WRB—Mar. 4, 2026
“abandon syntax”
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t managed to edit all the email newsletters that you have.”
Links:
In our sister publication Down Under, Jo Langdon on young children and poetic expression:
The moon appears too in Galchen’s work. “Mysteries of Taste,” for example, which catalogues the baby’s interests and preferences, and closes with the line, “Always she is the first to notice the moon.” It is through Brown’s Neon Daze that I learn how Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon, “possessed no special desire to write children’s books” and “wanted to be a serious modernist—a Gertrude Stein or Virginia Woolf” but “believed she was stuck in childhood.”
While this might imply an opposition between (the texts and perspectives of) childhood and the works of “serious modernists,” it feels worth contemplating how the disruptive presence of motherhood, babies and children—present in the works of many—has the potential to unsettle language and perception in meaningful and arguably positive ways. Children might interrupt and disturb the focus of adults, but what new forms—of listening, receiving, and response—might emerge through these ruptures, giving rise to potential for dialogue and interaction?
[I discussed certain similarities between Goodnight Moon and the Cantos of Ezra Pound in WRB—Sept. 17, 2025.
Listening to small children talk is fun. (He says, not having any himself.) They do things with language that you simply do not encounter anywhere else. Some of it comes down to their lack of familiarity with the language; they don’t know enough words, and so they use the words they do know in ways that would never occur to someone with a more developed vocabulary. And some of it is their endless desire to categorize things and understand their relationships, which combines with their lack of set conceptual frameworks to produce new ideas of how to understand the world. Part of the modernist project was defamiliarization, and few things are as defamiliarizing as trying to see the world through the eyes of a three-year-old. —Steve]
Two in Literary Review; first, Peter Davidson on John Aubrey:
An Oxford-educated Wiltshire gentleman who lost his small estates to lawsuits and debts after the Civil Wars, he was somehow set free by this personal disaster to live, in Auden’s words, “a wonderful instead.” Instead of worrying about lawsuits and estate work, he lived on and with his innumerable friends. He travelled and observed places, traditions and monuments, always with a sense that many of his contemporaries, especially during the wars, were intent on the destruction of all these things. His drawn records of the megaliths at Stonehenge and Avebury are still valued today; but so are his records of people’s customs, songs and beliefs, which he gathered in Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (1686–7). Both comic and melancholy, his writings offer a paper museum of people and things. “How these curiosities would be quite forgot,” he writes in his celebrated Brief Lives, “did not such idle fellows as I am put them down.”
The context for this delightful sentence about memory comes at the end of one of his most intricate and memorable pieces of writing. His notes for a life of the short-lived beauty Venetia Digby (as edited from Aubrey’s manuscript by Kate Bennett) are haunting: “She had a most lovely sweet turn’d face, delicate darke browne haire . . . her face, a short oval, darke browne eie-browe: about which much sweetness, as also in the opening of her eie-lidds. The colour of her cheeks, was just that of a Damaske-rose: which is neither too hot, nor too pale.”
[“Such idle fellows as I am”—writers can’t resist the chance to be self-aggrandizing and self-effacing at the same time. The artistic temperament is caught between the two.
“Much sweetness . . . in the opening of her eie-lidds’: to read great writing is to be shamed for our comparative lack of attention. —Steve]
Reviews:
Second, Declan Ryan reviews John Berryman’s unpublished Dream Songs (Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, edited by Shane McCrae, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Dec. 9, 2025; we linked to a piece by McCrae about the Dream Songs in WRB—Sept. 10, 2025.]:
The poems here are immediately recognizable thematically, syntactically and in their means of address for anyone familiar with the original 77 Dream Songs (1964). In truth, there’s little to match the intensity or dazzle of those, but that same heartbreak note, wry self-scrutiny and bawdy romanticism are all present and correct, as well as some more occasional, elusive or private-seeming work. These Songs retain the same blend of the Blues, Shakespearean phraseology and bar-room chatter, something Berryman comments on in one of the poems here: “He make their minds blur, with that syntax. Then / he abandon syntax and he count on tone. / Then he go underground.” This sort of exegetical turn isn’t a rarity. Throughout, Henry or his pal, who addresses him here as previously as “Mr. Bones,” annotates and explicates as he goes, foregrounding the poems’ making as much as their impact, either on his sanity or on his trophy cabinet: “One typewriter & very sharp pencils. / —Mr. Bones, take it easy”; “Star-showers of honors hesitated and then fell on Henry, / knocking him to his knees”; “every time most people praise me / I figure there must be something wrong with my style, / trudging away at perfection.”
In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, David Trotter reviews Lydia Davis’ book about why she writes (Into the Weeds, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Sept. 13, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Oct. 15, 2025.]:
By Into the Weeds, any remaining reluctance to discuss the virtues of what we might call inadvertently long-form writing has long since disappeared. Witness the illuminating account Davis offers of the composition of “The Cows,” published as a pamphlet in 2011, and then in Can’t and Won’t. In this case, the raw material really was “found in a field”: the one just across the road from her house. Davis had no “overall plan” for her “observations,” which she entered in a notebook among other jottings. Days might go by, or weeks, or months, before she felt moved to add a further entry. “And so the set of 83 observations was written by accumulation over several years.” She has spoken in a recent interview of the “many, many, many, many pages” of her journals which “never were used in stories and never will be.” About halfway through Into the Weeds, she comes clean. Asked to write about why she writes, she eventually settled, she says, on a form that bears “some resemblance” to a diary. This text, too, has been allowed to accumulate. Its method is the enactment rather than the exposition of a motive.
[A diary is an accumulation of impressions, but reducing all the impressions of a day to a couple sentences demands ruthless editing. Only these hard-edged synopses of a day—or, for those who use diaries as commonplace books, material selected from elsewhere—are allowed to accumulate, because they provide an understanding of the day that would not be possible if the diary entries were more diffuse. Trotter refers to Davis’ predilection for “the yield from pithiness and extreme brevity”; this also characterizes one kind of diary worth reading. —Steve]
In The New Yorker, Sarah Chihaya reviews a new translation of Emi Yagi’s second novel (When the Museum is Closed, translated from the Japanese by Yuki Tejima, January):
The world of Venus and Rika, though, is vague. They talk in an unnamed museum in an unnamed city. Venus is amusingly casual and surprisingly more street-smart than Rika, despite her centuries-long captivity; beyond the shock of her attitude, though, we learn very little about her. One might think that an ancient living statue might be the most interesting character in this story, but we never discover what motivates her, beyond a clichéd desire to get out and see the world. The novel’s villain is the handsome male curator Hashibami, who wants Venus for himself; a consummate collector, he thinks of female beauty as something that can be revealed and perfected only by the male gaze. Hashibami, who we find out lives in the museum, seems to want both to possess Venus’ timeless beauty and to embody it himself. There’s a rich commonality between him and Venus that could be explored here—who’s manipulating Rika more? But the novel ultimately retreats from these complicating questions. The final message is a little too clear; the fairy-tale setting makes the fairy-tale plot too easy.
N.B.:
Mail clubs. [The subhead here says that “people still really love to get things in the mail”; if you’ve ever doubted this, look at all the junk mail that uses a font imitating human handwriting for the address. Even though people hardly ever get hand-addressed envelopes in the mail anymore, the sense that this is what mail should be lives on.
Maybe I should start mailing out the Print Edition of the WRB. —Steve]
The life and times of extremely annoying alarm clocks. [I pretty consistently wake up before my alarm; interesting to see how the other half lives. And I feel like we lost something when we went from alarm clocks named “the Rattler, the Slumber Stopper and the Tornado” to “Nuj” and “Alarmy.” We lost something before that when we went from the factory bell to the alarm clock. Make the whole town wake up early. Really, what they should do is ring the bells whenever a new WRB comes out. —Steve]
“Last Wednesday, The Times officially launched the Midi, our new daily medium-size crossword.”
“Staffers at Film at Lincoln Center keep a list of the incorrect movie titles they’ve heard from patrons. That list is very, very long.” [What about a list of incomprehensible plot summaries from which it is impossible to figure out what movie the person is talking about? —Steve]
The Royal Mint is training its coin-makers to make jewelry.
New issues:
The Hedgehog Review Spring 2026 / Volume 28 / No. 1: Humanism in a Posthumanist Age
Literary Review March 2026 [As linked to above.]
Poem:
“A Vision Vpon This Conceipt of the Faery Queene” by Walter Raleigh
Me thought I saw the graue where Laura lay,
Within that Temple, where the vestall flame
Was wont to burne; and passing by that way,
To see that buried dust of liuing fame,
Whose tombe faire loue and fairer vertue kept;
All suddeinly I saw the Faery Queene:
At whose approch the soule of Petrarke wept;
And from thenceforth, those graces were not seene,
For they this Queene attended: in whose steed
Obliuion laid him downe on Lauras herse:
Hereat the hardest stones were seene to bleed,
And grones of buried ghostes the heuens did perse,
Where Homers spright did tremble all for griefe,
And curst th’ accesse of that celestiall theife.
[The WRB is, as always, a Spenser newsletter.
The first stanza introduces a paradox of poetic immortality—“buried dust of living fame”—and hints that poetic immortality is somehow inconsistent with life. The living fame granted by the poetry is only necessary because Laura is not, in fact, alive. But poetic immortality’s problems don’t end there; it turns out to be inconsistent with itself. The text of the poem says that the appearance of the Faery Queene causes Love and Virtue to desert Laura’s tomb; it might as well say that The Faerie Queene is going to take some portion of the attention and reputation Petrarch has. Human time and attention are limited resources; any new claim to artistic immortality is—has to be—made at the expense of the existing canon, and require us to revise our relationship to it. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” T. S. Eliot says:
The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
Raleigh argues that Spenser’s poem, and the historical situation that gave rise to it, demand of us that we revisit Petrarch and reconsider his work. How does it change if Laura is no longer a moral exemplar? And the seemingly-unprompted reference to Homer in the penultimate line (and in a state somewhere between dead and alive—“spright”) pushes the question all the way back to the beginning. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Out March 8:
ACMRS Press: Shakespeare and the Senses by Holly E. Dugan
Grove Press | March 10
The Quantity Theory of Morality: A Novel
by Will Self
From the publisher: In The Quantity Theory of Morality, Will Self’s unconventional new novel, his pen remains dipped in vitriol and elegance as ever. In this dark yet hilariously satirical “state-of-an-era novel,” Self’s target is a collective morality that is nothing more or less than pure sociability. His middle-class, middle-English characters appear trapped in a timeless go-round of polite chitchat in dinner parties that refract like a hall of mirrors as the novel progresses, until one day someone says something to the effect of, “This way to the gas chamber, please, ladies and gentlemen.” The Quantity Theory of Morality finally solves the equation of time and money that dominates our lives, in a way that is simultaneously deranging, destabilizing, and hilarious.
With recurring—if defeated—appearances from now-canonical characters like Zack Busner, the repetition of each chapter, or “Proposition” shows Will Self to be both a master of satire and slapstick humor and a sublime and thoughtful critic of the alienation of modern life. With The Quantity Theory of Morality, Self provides the sequel to his award-winning debut of 34 years ago: The Quantity Theory of Insanity. That literary psycho-surgery proved there wasn’t enough sanity go around—now he’s established what many of us fear to be the absolute truth: there isn’t enough good to go around, either.
Also out Tuesday:
Columbia University Press: The Traitor: A Novel by Abe Kōbō, translated from the Japanese by Mark Gibeau
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Down Time: A Novel by Andrew Martin
G. P. Putnam’s Sons: Judy Blume: A Life by Mark Oppenheimer
Melville House: Still Talking: Stories by Lore Segal
Viking: The Complex: A Novel by Karan Mahajan
What we’re reading:
Steve read more of The Recognitions.
Critical notes:
Victoria Moul on Gérard Bocholier and what we find in what we read:
I taught language and literature (in English, Latin and Greek) for twenty years and for me teaching—whether it’s an elementary language class or a doctoral student—is mainly about helping both others and myself to read better. There are so many ways to do this, both as a reader and as a teacher, but one thing that comes up quite a lot is the difference between a purely personal response and a critical one. A line of a poem might move me because it reminds me, for example, of a nursery rhyme that my grandmother used to say to me. The particular memory of my grandmother and all that that brings with it is entirely personal to me; but the way that the line echoes a well-known nursery rhyme is not. On the other hand, if I am struck by a piece of writing because it happens to use a word that my grandfather or my first school teacher often used, that might make it very moving for me, but it probably does not have much relevance beyond myself.
As sophisticated readers, we know that coincidences or echoes of this latter kind are not really critically significant in themselves. We teach students, and learn ourselves, to sift them out of formal writing. But all the same, these sorts of associations can be very important to us as readers, and are quite often part of what draws us into a work of literature, even if they are not what keep us there. And perhaps we can talk meaningfully about how literature may provoke such associations—the way that some kinds of poetry, for example, seems designed to elicit them.
Writing is a reliable antidote to boredom. A well-crafted sentence, an elegantly framed argument, a neatly arranged set-up and punchline focus our attention and feel substantial, even permanent, even when we know otherwise. In addition, every act of writing is a reply to a predecessor, one half of a conversation—a lesson taught by Guy Davenport. Literature is a vast kinship network of precursors. Readers and writers have no excuse for feeling alienated, apart from self-pity.