WRB—May 1, 2024

“you can’t ‘solve’ it”

The Washington Review of Books became an invaluable fragment shored against my own young ruins.

N.B.:

This month’s WRB Presents event will take place on May 14, organized with our friends at the Cleveland Review of Books, and will feature readings from Malcolm Harris, Joseph Grantham, and Margarita Diaz. As last time, doors are at 6, the readings begin at 7.

The next WRB x Liberties salon will take place the following weekend, on the evening of May 18. If you would like to come discuss the topic “Should you like your friends?” please contact Chris or Celeste Marcus.

Links:

• In TNR, Colin Dickey on the life of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross after On Death and Dying (1969):

  Released from clinical work and now a household name, Kübler-Ross became more famous touring the country giving seminars on death and dying. Eventually, she began to shift her message: She broadened out from death to grief, going so far as to copyright the phrase “The Five Stages of Grief.” But soon she began to speak past mortality and mourning altogether. In the early 1970s, she claimed an out-of-body experience helped her overcome a serious illness, and from there moved on to more esoteric philosophies. “There is no death,” she told audiences; only “life after life.” She began to embrace Spiritualism, claiming she had communed with spirits of the dead with names like “Mario,” “Anka,” “Salem,” and “Willie.” She spoke of reincarnation, and told listeners she’d lived during the time of Jesus, when she’d been named Isabel.

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Paul Lay on Henry Stubbe, classicist, friend of Thomas Hobbes, radical republican, and advocate of “Mahometan Christianity”:

  Stubbe’s Account is both a history of religion—and in terms of invention it owes something to Herodotus—but it is perhaps more a meditation on the state of contemporary Christianity. The nation would be improved if religious authority was vested in the civil sovereign, who should impose a rational religion, whether a return to the primitive Christianity of the Apostolic Christians or the “Mahometan Christianity” of Muhammad. It is Islam as seen through the prism of Hobbes, Stubbe’s own radical independency, and the events of a distracted time. Hobbes wins in one particular way: his preference for a king as civil sovereign seems no longer to be contended by Stubbe, who appears now to be a “former” republican, though, as virtue seems to be a prerequisite of a successful monarch, let us remember who is on the throne at this point.

  [Don’t miss the part where Hobbes asks Stubbe to polish his Latin in order to better accuse someone else of incompetent Latin. That person, his opponent in a textual back and forth that lasted two decades, was John Wallis, whose contributions to mathematics include the Wallis product for pi. (One of the rare discoveries in mathematics named after the person who actually discovered it; there was an excellent YouTube video a few years ago walking through an original geometric proof that the product does, in fact, equal pi.) The dispute, which was theoretically about geometry, was clearly motivated by religious and political disagreements. Think about this the next time you see one of our public intellectuals devoting some of their limited time on God’s green earth to such subjects as “prestige television.” It doesn’t have to be like this. A better world is possible. —Steve]

• In The New Yorker, Nathan Heller on the work [Art? These are loaded words. —Steve] of paying attention and the mysterious Order of the Third Bird:

  Next comes Attending, announced by the first bell. “At the party, that’s when you maybe settle into conversation with someone,” Knauss explained. The Birds line up before the work, side by side, in what is known as the phalanx. For seven minutes, they silently give the work their full attention. Three things are discouraged during this period, Knauss told me. “One is what we call studium”—analysis from study. Another is interpretation, and the third is judgment. If Birds find a work offensive (or simply bad), they’re meant to put aside that response. Alyssa Loh, Burnett’s partner, who is also a Bird, told me that she understands the injunctions as a guard against the ways that people shut down their attention. “There’s a question you often hear in relation to art objects: What is it for and what do you do with it?” she said. “In the Bird practice, we mostly answer that in negatives—you can’t ‘solve’ it, can’t decide if it’s good, can’t victoriously declare that you have correctly identified its origins or that it’s an example of an eighteenth-century whatever.” You just keep attending.

  [“I’ve always thought it’s somehow French”—the French PR team has done some incredible work. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall: Steve opines on which animals publishing houses should name themselves after, Alice Notley, Borges, book lists, Helen Vendler, repetition, David Foster Wallace, 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.]