WRB—May 6, 2026
“Ozymandian pathos”
Does he re-buckle his knickerbockers below the knee?
Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger?
A dime novel hidden in the corn crib?
Is he starting to memorize jokes from the Washington Review of Books?
Links:
In Poetry, Boris Dralyuk on the poetry of nostalgia:
That sofa was “pushed back” during the lessons, recalls the speaker, and the dancers “managed always just to miss” it with their “last-second dips and twirls—all this / While the Victrola wound down gradually.” Everything in the lyric—from the casually varied pentameter (so much like a slow-moving fan), with its surprising yet gentle enjambments (so much like those dips and twirls in a cramped living room), to the perfectly chosen sensory details (the spicy scent in the sultry air, the soft cushions, the drawn-out strains of a record reaching its final rotation)—works to enchant. Like the mechanism of memory for us nostalgists, Justice’s composition smooths out the roughness of the past, elevating snatches of pleasure, suppressing what we would just as soon forget. Suppressing, yes, but not eliminating. Notice the “buried life,” buried in parentheses. These “little lost Bohemias of the suburbs,” as he calls them in the final line, are worlds of desperation, of poverty barely hanging on to gentility. The “brave ladies who taught us / So much of art, and stepped off to their doom / Demonstrating the foxtrot with their daughters” in the depths of the Depression suffer an “exile” less dramatic than that of Tsvetaeva, but no less poignant. Justice dignifies them by not dwelling on their pain, but neither does he deny it. He leaves the sugar coating in place, with only a crack here and there revealing the kernel. Surely, they would have wanted it that way.
[Like Dralyuk I also love “Miniver Cheevy,” which I once described in these pages as “about what it is like to be a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books.”
Nostalgia is the other side of Horace’s phrase about those who rush across the sea changing their sky and not their soul—it accepts the inability to escape from yourself and escapes instead by retreating further into yourself, into those smoothed-out memories that no one else will ever possess. Really there should be even more poems about it than there are. Poets are always doing that kind of thing. —Steve]
In The New Yorker, Ed Caesar on Jonathan Swift’s epitaph:
Why, then, would Swift have asked for his epitaph to be placed next to such an unimpressive man? On our tour of the cathedral, Kenny showed me Marsh’s monument. It was a huge slab of white marble on which there were some sixty lines of text, in Latin, listing Marsh’s many achievements and virtues—he was brilliant, pious, munificent, and a seven-time Lord Justice of Ireland. Kenny laughed at the Ozymandian pathos of the scene: the monument was partially obscured by several towers of stacked plastic chairs.
Kenny explained to me that the monument had originally been outside the cathedral, near the public library that Marsh had founded and that bears his name. The stone was moved inside in 1728, to save it from the weather. Swift’s will was written after Marsh’s vanity project took up residence in the cathedral. It was notable to Kenny that Swift had stipulated that his monument be “deeply cut” in black marble, to contrast with Marsh’s. In Kenny’s mind, the placement was a jab at his old rival’s vainglory: the ultimate satire.
[Last week the WRB featured Robert Browning’s bishop ordering his tomb at St. Praxed’s and using his epitaph to show up the epitaph of another person buried in there; this week the New Yorker runs this. We report, you decide. (Did Browning know about Swift’s epitaph? I just sort of assume he knew everything.) —Steve]
Reviews:
In Literary Review, Jane Yager reviews a memoir by Herta Müller (The Village on the Edge of the World: Writing and Surviving in Ceauşescu’s Romania, translated from the German by Kate McNaughton, May 5):
Fear, she found, “could be tamed by writing,” and “precise observation” became a survival tactic in the face of despotism. “The regime’s use of words and its use of harassment . . . blended into each other,” Müller recalls. She writes in German, but “the Romanian language writes with me”—not the “concrete-covered, grey State language” but the “spoken language that belonged to the people.”
After the publication abroad of Müller’s first book, Nadirs (1982), the secret police stepped up their harassment of her. Müller is an unnervingly acute observer and the account here of the nightmarish texture of persecution is equal in its intensity to any in fiction. At one of the many surreal interrogations to which she was summoned, she “had to eat eight hard-boiled eggs with onions and coarse salt from the long table they were sitting at. A woman’s voice was screaming through a closed door at the back of the room.” The Securitate also left deliberate signs they had invaded her flat in her absence: “a picture that hung on your wall would be left lying on your bed, a shoe would be on top of the fridge, or a kitchen stool would be in your bedroom, but the door to your flat would be intact.” In a final Kafkaesque touch, when she departed for Germany, the exit stamp in her passport bore the date February 29, 1987—a non-existent day, as 1987 was not a leap year.
[Reading this I learned that my touchpoint for being forced to eat a lot of eggs is, apparently, Cool Hand Luke (1967). My first response to the detail about onions and coarse salt was to chuckle, and that made me think of some lines from Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” review of that movie:
The movie is “crowd-pleasing,” says the critic Tim Dirks, and James Berardinelli speaks of such “comic” scenes as the one where Luke eats 50 hard-boiled eggs. I saw the movie at the time and can testify that it is crowd-pleasing, and in my review from 1967, I wrote that Luke was “always smiling, always ready for a little fun. He eats 50 hard-boiled eggs on a bet and collects all the money in the camp. That Luke, he’s a cool hand.” What was I thinking? Today, the egg-eating scene strikes me as all but unwatchable. The physical suffering and danger are sickening.
I’m with the much older Ebert revisiting one of of his first reviews written 40 years earlier. It’s funny, conceptually; it’s horrific to watch. —Steve]
[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:
Against the idea that our cultural moment is too backwards-looking
A review that got me to buy the book about halfway through
A Poem by Robert Herrick and me complaining about flowers
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.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. 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 WRB with other people. —Steve]
