WRB—May 13, 2026
“one’s own problems”
The Washington Review of Books Is Decadent and Depraved
Links:
In Van, Leah Mandel on insects in music:
A few years after Hearn wrote of his impossible-to-describe cricket sounds, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakav composed “The Flight of the Bumblebee.” Not a minute and a half long, it depicts protagonist Prince Gvidon’s apian transformation so that he can traverse the sea and visit his father’s court in secret. The orchestral interlude, from his opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan after Pushkin’s 1831 verse fairy tale, is meant to emulate the sound of a bee as closely as possible. For Rimsky-Korsakov, insects were deeply tied to the spirituality and magic of Slavic myth. It was a Romantic-style attention to the natural world, to ancient stories—and yet, Rimsky’s song became famous for being extremely difficult, at a breakneck tempo that requires its player to perform with mechanical precision. As Rothenberg notes, “It’s almost as if Rimsky wants to turn the orchestra into a warbling electronic oscillator, an instrument more comfortable with the sliding pitches and buzzing tone of the insect world.” While Rimsky reached into the past toward fairy tales, his perpetuum mobile stretched into the future logic of the twentieth century, with its cybernetics and steely mechanics. Rimsky’s bee, though, as Revell later argued, had only “an awkward timbral relationship with the songs they would imitate.” It remains an epitomic instance of the insect that bridges the fairy world with the machine world—somehow both organic and industrial. (Revell calls “Bumblebee” the “odd example of nature and formalism colliding in music,” noting that he far prefers organist Olivier Messaien’s bird song transcriptions.)
[“Both organic and industrial” is the usual means of relating to hive insects, at least now that we have the concept of “industrial.” (Were we capable of understanding the scale of ant warfare before we had fought our own Verduns and Stalingrads?) And even those famous pre-Industrial Revolution bee metaphors gesture at a kind of impersonality. The bees to whom Virgil compares the men building Carthage are at work on various tasks but compose a unified force, and Milton compares the demons in Pandaemonium to “Bees / In spring time” who “expatiate and confer / Thir State affairs.” (Dark Satanic hive?) —Steve]
Ross Barkan on Pet Sounds (1966) at 60:
Few rock acts could speak more to this fizzing era of postwar American exceptionalism; with their odes to surfing, hot rods, and summertime bliss, they were something of a synecdoche band in the popular imagination, standing in for all the promise of Southern California. And there is no way to understand the United States of America without California, the gleam and hush of the Pacific, the bleeding edge of the godly frontier. Brian, one of three Wilson brothers, had been born during World War II and inherited this particular form of manifest destiny, part and parcel of the Golden State’s youth bomb, a capitalist transcendentalist. The story of the Beach Boys has been told and retold, swallowed up in books and films and documentaries and endless reams of oral recollections, and all of it, for a writer attempting to apprehend the history, can be like scaling a mountain in a dream, the crags and cliffs forever shifting, the laws of gravity bending and breaking, nothing to do but let go and hope there’s rock beneath. Writing on Pet Sounds is no easier. Forever deemed the second greatest album of all-time—no matter how many times, in seeming anguish, Rolling Stone reshuffles its rankings, Pet Sounds can always clock in at number 2—it defies the English language, as all great music does.
[We linked to a review of a book about the Beach Boys in WRB—Apr. 22, 2026.
The Beach Boys were an American band; Brian Wilson was an American artist. Part of me has always found American praise of the Beach Boys to be yet another manifestation of American insecurity about our achievements compared to Europe. Say what you want about kultur, at least the Europeans were working on that when they had no idea there was a continent here. Rock music, though—we invented it, and it could never have happened anywhere else. Then we got beat at it by the Beatles and the Stones. The elevation of the Beach Boys would claim otherwise.
In the days of rockism this project probably seemed even more necessary. Rolling Stone’s 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums had as the best album of all time a piece of Edwardiana with two songs on it that “rock” called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). Again, this genre was invented by Americans. To ask “what if Brian Wilson had finished SMiLE?” is to ask “what if against Pepper there had been an American album in 1967 of comparable achievement, one whose lyrics invoke piece after piece of Americana, whose conceptual centerpiece rejects the world of a corrupt and dying aristocracy for the simplicity and freshness of a children’s song?” Or a Brian Wilson song, as the case may be.
But Wilson was also an American artist in the sense Ralph Waldo Emerson envisioned in “The American Scholar”:
We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. . . . if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
The Beach Boys do have songs that rock as conventionally understood, but, while “I Get Around” is a great song, nobody feels an emotional connection to Brian Wilson because of “I Get Around.” Most everything that rocks about the Beach Boys is imitative. The ballads are where Wilson plants himself indomitably on his instincts and abides. And it is instinct. While he was trying to write hits and compete with Phil Spector and the Beatles, he never stands outside his own work to evaluate how it will play with any given audience. (In this he was quite unlike Lennon–McCartney and Jagger–Richards.) He creates and revises by retreating deeper within himself, asking whether this combination of sounds is the best at reflecting his interior state out into the world. Barkan mentions the story of Wilson deciding that the “fire music” he was working on was responsible for actual fires in Los Angeles; as his mental state worsened he retreated so far that there was no world outside the one he made, and fires “out there” are merely the parallels of the one he was imagining in song. Wilson trusted his instincts as far as they would go, and if they betrayed him in 1967 the world did eventually come around. —Steve]
Reviews:
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Charlie Lee reviews a reissue of John Gregory Dunne’s trip to Las Vegas (Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, 1974, 2025):
Maybe he really does feel badly, but the feeling doesn’t last very long. I get the sense that, for Dunne, the point of doing this work is precisely the opposite. The point is to feel better. “There is a therapeutic aspect to reporting that few like to admit,” he writes. “Reporting anesthetizes one’s own problems.” By the time he’s been in Vegas for a few months, it’s become clear that hanging out with Jackie and Artha and Buster is not so much a respectable professional undertaking as a sort of errant compulsion, a vice not unlike gambling or placing obscene phone calls to strangers.
And it’s this, I think, that Dunne is really after in the book, and what finally makes it more than just another plotless novel or confessional memoir: the notion that a reporter like him should be thought of not as a detached observer, or as a civic-minded truth teller, or even as an extractive careerist, but as a shambling, superfluous figure who goes “scavenging through the bureau drawers of men’s lives, searching for the minor vice, the half-forgotten lapse.” Here is a way, Dunne seems to think, of fending off the clamor and threat of real life, real intimacies. There’s something of the garden-variety New Journalist in this, to be sure, but unlike his more gonzo contemporaries Dunne is not so bent on getting where the action is or even on filing a good story. He has come to town for his own gratification. What he wants is “absolution through voyeurism.”
[Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” also ends with a failure to actually distinguish himself from the people he intends to feel superior to:
“Shit,” I said. “We both look worse than anything you’ve drawn here.”
He smiled. “You know—I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “We came down here to see this teddible scene: people all pissed out of their minds and vomiting on themselves and all that . . . and now, you know what? It’s us . . . ”
Reporting might anesthetize one’s own problems, but I have been reliably informed that going to Vegas also does. (I haven’t been myself; I have a Puritan attitude towards gambling, and without gambling I’m not sure what the point would be.) And this anesthetized confession of a superfluous man, revealing that his voyeurism is a means of escaping his own life, is not usually handled with such distance—it can be seen luridly dramatized in many of your favorite films by Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma. —Steve]
In Sidecar (the NLR blog), Luke Roberts reviews a posthumous collection by Fanny Howe (This Poor Book: A Poem, May 5) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 29, 2026.]:
Despite Howe’s prestigious family, when the marriage fell apart there was no money to fall back on. She became a single mother of three, surviving on a mixture of writing, teaching and living by her wits. Her bibliography, which is vast and messy, full of nooks and crannies, reflects these pressures. It includes several odd, spiky novels (collected, in 2006, as Radical Love); books for young readers; a couple of pulp paperbacks; several volumes of genre-defying essay and memoir; an experimental film or two. At the heart of it all is more than a dozen collections of poetry. As Howe put it: “my passion, first and last, / is for the ecstatic lash / of the poetic line.”
Her “passion” is also, in the theological sense of the word, her sufferance. Or as Simone Weil, one of Howe’s great intellectual influences, had it: “Poetry: impossible pain and joy.” The “first and last” recalls a line of scripture, Revelation 22:13: “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” Lines of poetry, with their uncertain beginnings and endings, and their strange sonic transformations: little mechanisms of connection and crossed wires. But the “poetic line” might also be her poetic lineage, Howe’s sense of place in a tradition; I hear a hint of the Party line too.
[I change Bible quotes to the KJV here, but what Roberts gives doesn’t match any translation I can find. I assume he quoted it from memory, then—how many critics now are out there quoting the Bible and giving chapter and verse to match from memory?
And we all love Housman’s thing about poetry:
Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keats’ last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, “everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.” The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach.
But “ecstatic lash” is shorter. —Steve]
In The Paris Review, Sheila Heti reviews a novel by Andrés Felipe Solano (Gloria, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden, April):
His thought that this is the moment that he started writing the book comes again later, and again one more time. It’s true: with certain books, you feel like you started writing them when you were ten years old, and again at twenty-four when you had a certain dream, and again when you wrote the first sentence down. Such books feel like they were fated to be written, and also could have been written only at the time they were written, and not a moment before. It’s vanity to think you can start a book whenever you wish: the big orchestrator of art decides. Solano may have wanted to write this book five years before he started, but he needed to be with his mother in New York, in that laundromat, didn’t he? He couldn’t have known that, and might have become frustrated with himself. I’m so lazy. Why haven’t I started on the book about my mother working at the Agfa photo lab when she lived in Manhattan? But he hadn’t lived everything he had to live yet.
In New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry, Sunil Iyengar reviews a chapbook by Matthew Buckley Smith (The Soft Black Stars, 2026):
Smith’s clever use of the word “tired” in that stanza—like “thought” and “those girls” in his opening sonnet—shows that repetition is his friend. The next poem, “My Lord You,” named after an endearment from Ezra Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” includes a magical couplet: “Time ran from us the way the river runs / And stung the way a river serpent stings.” What works beautifully is not just the parallel construction of “ran / runs” and “stung / stings,” but also the transformation of “river” to “river serpent.” It is the exact opposite of the dud effect Twain illustrated by juxtaposing “lightning” and “lightning bug.”
All poets put a premium on finding the right word. In a Smith poem, the words are so common, so quotidian, that their usage is vindicated almost entirely by their settings: the artful rhymes or rhythms to which they contribute, or the ironic coloring they are made to wear.
N.B.:
Preserving ancient libraries in Mauritania.
Poem:
Delia 17 by Samuel Daniel
Why should I sing in verse? Why should I frame
These sad neglected notes for her dear sake?
Why should I offer up unto her name,
The sweetest sacrifice my youth can make?
Why should I strive to make her live for ever,
That never deigns to give me joy to live?
Why should m’afflicted Muse so much endeavor
Such honor unto cruelty to give?
If her defects have purchased her this fame,
What should her virtues do, her smiles, her love?
If this her worst, how should her best inflame?
What passions would her milder favors move?
Favors, I think, would sense quite overcome;
And that makes happy lovers ever dumb.
[Daniel had clearly read his Petrarch carefully, but someone should tell him that when singing his ideal—his Delia, sorry, it’s the same letters—he’s singing his ideal, and that’s the trick. I do like his explanation for why happy poets don’t write good poetry. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Out May 15:
University of Chicago Press: Given Time II by Jacques Derrida, edited by Laura Odello and Peter Szendy, translated from the French by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf
Europa Editions | May 19
The Danger to Be Sane: Creativity and the Eccentric Mind
by Rosa Montero, translated from the Spanish by Lindsey Ford
From the publisher: In this bold and deeply researched blend of memoir, essay, literary analysis, and intellectual sleuth story, Montero draws on psychology, neuroscience, and literature, as well as the lives of writers and artists, to explore the connection between creativity and mental vulnerability.
With narrative élan, Montero brings to life figures such as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, and Doris Lessing, and paints a fresco of the ways in which the brain works, its quirks and dark corners. Breaking down the forces that influence creativity, Montero proposes new ways of thinking about both the creative act, and what we consider “normal.”
Part intimate memoir, part cultural history, The Danger to Be Sane is a moving and inspirational homage to minds and lives that sit outside of the mean.
Also out Tuesday:
Princeton University Press: What’s So Great About the Great Books? Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) by Naomi Kanakia
University of Chicago Press: Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old by Mary Beard
Yale University Press: Tao Te Ching: A New Translation by Laozi translated from the Chinese by David Bentley Hart and Patrick Robert Hart
What we’re reading:
Steve continued his Martin Amis journey with Other People (1981). He also read Samuel Daniel’s Delia.
Critical notes:
Nicholas Tate on Iggy Pop’s essay about reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (h/t Patrick Kurp):
It was not just the admiration that one hard-working artist had for a “guy” who had “stuck with things” or that the cameo illustration of Gibbon on the cover made him look like “a heavy dude,” but also the beauty of the language, the sense of being freed from the tyranny of the present, and the humbling revelation of “how little I know.” If Gibbon got it all wrong and is looking down from some other place, one can imagine the broad smile on the heavy dude’s chubby face—Gibbon was no prude—at the thought that two hundred years later his magnum opus was being read with great pleasure, to the accompaniment of drugs and whisky, around 4 a.m. in cheap motels somewhere in the American South.
[Pop’s “In 1982, horrified by the meanness, tedium and depravity of my existence as I toured the American South playing rock and roll music and going crazy in public, I purchased an abridged copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” is one of the great opening sentences of anything. His essay appeared in Classics Ireland in 1995, and that issue features the following wonderful and very of-its-time editor’s note from Theresa Urbainczyk:
It is an enormous personal thrill to be able to include an article by someone I have admired for more than 15 years, the inimitable Iggy Pop, who has acquired classic status himself in another field. Here he explains how he came to write the track “Caesar” on his latest album American Caesar (1993). I would also like to thank Andrew Erskine, not only for introducing me to the work of Iggy Pop, but also for help and advice about computers. It is entirely thanks to him that Classics Ireland is available on the Internet.
—Steve]
BDM on her approach to criticism on her Substack:
One thing that has shifted for me over time, but which I’ve only recently figured out, is that I used to think of naïve reading as the absence of skill. That is, naïve reading is what you do when you are not doing other things: psychoanalytic readings, formalist readings, historical readings, biographical readings, philosophical readings, and so on. Now, though, I think that naïve reading is its own skill. It is like learning to see when you draw. You have to learn how to look at things with openness and pay attention.
Furthermore, you have to keep learning how to do it, because it is easy to forget. The most basic and most important thing for getting anywhere real is the willingness not simply to look stupid, but to be stupid. I really do believe that. There are lots of things that will try to get in the way of cultivating this necessary stupidity, including people who do not understand that it is a useful thing you’re cultivating within yourself. But we’re all gonna die one day, so you can’t really worry about them.
[Later BDM says that she could be more naïve by not “allowing whatever associations or juxtapositions or coincidences going on in my life to infect the process,” but if I’ve learned anything from Ezra Pound, Guy Davenport, and Eliot Weinberger, it’s that the whole point of knowing things is to supply the material for juxtapositions in your criticism. —Steve]