WRB—May 8, 2024

“intelligence in love”

Like Louis XIV—or as tradition has it of him—the Managing Editors, as they went on in years, banished from their style every common word. It was at this time that the school authorities adopted selections from the Washington Review of Books into their text-books.

N.B.:

This month’s WRB Presents event will take place on May 14, organized with our friends at the Cleveland Review of Books, and will feature readings from Malcolm Harris, Joseph Grantham, and Margarita Diaz. As last time, doors are at 6, and the readings begin at 7.

The next WRB x Liberties salon will take place on May 18. If you would like to come discuss the topic “Should you like your friends?” please contact Chris or Celeste Marcus.

Links:

• In The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead on the British Museum’s handling of demands to return the Elgin Marbles and the theft of hundreds of artifacts by a member of the staff:

  In May 2020, Gradel was checking the British Museum’s website when he made an alarming discovery: a photograph of the cameo fragment depicting the girl and Priapus. So it did belong to the museum. On eBay, however, the cameo’s gold mount had been removed. “Clearly, the museum’s photo could not possibly predate 1952—that told me the provenance story was a lie,” Gradel said. “And if the seller had been lying to me about that, I could trust absolutely nothing he had told me.” He went back through his records and discovered that the name on his final PayPal receipt, from 2018—the only one recent enough to remain accessible on his online account—was not Paul Higgins but Peter Higgs. In a phone conversation with a colleague in the U.K., Gradel described his confusion. “I said, ‘I don’t understand it, his real name is Peter Higgs, and he’s been lying, and there’s some trickery going on.’ And my colleague said, ‘You do realize, don’t you, that that’s the name of a curator at the British Museum?’ And then all my hair stood on end.” If the thief was a professional curator, then Gradel had been tricked in more ways than one: the improper valuations of some items hadn’t been a sign of ignorance but, rather, a crafty way for Higgs to disguise his identity.

  [Our readers who think about the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum theft at least twice a day can have something new to meditate upon. —Steve]

• In Minor Literature[s], Cristina Politano interviews Max Lawton, translator of many of Vladimir Sorokin’s novels:

  If it works, I’m really not that concerned with what Slavists say. One guy on his blog pulled out some lines from the giant who speaks gibberish and said: “This is Max Lawton’s version of Southern dialect. It’s incomprehensible! I’m confused.” I was like, it’s fully gibberish in Russian, this is disingenuous. But I really am writing for English readers. That’s not to say I’m not worried about accuracy in any sense of the word. I am definitely concerned about it. But I want the text to be a total experience in English. People can always come back after I’m dead and, where my translations aren’t precise enough, can correct certain elements of them—like with the Moncrieff Proust.

  [We linked to a profile of Lawton in WRB—Apr. 17, 2024.]

Reviews:

• In the Journal, Dominic Green reviews Nicholson Baker’s account of learning to paint (Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art, April) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Mar. 30, 2024; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Apr. 13, 2024.]:

  The results are so harrowing that Mr. Baker admits that he “really didn’t know how to draw.” And he never learns to, because he can’t be bothered to learn to develop his eye. Mr. Baker copies old advertisements and short-story illustrations, portrait photographs and snapshots, commercial posters and oil paintings—but typically not the real thing, and nothing from before the late 1800s, by which time photography was already reshaping the painter’s vision. His eye has been depraved by the misleading candor of the camera and the ease of the computer, and that is how he likes it.

  He tries to paint the parking lot at his local multiplex but loses his temper with the brush. So he takes a photograph, works it over in Photoshop until the colors have a “sequined, pointillistic, silver-screen sparkle,” then traces the outline and spends two days “dotting and dabbing and muttering.” He finds the result pleasingly “candified,” as if the “Sour Patch Kids in the concession stand in the movie theater had escaped and had barnacled over the brutalism of the outside world.” The brutality is in the eye of the student unwilling to behold his subject in the raw.

  [The assumption that photographs are true to life has no excuse for persisting at a time when everyone’s phone camera offers them all kinds of settings to fiddle with, yet here we are. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall: Steve on dying in Venice, Julia passes around a book of poetry, Paul Auster, devotional verse, tone, apples, reading out loud, swagger, Céline, mercy, 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.]