WRB—Nov. 26, 2025

“party girl”

The WRB is father of the man.

Links:

• In Lit Hub, Ed Simon on bibliomania:

  Another credo that probably makes sense to you—“When I have a little money, I buy books,” wrote Erasmus in a letter, “and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.” Those are priorities that Eco internalized, comprehending the paradox of owning more books than you could ever read, of existing in a slipstream between possession and loss. This portly, bearded semiotician referred to his “anti-library,” that is the mass of books that Eco would never read but which he owned, their mere presence a humbling reminder of all of that which we’ll never know. “Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then can get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books,” writes Eco in How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, but those “who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.”

  Bibliomania, the only hobby which is also a mental health affliction. The person with piles of titles on their nightstand, in their closet, in the trunk of their car. Books in front of books on their bookshelf. “With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person’s character,” writes Nicholas Basbanes in A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books. “When out of control and indulged to excess, it lets loose a fury of bizarre behavior.” The sort of figure mocked in the engraving “The Bibliomaniac” from Sebastian Brandt’s 1497 satirical allegory The Ship of Fools, a work that Erasmus knew well, where he may have recognized himself in the woodcut. I certainly do, seeing a reflection of my own bookish pursuits from half-a-millennia ago in Brandt’s ridiculous figure in monastic robes and scholarly cap and eyeglasses, sitting behind a desk and shelf piled with books, the figure fanning them as if he’s their servant rather than they his possessions.

  [It probably takes any book I buy, unless I want to read it immediately, at least two months to make it from the back seat of my car to my desk or shelves or any other place. There’s a copy of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer that’s been in there for something like five years at this point. At least, I think it’s in there somewhere. —Steve]

• In Public Books, M. P. Kennedy on an ad campaign for Hamm’s:

  This advertising works in synchrony. We get not only the light box or the single commercial but a “campaign” with a set of motifs. Advertising is pop culture’s Gesamtkunstwerk: The Hamm’s campaign is a mini-Wagnerian opera for canned beer. It includes jingles, live-action sequences, animations, and print. If we engage with the ads, we experience them as a gestalt rather than a series of independent images. They present us with a complex but coherent fantasy.

  Though the light box is not art, it has its attractions. Its medievalism extends well beyond its plastic imitation of stained glass. The designer mimics the sensibility of medieval artists who made their romances and religious paintings glitter. Medieval pictures, with their jewels, “ruddy gold,” iridescences, and holy radiances, are alluring, even considering their inherent unreality, or perhaps because of it. In a romance like Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, we read about the knight Gahmuret’s “dazzling” armor: “With what was his shield embellished, you ask? A priceless boss of gold of Araby had been riveted onto it. . . . It shone with a reddish luster so that you could see your own face in it. . . . His tabard . . . shone like a live fire burning in the night. There was no spot of faded color. Its dazzling light did not elude one’s gaze—a weak eye could have cut itself upon it!” The Hamm’s light box, in its cottage frame, with artificial stained glass and imitation wood, jewel tones, and halo of light, satisfies the taste of the age it signifies. It has the same luster: It is a “fire burning in the night.” If Aquinas, meditating in his cell in the thirteenth century, had a vision of its glowing streams, he would have thought it a wonder of claritas, of light and vivid color. It is our habituation to electricity and our cynicism about advertising and mass production that make it unremarkable.

  [I can already tell that “this advertisement is a Gesamtkunstwerk” is going to pop into my head whenever I watch television from now until the end of my life. (We don’t really get objects like the light box as part of advertising campaigns; everything is mediated through screens.) And as someone who went to college in the Midwest, I appreciate Hamm’s. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Cuyahoga, Eliza Browning reviews a book about the death of the author’s husband (In Farthest Seas, by Lalla Romano, translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore, August):

  In another memory, Romano recounts a moment from her teenage years when her parents returned with a catalogue from the Turin Biennial. A painting entitled The Poet featured a “young, tall man [who] looks pensively at a lake; an overcoat folded on his arm.” In this image, Romano reflects that she had “later identified Innocenzo. I consider it one of my premonitions of him, of his happening.” Here, Romano reflects on the apparent inevitability of their marriage. By suggesting she was destined to meet Monti, she extends their bond back in time before their first encounter, just as she extends it forward in time by memorializing him after his death. Late in her life, Romano embarked on a second relationship with a young photographer and journalist, Antonio Ria, with whom she would collaborate on a series of photographic texts. But photography, as an alternate mode of memorialization, is one Romano ultimately rejects in In Farthest Seas. She remembers saying to her son Piero after his father’s death: “You should have taken a photograph of your dad in these final days.” Piero replied, “I thought about it, but it would have shown a lack of respect towards him.” Romano ultimately agrees with Piero’s opinion that the act of photographing Monti would have been a stark, almost brutal intrusion into a dying man’s final moments. Instead, she remembers her husband through a series of cherished memories: hikes on sunlit hills in Cuneo, wedding anniversaries spent in London, his face in sleep.

  • “Hopsy” Pike (Henry Fonda) in The Lady Eve (1941):

    I’ve just understood something. Every time I’ve looked at you here on the boat, it wasn’t only here I saw you. You seemed to go way back. I know that isn’t clear, but I saw you here, and at the same time further away, then still further away; and then very small, like converging perspective lines. That isn’t it. It’s like—like people following each other in a forest glade.Only way back there you’re a little girl with a short dress and your hair falling to your shoulders, and a little boy is standing, holding your hand. In the middle distance, I’m still with you, not holding your hand anymore because it isn’t manly, but wanting to. And then still further, we look terrible. You with your legs like a colt and mine like a calf. What I’m trying to say is, only I’m not a poet, I’m an ophiologist, I’ve always loved you. I mean, I’ve never loved anyone but you. I know that sounds dull as a drugstore novel, and what I see inside I’ll never be able to cast into words, but that’s what I mean.

  • Carly Rae Jepsen: “Before you came into my life I missed you so bad.”

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• Martin Amis on John Updike

• The subtle delights of writing negative cultural criticism

• A Poem by John Berryman and what happens to you if you write too many sonnets

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]