When he has yearned to know something which would require the consultation of a dictionary, a directory, or a gazetteer, or in some cases the application of ordinary common sense, he adopts the easier method of pulling up the internet and reading the Washington Review of Books.
Links:
In The Paris Review, Noelle Mateer attends a French festival about American literature:
The more the panelists riffed, the more they came to describe my husband. A panelist brought up the idea of “an American-style résumé”—belonging, it seemed, to someone who fits writing in between blue-collar gigs. The panelists called this type of writer “artisanal,” someone “whose real-life experience shows through in their work.” This writer “had lived.” And this writer had done so in places the French reader could hardly imagine, like Ohio.
It’s in this misunderstood land that Sébastien begins his book: in a Wendy’s parking lot, sweating with anxiety about his impending visit to Donald Ray Pollock’s house. After the panel, I found Sébastien sitting behind a stack of copies in the book-signing tent, and he told me he fell in love with American literature at fourteen, reading Stephen King. It wasn’t the horror that gripped him; it was the way King described small American towns. Before a single plot twist even dropped, Sébastien was entranced by Derry, King’s fictional Maine hamlet. This pleased me, as someone from an American town.
“The writers who have a lot of success in France,” he said, often aren’t as successful at home, and sometimes “are not even published in America.” I asked him why French people liked American literature that doesn’t get much attention in the U.S. He had a theory about this. “French people, they’ve got a problem with America,” he said. “We are fascinated by America. But we truly, deeply think we should be, as France, as a country, where America is.”
[If the French are interested in a writer with an American-style résumé, boy, do I have an email newsletter for them! I’ve even lived in Maine. I have not lived in Ohio, though. (Having lived in Maine I can confirm that Stephen King’s portrayals of small Maine towns are basically accurate, even if reading him for the ethnography is a bit beyond me.) —Steve]
In The New Statesman, Ryan Ruby interviews Tom McCarthy:
In [Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1885)]—a key text in the history of psychology—Schreber described a cosmology of angelic rays that connected his nerves to the sun. His premises may be mad, we both agree, but if accepted, they form a metaphysical system of astonishing coherence and even beauty. “Schreber is just amazing; what a brilliant, brilliant text!” McCarthy exclaims. Then he shoots off again, like one of the rays themselves, into a history of texts written on the body, from the stigmata of medieval mystics to Queequeg’s tattoos in Moby-Dick to the torture machine in Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony.” “I’m just fascinated by these figures,” he tells me. Did I know “the reason a book’s spine is called a spine is because it was literally the spine of a sheep, and the pages were the skin—the vellum”?
Stanton, who has a mysterious bullet wound, is himself a “markèd” man. He owes no small part of his vaunted reputation at the Court of Justice to speech impediment and his illegible shorthand. McCarthy reminds me that Moses, too—the archetypical lawgiver—was a stutterer, and so were Dadaists like Tristan Tzara. “A new law demands a new language,” says McCarthy, and this is what connects the most ancient religious text to the most innovative avant-garde poetry. But in the Old Testament, God gives the tablets of the law to Moses “pre-printed”: Moses is just the “delivery guy, the Amazon guy.” In The Rhyl Poster, the lawgiver creates a whole new diction and notation system.
[God gives the first set of tablets to Moses pre-printed; after Moses breaks those when he sees the golden calf, God asks him for new tablets on which he’ll rewrite everything that was on the originals. I don’t have any interpretation of this but it’s what the Bible says.
The law also demands—at least law promulgated in any sense we would recognize—that it be a matter of public record; hence the basalt stele of Hammurabi’s Code, the Twelve Tables being engraved on brass and displayed publicly, Solon’s laws being inscribed on rotating wooden slabs in the agora, and so on. That the lawgiver creates a whole new dictation and notation system is not even half of it; he then has to make his dictation and notation system common knowledge. What good is the new language if nobody understands it? —Steve]
Reviews:
In Engelsberg Ideas, Philip Womack reviews a biography of Saki (Super-Beast: The Mysterious Life of Saki, by Oliver Soden, November 5 in the UK):
Like so many writers of the period, Munro was a child of Empire, born abroad in 1870. His father was a distinguished soldier, and, after Munro’s mother died, he and his two older siblings were packed off to England to be cared for by a brace of aunts, Charlotte and Augusta, who absolutely loathed one another. Aunts, of course, are a major theme in Munro’s stories, usually cast as oppressors. One of Munro’s best-known stories, “Sredni Vashtar,” concerns Conradin, a sickly little boy whose ghastly “cousin” takes away his pet Houdan hen. But unknown to the cousin, a magnificent pole-cat ferret is lurking in the same shed.
Conradin prays fervently to the beast, turning him, in his imagination, into a god: and soon the “cousin,” an aunt in all but name, meets her doom, at the jaws of Sredni Vashtar. Conradin, entirely unruffled, simply butters another piece of toast. The story displays all Munro’s concerns: children, revenge, animals, an almost psychopathic indifference to death, and the sense of wildness set loose among the silver tea-sets.
Though Soden is (understandably) wary of drawing direct autobiographical inferences from the stories, he allows that this is a fictional revenge on the ghastly aunt Augusta: Munro himself, also a sickly child, owned a Houdan hen, which he petted “as he might a puppy.” The hen died, though it’s not known exactly how. This love of animals was a constant throughout his life: later, he tamed a squirrel, and even kept a pet tiger cub.
[I read “The Interlopers” when I was young—it must have been assigned in school, since I can’t imagine I would have stumbled across it on my own—and if I recall correctly a couple other Saki stories in high school. I was going to say that Saki deserves a place in what BDM once called “the English class canon”—the clear takeaways and approach to their subject matter make them good for teaching, and the absolutely nasty twists give them a base interest—but as I looked through the article after pulling the link I saw that she already listed “The Open Window” as a classic of the genre. If anything, though, that one’s too obvious; the concluding “Romance at short notice was her speciality” lays it on a bit thick. “The Interlopers,” with Saki dragging out the final conversation until supplying the punchline of “wolves” come to kill and eat the two trapped men, “Sredni Vashtar,” with its final line about another piece of toast, “The Schartz-Metterklume Method,” in which the woman imitating a governess demonstrates her superiority over the employer she’s fooled for a day one last time—in comparatively underplaying the point they leave more to work with. —Steve]
N.B.:
Problems with methods of lamination previously in use: “Applying intense heat and pressure to fragile documents could activate the natural acids in paper and ink—particularly the iron-gall ink that was favored by writers from medieval times until the early twentieth century. This in turn could speed up decomposition.”
How to use the phone book.
How to use the phone.
“Hollywood’s New Superhero Is the Guy Who Tells Moviegoers When to Pee”
Richard Lloyd died on Saturday, November 8. R.I.P. [Occasionally someone will say how strange it is that Television and their lengthy guitar jams were at CBGB with all the punks (there’s a line to that effect in the NYT obit), but this seems to me to miss what Television was actually doing. There’s no guitar-god stuff there; for all their talent Lloyd and Verlaine never draw attention to it. Refusing self-indulgence meant they had to find an alternative principle for their guitar workouts. Some of this they found in textural playing off and against each other (a trait they shared among the CBGB crowd with what David Byrne and Jerry Harrison were doing in Talking Heads), but their particular genius was in the build. The best Television songs—“Marquee Moon,” “Little Johnny Jewel”—take several minutes to go from nothing to apocalypse, and Verlaine and Lloyd slowly ratchet up the tension without rushing it. They don’t play anything particularly complicated or flashy in the “Marquee Moon” jam; the guitar solo just slowly rises in pitch, and each new highest pitch it reaches feels momentous. The section right before the climax is even simpler, just patterns iterated up the scale. The rejection of complexity for complexity’s sake and virtuosity for virtuosity’s, the insistence that simplicity has its own power—in this they were right at home with the rest of the CBGB scene. —Steve]
Poem:
“For the Fallen” by Laurence Binyon
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.
[Where were you when you learned there were other stanzas to this besides the fourth? It might as well be from a different poem. It certainly has a different model; all the others are cod-Swinburne—something like this noise that opens his “The Armada”:
England, mother born of seamen, daughter fostered of the sea,
Mother more beloved than all who bear not all their children free,
Reared and nursed and crowned and cherished by the sea-wind and the sun,
Sweetest land and strongest, face most fair and mightiest heart in one,
It also has Swinburne’s impressive-sounding adjectives that mean very little: “Death august and royal,” “hopes profound,” “innermost heart.” The last stanza, with its repetitions of “stars that are starry” and “to the end, to the end,” is almost parody of a poet whose ear for sound prevent him from thinking about the actual words he is using. No wonder nobody ever talks about them or invokes them. (Not in America, at least; perhaps things are different in the Commonwealth.)
That fourth stanza, though, is Binyon remembering that we have much better sources to draw on than Swinburne for solemnity. For that one stanza he writes cod-King James Version: “at the going down of the sun and in the morning” echoes Psalm 113’s “from the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same the LORD’s name is to be praised,” and the parallelism of “age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn” is a familiar psalmic trope.
(One last note: those readers interested in the running WRB theme of Swinburne’s influence on modernist poetry will note that Pound and Binyon were friends. Last year’s Armistice Day poem, as it happens, was from Cathay.) —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Yale University Press | November 17
Camera Obscura: A Novel
by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated from the Spanish by Valerie Miles
From the publisher: In Camera Obscura, Enrique Vila-Matas returns with a novel-in-motion that turns the very act of looking into a literary method. Set in Barcelona, the novel follows widower Vidal Escabia as he undertakes a precise, time-bound task. Over the course of seventy-one days, he must construct an “untimely” counter-canon by entering his home library in darkness, reaching for a book at random, and, in the light of his picture window, selecting a single fragment. What begins as the fulfillment of his master’s dying wish gradually gathers force, propelling the reader through a journey governed by luck yet shaped by necessity.
The fragments accumulate; so, too, do the stakes. As he moves through Barcelona among androids known as the Denver-7, Escabia is haunted by his estrangement from his only daughter, and by the absence of his beloved wife, lost to the cliffs of Tojinbo. In this unstable landscape, where human intention increasingly intersects with automation and chance, the novel builds a subtle but persistent tension: Is Escabia truly constructing the canon, or is another intelligence at work alongside him, in the dark?
Camera Obscura refracts Vila-Matas’s singular vision into a book about how we see, how we read, and how meaning assembles itself in the margins of our experience.
Also out Tuesday:
Catapult: Notes on Postcards: A Memoir by Jennifer Croft
Knopf: Anita Brookner: Art and Life by Hermione Lee [We linked to a review in WRB—Sept. 16, 2026.]
What we’re reading:
Steve started reading Fortress Besieged by Qian Zongshu (1947, translated from the Chinese by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao, 1979). [Absolutely hilarious. I was trying to describe it to someone the other day and landed on The Recognitions meets the Satyricon. The description of how our hero acquired a fake PhD by swindling some Irishman in New York is uproarious (“the incident may well mark China’s sole victory over the foreigners since she began to have foreign relations or signed her first treaty of commerce”). Perhaps even better is the scene where, upon his return to his hometown, he is asked to give a lecture at the local high school. Discovering while being introduced that he has forgotten his notes, he starts riffing on what he read in some old textbooks his dad gave him to look through the night before: “In the last several years of overseas communications, there are only two items from the West that have been lasting in Chinese society as a whole. One is opium, and the other is syphilis. These are what the Ming dynasty assimilated of Western civilization.” “Whereas ancient poets sought inspiration from wine, modern European and American poets all find inspiration in opium. Syphilis transmits idiocy, insanity, and deformity by heredity, but it is also said that it is capable of stimulating genius.” After the speech, the narrator goes on: “Before the day was over many people had learned that Fang’s son, just returned from study abroad, publicly advocated smoking opium and visiting brothels.”
If we must have all this fuss about the lack of a novel of our time (surely, like Lermontov’s hero of our time, that description is mostly a condemnation), we could do with more picaresques attempting to supply one. Interiority is all well and good, but there’s a lot of wild stuff going on out there. Tell me about a guy that it keeps happening to. (That, incidentally, is how to translate the first line of the Odyssey.) —Steve]
Critical notes:
In Poetry London, Victoria Moul and Boris Dralyuk on poetry and translation. Drayluk:
As is so often the case, once I hear (alright, read) a poet I admire say (alright, write) something, I recognize it as true of my experience. I sound out everything I read in my head, and it’s the sound that sells it. I can’t recall ever mentioning this in print, but I suffer from OCD, which is now in abeyance but was positively crippling when I was a teen; I really couldn’t make the walk home from school, which should have taken fifteen minutes, in under two or three hours, since I had to step on every crack in a particular way. Well, that’s behind me, but I retain the habit of pronouncing everything I read in my head as often as it takes for me to understand it fully. I believe—perhaps I have to believe—that this has helped me become a better reader, though I tire more easily, and to improve my writing, though the size of my output is smaller than it might have been. I certainly feel my condition partly accounts for my love of meter. In one of his essays, Donald Justice, among the finest and most flexible of American formal poets, writes: “If the meters do represent or imitate anything in general, it may be nothing more (or less) than some psychological compulsion, a sort of counting on the fingers or stepping on cracks, magic to keep an unpredictable world under control.” A humbling thought. In fact, I try to approach my craft with that humility; my pentameters aren’t a bulwark of Western Civilization, they’re a source of comfort and assurance for me and, one hopes, of pleasure for others.
[Ezra Pound, in one of the lines from ABC of Reading I am always quoting around here:
The author’s conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing,” as the poet says. The meters keep it from getting too far from music; and if we are trying to distinguish music from noise we might point to intent. Meter signals that intent. However it may look, meter says, this at least is under some sort of control and constraint. —Steve]
Adam Roberts on Anthony Burgess’ Napoleon Symphony (1974):
Nonetheless, working through the Napoleon Symphony trying to trace exactly how the “fusion” has worked makes me think that the music is the barest formal scaffold, and little else, to the novel. But then again, could it be anything other? I think Peter Porter was closer to the truth of it in his “The Lying Art” (from The Cost of Seriousness, 1978). “Music gets the better of it, since music is all lies. / Lies which fill the octave.” I take him to mean it is a specie of lying by omission, rather than intent (he goes on: “chromatic space / In verse turns out to be the ego’s refractions, / Truth always stained by observation”). It’s not that music cannot communicate on a semantic level; it’s that it’s just not as good at communicating on a semantic level as are words; and the things that words can’t do—the transcendental, inspiring, dignified stuff—have little relevance to the writing of history. One need not subscribe to a naive “history = truth” credo to feel that a mode of art that is a Porterish all lies is going to have a hard time melding effectively with a mode that is based on stuff that actually happened in the real world, like the life of Napoleon.
[More boys and reading discourse—one on Hatchet, one on a more general lack of male protagonists in books for middle schoolers. Those who like this sort of thing will find it the sort of thing they like. In lieu of a bunch of reactionary raving about how we need to stop coddling recalcitrant malcontents in our schools, I’m merely going to observe: we insist on teaching kids about photosynthesis and the Intolerable Acts and how to divide fractions despite these subjects not being of inherent interest to them. We do this because we understand that what 11-year-olds think is fun should not particularly influence how we educate them. But as soon as the topic switches to reading, all of this immediately slips the collective mind. No doubt this is because we read, or like to think we do, more than we think about photosynthesis and the Intolerable Acts and how to divide fractions, and we don’t like to read things we think are boring, irrelevant, or bad. And we project ourselves back onto the middle schoolers—but they don’t know much at all about what’s interesting and what’s boring, what’s relevant and what’s not, what’s good and what’s bad. That’s why they’re in school. —Steve]