WRB—May 11, 2024
Historians are shy of attributing vast consequences to two people’s decisions, but the Managing Editors really give them no choice.
N.B.:
This month’s WRB Presents event will take place this Tuesday, May 14, organized with our friends at the Cleveland Review of Books, and will feature readings from Malcolm Harris, Joseph Grantham, Margarita Diaz, and Nick Gardner. As it was last time, doors are at 6, and the readings begin at 7.
The next WRB x Liberties salon will take place on May 18. If you would like to come discuss the topic “Should you like your friends?” please contact Chris or Celeste Marcus.
Links:
Two in our sister publication in the City of Angels:
Peter Holslin on his father and the history and resonance of New Age music:
In Ocean of Sound (1995), Toop identifies 1889 as a significant year marking the emergence of the music that would eventually come to be tagged under categories like ambient and New Age. That’s the year French composer Claude Debussy attended the Exposition Universelle in Paris, a colonial exhibition where he first encountered a range of folk-music styles from Southeast Asia. At one performance Debussy is said to have attended, a Javanese ensemble played suling flute, bowed rebab, and some kind of metallophone (an instrument that produces sound through metal pieces like bars, tubes, or bowls) while accompanied by the “slow, eerie grace” (Toop’s words) of a bedhaya dance troupe. Toop, long regarded as an authority on ambient and experimental music, suggests that this was an early example of Western fascination with Indonesian gamelan, a musical tradition whose gong instruments would later captivate influential composers like Colin McPhee and Steve Reich. Toop makes an effort to draw a link between Debussy’s 1889 moment and his later works of aquatic-themed Impressionism—it’s one of many wishy-washy, not-totally-convincing thematic connections he makes throughout a book that is itself deeply impressionistic.
[Debussy’s “La cathédrale engloutie” has, within the framework of the (Western) story of Ys and its associations with water, a bunch of bell sounds which both point to church bells (especially in its use of the bell-like lowest notes on a piano—not a trick Debussy invented) and the insistent and various chiming that characterizes gamelan. Even the imitations of organ chords (as happens when imitating the organ with a piano) chime. “Slow, eerie grace” is a good way to describe the piece as a whole. Or maybe I should be thinking about “Voiles” instead. —Steve]
Kristen Malone Poli on recent personal essays from women about failing marriages and food:
After reading these essays, one gets a sense that the real objects of appetite for these authors are hidden somewhere out of sight. When describing what they consciously want, Jamison and Gould often rely on the language of metaphor and mythopoetics. Gould, in particular, has an affinity for the epic mode, quoting a passage from Rachel Cusk’s 2012 memoir Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation that describes divorce in Homeric terms, positioning children as totems given from a husband to a wife “for her to hold so that he can return to the world. And he does, he leaves her, returning to work, setting sail for Troy.” In one particular passage of Gould’s essay, her husband sets off, not to fight in a war but to cover one for a magazine, and his journey incites rage in Gould for placing himself in harm’s way and, crucially, for “going out into the greater world while [she] tend[s] to lunches, homework, and laundry.” On a material level, it’s unclear what “going out into the [. . .] world” means to Gould, and why it inspires so much envy—she could be interested in travel, journalism, politics, or something else entirely.
[“Returning to work” rather understates the Trojan War—and as its connections to marriage and children go, I might gesture to such questions as “What was the cause of the Trojan War?” and “What did Agamemnon do to get the wind to blow the Greek fleet to Troy?” —Steve]
In The Paris Review, Elisa Gabbert on the work of memory and the uses of diaries:
It seems we can’t help but imagine an audience when we write. Because a journal makes the self external, the self counts as an audience. But I also think Woolf and Sontag, in saving their journals, just must have imagined that others might read them as well. They must have, because they loved reading writers’ diaries. Sontag read Kafka’s diaries. Kafka read Goethe’s: “Distance already holds this life firm in tranquility, these diaries set fire to it. The clarity of all the events makes it mysterious.” (The next day he writes, “How do I excuse yesterday’s remark about Goethe [which is almost as untrue as the feeling it describes, for the true feeling was driven away by my sister]? In no way.” For Kafka, contra Sontag, writing the thing often made it less true, reduced the verity of pure thought to lies. “Nothing in the world is further removed from an experience . . . than its description.” The words spoil reality.) Plath read Woolf’s: “Just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf which I bought with a battery of her novels Saturday with Ted. And she works off her depression over rejections from Harper’s (no less!—and I hardly can believe that the big ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock and sausage. Bless her. I feel my life linked to her somehow.”
[I’ve gone back through old issues of the WRB a couple times to see my initial reactions to books that have stuck in my mind. —Steve]
Reviews:
- Moul reviews an anthology of Indian poetry (How to Love in Sanskrit, edited and translated by Anusha Rao and Suhas Mahesh, February):
I recommend the very brief introduction and (especially) the following “Tour of the Translators’ Workshop” for anyone doing serious thinking about classical translation. The editors are frank and funny about their project and its principles. They pull no punches and are not afraid to admit what they think can’t be done, and why. In the note on translations, they cite a couplet from the Ramayana which, in a way that is typical of Sanskrit poetry, relies upon a series of four word-plays: one meaning ray or hand; one star or pupil (of the eye); one redness or love; one the sky or a dress. As a result, the same couplet can be read simultaneously in two different ways: as a description of stars fading from the sky at dawn, or of a woman in love who takes off her clothes. The rhetorical effect is similar to that of a multi-correspondence simile, but the poetic effect is quite different, since the two elements of the comparison are conveyed by the same words. The editors are straightforward: “Indeed, it is impossible to translate such poetry for general audiences; the magic dissipates in the process.” This seems to me, essentially, true, though it does rule out of practical scope a lot of the most characteristic Sanskrit verse. For this and other reasons, they conclude: “though a ship’s worth of Sanskrit poetry has survived, only a bucket’s worth has potential in English.”
[This is something like the explanatory note, longer than the poem itself, Pound attaches to “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance” from Cathay, which on its face explains the meaning of various details in the poem and more importantly hints at the detail the translation excludes. —Steve]
In 4Columns, Brian Dillon reviews a book about attempts to communicate with aliens (Extraterrestrial Languages, by Daniel Oberhaus, May 7):
The modern era of Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) begins with the advent of radio, which inevitably is also caught up in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). (Early on, Nikola Tesla thought he heard a memo from the red planet: “It reads: one . . . two . . . three.”) A halo of signals has been swelling inadvertently from our world since the late nineteenth century, comprising by the middle of the twentieth a potentially bewildering array of radio communications and entertainment, TV shows and radar signals. In 1973, Carl Sagan lamented that the only signs of intelligent life on Earth might be “housewives’ daytime serials, the rock-and-roll end of the AM broadcast band, and the semi-paranoid defense networks.” A suspicion unexplored by Oberhaus: that the whole METI/SETI field is itself wildly paranoid about appearing smarter than any aliens who might be riding the wavebands.
In The New Statesman, Rowan Williams reviews Edith Hall’s book about suicide and Greek tragedy (Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me, March):
Digesting all this, we may come to understand more clearly the reactions that help to perpetuate the stigma surrounding the issue. There is sheer anger: how could they do this to me, to us? There is condemnation, religious or otherwise: this is a sinful rejection of the gift of life. There is passivity, collusive passivity: it’s their decision, it’s a matter of freedom. The anger has to be dealt with by the sort of patient narration that Hall undertakes so sensitively in her extended memoirs of her family (providing, incidentally, a vivid snapshot of Scottish civic and cultural life from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century). Condemnation abandons this patient quarrying for understanding and will get us nowhere. Collusive passivity simply fails to register the depth of destructive impact; at worst it spills over into the cheapened existentialist dramatising of suicide as the ultimate expression of sovereign autonomy (Dostoevsky has some things to say about that).
[I think Williams is being a little unfair to Augustine in his discussion of rape in The City of God; it is true that I would not expect a modern writer to approach the subject in this manner, but especially in 1.25 he addresses the burden of self-disgust (to use Williams’ words) and one cause of its intensification. —Steve]
In the TLS, Ian Penman reviews a history of surrealism (Why Surrealism Matters, by Mark Polizzotti, January):
This all feels a bit stag night or rag week. Lairy, laddish, alpha male: one member is captured “penning its broadsides, throwing punches at its brawls.” But when it came to matters of sex and sexuality the wild boys of Surrealism were rather prim and proper, and distinctly heteronormative. “Transgression”, says Polizzotti, “interrogates questions of identity, especially with regard to sexual politics and the role of women in the movement.” This could indeed stand a lot of interrogation. Women tended to be seen by the Breton circle as objects of worship or study rather than autonomous subjects. My favorite quote in Polizzotti’s book (to be read, perhaps, in a Mae West voice) comes in a section on the twelve all-male “inquiries on sexuality” held by the Surrealists: “In practically the only session that a woman did attend, Youki Foujita, who would later marry Robert Desnos, listened for a while, then remarked, ‘You boys need to learn a few things.’”
In The Baffler, Philippa Snow reviews a recently reissued novel by Heather Lewis (Notice, 2004, March):
A glassy-eyed pragmatism keeps us moving through the story, from one seemingly unsurvivable crisis to the next. Very little of the husband and wife’s home is depicted on the page, and yet somehow it is easy to imagine how fastidiously beige it might be, how blankly tasteful—how obviously and perversely it would show all that spilt blood. In a sense, the novel’s minimalist, carefully omissive language performs the same function, ensuring as it does that we never learn what characters, rooms, or clothing look like, only how things feel, taste, or hurt. Its title, as far as I know, is never literally explained—noticing, though, is a key survival mechanism for Nina, allowing her as it does to make split-second judgements about who to trust, whose car to climb into, and so on. (Sex workers and victims of abuse, both, are keen noticers by nature, relying on a learned form of high-speed visual profiling for safety.) As in House Rules—whose narrator, Lee, says very little aloud but shares with us a near-constant stream of observations about psychology, physical space, and sensation—Lewis’ jettisoning of description leaves more room for action and reaction.
In Jacobin, Samuel McIlhagga reviews a collection of essays by Raphael Samuel (Workshop of the World: Essays in People’s History, edited by John Merrick, January):
All these essays are resurrections of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century life, rather than clinical dissections. Indeed, Samuel’s work can overwhelm the reader with the cumulative details it gathers from primary sources. In Workshop of the World, we get an almost pointillist prose: filled with granular details that make up a whole. For instance, in the essay that lends its title to the collection, “Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in Mid-Victorian Britain” (1977), Samuel pushes an anti-Whig history of the British industrial revolution, claiming that the rise of mechanized and steam powered production was a contested and nonlinear process.
Yet it is the background detritus of factories, manufacturing yards, and cottage workshops that accidentally dominate Samuel’s theoretical foreground. In his attempt to argue for the continued economic and sociological relevance of hand power and artisanship during the industrial revolution, Samuel also brings his subjects to life. His point about the continued power of the artisan is quickly proven, but the essay powers on, opening up the lifeworld of the nineteenth-century working class.
In the Journal, Darrell Hartman reviews two books about climbing Everest (Fallen: George Mallory and the Tragic 1924 Everest Expedition, by Mick Conefrey, May 7; Everest, Inc.: The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World, by Will Cockrell, April):
One upshot is that it can be cheaper than ever to climb Everest. Nepali companies pay less for their commercial permits. They also offer less-than-full-service packages that many Western guides consider irresponsible. On the easier-to-climb Nepal side, the low-cost tours are one reason the crowds have increased, sometimes with fatal consequences.
The proximity of death makes Everest unlike other tourist attractions. “It has been suggested that the visible dead bodies on Everest reinforce the heroism of climbing it,” Mr. Cockrell ventures. Does this mean that a steady trickle of new fatalities is good for business? The provocative question goes unexplored.
[Many of the corpses on Everest (since getting them off the mountain would require a lot of effort, they get left there) have become landmarks of a sort. —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
The disappearance of the neck brace in popular culture. [This article makes no mention of Bobby Petrino. Disappointing. —Steve]
The history of calling things galas. [The WRB, at least for now, is more of a soirée enterprise. —Steve]
The Greek equivalent of trick-or-treating involves swallow songs. [Tennyson? —Steve]
More restaurants serving non-Western cuisines are getting Michelin stars.
Vice Media is partnering with Savage Ventures to relaunch its digital properties.
David Shapiro died on Saturday, May 4. R.I.P.
Steve Albini died on Tuesday, May 7. R.I.P.
Poem:
“Blue” by Claire Schwartz
came late to
language once
we werethrashing the sea
was wine-
dark flashof wing
and nothing
was the samethe sea
kissed the
sky and nowday is then
night is
more what didyou lose
in becoming
family whatdazzling otherwise
do I name
when Iaddress you
[This is from Schwartz’s Civil Service (2022), her first full-length collection.
I’m so interested in the waves that exist in this poem. I don’t just mean the shape made by the triplets, but the ebb and flow of clarity that comes through the unpunctuated syntax. The poem moves between moments where it’s difficult, if not impossible, to parse the meaning—is it
Blue came late to / language once / we were . . .
or
Blue came late to / language; once / we were . . . ?
There’s a similar difficulty in the lines
day is then
night is
more . . .
It’s hard to tell, there, where exactly to pause; the closest we can come to grammatical sense would be “day is then; night is more,” which doesn’t really carry much meaning. But then these moments of confused, strange language give way to moments of clarity like “flash // of wing / and nothing / was the same,” and those two final questions: “what did // you lose / in becoming family?” and “what // dazzling otherwise / do I name / when I // address you?” I love those questions, both on their own and in how they stand next to each other. What did you lose in becoming family? The answer to that is a lot, right? In binding oneself to a particular person, a particular family, there’s both all of the potential losses—all of the other options that are rejected in favor of this one—and all of the inevitable actual losses—illness, fights, those small things he or she does that drive you crazy in moments where your patience is thin. But even though I know that “a lot of loss” is the answer to that question, it’s still not where I’m immediately led when I read the question. My thoughts go somewhere else entirely because of that verb: “becoming”. “Becoming” is so gentle, and so tender; it signifies something incremental and ongoing, which, I have to think, is part of why we chose to bind ourselves to others at all. “Becoming family” promises loss, yes, but it also promises to change us, and keep changing us.
And that gets into the question of the “dazzling otherwise,” which I see working in two ways here: the word choice of “otherwise” ties back into the potential losses I mentioned earlier—everything that could have existed had this one choice not been made. The other part of it is about the self’s (perhaps more accurately the lover’s) own possibility; when I address you, I name all the ways I might be changed by this love, ways which can’t be predicted (hence the framing of it as a question). But they’re also possibilities that Schwartz renders optimistically: not just the “otherwise,” but the “dazzling otherwise.” —Julia]
Upcoming books:
May 14 | Penguin
My First Book
by Honor Levy
From the Lit Hub preview: The bluntness of this title feels like an apt entry for Honor Levy into the mainstream publishing scene: she’s one of those writers I’ve been hearing about for years, reading her various essays and stories, and in my mind, she will always be 24. She’s been touted as the “voice of Gen Z” for some years now, and managed to make a name for herself before she even has a book out. Someone who can do such a thing is always one to watch, and the anticipation has been growing for Levy’s “First Book” for a long time. Finally, her collection of short stories about growing up in the digital age will be released in May: they promise to be ironic and poignant and funny and faith-seeking in a collapsing world.
[We linked to a review in WRB—May 1, 2024. If I were touted as the “voice of Gen Z” I would move to another country, change my name, and live a life of solitary prayer and penance. —Steve]
What we’re reading:
Steve read Austin Woolrych’s short little pamphlet on the Interregnum (England Without a King: 1649–1660, 1983). [A warmup for his 800-page Britain in Revolution: 1625–1660 (2002), which I recently bought. —Steve]
Julia read more of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise.
Critical notes:
Adam Roberts on “The Reader” by Wallace Stevens:
The second jarring thing (“the jar was round upon the ground” and so on) is the line: No lamp was burning as I read. But this is unambiguous. The speaker of the poem is sitting in unlit darkness, and yet is still reading a book. How?
At the risk of perpetrating a kind of fatuous literalism, I wonder: is s/he blind? It is a function of the automatic assumption, the ableism of the sighted, that “reading a book” means: looking with one’s eyes at a page printed with Gutenbergian letters. But there are other methods of reading. Louis Braille first published his system for tactile reading in 1829. By the twentieth century—as today, although it is losing ground because of the primacy of audio books—it is a global matter, widely practiced.