WRB—Nov. 20, 2024

“eighteenth-century revenants”

An apple a day keeps the Managing Editors of the Washington Review of Books away.

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 email Chris for the details.

Links:

• In our sister publication in Oz, Kate Fagan on Lyn Hejinian, who died earlier this year (R.I.P.):

  I’ve followed Lyn’s preoccupation with this idea since the late 1990s, when she first penned the phrase along comes something—launched in context. (When the Lyn Hejinian tea-towels are made, this will be their slogan.) “I wrote that phrase one evening,” she remarked during a conversation we recorded at her home on August, 3, 1998. “I don’t know what prompted it, and it just has obsessed me ever since.” These six words and their hyphen became the opening line of “Reason,” an essay written for the first issue of Shark journal, edited by Emilie Clark and Lytle Shaw. They reappear in the long poem Happily (2000) and drift through many of Lyn’s works of the 2000s, sometimes as a soft echo. Enduring as the epigraph to Allegorical Moments (2023), Lyn’s disarmingly modest catchphrase carries her philosophy of collectivism, her respect for history, her commitment to everyday conditions and labors, and her phenomenological allegiance to “the other on which my eyes are fixed” (A Thousand Eyes, 2012); or rather, a matrix of “others” that might include ideas, things, environments, creatures, occurrences, and people.  

  [We linked to earlier remembrances of Hejinian in WRB—Mar. 9, 2024 and WRB—Apr. 6, 2024. “Make it new!” has a punch that “along comes something—launched in context” lacks, if for no other reason that all the vowels are at the front of the mouth instead of the back. But the lack of a command—the lack of any agent at all—gets to the core of the challenge. The artist is tasked with making something new out of the old because in every other aspect of existence new things are being made out of the old, and so they come along, and in their contexts. Experiencing all these somethings launched in context is the raw material from which the artist can make something new. —Steve]

• In our sister publication at the confluence of the Thames and the Cherwell, Austin Spendlowe talks to Camille Ralphs about her poetry:

  Auden’s biographer Humphrey Carter leaves us a vivid vignette of the verbologist and his beloved Oxford English Dictionary in his study at Kirchstetten, Austria—“The most prominent feature of [Auden’s] workroom was a set of the Oxford English Dictionary, missing one volume, which was downstairs.” I asked Ralphs if any books served her similarly, books she couldn’t live in a house without. Ralphs’ first recourse was to describe the thirteen-volume OED she saw at the Seamus Heaney HomePlace Museum in Bellaghy. Without forgetting the usual suspects—Glyn Maxwell’s On Poetry (2012), John Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason (1981) and Ted Hughes’ Poetry in the Making (1967)—Ralphs admitted that it is The Pocket Oxford Etymological Dictionary and “a couple of books of word stems” that nourish her large appetite for brilliant, baffling words. The King James Bible and Robert Alter’s English translation of the Hebrew Bible also rank among Ralphs’ indispensables. 

  [On Poetry is a great book and (given the subject matter) surprisingly funny. —Steve]

• Two in Harper’s; first, an excerpt from Sofia Samatar’s new book (Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life, August):

  The dream is to create a book that will be a tonic: not a course of study but a course of treatment. “I’m beginning a new book to have a companion,” wrote Hervé Guibert. He had been reading The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon in the country. Shivering with cold, he bit into an overly salty biscuit. “Living with a book, even when one isn’t writing it, is altogether marvelous.” That’s what we are looking for, the altogether marvelous. I wrote of a method: Take notes on index cards and put them in a shoebox. When the box is full, the book is done. I would write my next book that way, as notes that take in everything: a compleat or commonplace book, a companion text. A book you keep ready to hand. You’d live with this text as with some necessary daily drug. You’d sit up with it—or it would sit up with you—as one sits up with the dying.

  [Imagine the parasocial relationship you could develop with this newsletter if we sent it to you every day. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall: Steve on contempt, Thomas Hardy’s women, and the sorts of characters who read novels, as well as Jean Strouse, the history of poetry, poetry by oil workers, absinthe fraud, futuristic war, dull men, 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.]