sexuality, or any of the large forces that affect a life, without giving them totalising authority over one’s self?
[The Managing Editors of this newsletter will never beat the charges that they can only bring everything back to their obsessions, but: when I read this piece I thought of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. While it tells the story of Tess at the mercy of those large forces until she dies, the narrator very frequently interjects political statements which generally express the idea that, if something in society had been different, the incident just described, and so the story as a whole, could have gone better for Tess. Over the course of the novel the narrator asks for more or less the impossible—and the narrator, who knows this, is often bitter and sarcastic as a result—but the incessant asking is a denial that those large forces that buffet Tess are totalizing. The world could be different. She didn’t have to die.
But no one writes like that now. As notes (and we quoted in WRB—Nov. 22, 2023):
You’ve got, on the one hand, artists who are terrified of being misunderstood and feel like they have to make things very obvious. But they also have a lot of cultural training that teaches them to value subtlety and ambiguity, showing and not telling, and the like. So unlike Dickens—who will just write a story explaining that if you don’t oppose the Poor Law you will simply go to hell when you die—these are stories whose aesthetic aspirations are at odds with what they’re trying to convey politically.
We can dispute how effective novels are at producing political change or shaping social mores, and to what extent that should be their aim, but the approach in contemporary literature Taylor identifies won’t get there and won’t make a virtue out of not trying. Like Otter says, “I think this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part.” If you’re a novelist, you’re just the guy to do it. —Steve]
In Poetry, Brian Patrick Eha on the life and work of Tu Fu:
Taoists spoke of creation, the material universe, Being in its countless manifestations, as “the ten thousand things”—here transmuted into multitudinous wellsprings of sorrow, as if mere contact with reality were wounding. (Reader, it is.) In Tu’s verse the outer world is given at least equal standing with the poet’s inner life. The ideal Ch’an meditative state of “empty-mind” or “mirror-mind,” an intense form of awareness, is conceived as the cosmos being conscious of itself, giving back in its pellucid depths the limpid surface (or in its limpid surface the pellucid depths) of the visible. The fleeting arrangement of objects and people captured in a poem reflects the fabric of existence itself in its endless becoming.
[Behind the paywall: Steve tries to find a book about the English Civil War, Julia on attention and syntactic collapse, Saddam Hussein’s novels, British and Irish architecture, interior design, Henry James, baseball, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]
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