WRB—Mar. 30, 2024
In the Washington Review of Books the Managing Editors discover, not with ostentatious exultation, but with calm confidence, their high opinion of their own powers; and promise to undertake something, they yet know not what, that may be of use and honor to their country.
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 Guardian, Amelia Tait on finding love in the missed connection ads:
As romantic as it all is in hindsight, when Brian first replied, Katie did briefly wonder if it was “weird and creepy” that he read missed connection posts for fun. She thought: “Maybe there’s something wrong with him that I didn’t notice?” In 2016, data journalist Ilia Blinderman analyzed 10,000 Craigslist missed connections for the online magazine Vox and found that posts written by men far outnumbered those by women—in LA, the ratio was 5:1. The most commonly used phrases by men seeking women included “eye contact” and “long shot”, but also “parking lot”—it’s not hard to imagine that some women found these encounters less romantic than the posters did.
As far back as 1872, this gender imbalance attracted mockery: “If a lady allows her face to wear a pleasant expression while glancing by the merest chance at a man, she is very apt to find some such personal [ad] addressed to her,” warned one New York City guidebook. Today, on Reddit, anonymous users complain of creepy missed connection posts: “I had one posted about me from a guy who came into my bar. It freaked me the eff out”; “He told me he was old enough to be my father and still sends me creepy emails”; “He kept pushing for my phone numbers or saying he ‘was going to be around my work’.”
[Still waiting to hear about one of these “you were reading the Print Edition of the Washington Review of Books at such-and-such” which I am sure some of our readers would be happy to write, probably with eyes bugging out like a cartoon character. I think of my work here as in the service of God and man, an exercise of monkish devotion like that of those Irish monks reputed to have saved civilization. It’s good to have a countervailing element to forefront the desires (illegible, as we always say) and passions (likewise) of this world. All of which is to say, maybe we should bring the Classifieds back. —Steve] [On the one hand, they didn’t work the first time. On the other hand, everyone thought they were extremely amusing. So they’re an image of the newsletter as a whole, I suppose. —Chris]
In The Berliner (until very recently Exberliner), Alexander Wells on the limited portrayals of West Berlin in English:
For all its grit and glamor, West Berlin has a strangely muted status on the English-language bookshelf, with many titles focusing on familiar stories about anglophone bohemians. Tobias Rüther’s Heroes (2008, translated 2014)—one of multiple books dedicated to Bowie’s Berlin years—is packed with charming tidbits, including a description of how the artist formerly known as Ziggy Stardust liked cycling to the Brücke-Museum, where he encountered an Erich Heckel painting that inspired the famous “Heroes” (1977) album cover. The most worthwhile chapters of Rory Maclean’s genre-crossing Berlin (2014) use the author’s first-hand experience with Bowie and Marlene Dietrich to produce exciting portraits of their milieus.
[“David Bowie looming hilariously large in the minds of creative types” is not a new phenomenon. —Steve]
In The Paris Review, Zain Khalid on looking for Lorca’s New York in its present instantiation:
The kid and his father started laughing. The overwhelming light wasn’t all that frightening, apparently. In the far corner, a custodian rode an escalator up and down, dragging his mop across the escalator’s steel divider, cleaning something that is almost never dirty. The capitalist economic system, according to Lorca, was one “whose neck must be cut.” Sure thing, my man. I’m on it. Exiting the mall, I heard the drone of a helicopter; it was affixed to the sky as if by flypaper, loudly headed nowhere.
Lorca said he was “lucky enough” to witness the Wall Street crash. One could say he didn’t like bankers and was angry even at their suicides. “Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit.” And on this Wall Street, where Lorca situated his poem “Dance of Death”—a true death from which there is no resurrection—I found a team of exultant rats tearing into a Sweetgreen bag. Life had officially been affirmed! There was something doleful about the whole scene, of course, but the rats had a winter to endure.
In Engelsberg Ideas, David Lloyd Dusenbury on Spinoza’s Jesus:
For whatever we make of it, we note that the “perfection” Jesus urges is not only an imitation of God, but of Nature. The skies, in their non-judgement of “the evil and the good,” might be taken to be something like God-or-Nature avant la lettre. And who is instructing us, here, to imitate God-or-Nature? “I say to you,” says Jesus. Is he not, here, very much like the voice of Spinoza’s God-or-Nature?
This, I think, is the strangeness of Jesus in Spinoza’s corpus. For Jesus is both a “rabbi” and a “prophet” in the Gospels (see “prophet” in Mark 6:15, “rabbi” in John 1:38, and many other places). And yet, unlike the prophets and rabbis of antiquity—unlike the apostles, too—Jesus often speaks with a sublime and uncanny “I” that we could take (or mistake) for the indestructible substance that Spinoza calls God-or-Nature.
In the JSTOR blog, H. M. A. Leow on the search for home in Hmong-American poetry:
The loss felt by Hmong Americans who became refugees at a young age and who continue to relive the experience through their parents’ memories echoes through the lines. Moreover, “the poem reflects the refugee’s vexed relationship to home as a deterritorialized subject whose existence challenges the very notion of a past origin and a possible future location that is tied to the nation-state,” Vang explains. The dominant portrayal of refugees presents their resettlement as rejoining the nation-state. But Xiong’s narrator continues to move from town to town, which “suggests that these places are temporary sites from which to leave rather than places to run to.”
Two in our sister publication in Joni Mitchell’s “city of the fallen angels”: First, Sameer Pandya on the 100th anniversary of A Passage to India and his own return to that country:
And alas, I was not done with the novel quite yet. I had assigned it for a class, and it is a testament to its layers that I had no trouble reading it once again, alongside my students. And this time, in a very California college classroom about as far away from India as possible, I thought about Aziz, Fielding, and the others again. In all these readings, I had always placed myself in the shoes of Aziz and the other Indians. It was a natural, expected affinity. But what if, on this last trip, I was actually Adela seeking the “real India”? Or alternately, maybe I felt closer to Fielding, who Forster arms with foresight and clarity, his one foot in India and the other out of it.
Reviews:
Second, Christopher Newfield reviews Bruce Robbins’ book on criticism’s relation to politics and its future (Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction, 2022):
Robbins and Felski thereby face off in a script that the profession has been writing about itself since the 19th century. Within this framework of criticism and politics, Robbins insists that politics are an inherent feature of criticism in English, that “critics need to belong to the world [. . .] and ensure that their work makes changes in the world.” This engagement was the mark of 18th-century criticism, he notes, carried forward during the English Romantics’ defining encounters with revolution and industrialization, and then codified decisively in the mid-19th century by Matthew Arnold. Criticism, writes Robbins, “sometimes takes literature as its object, but it always and necessarily aims at life,” and he goes on to invoke Arnold’s “much-repeated formula” that poetry “is a criticism of life.” English-language literary criticism is thereby historically a subset of cultural criticism, even of social criticism in the broadest sense; it can’t be denatured by engaging in cultural or social criticism.
In the Journal, Benjamin Balint reviews a book on the world of Diana Trilling (Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, by Ronnie Grinberg, March 26):
The principal figure here is Diana Trilling, a brilliant essayist and the wife of the celebrated cultural critic Lionel Trilling. Diana, “the more abrasive of the two,” Ms. Grinberg writes, balanced her husband’s checkbook and deftly edited his drafts. But when she offered similar editorial help to various male friends, they took it (as she herself reported) “as an assault on their masculinity.” According to the novelist and memoirist Ann Birstein, many men in this milieu “feared losing their manhood to literary women.” She noted that “reviews of my books still referred to me in parenthesis as Mrs. Alfred Kazin, as if that were a career in itself.”
Like other “literary wives”—Zelda Fitzgerald, Veza Canetti and, in this book, the essayist Pearl Kazin Bell come to mind—Diana struggled to emerge from the shadow of her husband’s reputation and establish herself in her own right. “I wanted as much for him as he wanted for himself,” she said of Lionel, the first Jew granted tenure at Columbia University’s English department, “and more than I wanted for myself.”
Two in our sister publication on that river where “‘cheerioh’ and ‘cheeri-bye’ / Across the waste of waters die”:
Mary Wellesley reviews a book on the history of words used for women and their anatomy (Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words, by Jenni Nuttall, 2023):
When past my due date with my second baby, I had a “sweep”—a procedure in which a doctor pokes at your cervix in the hope of getting labor going. (This meaning of “sweep” isn’t, incidentally, listed by the OED, which gives 28 other senses of the word, including those relating to cricket, shipbuilding and artillery.) I remember being told that my cervix was already a bit open. A good sign. I saw my father not long afterwards and cheerfully told him that I was “two centimeters already.” “What does that mean?” he asked. A feeling of terror gripped me. I was going to have to say the word “cervix” to my father, a man who might have been written by Trollope. “Oh,” he replied, “you mean . . . the birth canal.” Relief washed over me—the canal, such a reassuring word, so redolent of nineteenth-century industrial infrastructure.
[The two genders: women’s bodies and nineteenth-century industrial infrastructure. —Steve]
Michael Hofmann reviews a biography of Halldór Laxness (The Islander: A Biography of Halldór Laxness, by Halldór Guðmundsson, translated by Philip Roughton, March 12):
Genius, perhaps even talent, tends not to survive in accounts of it. Genius from peripheral and exotic backgrounds is even more difficult. There is no way for us outsiders to watch its progress, no familiar pyramid or ladder that means anything to us. It is like a design sketch or architectural drawing submitted without any indication of scale. For a long time, at home and abroad, Laxness was an Icelander among Icelanders with their cozy first names and—to most of us—near indistinguishable patronymics. An identity parade. The friend, the patron, the employer, the rival, the enemy. It’s only in the latter half of his biography that he seems to enter the known world, meets Jorge Amado, meets Brecht, exchanges letters and postcards with Hemingway and Pasternak. Even in Guðmundsson’s biography, in translation and to English readers, he maintains a kind of invisibility. Success or failure? Original or derivative? Contented or driven? Vital or past-it? It’s hard to be sure. The separateness of the language and the discreteness of the personnel leave the issues obscure. All this makes for an uncommonly interesting (and relativizing) read.
N.B. (cont.):
Boston Review is hiring for its summer editorial fellowship.
Toni Morrison’s rejection letters.
- on different approaches to marginalia. [I don’t really write in my books. This will no doubt disappoint my future biographers. —Steve]
Life is coming back to print publication under the aegis of Josh Kushner and Karlie Kloss.
Local:
“Caps, Wizards will stay in D.C. under deal announced by Bowser, Leonsis”
Lost City Books is having a sidewalk sale today and tomorrow, March 31.
The cellist Sophie Shao, the harpsichordist Stephen Ackert, and the guitarist Mak Grgic will discuss and play Bach’s music for his 339th birthday at the National Gallery of Art tomorrow, March 31.
Poem:
“Surfacing” by Cora Clark
When it flooded I felt it. The earth gutted
beneath the peonies, a drowned cornfieldfeeling for a touch of sun. I walk to where
the lake broke rock and wonder whetherthe halves were ever used to being together, one
before the water rose. For them, it won’t lastlong; already, moss stitches the scar.
I’ll let my lover think I’m easy, feathered allin leaves. But make no mistake. Each time he loves me
my body climbs up dripping from the lake.
[This is from the v22n2 issue of Blackbird.
I’ve had this poem of Clark’s stuck in my head for the past two months or so. When I first read it, it reminded me so much of the Deep Image love poems of Robert Bly’s Loving a Woman in Two Worlds. Thinking more about it, though, I realized that the final image of this poem has a clear parallel to the core myth of Bly’s book Iron John, in which Iron John, the “wild man,” rises up out of a pond. I can’t imagine that Clark had Bly’s book in mind when she constructed that last image, but that word—wild—feels to me as if it’s at the heart of this poem. From the first sentence, we know that the speaker is tied up with, sympathetic to, the landscape. When it flooded I felt it. Then, midway through the poem, there’s a turn away from that sense of unity when she says, of the stones, For them, it won’t last / long. The implication there is clear: for us, it will. While the split halves of rock will lose a sense of their own separation—and in doing so, in some sense will lose the separation itself—the speaker and her lover will not. They’ll stay separate, and aware of the separation. Here, there’s a kind of shift where the wildness of the landscape is surpassed by the lovers’ wildness. While for the rocks, moss stitches the scar, the lovers exist with the wild, open wound of their separateness.
The speaker has a wildness all her own that she’s grappling with in those last three lines. I’ll let my lover think I’m easy, she says. Easy as in uncomplicated, convenient. Still, that sentence isn’t so much saying that he wants to view her as not-wild; look, after all, at the fact that feathered all in leaves is the visual image that follows easy. She allows him to assume she’s a kind of wildness familiar to his own. The final two sentences (and note the lovely internal rhyme they have! I just love the sonics of this poem so much) show us her reality, as a woman and as an agent of desire, is stranger than that, though. It’s messy, and even a little ominous. The wild woman, climbing up dripping from the lake. —Julia]
Upcoming book:
April 2 | Metropolitan Books
All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess
by Becca Rothfeld
From the publisher: All Things Are Too Small is brilliant cultural critic Becca Rothfeld’s soul cry for derangement: imbalance, obsession, gluttony, ravishment, ugliness, and unbound truth in aesthetics, whether we’re talking about literature, criticism, or design. In a healthy culture, Rothfeld argues, economic security allows for wild aesthetic experimentation and excess; alas, in the contemporary Anglophone West, we’ve got it flipped. The gap between rich and poor, privileged and oppressed, yawns hideously wide, while we stagnate in a cultural equality that imposes restraint.
Also out Tuesday:
Graywolf Press: Like Love: Essays and Conversations by Maggie Nelson
Milkweed Editions: You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World edited by Ada Limón
New Directions: The Life of Tu Fu by Eliot Weinberger
Penguin Press: Finding A Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art by Nicholson Baker
What we’re reading:
Steve read more of Portnoy’s Complaint. He also read the entry on Milton from Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and started writing out Samson Agonistes by hand. [This is by no means a new observation but things strike you more strongly when you write them out with pen and paper: Samson’s early speeches are the compositions of a broken man. The discussion of blindness is one thing, but in the more political sections there is impotent anger:
But what more oft in Nations grown corrupt,
And by thir vices brought to servitude,
Then to love Bondage more then Liberty,
Bondage with ease then strenuous liberty;
He is not just speaking about ancient Israel. The language calls back to Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth: “this noxious humor of returning to bondage,” “before so long a Lent of Servitude . . . take our leaves of Libertie,” “turning regal bondage into a free Commonwealth.” (This is not the only place in Samson Agonistes Milton more or less versifies material from an earlier political tract of his; I commented on a similar maneuver with The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in WRB—Feb. 3, 2024.) The appeal of the story of Samson to a blind man who has seen his political ambitions for freedom fail miserably is obvious. I suspect that in writing Samson’s journey from this state to an acceptance that God will use him to accomplish his will, however mysterious, and that he must discern the will of God as best he can, Milton is writing something he himself experienced. —Steve]
Julia read Nicole Sealey’s The Ferguson Report: An Erasure (2023).
Chris did not finish Mansfield Park.
Critical notes:
- on Simon Leys:
A challenging question, though, is why we feel the urge to reflect on one author like this. Different motivations present themselves. To commend their work to others. To frame it in the sense in which we think it should be framed. To enjoy the clarification of our thoughts.
Yet there is, sometimes, a more opportunistic impulse at work—an impulse towards attempting to define ourselves by them. Pierre Ryckmans spoke uncomfortable truths, I might be saying, AND SO DOES BEN SIXSMITH!
Well, I’d like to be remembered in such terms, of course. But I’m well aware that my culturedness, erudition and courage could not even play on the same team as his. Perhaps there is another embarrassing but less self-flattering impulse at play: the impulse towards attempting to internalize a quality by praising it. We do not ask that it reflects on us but by reflecting on it we may still catch a little of its light.