Exit, pursued by a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books.
N.B.:
This month’s salon will meet on the evening of November 30 to discuss the topic, “Is order more important than justice?” If you would like to attend, please please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In The New Yorker, Victoria Baena on Flaubert and Amélie Bosquet:
In one scene that bears strong echoes of Bosquet’s fiction and journalism, the character insists that “the emancipation of the proletariat was possible only through the emancipation of women.” A few weeks earlier, Bosquet had specifically mentioned Mademoiselle Vatnaz in the letter she sent to Flaubert upon finishing the novel: “You have given the woman who defends her rights a rather degrading role; but we will lift it back up, that role—it has already been taken up!” She may have been wounded by Flaubert’s depiction of revolutionary feminism, but their years of conversation and correspondence had also equipped her with certain tools. She had grasped the stakes of his method and knew how to counter it on her own terms.
In her review, Bosquet echoed Flaubert’s cherished literary theory back to him mockingly. “He claims to soar atop his work like the God of the spiritualists soars above creation,” she wrote. She proposed a different way to tread the bounds between beauty, truth, and art: “We feel that the world outside, despite its faults and weaknesses, is better than the one in which the author envelops us. There we can seek what the book doesn’t give us: the breath of air that revives, and which we do sometimes find.”
[I don’t really agree with Bosquet about Sentimental Education, but “God of the spiritualists” is one of the most devastating phrases I’ve ever seen in a review. —Steve]
In The Paris Review, an excerpt from an upcoming collection of Kevin Killian’s Amazon reviews (Selected Amazon Reviews, November 26):
Puppets and marionettes make even the oldest of grown-ups into children. No one knows this fact of life better than master creator Daniel Oates, the renowned artist. I bought Darwin on a whim, wanting to produce some magic spells to get myself a raise at work. I figured with all the kids bragging about how Oates’s four-string system made his marionettes impossible to tangle that even I could manage to take him out of the box. I liked what I saw and went ahead and ordered the whole lot of Oates’s magical “dolls”—all of them boasting names that begin, like his, with the letter D.
There’s a wonderful full-size puppet theater you can buy with shifting backdrops of medieval scenes. It’s a little like Shrek (2001) come to life. The lovely Princess Destiny, her fuchsia hair almost silvery in the moonlight of San Francisco, is guarded by her knight, Sir Dorric. The strange and weird oversized raven, Dave, caws out a greeting to any who come to my apartment in the Mission. Dexter the Jester will tell a few jokes and mouth some warped wisdom, like the fool in King Lear. The extravagant unicorn, Delilah, loves Princess Destiny and will often approach her to try to tease some barley sugar out of her long, elegant, fingertipped hand. As you ring the doorbell of the moat, watch out for Dunstan, the playful dragon. He’ll breathe fire all over you if you don’t watch out. In this way my medieval fantasies go unchecked, thanks to the mastery of the one and one Daniel Oates.
[Shrek come to life is a nightmare. —Steve]
In Poetry, Alexander Wells on Lutz Seiler:
Objects serve a poetic purpose as well. Carl’s old schoolmate reminds him of his injury: “Radioactive. Maybe it’s good for you, Carl, right? A bit of dirt from home under your skin. Slag in your writing hand.” While holding an old gun, Carl’s lips start to move, conjuring what he calls a “material shape for language.” In Seiler’s work, East German objects are not nostalgic fetish products, but portals into the author’s local history of sound and sensation—an underground seam of associations and lost utopias, linguistic constructions, and obsolete accents. In an essay about his poetry from In Case of Loss (2023), Seiler describes his impulse to “talk to things, converse with their substance.” He continues: “Objects are not important for their past reality, but as part of our perception, of hearing or seeing, of the very sensations they once helped to shape. They are the go-betweens and indirect paths taking you to the poem.” Objects, especially radioactive ones, bring a centrifugal energy to Seiler’s work. A few lines of dialogue in Star 111 (October) might easily be a manifesto for his poetry. Visiting the Curie Museum in Paris, Carl describes radiotherapy to his lover as “a substance that transmits something, a message that penetrates everything—you, me, everything, without limit.” Inside, he observes that “[e]verything is radiating . . . even her logbooks, the paper, the ink, every word is radiating. They should only be read with protective clothing.” But what about the slag in Carl’s own hand?
[Behind the paywall: Steve on poets from Maine and tales of winter, as well as Hank Williams, Didion and Babitz, procrastinating, olive oil, how to tell if books are good, 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.]
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