One incident among many arising from the storm of words was that an English man of letters, who did not whitewash his own morals, informed me that, having subscribed to the Washington Review of Books on the strength of the shocked criticisms, he read on and on, wondering when the harmfulness was going to begin, and at last flung his phone across the room with execrations at having been induced by the rascally reviewers to waste five dollars a month on what he was pleased to call “a religious and ethical treatise.”
I sympathized with him, and assured him honestly that the misrepresentations had been no collusive trick of mine to increase my circulation among the subscribers to the papers in question.
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 Commonweal, Kenneth L. Woodward interviews Denys Turner about the Divine Comedy:
Woodward: Still, I was not at all prepared for the closing cantos of the Purgatorio where Dante’s beloved Beatrice finally makes her appearance and—boom—she comes on like a scolding fishwife.
Turner: Yes, those closing cantos are one of the crucial turning points I mentioned where everything that we’ve read so far has to be seen in a different light. Dante has just completed a steep ascetical journey and he thinks he is now fit for Paradise. Beatrice says, “What I’m here to tell you is you are not. You needed to go through these stages of moral reform. You got yourself out of Hell and through Purgatory and now you’re pleased with yourself for having done it. But you haven’t even started. What you’ve got to do next is get rid of this whole story of yourself as a reformed sinner that you have created for yourself.”
Woodward: And that Dante has created for the reader?
Turner: Yes, exactly. What Dante the protagonist needs to do, Beatrice tells him, is lose that old self and the story that goes with it. Until he lets go of them, he can’t move on and allow grace to do its work. That’s why he has to be immersed in “the ocean of forgetfulness.” For readers, of course, this new turn revises the whole narrative of sin and salvation that we’ve read until now. You think you’ve got the story and you are told, no, you haven’t even begun to understand how the story of salvation works.
In Van, Benjamin Poore on durational music:
As disorienting as Satie’s Vexations, though a little shorter, is Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston, likewise programmed for rainy days. A trio for flute, vibraphone, and piano doubling celesta, it plays untrammeled for four hours. Feldman’s recursive musical material, whose clipped melodies often orbit just a handful of pitches, disturbs your sense of the passage of time and musical architecture. Gestures and harmonies return though are never the same; you suddenly glimpse them from a new angle as if you have been unwittingly walking in circles for hours, thinking you’ve spotted something familiar through the trees. Alex Ross likens it to Mahler’s visions of empty, infinite space in his late music, like the weightless farewell of Das Lied von der Erde. Listening to For Philip Guston, I’m also reminded of Schubert’s late music, especially the piano sonatas: vast, maze-like structures partitioned with abyssal silences and often preternaturally quiet.
[Vexations is just making fun of Wagner, but the instruction that to play it 840 times “it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities” is a warning that the music and its performance will induce a trance state. (The pianists have to know what they’re getting into.) Poore quotes a Guardian piece about a past performance: “Pianists who have attempted too many repetitions have complained of hallucinations, evil thoughts, and an alarming inability to remember the melody.” There’s no guarantee that your trance will be pleasant.
But, pleasant or not, the desire for trance motivates much of this music, as it did the Grateful Dead making “Dark Star” however long they felt like, as it animated the singers of epic. As says in his book on the subject:
In the 1930s, when Harvard scholars Milman Parry and Albert Lord recorded the epic singer Avdo Međedović—in their opinion, the closest modern counterpart to ancient bards such as Homer—they found that his musical accompaniment was a simple one-string instrument called the gusle, incapable of playing chords or providing harmonic support. If you watch the rare film clips of Međedović in performance—which I strongly advise you to do because they will completely change your views on the origins of Western culture (fortunately a few are now accessible online)—you will be struck by the huge gap between this music and what we generally consider epic literature, or even song.
The gusle is played not for melodic embellishment or even what nowadays we call a bassline, but generates a pulsating rhythmic drone. Međedović’s singing, for its part, sounds like an incantation, and he appears to have fallen into a kind of trance. You can easily imagine listeners falling into a similar trance given the hypnotic and ritualistic nature of the proceedings.
—Steve]
In Liberties, Greg Gerke on responding to art:
The book or art object is here and the reader/viewer is over there, but only for a brief moment—when they come together chemicals are released—maybe many, maybe few. The viewer goes away with something, maybe bothersome, maybe not. The response to art is everything—and in that microsecond encounter we create a portal to a different world, the one between us and the art, where there are no boundaries or limits, only mostly unseen secret union. Today, we want to think the author did it, that the muse is in retrograde, but in actuality so many people who create do so through their wisdom texts or their ancestors, who are not writers or artists, but who have made their way into our work. The same can be said for the reader/viewer since the “uninterrupted message” continues on with them. I can live in Brooklyn or on the banks of the Tennessee river watching a plover—I still carry the “message” in the fractaled moment.
From Donald Hall’s interview of Ezra Pound:
Hall: When you write a Canto now, how do you plan it? Do you follow a special course of reading for each one?
Pound: One isn’t necessarily reading. One is working on the life vouchsafed, I should think. I don’t know about method. The what is so much more important than how.
In On The Seawall, Randall Mann on May Swenson:
Maybe part of her project is to try to have it both ways, as it were, to inflict and be inflicted upon, to give but always, always take something from the reader, disillusionment and qualified distraction a form of argumentative charity. Put another way, as she does in “At First, At Last”: “To feel, to feel, / To be the implement // and the wound of feeling.” Swenson is keenly aware of the interdependencies of language and meaning, and the fragile notions of both in, say, the poem “Bleeding,” which begins: “Stop bleeding said the knife. / I would if I could said the cut.” There is a woozy erotic terror to such lines, and dry humor too, that coexist in the truth of the poem.
[I at least think of the first few lines of the “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” soliloquy. —Steve]
In The Dial, Teresa Grøtan (translated by Caroline Waight) on learning Spanish and encountering the subjunctive:
I became fascinated by the Argentinian short-story writer Julio Cortázar, who transformed one character into another—quite naturally—merely by virtue of a grammatical mood that doesn’t exist in Norwegian: the subjunctive. Mood indicates the intention of the speaker. While in Spanish there are three moods—indicative (realis), imperative (commands) and subjunctive (hypothetical)—in Norwegian we use only the indicative and the imperative, with the exception of a few set expressions, such as “fanden partere meg,” which literally translates into English as “may the devil carve me up” and more colloquially as “holy shit!” In this essay I examine solely the semantic use of the subjunctive, and not its more extensive and rule-governed grammatical usage.
We read gloomy, gorgeous and difficult poetry by Alfonsina Storni, also from Argentina. The subjunctive, I discovered, could be used to create a distinctive atmosphere, an uncertainty in the reader: What is happening? Can that be happening? Is the impossible possible? Yes! The impossible is made possible merely by an inflection of grammatical mood.
Reviews:
Two in our sister publication across the pond:
Adam Thirlwell reviews a novell and two novels by Yoko Tawada (The Bridegroom Was a Dog, 1993, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, 2003; Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, 2020, translated by Susan Bernofsky, July; Suggested in the Stars, 2020, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, October):
You might think that a novelist who works in more than one language would want language itself to become conceptual, to allow for its smoother transposition across borders. But Tawada is fascinated by the materiality of individual words and enjoys their specificity. It’s there in that term “trans-Tibetan,” which Celan coined in one of his poems and which here seems to stand for a kind of mischling promiscuity, just as other words from Celan’s poetry are braided into the sentences (even if in the original German title the angel is chinesische, or Chinese). To Patrik, “the word kissing, for example, tastes like dill pickle salad.” His “stomach is full of words he finds he cannot digest. This morning for breakfast he ate the word bread.” He also likes to count the letters in words, or to find repetitions of letters—all of which, in translation, must be either recreated or abandoned: “Shirt and pants have five letters each, as does the brain he wore as a hat. Hat, hair and hand all begin with h.”
[Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel was the Upcoming book in WRB—July 3, 2024, and we linked to earlier reviews in WRB—June 22, 2024 and WRB—Oct. 19, 2024; Suggested in the Stars was an Upcoming book in WRB—Sept. 28, 2024.]
Anthony Grafton reviews a biography of Leon Battista Alberti (Leon Battista Alberti: Writer and Humanist, by Martin McLaughlin, June):
Alberti did more than turn ancient (and medieval) literature into a quarry for quotations and allusions. He studied texts intensively and used them ingeniously—cultural judo again—in ways their authors could never have dreamed of. No text mattered more to him than Cicero’s Brutus, a history of Roman oratory in dialogue form. Alberti’s copy of the work survives, with other Ciceronian texts from his library, in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. It’s possible that he copied them and likely that he decorated their margins with the pointing hands and the summaries in elegant script that call attention to key passages. And it’s certain that he took the messages of Cicero’s book to heart. The Brutus taught him a vast amount about Roman rhetoric. It inspired him to claim that he had adopted an “Attic” style, more casual and more inclined to brevity than Cicero’s own (this claim, like many such, was exaggerated). It suggested to him that fine prose could be witty. Above all, it taught him to see that literature and the other arts had not been uniformly excellent, even in Greece or Rome. They had a history, as men shaped and reshaped them over time. “There is not one of [the arts],” Cicero told his friends Brutus and Atticus, “which was invented and perfected at the same time.”
[I would listen to an argument that the art of progressive rock was both invented and perfected with In the Court of the Crimson King (1969), but it would be difficult to fault Cicero for being unaware of it. (Do not email me about the Nice; also do not email me about Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (1973) or Red (1974), which are better albums than Court but which are so different from it that they indicate Robert Fripp’s knowledge that he had already completed the system of progressive rock.) —Steve]
In The Baffler, Stephen Piccarella reviews two examples of “the post-postmodern novel” (UXA.GOV, by Blake Butler, November 1; and Herscht 07769, by László Krasznahorkai, 2021, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, September):
Krasznahorkai’s novels have always been composed of unusually long sentences and paragraphs that trap their characters in a forward narrative motion they are unable to influence or interrupt. Herscht 07769 takes this formal tendency to its logical extreme. Plot points fade in and out, announcing themselves first as distant potentialities before gradually permeating the text like samples in a DJ set. As oppressive as it may be to reader and character alike, Herscht 07769’s form suits its subjects: particle physics, baroque music, and totalitarian fascism, three lodestars of a long modernism of which postwar literature was the last gasp. The thesis that history is divided into distinct eras—with distinct beginnings and endings, and each producing works of art with unique stylistic characteristics—meets its antithesis in the sustained temporal flow of Krasznahorkai’s prose.
In 4Columns, Brian Dillon reviews Kevin Killian’s Amazon reviews (Selected Amazon Reviews, November 26):
And then, quite brilliantly, there are Killian’s reviews of sundry consumer products, unrelated to art or culture. (Reader, if you’re dithering over the six-hundred-plus pages and the hardback sticker price, these pieces are themselves alone worth the price of admission.) Once more according to Bellamy, Killian “rejoiced in the not-useful ratings his reviews received.” Writing up the Wood Diner Birdhouse by Meadow Creek Trading, which is genuinely a birdhouse in the shape or guise of a diner, he comments: “The things you do for these birds, after all, you do for Saint Francis, who loved his feathered friends as he loved the moon and the sun.” Under the title “I Love This Puppet,” he reviews Darwin the Wizard Marionette but neglects to mention the wizard’s alarming googly eyes and spindly fingers. Instead, Killian tells prospective buyers: “I bought Darwin on a whim, wanting to produce some magic spells to get myself a raise at work.”
[We linked to an excerpt in WRB—Nov. 13, 2024. The best writing I know of about a birdhouse was done by several years back:
The bluebird sites, which I read religiously, instructed you to monitor the box, but not to overdo it. I didn’t listen. These were my equivalent of Tony’s ducks. I’d sometimes peep into the black hole of the bird box, spying Mama sitting there on her future children. I’d open the box and gently stroke her head, which she’d let me do, without flying away. (Which, by the way, I’ve never been able to manage since.) Shortly thereafter, her chicks broke free of their casings, and I had the equivalent of five new puppies with wings, all beaks and grey-blue downiness.
I checked on them all the time. Daily. Several times a day. You’re not supposed to do this. But I talked to them, I stroked them. I was in love.
Well, really, it’s about love and loss, but then many things are. —Steve]
In The Nation, Michele Moses reviews Lore Segal’s last collection of stories before her death last month (Ladies’ Lunch: And Other Stories, 2023) and her first children’s book, recently reissued (Tell Me a Mitzi, illustrated by Harriet Pincus, 1970, June):
The relationship among the women of Ladies’ Lunch is one of intellectual fellowship, and each gathering has a conversational “agenda”—a subject the women want to mine together for meaning or understanding. This group is apparently based on a real one, but the characters feel more like refractions of Segal’s distinctly avid literary mind than like particular individuals. The first line of dialogue spoken in the book is this: “You remember that we are the people to whom we tell our stories? Well, I have a story for you.” Later in the book, another woman echoes the same idea: “When I suddenly sat on my rear on the sidewalk outside my front door, I was looking forward to telling you.” They talk about death, illness, and the loss of their faculties or autonomy—nearly unbearable subjects to contemplate, were it not yet again for the pleasures of thinking. When someone asks a good question, the others respond by “brightening,” or with “interest” that “pricked right up.” In the titular story, a woman named Lotte won’t put up with the full-time caregivers her sons have hired, so they plan to move her to an assisted-living facility in the Hudson Valley. At lunch, in response to Lotte’s unhappiness, the ladies discuss “the scenarios we would rather die than live in.”
N.B. (cont.):
The transformation of The Great Gatsby’s “valley of ashes.”
The Rijksmuseum is restoring “The Night Watch” in public.
“Engineers Discover a 132-Year-Old Message in a Bottle in a Scottish Lighthouse”
Free stuff on the streets of Berlin.
New issue: The Dial Issue 22: Language [As linked to above.]
Poem:
“The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
[More from Maine. I have a soft spot for Longfellow even if I can’t really make a case that his neglect has been unfair. The second stanza is the best, with its humanization of the natural forces that remove any trace of the human. The physicality of darkness and the repeated “the sea, the sea” that echoes “the tide . . . the tide” are nice touches. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Seven Stories Press | November 19
Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry
by Ryan Ruby
From the publisher: Prophet. Entertainer. Courtier. Criminal. Revolutionary. Critic. Scholar. Nobody. Epic in sweep, Context Collapse is the secret history of the poet—from Bronze Age Greece and Renaissance Italy to the cafés of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, from the creative writing departments of the American Midwest to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Cheekily introducing academic discourse, media studies, cybersemiotics, literary sociology, and heterodox economics into his blank verse study of poetry, Ruby traces the always delicate dance between poets, their publishers, and their audiences, and shows how, time and time again, the social, technological, and aesthetic experiments that appear in poetic language have prefigured radical changes to the ways of life of millions of people. It is precisely to poets to whom we ought to turn to catch a glimpse, as Shelley once put it, of the “gigantic shadows futurity casts on the present.”
Also out Tuesday:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers by Jean Strouse [We linked to a review in WRB—Nov. 2, 2024.]
Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank [We linked to an excerpt in WRB—Sept. 25, 2024.]
Knopf: The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel
What we’re reading:
Steve is reading Jude the Obscure. [Making strides in the previously-mused-about Year of Thomas Hardy by reading another classic about what it is like to be a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books. I might say more on this after I finish, but I find it interesting that what goes wrong with Tess is contingent and what goes wrong with Jude is basically built into him from the start; in a Darwinian world, the fittest survive, and Jude is not fit at all. —Steve]
Critical notes:
- Moul on pamphlets:
Perhaps pamphlets have in fact become more of a “thing” only fairly recently. (I honestly don’t know; please do comment if you do.) The average length of poetry collections certainly seems to have increased in the last few decades. There’s an overlap between the length of a “pamphlet” (or chapbook) now and a briefer collection a while ago. I don’t really approve of the longer-poetry-book trend—when did you last read a collection of poetry (or, indeed, any book at all) that couldn’t have been improved by cutting it by a third? I don’t think that this trend has made me as a reader any more likely to buy a pamphlet, though I can see that from the poet’s perspective—especially a beginning poet—it might make a “full collection” seem a more daunting goal, and make an intermediate stage quite attractive. But again, this is the kind of “insider” logic which — like slogging for six months over a 10,000 word article for John Donne Journal which perhaps ten people will ever read—might get you “a publication” (and perhaps even a job) but doesn’t really get you any actual readers. Academics might be forgiven for not minding too much about readers, as long as they reach the handful of other relevant specialists, but poets surely ought to care about it.
[The WRB Print Edition is going to bring pamphlets back. It’s also going to bring back capitalizing all the nouns. —Steve]
- on “transcending” commercial fiction:
I’ve observed that there is a crop of recent awards-nominated literary books that draw heavily from commercial fiction, but are seen, by critics, as elevating or transcending the commercial elements they supposedly embody.
The problem is that this transcendence often manifests through techniques that slow down the reading experience and break the novel’s implicit promises to the reader. You see, if you’re writing high-brow fiction, then you need at all times to maintain that separation between your work and popular fiction. You have to aestheticize these ostensibly-commercial elements. The reader must always be reminded that it’s the form of this book that’s truly important, rather than the content.
The literary novel seeking to maintain an elevated separation from ostensibly-commercial elements can use three major tricks: objectivity; misdirection; and subversion.