WRB—Mar. 6, 2024

“the product of a different self”

In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations
From the WRB

N.B.:

The next WRB x Liberties Salon, on Sunday, March 10, will address the question, “Can art be useful?” All WRB readers are welcome; if you are interested in attending, please contact Chris or Celeste Marcus.

Links:

• In The Point, Scott Sherman interviews Edwin Frank, editor of New York Review Books and the NYRB Classics series, to ask about that work and the business of publishing [All hail our cultural overlord. —Steve]:

  Yes, the law of averages. It would be hard to publish books in any other way and it reflects the built-in iffiness of the whole business, and not just financial.

  To speak like a Marxist, books take a lot of work to write and put together, and at the same time have next to no exchange value and whatever use value they have—this is especially true of literature—is in the eye of the beholder, unlike a towel or a shoe. The only way to publish them is to hedge your bet and hedge it again.

  Of course, big publishers don’t just publish a lot of books; they publish a lot of different kinds of books, and cat calendars and so on. If there is range in our series, there is also concentration—perhaps too much on certain subjects. I have often vowed to swear off books about World War II.

  [The most fun I’ve had reading an interview recently that didn’t involve Juliette Binoche letting loose on the press tour for The Taste of Things (2024). Frank complains that the Times now runs listicles with titles like “Fifteen Spring Nonfiction Titles for Every Interest!” and “Fifteen Novels to Read Now!” Here at the WRB, we have no idea what an interest is; the novel to read now is Mansfield Park, same as it ever was. —Steve]

• In IAI News, Dana Dragunoiu on Kantian ethics in Nabokov: 

  Indeed, Nabokov seems to be acknowledging in Lolita that the cost of doing what is right as opposed to pursuing the consequentially good is too high. Dolly’s tennis playing is strikingly graceful, but it is ultimately “sterile” because it yields no “utilitarian results.” As one of Nabokov’s courtesy heroines, Dolly is admirable, yet the reader cannot help wishing that she had more “consequentialist” than “deontological” agency. Whereas Humbert laments that she never managed to claw her way to victory in tennis, readers lament that she had not managed to claw her way to freedom sooner and without needing the help of another pedophile.

  [This piece also features some material on that Managing Editor obsession “people reading Milton poorly.” —Steve]

• In The Yale Review, Dana Levin on what Charles Simic taught her about poetry:

  He said to me once, advocating a cut in a poem I showed him, “But is the word of hair-splitting, not very interesting.” He leaned for­ward, resting his elbows on his knees, clasping his hands and look­ing down at them, as he often did when making a point. “A thinker, a ‘civilized’ man, would say, ‘Farmer Joe had the loveliest pig and cared for it like his own child but slaughtered it for dinner,’ while the simple man, the peasant, says, ‘Farmer Joe had the loveliest pig that he cared for like his own child, and he slaughtered it for din­ner.’” He looked up at me, to make sure I was getting it. “And,” he said, “is more interesting than but.”

• In Noema, an excerpt from an upcoming book on trees by Daniel Lewis (Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Future, March 12):

  People climb far up into the high embrace of these trees, including Jerry Beranek, a pioneer of coast redwood climbing who first ascended one in 1971. As Jerry described it: “The views from the vertical column have a stunning three-dimensional effect: distance, depth and space filled in with the trunks of giant amber columns stirring and swaying.” Few people have had an opportunity to get that high up into a tree. More humans have summited Mount Everest than have gotten higher than 300 feet up a coast redwood.

  In the canopy, amazing worlds emerge. Different species of trees thrive in soil up to 3 feet deep within the inner folds of some of the redwoods. One tree climber once found an 8-foot-tall Sitka spruce growing in the upper heights of a giant redwood.

[Behind the paywall: Julia on linguistic playfulness, Steve on Lucretius and Thomas Hardy’s jokes, Sebald, Proust, stereotypically Italian gestures, subtitles, Formula 1, getting rid of books, poetry’s purpose, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you. If you like what you see, why not subscribe, and why not consider a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]