WRB—May 28, 2025

“bleached classicism”

I was driving home early Sunday morning through Washington
Listening to the news on the local NPR station
And the host said, you know you always have the Managing Editor of the WRB by your side
And I was so pleased to be informed of this that I ran twenty red lights in his honor

N.B.:

May’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Saturday, May 31 to discuss the question “Can lying be moral?”

Links:

• In The Paris Review, Lora Kelley attends “A Celebration of Martin Amis”:

  Amis showed, even early in life, a canny awareness of his own image (one doesn’t become a literary Mick Jagger by accident) and both his capacity and his inability to shape it. In a letter to his father and his then-stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard, ahead of his Oxford interview, a teenage Amis wonders: “Shall I be refreshingly different, stolidly middle-brow, engagingly naïve, candidly matter-of-fact, contemptuously sophisticated, incorruptibly sincere, sonorously pedantic, curiously fickle, youthfully wide-eyed? Should I bow my head in solemn appreciation of the hallowed atmosphere of learning? Should I play the profound truth-seeker, the seedy anti-hero, the crusty society-observer, the all-discerning beauty-appreciator?” Fair questions, all. But his conclusion, touching and wise, is: “No, I suppose I shall end up . . . just . . . being . . . . . . myself.” Himself he seemed to stay.

  [Michael Jagger, student at the London School of Economics, didn’t become a rock ’n’ roll addict prancing on the stage by accident either. And Amis had the sort of self that asked rhetorical questions like this.

  The Parul Sehgal quote in here—“The hallmark of his own literary criticism is his interest in the pressures that life and art exert on each other”—resonates with, of all things, Amis’ admiring review of Goodfellas (1990):

  “True crime,” as a form, always entails a certain trade-off. You gain in authenticity, but you cannot rearrange the narrative to give it artistic cohesion, artistic shape. You are left with happenstance and inadvertence—with the messiness, the loose ends and false leads, that attend any human life. Scorsese, however, finesses the difficulty. His visual logic provides a guideline through the chaos.

  The achievement is the combination. —Steve]

Reviews:

• Two in our sister publication on the Hudson:

  • Michael Hofmann reviews translations of novels by Andrey Platonov (Chevengur, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler, 2024; The Foundation Pit, translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Olga Meerson, 2009; Happy Moscow, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler, 2012; and Soul, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Katia Grigoruk, Angela Livingstone, Olga Meerson, and Eric Naiman, 2007):

    Cliché, jargon, abstraction, kookiness. It is somehow a barbarous style, the pen as it were held in boxing gloves. Modern Medieval, Science Fiction Realism, Dull Naiveté, Post-Civilizational Burdock, Occasional Haphazard Cunning, Riot of Pleonasms.

    I am full of awe at Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and their team for resisting the blandishments of English and the tyranny of normality. It is the total absence of unexceptional—or unexceptionable—sentences that makes reading Platonov such a wearing experience and imposes a daily two-page limit. Imagine if Paul Celan or Georg Trakl had written novels. Read much faster and you cease to register the strangeness, you take the edge off it. Open any book at any page. “Having eaten nourishment, the workers went off outside with spades in their hands.” “Horselessness had set in; waiting for a new generation of horses to be born and enter the province’s tractive force was out of the question, so it was necessary to seek a way out through science.” “‘That’s not possible,’ the locomotive replied with the meekness of wise strength.” “He had not bought a tram ticket and he had almost no desire to exist.” “Outside the window, in a sky unlike the earth, alluring stars were ripening.” Is it a style or a malfunction? Haplessness or originality? A detail or cosmology? You read with the hand brake on, with visibility of no more than five yards.

  • Lauren Kane
    reviews a book about the development of architectural drawing (God’s Own Language: Architectural Drawing in the Twelfth Century, by Karl Kinsella, 2023):

    A scholar of medieval art and architectural history, Kinsella sets out to make the case for reappraising Richard [of Saint Victor] not just as a theologian but as a proto-architect. He does not suggest that In visionem Ezechielis was anything other than a work of theology: Richard’s drawings of the buildings described by Ezekiel, he writes, were “a consequence of the exegetical process” rather than “a systematic attempt to create new visual forms.” But along the way, Kinsella argues, Richard produced manuscripts that bring architectural drawing closer to the workable designs of centuries to follow, particularly in his application of geometry.

    Kinsella delights in close-reading these illustrations as architectural objects; among his goals is to trace how the practice of architectural drawing developed during the period. “Richard’s cloistered life has obscured him from the gaze of architectural historians,” Kinsella writes, “and his theologically oriented objectives seem to place him outside the silo of our discipline.” And yet, studied with the right kind of attention, “his work might tell us something about how we came to have architectural drawings” as we know them.

    [I have a memory of being a small child, encountering the detailed architectural information for the tabernacle in Exodus, and wondering why it was included in the Bible. Was it so we could recreate it, if we had to? But why would we need to do that? Were we going to wander in the wilderness? (Consulting the passage as an adult, I must congratulate God on his foresight in sending his people into a desert wilderness with lots of empty space to set the tabernacle up; moving it around the Maine woods would require cutting down lots of trees.) —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• T. S. Eliot and social media marketing

• A hodgepodge of mishmashes, a gallimaufry of farragos

• Hannah on a Poem by Emily Dickinson and rivers

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the newsletter with a friend. —Steve]