Newsletters are a possible strength in an actual weakness. The Washington Review of Books transforms a distraction into a support the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.
N.B.:
The next WRB x Liberties Salon, which takes place tomorrow, 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 Times, Alexandra Alter on the new novel from Gabriel García Márquez (Until August, translated by Anne McLean, March 12) [One of today’s Upcoming books.] and the tradition of posthumous publication of work writers want destroyed:
For García Márquez’s sons, the question of what to do with Until August was complicated by their father’s conflicting assessments. For a while, he worked intensely on the manuscript, and at one point sent a draft to his literary agent. It was only when he was suffering severe memory loss from dementia that he decided it wasn’t good enough.
He confessed to his family that he felt unmoored as an artist without his memory, which was his greatest source material. Without memory, “there’s nothing,” he told them. In that fractured state, he began to doubt the quality of his novel.
“Gabo lost the ability to judge the book,” Rodrigo García, the eldest of his two sons, said. “He was no longer able to even follow the plot, probably.”
Reading Until August again years after his death, his sons felt García Márquez may have judged himself too harshly. “It was much better than we remembered,” García said.
In The Paris Review, Silvana Paternostro with an oral history of the ten years since García Márquez’s death:
Dasso Saldívar: Everyone has three lives. A public life, a private life, and a secret life. Gabo said that to Gerald Martin, his English-language biographer. As if to say, very delicately, Just behave yourself. Right?
Gustavo Arrango: I find that story about his three lives curious. He started talking about it in the nineties.
Gustavo Tatis Guerra: And in each of those three lives, women were always the protagonists.
In The Guardian, Dorian Lynskey on whether song lyrics can be literature [“Begin, and somewhat loudly turn the page.” —Steve]:
Perhaps the real difference is that a song lyric has neither the narrative responsibilities of drama or prose, nor poetry’s duty to precision. Lines that seem crass, pretentious or entirely incomprehensible written down can thrill a stadium. Even songs with more literary flair can comfortably withhold meaning, merely gesturing at a larger story that the writer may or may not have thought through. After Bobbie Gentry’s tantalizingly enigmatic 1967 hit “Ode to Billie Joe” sparked a frenzy of speculation about what Billie Joe McAllister threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge, Gentry admitted that she did not know herself. Ishiguro argues that this “unresolved, incomplete quality” is what makes a song haunt the mind.
In 3:AM Magazine, Abel Debritto on trying to track down the pro-Nazi letters Bukowski claimed he wrote while in college:
“What Bukowski said in those letters,” Olmsted argued, “would not be considered extreme for the time. There’s a big difference between saying the U.S. should not enter the war and saying that the Nazis were right.”
Not surprisingly, Bukowski, the ever-self-mythologizing creature, exaggerated his views five decades after the fact in the poem “What Will the Neighbors Think?” Although there’s a good chance that he wrote these letters in 1941 to be heard and read—much like he did in his work for the rest of his life—his nonconformist attitude was actually quite common before Pearl Harbor. Calling his parents “deluded patriotic fools” fifty years later, glorifying the supposed unpopularity of his beliefs in the 1940s, pointed in the same direction: he was aggrandizing in retrospect the hostile reaction towards those letters. For the young Bukowski, upsetting his parents was as imperative as the compulsion to write. The older Bukowski was only too happy to fictionalize those youth exploits.
In Antigone, Baukje van den Berg on the use of Homer in Byzantine education:
Different in tone and approach are the Allegories of the Iliad and Allegories of the Odyssey, written in accentual fifteen-syllable verses. Tzetzes undertook this project initially at the behest of Empress Irene, the spouse of Emperor Manuel I Komnenos. As a foreign princess from Bavaria, Irene needed a crash course in Homer to be able to participate in Constantinopolitan court culture. For every book of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Tzetzes first gives a brief summary of the plot, followed by an allegorical interpretation. He mostly explains the Homeric gods as natural elements or as planets and stars, as ancient exegetes had done before him. He was convinced that Homer did not really believe in the pagan gods, but had meant for his mythical tales to be read on a deeper level. With his allegorical reading, Tzetzes thus aimed to reveal the true meaning of the Homeric epics, as intended by the poet himself.
[I am reliably informed that many diplomatic staff read the WRB in order to participate in Washingtonian court culture. —Steve]
In The Nation, Ryan Ruby’s obituary of Lyn Hejinian, who died on Saturday, February 24. R.I.P.:
My Life is composed of sentences and fragments that showcase the great diversity of uses to which these linguistic units can be put: lyrical description, overheard speech, proverbial utterance, philosophical assertion, factual reporting, narrative, and so on. Hejinian collages these units in such a way that they appear at first to be puzzling non sequiturs. The reader is invited to “goggle at the blessed place realism requires,” to instead imagine the linkages between the sentences herself, and to see—thanks to the repetitions of the titular fragments—how the meaning of a fixed phrase can alter, expand, and surprise when placed in new contexts, a literary experience that anticipates by several decades the sorts of language flows now familiar to us through the experience of digital, networked life.
[Stanley Fish now lives in my brain so much that when I read a phrase like “rejection of the concept of selfhood that undergirds the expressive first-person lyric” I start muttering about “Lycidas.” Fish: “We have, in short, a poem that relentlessly denies the privilege of the speaking subject, of the unitary and separate consciousness, and is finally, and triumphantly, anonymous.” —Steve]
Reviews:
In 4Columns, Brian Dillon reviews the new collection of poetry from Diane Seuss (Modern Poetry, March 5):
It’s possible to overstate the extent to which the early death of a parent determines the shape of a life. But a writing life? The loss tends, I think, to exaggerate both the adult writer’s desire for the order and control of literary form and a contending belief that all is unformed, subject to sudden swerves toward chaos and night, so why not let it fall apart? There is a strange lightness and liberty in the absence of at least one voice of steadying wisdom—an angry refusal to look back and learn, the temptation of nostalgia and a hatred of its lure. In “Weeds,” Seuss writes: “The danger / of memory is going / to it for respite. Respite risks / entrapment, which is never / good.” She has described (in an interview for the New York Review of Books) the voice that utters these words as “the oversoul speaking to the undercarriage, the walking-around self.” It’s unclear which of these is the educated self, which the cobbled one.
In Compact, Kyle Baasch reviews Anna Kornbluh’s look at late capitalism (Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism, January):
Kornbluh only deviates from this mannered style when referencing current events. “Shit is very bad,” she laments, and we find marbles of this shit scattered throughout the book in the form of hysterical non sequiturs: “One in five students pursues treatment for climate grief.” “The University of Chicago and Temple University have the largest private police forces in the country—and they actually shoot people.” “A small number of hyper-consuming billionaires have irreparably degraded the planet, ergo billions of people will be displaced and killed.” Notice how these allusions to suffering are delivered with an inappropriately blasé intonation, as though reality were something foreign that one learns about in Vox headlines. We are encouraged to believe that, because people are dying and the planet is melting, Marxist literary criticism is urgent, but the relationship between theory and practice remains obscure. Take, for example, Kornbluh’s basic political aspiration: “The masses of people and their social institutions, up to and including the state, must implement transformative solutions like decarbonization, universal care, and vibrant cities that prioritize people over profit, liberate sexuality, and combat racist imperialism with democratic internationalism.” OK. Does roasting Maggie Nelson bring us closer to this desideratum?
[We linked to a previous review in WRB—Feb. 21, 2024.]
In The New Yorker, Katy Waldman reviews the new novel by Adelle Waldman (no relation) (Help Wanted, March 5):
Through this device, Waldman knits her disparate characters together and gives them something their routines would otherwise lack: a plot. “Help Wanted” rotates through the minds of nearly a dozen employees, who sail into focus one by one as they react to the scheme and to the desires and resentments it stirs up. They come thickly alive, by turns ingenious, petty, motivated, yearning, empathic, perversely self-thwarting, and defiantly playful. They watch and judge one another endlessly, spraying characterization in all directions. Their perspectives are supplemented by the narrator’s own—gimlet-eyed yet measured, insistently curious and humane. Val is “a funny combination of childish and practical, a daydreamer, but also the kind of person who’d be good at evacuating people during a mass casualty event.” Nicole is “pretty, in a fresh-faced, apple-cheeked, straight-from-the-farm way. . . . To tamp down such associations, she slouched, wore baggy T-shirts and boxy pants that sat low on her hips, smoked constantly, avoided both the sun and foods that weren’t heavily processed and/or white in color, and generally cultivated an air of boredom and free-floating hostility.”
In The Rumpus, Georgie Devereux reviews Patrick Langley’s new novel (The Variations, February):
What drives our need to communicate? Whether it’s the noise of a “discomposed or decomposing universe . . . its harmonies marred by bombs and death-camps . . . ,” or the more intimate but no less jarring rupture of birth, the novel points to a dissonance at the heart of existence that its characters attempt to make sense of, reaching for connection with whatever tools they have. For Ellen, this means nurturing the students at St. Agnes’; for Wolf, it means understanding his genealogical past; and for Selda, of course, it is song.
In what might be read as a moment of meta-reflection on Langley’s book, Selda muses, “What form might her last piece take? A grand and overarching composition that ties everything together, or a simple and pared-back song, a kind of ballad, that will linger in the mind?” Langley’s is a masterful novel, grand and overarching, with sentences beautifully pared. At times it seems almost too finely tuned, and one wonders what would happen if it broke from linearity (the sentences themselves are linear, even as the plot moves back and forth in time) to take even greater formal risks.
N.B. (cont.):
On handmade vinegar.
Distribution on the internet. [I believe only in word of mouth. Tell your friends about the WRB. —Steve]
The sale of Tom Verlaine’s books. [We were a better society when guys were taking stage names like “Tom Verlaine” and “Pete Shelley.” I, however, was born with this last name. —Steve]
The pros and cons of Authors’ Equity, a new publishing house.
“A fortnight on, the many disputes tearing apart one of the world’s foremost literary societies remain just as puzzling.” [Comes with the territory, surely. —Steve]
NYRB sale on books adapted to film or TV ends tomorrow, March 10, at midnight.
New issue: The Brooklyn Rail March 2024
Local:
How the National Gallery of Art acquired a lost work by Anne Vallayer-Coster.
On painting flowers.
A book sale and artisan pop-up will take place at Van Ness Main Street today from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The National Gallery of Art will screen Rome, Open City (1945) tomorrow, March 10 at 2 p.m.
The Mt. Pleasant Library is having a book sale tomorrow, March 10 from 2 to 4 p.m.
Inna Faliks with the Inscape Chamber Orchestra will perform the world premiere of Lilith by Clarice Assad at the National Gallery of Art tomorrow, March 10 at 3 p.m.
Jessi Jezewska Stevens will discuss her new book, Ghost Pains (March 5), at Lost City Books on Monday, March 11 at 7 p.m. [One of the Upcoming books in WRB—Mar. 2, 2024.]
The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra will perform an exclusive program at the Kennedy Center on Monday, March 11 at 8 p.m.
Poem:
“To Describe My Body Walking” by Yona Harvey
To describe my body walking I must go back
to my mother’s body walking with an aimless switch
in this moment of baptismal snow or abysmal flurry.
There’s a shadow of free-fall frenzy & she unhurriedthe way snowflakes are unhurried toward transformation
at my living room window. She moves unlabored, she
will not ask me to invite her in, but she will expect it.I will open the door to her. She is my mother,
even if she is made of snow & ice & air & the repetition
of years. (A means, a ways).
She came out of trees surrounding me. I see her crossnow the creek in her patent leather shoes, their navy
glimmer like a slick hole I might peer over & fall into,
against so much snow weighing down the prayerfulof sycamores, which doused the bushes last autumn.
Her little hearse broke down near the exit
that leads to my house. Now she must walk.
She will be tired. I will let her in,though she will not ask. She has come so far
past the mud & twigs, the abandoned nests.
This time of year she can’t tell the living from the dead.The pathway is mostly still except for her moving
with the snow, becoming the snow. Forgiveness?
She is a stamp in it, the tapping of boots
at the porch steps. Not spring.Or summer. Just her advancing, multiplying—
—falling through branches
—there’s a flurry of her.
[This is from Harvey’s 2013 Hemming the Water, her first of two collections.
I love the way this poem is framed in that first line, because I love how quickly that framing device—To describe my body walking—is left behind as we love into this surreal merging of mother and snow. She is my mother, / even if she is made of ice & snow & the repetition / of years. I just love that line, with how it establishes the metaphor of snow-as-mother (mother-as-snow?) as a kind of inconvenient reality to be accepted out of sheer love. She is my mother, even if . . . The repeated gestures of opening the door to the mother connect back to this line: I will let her in, // though she will not ask. There’s so much resiliency and intimacy and distance in the love of this poem, tied up all at once, and the beautiful images and voice of the poem carry those things so well. —Julia]
Upcoming books:
March 12 | Knopf
Until August
by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Anne McLean
From the Lit Hub preview: Until August was Gabriel García Márquez’s last novel; he finished it near the end of his life, while he was struggling with dementia, but ultimately decided it shouldn’t be published. Now, ten years after his death, his sons are releasing the book, which is being described as “an extraordinary and profound tale of female freedom and desire.” One final work from a literary master will certainly be worth a look.
Also out Tuesday:
Bellevue Literary Press: Flight of the Wild Swan by Melissa Pritchard
What we’re reading:
Steve read more of Far from the Madding Crowd. [I continue to be uneasy with the poet behind “Hap” having a sideline in observational comedy. —Steve]
Julia has mostly just been reading letters from the Phillip Levine archives.
Critical notes:
- on Shakespeare's characters and formal criticism:
But Cordelia resembles a conscious person. She is not one, but she is an approximation of one. Her words can be brought to life when acted or read. We don’t feel true grief for her, but we do feel something like grief. King Lear is near unreadable because the ending is so upsetting. That is not because Cordelia is a motif. Character is a lesser form of personhood, but still some sort of form. To ignore this is to ignore something essential about the play. “If the critic never enters the dream he remains ignorant about too much of the work.”
[A couple days ago I was reading an old piece by Matt Zoller Seitz in which he tells a story about a professor of his who let his class have it for saying that Singin’ in the Rain (1952) was, among other things, “really primitive and kind of unsophisticated.” The professor:
In fact, I would argue that a movie that has people standing around having conversations with each other, and then suddenly has them singing and dancing to a score that appears out of nowhere, then goes back to having them talk, asks more imagination from its audience than a music video. You have to decide to be OK with whatever the film is doing at any moment. You have to decide to accept it as normal, and decide to care about what’s happening even though it just suddenly turned into a different kind of movie. It’s like when you’re at a play and you just decide to pretend that the characters are wherever the play tells you they are, rather than looking at the stage and seeing a couple of actors in chairs pretending to be people they aren’t. Any work that would ask something like that of an audience cannot be called unsophisticated.
—Steve]
Unlike Le Corbusier’s work, however, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées doesn’t propose an absolute break with the architectural language of the past. It fits harmoniously into its block on the Avenue Montaigne, though no one would call it a submissive, or even a sensitive, building. Its dignity is commanding, rather than quiet.
The overall aesthetic effect of the building is heroic. It projects a certain view of human existence and art. In that view, human life is a grand, serious matter, and art is a fitting vessel to pour that grandeur into. This is the view implied by The Rite of Spring, too. It was also the view of the rioters at the premiere. Regardless of whether they were right or wrong to reject it, it is to their credit that they didn’t accept the piece passively. Bad art should provoke riots.
One way to observe the effect of a work of architecture is to observe the behavior of the people who see it or enter it. And I believe the architecture of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was necessary for the The Rite of Spring riot to occur.
For the Greeks, numbers could be lengths, areas or volumes, and the proof of Pythagoras’ theorem in Book One of the Elements shows three squares attached to three sides of a right-angled triangle. It shows that the sum of the square areas on the rectangular sides, equals the square area on the diagonal side.
The Babylonians did things differently. They treated numbers in the more abstract way we do today. They could state and solve, for example, quadratic equations (which involve adding a square area to a length), and their method of solution was to apply a standard recipe that we call the quadratic formula. They were good at formulas, and clearly had one to derive the numbers on Plimpton 322. Unlike the Greeks, the Babylonians were unconcerned with whole numbers, so to find three numbers for the dimensions of a rectangle and its diagonal they took the long side of the rectangle to have length number one. They could then scale up or down as necessary.
[The real purpose of the WRB is to discuss ancient mathematics; unfortunately, the need to make concessions to audience tastes requires us to put such material in Critical notes. —Steve]