Just as Joubert gave thanks to God for having made him a man and not a woman, so you, too, will thank him for having created you not New Yorker but Washingtonian.
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 The Yale Review, Morten Høi Jensen on Thomas Mann’s essays in its archive:
But the artist’s bohemian irony can only ever be part of the equation. “Irony, by itself, can be of no service to life. Life demands that it be taken seriously; art, too, demands it,” Mann writes. In the Goethe essay, he recalls coming across the word “lebenswürdig,” which roughly translates to “worthy of life,” and finding it an expression of “an affirmation of life that rises above pessimism and constitutes, to my mind, a very high and abstract form of the bourgeois idea.” What Mann means by this can be illustrated by pointing to “Reminiscences of Thomas Mann,” a brief memoiristic sketch by his onetime secretary Konrad Kellen, published in TYR in 1965: “The quality that permitted Mann to write long novels without outlines and yet never waste words was the tense yet great and sober calmness with which he approached his task every day.” For these labors, Mann needed the health of the bourgeois but not his happiness. “I distrust pleasure, I distrust happiness, which I regard as unproductive,” Mann once wrote.
Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
In Liberties,
on political readings of Coriolanus:Nor are his opponents vindicated. The elites in Rome all talk as if they are afraid of Coriolanus becoming a tyrant. But what do they do? Their appeasement of the mob is confused and inadequate. Rather than calming tensions, they stoke them. It is perfectly obvious to everyone other than Coriolanus’ colleagues that inciting the mob against him will not end well. What did they expect of his exile? A peaceful retirement? There is an enabling inadequacy about the Roman opposition to Coriolanus that pervades the play.
Coriolanus’ charisma distracts everyone, himself included. Even Volumnia cannot control the monster she has created. There is a line in Hazlitt’s essay that sounds eerily familiar in our times. “Wrong dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance has more attraction than abstract right.” It is a common theme of Shakespere’s that our passions rule our minds: at the start of All’s Well That Ends Well, Helena is chastised for succumbing to “the tyranny” of her sorrow. She says a little later, “our remedies oft in ourselves do lie / Which we ascribe to heaven.” This is a line that echoes Cassius in Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves.”
[Coriolanus is an interesting companion piece to Macbeth, in which (as far as the political maneuvering goes) both Macbeth and his opposition are competent. —Steve]
In Lit Hub, Ryan Ruby on Alexander Pope:
Once considered the gold standard of formal elegance, Pope’s poetry now seems totally bizarre. That is precisely what I like about it. To read The Dunciad in the twenty-first century is to ask oneself: why on earth would anyone write like this? And to ask that question is to be immediately confronted by another: why don’t we write this way anymore?
The long answer would require a book, but a short one could probably be boiled down to two words: William Wordsworth. Despite the disruptive estrangements and complex novelties of modernism and postmodern poetry, most contemporary Anglophone verse operates according to the aesthetic norms first laid out in the preface to his and Coleridge’s 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads: the centrality of “natural” diction, the genre of lyric, the image and trope as device, and the personal experience of emotion as subject matter.
The ethos of “make it new” has given way to the ethos of craft and the standardizations of professionalism, marginalizing some of the effects that were still alive in the writing of what I like to call the “weird eighteenth century”: artificiality, rhetoric, impersonality, humor, paratextual and intertextual play.
[More on Pope and Ruby’s new book in What we’re reading below.]
In our sister publication in Hollywood, Sumana Roy on “etceterization”:
“Extra,” I’ve lately come to know, is Gen Z dialect for someone trying too hard or overreacting. Is this “extra” also “et cetera”? Who is the extra or et cetera on Noah’s ark? Is the repetitive last line of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”—“And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep”—et cetera? It is for emphasis, of course, and also does the work of a refrain, in the manner of a gentle whipping such as might stir the horse in the poem back on its journey. Perhaps because Robert Frost believes that even the et cetera must be given the dignity of centrality, he allows the line a perfect echo—it closes the poem. What is the difference between such a poetic et cetera and our everyday communications where such repetition or emphasis might begin to sound like nagging? I’m trying to understand the relationship between et cetera and the poetic. Take the well-worn words often attributed to Michelangelo: “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” Here, the chiseled-away marble might be misconstrued as et cetera, but that is not the kind of thing I mean.
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera
In the midst of life we are in debt, et cetera
[The repeated dismissal of everything else emphasizes the one statement made here. —Steve]
In The Paris Review, an essay by Quentin Meillassoux taken from the texts accompanying Florian Hecker’s Resynthese FAVN (December), which takes as its starting point Mallarmé’s “L’Après-Midi d’un Faun” and its musical interpretations:
As early as 1865, the poet had sought to exhibit the essential principles of his writing by way of the relation that the Faun sets up between his fantasy, the existence of the naiads, and the “twin reed” (his flute) through which he expresses, musically, the essence of his desire. So there can be no doubt about the reflexive dimension of the eclogue. Indeed, such reflexivity is the commonplace par excellence of commentaries on Mallarmé. Paradoxically, however, we have perhaps not yet done justice to the degree of reflexivity of this writing, which in its detail sometimes goes far beyond what is usually admitted. Lucidity sometimes arrives belatedly: it is now, wearied as we are of essays on the autotelic nature of Mallarmé’s work, that we shall have to discover what we think we know all too well, by demonstrating that we still have not realized the extent to which the Mallarméan poem refers only to itself, and the great originality with which it does so.
[At least for Debussy the whole thing is in the faun’s head:
The music of this prelude is a very free illustration of Mallarmé’s beautiful poem. By no means does it claim to be a synthesis of it. Rather there is a succession of scenes through which pass the desires and dreams of the faun in the heat of the afternoon. Then, tired of pursuing the timorous flight of nymphs and naiads, he succumbs to intoxicating sleep, in which he can finally realize his dreams of possession in universal Nature.
—Steve]
In The New Yorker, Alex Ross on the ending of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony:
Yet a musical challenge remains. How do you go about getting an orchestra to play all that blaring D major in a way that communicates conflict and doubt? To my ears, most of the slow versions sound no more troubled or menacing than the sped-up ones. Masur’s take is so surreally glacial that it begins to sound like a minimalist recomposition, along the lines of Leif Inge’s twenty-four-hour-long transformation of Beethoven’s Ninth. Often, the slower the tempo, the more self-aggrandizingly pompous the music becomes. Those final twin blows of the timpani and the bass drum have a fist-pumping vibe. If, as “Testimony” tells us, the rejoicing is compulsory, whom are we applauding when we jump to our feet? Are we, too, saluting Stalin?
[We linked to a review of a book about (in part) the political interpretation of Shostakovich’s music in WRB—Apr. 10, 2024.]
In The New Criterion, Eric Gibson on Ghiberti and Donatello:
I am not arguing that Donatello was a modernist. But a shared trait of Picasso’s, Matisse’s, and Giacometti’s work is that some of their paintings have distinctly sculptural qualities while some of their sculptures have notably pictorial ones. So it is with Donatello, whose sculptural sensibility, as we have seen, is in places distinctly pictorial.
This hybrid sensibility makes Donatello something of an anomaly in Renaissance sculpture. The aesthetic doctrines of the day called for the logical, scientific representation of the world of visual appearances. In addition, the arguments around the paragone—the debate over which was the superior art form, painting or sculpture—were predicated on the idea that each one was separate and distinct. Yet Donatello’s thinking did not always run along those lines. As a result, his work can sometimes be difficult to grasp. But that hybrid sensibility—and his rivalry with Ghiberti—impelled him to push relief sculpture into new and unimagined directions by creating, in the San Lorenzo pulpits at the end of his life, some of the most ambitious, visionary work of his career.
Reviews:
In the Times, Junot Díaz reviews Haruki Murakami’s new novel (The City and Its Uncertain Walls, translated by Philip Gabriel, November 19) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Nov. 16, 2024.]:
Like the characters in the books, divided between their real selves and their fading shadows, I found myself divided as a reader, both inside The City and Its Uncertain Walls and outside. My shadow self couldn’t shake the sense that Murakami has told this story better elsewhere, or that the novel’s obsessive focus on the narrator’s aimless woes didn’t do its characterization, world-building or psychological depth any favors. It’s as though the novel itself is a melancholic ghost, drained of experiential matter, and there were moments in the reading when I thought the text was trying to turn me into a ghost, detached from feeling, from materiality, from life.
At the same time, my real self was delighted by the novel’s uncanny shell games, by its Murakami voice, which (in contrast to the often anhedonic characters) is so ghostbustingly alive. I was moved by his portrait of impossible loss, how it can carve within us a Stygian underworld to which we are always being summoned. I even interpreted Murakami’s stinting on fictional norms as an attempt to more directly represent the self-exiling quality of melancholic grief.
In our sister publication on the Cuyahoga, Sophia D’Anieri and Charlie Hope D’Anieri review a new novel by Eva Baltasar (Mammoth, translated by Julia Sanches, August):
There’s a contradiction inherent in these novels. Absent—indeed, refused—is the idea that poetry and art can satiate this need to create and act on life, even while the language here becomes a life-generating force of its own. Books and language are not saviors for these women. Permafrost dissociates by reading biographies, “the fatter the better,” because they’re “the closest [she] could get to neither coming to an end nor arriving at a beginning.” Boulder is suspicious of language itself, which she calls an “occupied territory” while admitting that it “makes you human.” But to Boulder, “No emotion is more indulgent than feeling that you are intensely human.” There are no books or music in Mammoth’s hideaway—there isn’t even a pencil; at the inn she stays in during her journey there, she picks up a bible out of boredom, then puts it down when “the plot languishes.” Art is not allowed to fuel or resuscitate the experience of life for these characters, even while for the reader and, perhaps, the author, clearly it can. Baltasar’s epigraph to Permafrost is: “to poetry, for permitting it.”
In The Critic, Alexander Lee reviews a biography of Paul Gauguin (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, by Sue Prideaux, May 13, 2025):
This is most clearly evident in Prideaux’s account of his time living with Van Gogh in Arles, perhaps the most startling and brilliantly written part of the entire book. There, Van Gogh’s chaotic ways nearly drove him mad. He hated seeing tubes of paint without their caps on and was fastidious about keeping track of his (limited) finances. He was also remarkably well-read, having a good knowledge of Latin and Greek. He loved music and—most unexpectedly—had a fascination with Wagner.
Even more complex is Gauguin’s relationship with Polynesia. Of course, Prideaux does not deny that he was a man of his time. The image of Polynesian culture he attempted to portray in his art was just that—an image. He was keenly aware that, when he first set off for Tahiti in 1891, he had in mind only what he had read in Pierre Loti’s romantic adventures and the French government’s rose-tinted literature for prospective expatriates.
N.B. (cont.):
Cormac McCarthy had a relationship with a 17-year-old while he was middle-aged. [About the prose style here—what happened to our beautiful editors? —Steve]
The afterlife of the Greco-Roman gods.
- on the specific mediums being attacked in Robert Browning’s “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’” [Every time I read one of Browning’s dramatic monologues I think we’re overdue for a revival. Cf. on “rough, edgy Browning,” as linked to in WRB—July 31, 2024. Also cf. Kenner in The Pound Era:
Whole histories were compressed as we compress junked cars: plays, for example, into dramatic monologues where Browning’s reader becomes Sherlock Holmes to reconstruct a scenario of murdered naivete from 28 couplets imagined to be spoken in front of a woman’s picture, painted in one day, “looking as if she were alive.” That picture epitomizes the inscrutable brevity to which Browning has brought two hours’ stage time, and the spoken poem, which he would surely have made still shorter had he been able, is the exegesis of the picture.
On his old Medium blog Roberts also has analyses of a number of Browning’s poems, which are very much worth your time. —Steve]
New issues:
Cleveland Review of Books Vol. 2.2
The New Criterion Volume 43, Number 4 / December 2024 [As linked to above.]
Poem:
“Intention to Escape from Him” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I think I will learn some beautiful language, useless for commercial
Purposes, work hard at that.
I think I will learn the Latin name of every song-bird, not only in
America but wherever they sing.
(Shun meditation, though; invite the controversial:
Is the world flat? Do bats eat cats?) By digging hard I might deflect
that river, my mind, that uncontrollable thing,
Turgid and yellow, strong to overflow its banks in spring, carrying
away bridges;
A bed of pebbles now, through which there trickles one clear
narrow stream, following a course henceforth nefast—Dig, dig; and if I come to ledges, blast.
[Today Maine plays its ancient rival New Hampshire in football (as always this is a college football newsletter; go Maine, home of both Paideuma and NCAA men’s ice hockey championship trophies), so today’s poem is by a Mainer. This poem is a piece of the process it depicts—if you want to distract yourself, why not write a poem about your inability to distract yourself and hope that clears it up? (Dr. Johnson: “Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.”) But the silliness of the ideas used for distraction—“Is the world flat?”—and the jump from them to a wish to be the metaphorical Army Corps of Engineers reveals a desperation that will grab onto anything it can for distraction. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Semiotext(e) | November 26
Selected Amazon Reviews
by Kevin Killian
From the publisher: An enchanting roll of duct tape. Love Actually on Blu-ray Disc. The Toaster Oven Cookbook, The Biography of Stevie Nicks, and an anthology of poets who died of AIDS. In this only book-length selection from his legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com, sagacious shopper Kevin Killian holds forth on these household essentials and many, many, many others.
The beloved author of more than a dozen volumes of innovative poetry, fiction, drama, and scholarship, Killian was for decades a charismatic participant in San Francisco's New Narrative writing circle. From 2003–2019, he was also one of Amazon’s most prolific reviewers, rising to rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site. Alternately hilarious and heartfelt, Killian’s commentaries consider an incredible variety of items, each review a literary escapade hidden in plain sight amongst the retailer’s endless pages of user-generated content. Selected Amazon Reviews at last gathers an appropriately wide swath of this material between two covers, revealing the project to be a unified whole and always more than a lark.
[We linked to an excerpt in WRB—Nov. 13, 2024 and a review in WRB—Nov. 16, 2024.]
Also out Tuesday:
Columbia University Press: Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard, edited by Daniel Kane
Slant: Featherless by A. G. Mojtabai
What we’re reading:
Steve read Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry by Ryan Ruby (November 19). [An Upcoming book in WRB—Nov. 16, 2024; we linked to a review and an interview with Ruby in WRB—Nov. 20, 2024. One of the best things I’ve read all year.
Lucretius tells us why to write a verse essay 900 lines into De rerum natura:
Consider a physician with a child who will not sip
A disgusting dose of wormwood: first, he coats the goblet’s lip
All round with honey’s sweet blond stickiness, that way to lure
Gullible youth to taste it, and to drain the bitter cure,
The child’s duped but not cheated—rather, put back in the pink—
That’s what I do. . . .
(Translation by A. E. Stallings.) The poetry makes the discourse about atoms and the void go down. But this is also a bait and switch of a kind; the facts about the world allow Lucretius to introduce the reader to Epicureanism as a philosophy—specifically, by confronting the reader with death and offering Epicureanism as a way to reconcile himself to it. (Jude Russo wrote a very nice essay about this several months ago.) The poetry brings the reader along and doesn’t let him realize he’s in too deep, until at the end Lucretius concludes the poem with the plague of Athens and the failure of all human activity in the face of it.
Context Collapse pulls the same trick as De rerum natura (which Ruby mentions in his razo-introduction as another example of the verse essay). The subject of the poem is, as the subtitle indicates, the history of poetry, but the idea of literary immortality and how to obtain it starts appearing early on, as soon as writing allows
. . . the ability, however
Imperfect, to translate evanescent
Breath into preservable signs
and so motivates lyric poets to use the first person pronoun. From there it never stops:
. . . The Oedipal logic
of immortality, which continues
long after the death of romanticism,
forbids belatedness and impresses
upon poets a “horror” of finding
themselves to be a “copy or replica”
relative to their precursors, that is,
finding themselves to be redundant persons
whose poems are buried with their bodies
(if not, as often happens, well before then)
both of which might as well have never been.
The innovations in poetry Ruby describes are made possible and shaped by the technological, economic, and political changes he recounts. But the individual poet is motivated by a desire to make something new and therefore not redundant, which will provide the poet a kind of escape from death.
From literary immortality it’s only a short distance to the real thing (or the lack thereof). In the tornada at the end of the poem, Ruby (like Lucretius as De rerum natura goes on) makes his real subject explicit with various apocalyptic scenarios (global warming, plague, nuclear war, killer robots). In this world “the context of / Poetry is death,” but poetry is “futile resistance” that for Ruby justifies itself through the attempt. It’s the same question Lucretius poses to the reader: death is coming, so how will you prepare for it? What will you do between now and when it comes?
Finally, a note on The Dunciad. Ruby mentions it in the razo as an inspiration: “Context Collapse is mock-academic in the same way The Dunciad is mock-heroic.” And (as Ruby notes in his essay linked above) it opens promising to make fun of the hacks Pope hates (and the reader would have gone in expecting that anyway) and ends somewhere very different:
Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.
This is also a vision of inexorable destruction (undoing the opening of Genesis) and death which must nevertheless be resisted; and the poem itself provides a model for said resistance. —Steve]
Critical notes:
[A reader wrote in to say that the source of the “novels are adolescent” take that I couldn’t remember on Wednesday might be this John Stuart Mill passage and accompanying Twitter joke. I think it’s likely. —Steve]
- Moul on a verse from the Meghadūta:
English is an enormously rich literary language, and every language has its particular resources. Many of the features that make kāvya (ornate classical Sanskrit poetry) so distinctive have equivalents in English: the English tradition has plenty of metrically inventive poetry, for instance, and plenty of allusively dense verse marked by a rich use of simile and metaphor. (We might think of something like Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, for example.) Other elements of Sanskrit poetry, like the great concision and flexibility of word order produced by a highly inflected language, are found also in Latin and Greek verse. But there is just no way, I think, in any of these languages to reproduce the syntactic counterpoint so common in Sanskrit poetry of this kind—even much less sublime examples than that of Kālidāsa—between a sentence structured, on the one hand, around complex inflection (in this example, the nominative, accusative, genitive and instrumental) and, on the other hand and within the same sentence, by the uninflected relationships between the elements of a compound. This feature, I think, helps to make kāvya unrivaled as the poetry of pure description.