WRB—May 31, 2023
“Status panic”: that’s the affliction of the middle class. Hence the middles’ need to accumulate credit cards and take in the Washington Review of Books, which it imagines registers upper-middle taste. Its devotion to that newsletter, or its ads, is a good example of the description of the middle class as the one that tends “to borrow status from higher elements.”
[The problem with an email newsletter is that no one else can see you’re reading it. —Steve] [That’s certainly not the only problem. —Chris]
Links:
In Poetry, Ben Libman writes about C.P. Cavafy:
Cavafy’s lifestyle was probably ill-fitting for a writer keen on modernizing the poetry of his linguistic tradition. He did not spend his days tramping around the back alleys of Alexandria, observing the rogues and taking signs for wonders. He was, in the colorful words of scholar Wendy Moffat, “a clerk for the government office improbably named the Third Circle of Irrigation.” There he “cultivated an exquisite sloth,” piling his desk with papers to give the impression that he was busy, all the while tinkering away at his verses in full view of the colleagues with whom he shared an office. For Cavafy, the Third Circle of Irrigation might well have been the counterforce in the negative capability of his life, which required the coexistence of nighttime deviance and daytime compliance for the generation of his poetry.
Teju Cole writes about the big Vermeer show in the Times:
As we were heading out of the exhibition, I dashed back and went to stand again in front of the painting that had surprised me most: “A Lady Writing.” Her gaze has a shadowy complexity to it, a soft smile; on her irises are white points. (She feels far more real to me than the “Mona Lisa” ever has.) There are white highlights, too, on the enormous pearl earrings she wears. If real, the pearls would have been harvested by pearl divers in the Gulf of Mannar, between present day Sri Lanka and India. In her right hand is a quill pen, paused. Underneath it, a streak of white paint perfectly denotes a sheaf of white paper. The ornate writing box, of different kinds of wood and with round metal studs, is most likely from Goa under Portuguese rule. Made by whom? I found myself asking again. Under what conditions? Behind her is a painting in dark umber of a viola da gamba, a stilled music that suggests or confirms the love theme of the picture. But if her lover is absent, who has interrupted her? At whom is she smiling with such gentle familiarity?
At you. This gaze has held yours for centuries, suspending time on your behalf. There’s not a single hard line of drawing anywhere in the painting, just layers of paint set beside one another, patches of color blurring into one another as though seen through an old camera lens that refuses to focus. The softness of “A Lady Writing” is so pervasive, it’s as though the picture were on the verge of dissolving.
And for ASAP/Journal, Cara L. Lewis with notes on those squishy book covers:
Part of what the Soft Book Look does, I think, is to lead readers to expect that something new (a debut novel) or someone “other” (a woman, a person of color, a queer or trans writer) can be encountered on familiar ground, with familiar terms. The prospective reader is offered a smooth transition into a book that has been designed and marketed to appear very much like other books. This cover says, softly, “please look on this book as a readable, laudable work of fiction.”
Reviews:
For the LARB, Ed Simon reviews Stuart Jeffries’ book about how things are going (Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern, 2021):
Jeffries’s argument can be best understood as an addendum to Fredric Jameson’s contention in Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) that postmodernism developed as a “substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure,” that all of the deconstruction and dismantling binary oppositions was merely a masturbatory replacement for political agitation, signaling not just the demise of utopia, but the demise of even the idea of the possibility of utopia. Jeffries writes that if “we are today scarcely capable of conceiving politics as a communal activity, because we have become habituated to being consumers rather than citizens,” then it is postmodernism’s fault. According to him, if there was an anarchic playfulness with the initial generation of theorists, then capitalism did what it always does and vampirically drained such thought of any of its subversion, leaving behind only relativism and amoralism, so that now “[f]reedom, opportunity and choice were reconfigured in narrowly economic terms that precluded selflessness, community-spiritedness and kindness.”
Two in the June issue of The New Criterion:
William Logan has his customary poetry roundup, on
B.H. Fairchild (An Ordinary Life, January): “Fairchild is the Cheever of the Midwest, though not so wry or restrained. When the poet wants to be heartbreaking, he wields a sledgehammer.”
Devin Johnston (Dragons, March): “Sometimes there’s not much beneath the saying to justify the long prelude. Other poems are predictable once you’ve read the title, another reason never to read titles.”
Sharon Olds (Balladz, October): “poetry for which the term obsessive-compulsive was invented”
Robin Coste Lewis (To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, December): “There were many ways to make this book good, and a few that might have made it great; but Lewis would have had to write better poetry for that.”
Thomas Kinsella (Last Poems, April): “When Kinsella was not raging against humanity, his flat tone revealed his early career as an Irish civil servant, just as Kafka’s manner reminds us that he was an insurance adjuster.”
Ada Limón (The Hurting Kind, May): “Limón’s gently confiding delivery goes a long way toward making lines ease into the subconscious, where poems work best.”
Jonathan Gaisman reviews Nigel McGilchrist’s recent book about Pythagoras (When the Dog Speaks, the Philosopher Listens: A Guide to the Greatness of Pythagoras and his Curious Age, April):
When the Dog Speaks is also a physical pleasure to possess. As one would expect given the themes of the book, its photographs are beautiful and in excellent taste; like the text, they often have an agreeably oblique relation to the subject. It is therefore a book that one should judge from its cover and appearance. It is the modest yet far-reaching wisdom of its contents, however, that will draw one back for successive readings. McGilchrist concludes with the observation that Pythagoras “simply gave us better eyes with which to see and understand.” In its reticent way, the same is true of this book.
N.B.:
50% off through today at Princeton University Press.
Public Discourse is looking for a Managing Editor.
Issues we’re having:
Orion’s Summer 2023 issue, “The Deep Dark Burning Woods: Fairy Tales for the Climate Crisis”
Meanjin Quarterly’s Winter 2023 issue [Better late than never. —Chris], “First Nations First”
Local:
The National Philharmonic ends their season on Sunday with Carmina Burana [Like from movies. —Chris] and Hailstork’s Symphony No. 5.
This weekend: National Symphony Orchestra presents Beethoven & American Masters.
Upcoming book:
June 1 | Subterranean Press
The Dead Man and Other Horror Stories
by Gene Wolfe, illustrated by Tom Kidd
From the publisher: Although best known for his world-building Book of the New Sun science-fantasy saga, Gene Wolfe wrote brilliant fiction that resisted encapsulation within rigid genre categories. This volume collects twenty-eight tales spanning nearly a half century—six of them never before collected—and gathered from venues as varied as men’s magazines, periodicals devoted to short works of fantasy and science fiction, and tribute anthologies to the works of authors as wildly opposed in their literary visions as Dante and H. P. Lovecraft. Although selected for their overtones of “horror,” they frequently defy the conventions that contemporary category label conjures. Wolfe’s tales of horror, like all of his fiction, are stories in which readers—however uneasily—recognize, and relate to, much of themselves.
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