O ho, O ho! would’t had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else
This isle with reviews of books.
Links:
In Liberties, Ben Libman on voyeurism:
As should by now be clear, the taboo in question is not merely the manner of Aphrodite’s undress, but more seriously the act of spying on a woman in the privacy of her toilette—of peeping-tomism, simply put. The interdiction in Greek culture is encoded in the myth of Actaeon, the hunter who stumbles upon a clearing where Artemis is bathing in private. Outraged by his transgression, Artemis transforms him into a stag, and has his own dogs tear him limb from limb. Or we may turn to Herodotus, who tells us of Candaules, king of Lydia, who is so proud of his own queen’s beauty that he implores his friend Gyges to hide in their bedroom and spy on her to see for himself. When the queen catches him peeping, she forces him to choose: either he kills Candaules and marries her, or he submits to his own execution. (His decision is predictable.) In either case, we are left no doubt that for a mortal to spy on a woman in this way is wrong.
And yet, at the same time, the very erection of the Knidian Aphrodite in her temple authorized this mode of spying by circumscribing it in a devotional and aesthetic experience. She creates a structure of permission, an environment in which the taboo can be enacted as a sort of game between viewer and artwork. That it is a game, a sort of make-believe as might befit the child in each of us, distinguishes it from an act of violence. The rules which are meant to be broken are sheltered within other rules, which are not.
[“She” doesn’t do anything, because she’s a chunk of marble. Voyeurism is more complicated than this, especially when it involves not stumbling onto a situation but having it carefully set up for your viewing pleasure. The content of the fantasy is not your own but the creation of the artist; you are merely led to think that you came up with it independently. The seeming power that comes with gazing at something distracts from what is actually happening and who is actually in charge. Vertigo (1958) and Body Double (1984) put it bluntly; to be a voyeur is, perhaps, to be manipulated, and the manipulation is only effective because the pleasure of voyeurism makes you stop thinking. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, Toril Moi on Fredric Jameson, reader:
The striking feature of Duke’s Literature Program, then and now, is that no faculty member tried to emulate Fred. Fred was Fred, sui generis, and his capacious, dialectical vision of intellectual life inspired him to create a programme that could sublate, without chafing contradictions, an exceptionally wide range of intellectual interests. He arrived at Duke in 1985, four years after publishing The Political Unconscious, his great book on interpretation. The programme he created was made in that book’s image. It was not, Fred decided, going to educate specialists. Its mission would be to train intellectuals.
Fred had three overarching ideas as to how to achieve this. First, there was his slogan, the first words of The Political Unconscious: “Always historicize!” The second idea could be summarized as “Always theorize!,” or perhaps “Always engage in metacommentary”—which means something like, “Always explicitly reflect on the moves you make in your efforts to think about your subject.” Finally, the third injunction: “Know your archive!” Fred believed, firmly, that students had to have an archive, that is, some cultural form or historical period which they knew intimately. A few classic works would never do. Fred included three cultural forms from the start: literature, film, and the objects and phenomena studied under the label “cultural studies”—the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, for example.
[I am not sure that this is exactly what Moi means, but I acutely feel a sense, when I have merely read a few classic works from a period, that I don’t actually understand what distinguishes them from similar work that has not endured in the cultural memory. I can say, generally, why something is good, but saying how it puts the ideas floating around in an artistic culture to better use requires a familiarity with what the average looked like. —Steve]
Reviews:
In The Wall Street Journal, Matt Gallagher reviews an annotated The Sun Also Rises (The Annotated Sun Also Rises: 100th Anniversary Deluxe Edition, edited by Robert Trogdon, October 13):
As a veteran of the war in Iraq, I’ve been struck by how The Sun Also Rises continues to resonate among the reading ranks of my cohort. Something about the book connects and transcends. I’ve taught it in workshops; I’ve recommended it to aspiring vet-writers who find me on social media. A veteran almost always reads this novel with different eyes than others.
Yes, Jake is disenchanted and bemused by the civilian world he’s returned to; that’s a familiar journey. But other details stand out. There’s the scene with Jake standing naked at his bedroom mirror, assessing his hidden “old grievance.” On the very next page Jake, stoic and aloof up to this point, sobs himself to sleep, alone. Then there is Mike, ever-angry at everything, making fun of “bloody military medals” and how they have been earned—or not. Bill decides to disappear into irony and jokes. Brett lost the love of her youth to the war in the Mesopotamia campaign.
[Ezra Pound, in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley:
Daring as never before, wastage as never before. Young blood and high blood, Fair cheeks, and fine bodies; fortitude as never before frankness as never before, disillusions as never told in the old days, hysterias, trench confessions, laughter out of dead bellies.
The Sun Also Rises is a novel-length treatment of “disillusions as never told in the old days. —Steve]
N.B.:
Congratulations to Anne Carson on winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. [I have no idea what box my copy of If Not, Winter is in. Sorry. —Steve]
In Engelsberg Ideas, Jared Marcel Pollen:
As with the ancients, eros and alienation are the twin drivers in Carson’s work. Historically, they are the daimons of poetic expression and philosophic inquiry (for Sappho and Socrates, it was eros; for Simonides and Plato, alienation). Both occasion pangs of estrangement, but at different emotional poles; both occasion a retreat inward, and a need for a language with which to talk to oneself. The move out of the epic and into the lyric can be interpreted as the takeover of eros and alienation in the poetic imagination: the poet at last falls out of the ecstatic trance and into their own self, as an embodied, thinking, feeling thing, and is forced to step forward and reckon with the curious, agonistic and strange nature of their own existence, with only language to brace themselves. Reading Anne Carson feels a great deal like this.
[As Horace implies in Odes 1.6 about his decision not to write epic poetry, the subject matter of lyric has its own heft. —Steve]
Cats in hardware stores.
Indigenous dogs in America.
Giant trolls in Tupper Lake.
A new apple in Canada.
New issue: Liberties Volume 7—Number 1 | Fall 2026
Mike Ditka died on Friday, October 9. R.I.P,
Poem:
“Vergissmeinnicht” by Keith Douglas
Three weeks gone and the combatants gone returning over the nightmare ground we found the place again, and found the soldier sprawling in the sun. The frowning barrel of his gun overshadowing. As we came on that day, he hit my tank with one like the entry of a demon. Look. Here in the gunpit spoil the dishonoured picture of his girl who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht. in a copybook gothic script. We see him almost with content, abased, and seeming to have paid and mocked at by his own equipment that’s hard and good when he’s decayed. But she would weep to see today how on his skin the swart flies move, the dust upon the paper eye and the burst stomach like a cave. For here the lover and killer are mingled who had one body and one heart. And death who had the soldier singled has done the lover mortal hurt.
[There are so many nice touches in this one: the repeated “gone” in the first line; the contrast between “nightmare” and “in the sun”; the failure to specify what exactly the barrel of the gun overshadows, letting it overshadow everything; the “Look.” that makes the reader into one of the men finding the dead German alongside the speaker; the gothic script being “copybook,” universalizing it; the “almost” that complicates the men’s feelings before the next stanza moves into imagining Steffi’s; the “paper eye” that (probably due to the discussion of The Tempest below) reminds me of “those are pearls that were his eyes,” letting a transformation of the eyes into something inhuman stand for a more general transformation; the contrast between “burst”—exploding outwards—and “cave”—empty inside; the chiasmus in the last stanza of lover/killer/soldier/lover; the chiasmus in the last two lines of death/soldier/lover/mortal. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Bloomsbury Publishing | October 20
The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City
by Susanna Clarke
From the publisher: “He had already served three kings. He did not see why he should not be useful to a fourth.”
During the conquest of Northern England, the fairy host sweeps across the countryside. The city of Durham finds itself surrounded. But the encircling forces are not fairies, nor even other humans, but trees that trap the city within an eerie wood.
Ranulf, Bishop of Durham—a consummate politician—understands that the survival of the Northern English people depends on his finding a way to unite the two races, human and fairy. And he’s not averse to improving his own position at the same time. With these aims in view, he sets off for the New Castle, in search of the new King—the leader of the fairy host, rumored to be a mysterious human boy, no more than fourteen years old, who speaks no word of any human language.
Set 700 years before the events of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City is a bewitching, must-have addition to any fantasy reader’s shelf.
Also out Tuesday:
Princeton University Press: Shakespeare at Thirty by Rory Loughnane
What we’re reading:
Steve finished Chinese Postman by Brian Castro (2024). [One of the best new novels I’ve read in a while. I only learned about this one from a review in our sister publication Down Under (linked to in WRB—Aug. 19, 2026). What else is going on in Australia? Does anyone know? If this is any indication, it might be very interesting and no one outside Australia will ever hear about it. —Steve]
He then read Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress by Ramsey McGlazer (2020). [Wonderful little book about the liberatory potential of “the old school,” made funny by all the throat-clearing McGlazer has to do whenever he wants to suggest progressive education might be bad. (Large portions of the introduction amount to “progressive education? The thing Giovanni Gentile invented for Mussolini?” I guess you have to say things like that if you want to sort of people who read academic works about education to continue reading and not clutch their Freire to their hearts.) —Steve]
He then started reading Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 by Gordon S. Wood (2009). [That’s right; this is going to become a newsletter of the Early Republic again. —Steve]
Critical notes:
Brandon Taylor on Rachel Cusk et al.:
That this rhymes significantly with social media, reality television, and the cultural logic of late capitalism itself is not entirely surprising. We hear much about dwindling attention spans, which is often considered from the perspective of duration. But I think there is a concomitant loss of tolerance for density. If a work of fiction does not present itself as continuous with reality—to say nothing of the content of that fiction, but only its mode of presentation—then that work will be difficult for the contemporary reader to take on board. Fiction grows ever sleeker, ever more deaccessioned of the techniques and characteristics that defined the earlier phases of literary production. In essence, it is becoming more and more like anecdote in content and form. That Rachel Cusk’s Outline novels became massively popular at just the moment when reality itself became liquified and colonized by the capitalist logics of the market does not surprise me. In fact, they seem largely part of the same general shift in our capacity to tolerate density at the interface between our individual sense of reality and culture itself. In that, the content of these novels is largely irrelevant just as the content of the anecdotes are irrelevant. What matters, I believe, is the form, which arranges all of it into a pleasant, smooth texture that is exactly continuous with our own perception of reality.
[All this is, I think, right so far as it goes, but whenever phrases like “continuous with our own perception of reality” start getting thrown around I no longer have any idea what we’re talking about. It’s a novel. It’s a bunch of words on pages. What would it mean for a bunch of words on pages to be continuous with reality? They exist in reality, and we experience them in reality, but we have become far too used to these technologies if we encounter them without friction.
This goes for other artistic moments purporting to get rid of all that fancy literary stuff in order to get at how things really are. John Pistelli quoted Thomas Hardy this week:
Art is a disproportioning—(i.e., distorting, throwing out of pro-portion) of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities, which, if merely copied or reported inventorially, might possibly be observed, but would more probably be overlooked. Hence “realism” is not Art.
Whether “realism” is Art I don’t know—depends on the realist—but what Hardy has actually shown is that “realism” isn’t even realism. Any depiction of anything is going to include some things and exclude others, going to have a view of which features matter in a reality and proceed accordingly. There is no escape from making artistic decisions, and feigned artlessness is its own kind of art. —Steve]
Victoria Moul on the Philoctetes and The Tempest:
Reading the Philoctetes this summer, I was reminded oddly and insistently of The Tempest, another play about someone trapped on an island (in Prospero’s case, for 12 years) by trickery and betrayal. (Illegally ousted by his brother as Duke of Milan, he and his infant daughter Miranda were not killed outright, but instead put to sea in a leaky vessel.)
Obviously there are a lot of differences between the stories—there is no character like Miranda in Philoctetes, and no romantic sub-plot as there is between her and Ferdinand, the son of her father’s enemy the King of Naples. Philoctetes is not a magician, but he does, like Prospero, have a magical implement: in his case his bow, a gift of Hercules; for Prospero, his staff. Both control all the creatures of the island—Prospero by magic, Philoctetes because his bow (until he is deprived of it in the middle of the play) gives him the power to kill the birds and the beasts.
Both will be restored at the end of the play to their proper social status. Both in the course of the play confront their old enemies and, as it were, “replay” the original deceit: Odysseus, albeit via a proxy, tries once again to trick Philoctetes; Prospero must, once again, face an ambush and an attempt to overthrow him.
[I thought we all agreed that Prospero is Caliban is Ariel, with his internal conflicts dramatized by splitting him into three characters. Moul suggests later on that The Tempest divides Philoctetes between Prospero and Caliban; the expectations of the audience mean that Shakespeare needs more characters than Sophocles did. —Steve]
In The New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham on how we talk about football:
There was something thrilling about this highly informed short monologue—perhaps it was the fact that Kimes never once considered explaining (as I, just a paragraph ago, have sheepishly done) what the hell play-action is, or why not being “under center” would make it hard to pull off. The slang term for employing and interpreting lingo like Kimes’ is “ball knowledge.” There’s a heartening respect for the intelligence of the audience in this pocket of the media. If you don’t know, after all, you’ll probably look it up. If you’re searching for organic, largely unquestioned, even aspirational intellectualism in American public life, here it is. The public intellectual of the future won’t be wearing tweed or a button-down collar—the new uniform involves a coach’s headset, or the pancake makeup from the greenroom of some sports network.
[When football comes up in the WRB—this is a football newsletter, after all—I try to explain things out of deference to the international audience because football is incomprehensible. Everything else the reader can just look up. Like the football commentators, I assume my audience is smart and can follow along. How anyone does it the other way is beyond me. Why bother doing anything for an audience of the world’s most tedious and ignorant dullards—and, if your audience is tedious and ignorant dullards, what does that say about you?
On the other side, I do like it when sportswriters demonstrate that they are literate. (The prose most of them produce suggests otherwise.) The other day I was reading a piece about college football that included a reference to the Algonquin Round Table. Good stuff. —Steve]