WRB—May 22, 2024

“teeth going dark”

Washington Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of the Managing Editors

Links:

• In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane on reading books in fifteen minutes:

  Here’s the strangest thing of all. To reach peak Blinkist, you must pass beyond Jane Austen and James Joyce and head not upward but downward, into the fiery pit. There it is, in the Blink-friendly précis of Paradise Lost (yes, it genuinely exists) that we find the fallen angels: “They’ve just lost their first big battle against God and plummeted to hell. But despite their defeat, Satan wants to continue the struggle against God.” Brave fellow. And there’s more: “He assembles his demons to talk strategy.” Talk about the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People! Boy, have they overcome Layoff Survivor Syndrome. Such, to my dazzled eyes, is the crowning glory of Blinkist. Its high-tech alchemy, transmuting literature into business, turns the inhabitants of literature, even the ones with tattered wings, into businessmen.

  [Screwing around with GPT the other day at work, I took a picture of Catherine Pickstock’s first book (After Writing, 1997) and asked it to “summarize what this book says about Derrida.” The results were, I guess, something I’d say to a teenager. Fair enough. What surprised me was that it seemed to have access to the entire book; I got it to summarize certain precise passages of close-reading for me (specifically the breakdown of the chant Gloria in excelsis, which I’m thinking about basically constantly) and it pulled right from it without any wrangling, even if the summary left a lot to be desired. Sort of bizarre experience! —Chris] [Speaking of Paradise Lost, cf. Mammon:

  Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell

  From heav’n, for ev’n in heav’n his looks and thoughts

  Were always downward bent, admiring more

  The riches of Heav’ns pavement, trod’n Gold,

  Then aught divine or holy else enjoy’d

  In vision beatific . . .

  If the shoe fits. —Steve]

• In Words Without Borders, Lauren Goldenberg interviews Kate Briggs about her new novel (The Long Form, 2023), translation, and parenting:

  Goldenberg: There’s a phrase in This Little Art (2017) where you talk about translation as a hidden—I’m going to get the quote wrong—a hidden but necessary labor, and I was thinking, you often describe the labor of translation with language that is used to apply to the labor of parenting, or mothering in particular.

  Briggs: It felt to me like these two endeavors, these two forms of work, which are going on all the time and are massively consequential in terms of the circulation of ideas—the ways in which writing by others gets represented in new languages, especially dominant languages, and, likewise, looking after humans—they are both immensely high-stakes. I think if you’re doing this work, you’re conscious that it’s high-stakes but at the same time have the sense that its importance is being regularly underrecognized, culturally minimized. Mothering and translating get described in similar ways; they are often devalued in similar ways. Yet both involve these vital questions: what it is to take responsibility for others, what it is to reckon with otherness.

• Henry Oliver
  on actors’ cues in Shakespeare:

  The Friar speaks only to Leonato, but about Hero. This is a play of gossip, of people talking about each other. We have already had three scenes where people hide and eavesdrop on conversations; now we get a scene where the opposite happens. They talk about Hero knowing she is there, almost indifferent to her presence. The audience has got used to watching how a hidden character reacts to the speech of the others; now they get the same thing, but with a character out in the open.

  Imagine you had been falsely accused of infidelity, had fainted at your own wedding, and woke up to hear this speech. There’s so much Hero can do here. The choices are vast. You can play up the “silent woman” part and have her shrink away, or interact with Beatrice, or cry, or show some anger, or really almost anything. That she is never cued is a very significant indicator: presumably she watches is dumb amazement, waiting for someone to turn to her.

  [There was some discussion of Shakespeare’s second chances in Saturday’s WRB. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall: Chris on sad lovers, Persian and German, Steve references Paradise Lost again, Julia on punctuation in poetry, Tu Fu, Clarice Lispector, Anthony Burgess, Adorno, the Internet, male novelists, being the main character of life, 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.]`