I read the Washington Review of Books for the articles.
N.B.:
The next monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “Is art more beautiful than nature?”, will take place on Friday, October 25. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Before the Salon that Friday: in honor of dress up season and in concert with the themes art and beauty, vintage popup shop Grift the Rich will have a special selection of costumes, clothing, accessories, and knick knacks for sale—starting at 5:30 p.m.
Save the Date: The next WRB Presents will be November 12, featuring Ralph Hubbell, Johannes Lichtman, Mikra Namani, and Danuta Hinc.
Links:
Two in Harper’s:
Yiyun Li on minor characters and human possibility:
The problem with these descriptions is that they might lead readers to dismiss Nikolai as predictable—there is nothing transcendent about him. To make the case for Nikolai’s significance is to make the case for minor characters. In fact, I would like to argue that most of us in life are in positions close to those occupied by the minor characters in War and Peace (and there are nearly six hundred of them). Very few of us are the Napoleons or Kutuzovs of our time—a comforting fact. Some of us have a bit of Pierre in us, or a bit of Andrei, or a combination of both. Many of us would like to believe that we, the protagonists of our own stories, are also the protagonists of something far grander. (Years ago, when I was in the Chinese army, Gone with the Wind was a popular novel among my fellow teenage soldiers, and I was shocked to find that nearly everyone in my platoon thought herself a Scarlett O’Hara.)
Lukács:
War and Peace is the modern epopee of popular life even more decisively than the work of Scott or Manzoni. The depiction of popular life is broader, more colorful, richer in characters. The emphasis on popular life as the real basis of historical happenings is more conscious. Indeed, this manner of presentation acquires a polemical accent in Tolstoy which it did not and could not have in the first classics of the historical novel. The latter portrayed above all the connection; the historical events emerged as the crowning peaks of the contradictory, vying forces in popular life. . . . At the heart of Tolstoy is the contradiction between the protagonists of history and the living forces of popular life. He shows that those who, despite the great events in the forefront of history, go on living their normal, private, and egoistic lives are really furthering the true (unconscious, unknown) development, while the consciously acting “heroes” of history are ludicrous and harmful puppets.
An excerpt from Nicole Krauss’ introduction to a reissue of a novella by Roberto Bolaño (By Night in Chile, 2000, translated by Chris Andrews, 2003, September):
By Night in Chile was written while Bolaño was waiting for a liver transplant he would die before receiving. Every sentence is perfect. Perfect composure resting atop a volcano. I’ve often taught By Night in Chile to my writing students and watched their expressions shift from excitement to awe to disquiet as they try to work out how to stay afloat in the flood of words, and consider the implications of Bolaño’s sui generis, unremitting gift on the question of their own. It isn’t just Urrutia, but also Bolaño, and even language itself, that all seem to be in a race against death. Could my students possess, be possessed by, such momentum in their own writing? They have yet to experience much of what they will eventually lose through the hemorrhaging effect of time. And yet, for all its vitality, isn’t a break into freedom—whether youthful rebellion, or artistic innovation, or its many other possible forms—always also an escape from death? From an impasse that threatens to close us down, shut us in, keep us below, in a place of anxiety, claustrophobia, failure, and regret? From believing that what we have lost cannot be reinvented or regained?
In Engelsberg Ideas, Richard Bratby on Schönberg today:
Friede auf Erden is 117 years old and it still sounded like the boldest thing we’d heard all night. If Schönberg stands for anything today, it’s surely the artist’s (and the prophet’s) eternal right to be awkward—to insist, without compromise, upon things that we might prefer not to hear. He could have chosen to do otherwise; part of his tragedy is that he knew that. In later life, he liked to tell a story about his experience in the Austro-Hungarian army in 1915. “Are you the notorious musician Arnold Schönberg?” asked the officer who enlisted him. “Beg to report, sir, yes,” replied Private Schönberg. “Someone had to be, and no one else wanted to. So I took the job myself.”
[I’ll stand up for Moses und Aron, which is basically about this. No one else will. —Steve]
Two in The Lamp; first, Sam Kriss goes to Paris to see Taylor Swift:
I thought about Jim Morrison. I’d been to see his grave at Père Lachaise that morning. It’s small, tucked away in a little thicket of the dead, but surrounded by even more of the living. Édith Piaf has a few small tributes, Chopin has some flowers; Jim Morrison’s grave is like a refuse heap. It’s become a tradition to stick a wad of chewing gum on one of the trees next to his headstone; the tree is now practically coated in slime. Heaps of tat piled over his corpse. Here lies an American. I listened to The Doors on the train to La Défense. California, misery, menace, sex. All the children are insane; I’ll never look into your eyes again. Once, when American pop stars came to Paris, they came here to die.
I don’t think Taylor Swift was planning to die in Paris, this waning, sunset city whose most interesting inhabitants are all already entombed. It was just another piece of set-dressing in her worldwide festival of herself. But that’s what was happening. Somehow, just as her star started to dim, she ended up here.
Reviews:
Second, Edward Short reviews a book about Thomas Hardy’s first marriage and its impact on his poetry (Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry, by Mark Ford, 2023):
For Hardy, it was certainly no longer the mirror of English Christianity or the sort of rationalism approved by his friend Leslie Stephen that could sort out with any reliable authority the “breast-bared spectacle” of the human condition. “The word ‘vision,’” Ford points out, “glossed as the ‘divine faculty’ by Wordsworth, and used to describe the magical trance inspired in Keats by the nightingale (‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream?’), occurs repeatedly in Hardy’s poetry, but the word is frequently imbued with either a hint of wistfulness or with . . . ironical humor.” One can hear the wistfulness in the poems that Hardy wrote of Emma, including “The Voice,” “Beeny Cliff,” “The Phantom Horsewoman,” and “At Castle Boterel.” But it is in such prophetic poems as “We Are Getting to the End” that we hear the ironical humor—the savage, satirical humor—which arises out of the questions of what we mean by love, which is to say, the question that so haunted Hardy after Emma’s death.
[We linked to an earlier review in WRB—Oct. 5, 2024. And this ironical humor is no doubt why Larkin (as quoted in WRB—Aug. 21, 2024) says that his “ideal writer wd be a mixture of D. H. L., Thomas Hardy, & George Eliot.” I think Larkin would be more apt to open a poem with “We are getting to the end of dreams!” than close it, though. Certainly sans exclamation point.
Today’s Poem is also by Hardy. —Steve]
Two in our sister publication across the pond:
Helen Thaventhiran reviews a collection of William James’ writing (Be Not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James, edited by John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle, 2023) and a book about him (William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician, by Emma K. Sutton, 2023):
Between these two ways of talking about how to encounter the world as joy, the differences between William and his sister stretch out. William’s rousing vision recalled the “whanging” world of freewheeling gulls on the river where he had adventured during his medical studies; Alice’s introspective note recorded her habitual practice of breaching the cozy dark of her sick room with a mere half-minute’s perception of “the gradation of the light in transition.” Kaag and van Belle don’t quote Alice’s slanted subtleties, her microscopic registrations of the point when existence briefly ceases to be absurd and becomes “exquisite.” After all, anyone buying a book that bills itself as having such health-giving force for its readers might exercise their right of return if extracts from Alice, “shut up in her sick room,” were to disrupt the “whanging” energies of William, standing firm at the lectern, or writing letters full of Amazonian air. But, for those less free than William to exercise their free will, or less inclined to believe in its supremacy, Alice’s notes could offer an antidote to the liberal resilience that scholarship tends to offer when it comes to William James.
[“Whang, whang, whang / On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!” —Steve]
Tom Johnson reviews a book about the spread of mathematics in England (By the Numbers: Numeracy, Religion, and the Quantitative Transformation of Early Modern England, by Jessica Marie Otis, January):
As Otis sees it, the writers of these textbooks were the guiding stars of the quantitative transformation. They refined the technical arithmetic of craftsmen, sailors and clerical workers into a science fit for gentlemen; in doing so, they also developed new cultural distinctions between kinds of knowledge. The mathematician John Kersey, reprinting a textbook by his friend Edmund Wingate in 1658, suggested that it would be useful for “Learners, as desire only so much skill in Arithmetick, as is useful in Accompts, Trade and such like ordinary employments . . . before any entrance be made into the craggy paths of Fractions, at the sight whereof some Learners are so discouraged.” Perhaps he had in mind readers such as Hobbes, who had griped publicly about the “scab of symbols” littered through Wallis’ work on conic sections. Wallis gave a fractious reply: “Sir, they were not written for you to read, but for them that can.” By the later seventeenth century it was embarrassing, in certain circles, not to know something about numbers. Edmund Cocker addressed his 1678 textbook to “the pretended Numerists of this vapouring age.”
[If I could have everything I want the WRB would be about college football. But if I could only have half of what I want the WRB would be about the history of mathematics. At the least, I’d like an end to “being bad at math” as a quirky personality trait. I think we can arrive at a place somewhere in between our current situation and the Hobbes-Wallis pamphlet war, during which two of the most impressive Englishmen of their time spent a decade accusing each other of being bad at math. It covered neither of them in glory—Hobbes because he was bad at math, Wallis because he simply wouldn’t let the thing go. (In the following three centuries more effective methods of critiquing Hobbes’ views about religion and politics have been discovered.) —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Cuyahoga,
reviews a new translation of a novel by Yoko Tawada (Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, 2020, translated by Susan Bernofsky, July) [The Upcoming book in WRB—July 3, 2024; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—June 22, 2024.]:Difficulty is not to be confused with impossibility. And crucially, understanding can happen without decoding. This insight seems charming and naïve, but it is at the heart of Celan’s oeuvre. Celan is a powerful poet because he is somber, and because the beauty of his work does not necessarily require unsealing. It is hermetic and transparent at the same time. You can let his poems wash over you, startled by the complex imagery, caught in their movement. Or, you can pick them apart relentlessly, your head buried in the archive. You can admire the brutality of their imagery, or notice the delicacy of their meaning.
Celan is also, like Tawada, a partisan of the human. In a letter to Erich Einhorn, he writes of his poem “Stretto” which had recently appeared in his collection Speech-Grille. This poem has a quintessential Celanian line, “Ashes, / Ashes, ashes.” Things are “asunder,” “darkening,” and there is plenty of mention of all kinds of “nothing.” Yet, Celan tells Einhorn that this poem was written “for the sake of the human, thus against all emptiness and atomizing.”
In our sister publication Down Under, Alix Beeston reviews Gail Jones’ most recent novel (One Another, February):
The effect of Jones’ epigraphs may be “more affective than intellectual,” as Genette writes of epigraphs more generally. They evoke a mood or an atmosphere, while also credentialing One Another as a literary work and Jones as an author of literary fiction. Yet in reading this novel, I found myself irrepressibly drawn into its rabbit-warren of intertexts. It is just this kind of reading practice Jones seems to invite through her work: a practice of strange relation, in which ideas, texts, and images are held together by the soft connective tissue of association and collocation.
This may be too convenient, a mode of criticism tailor-made for me. I sometimes think that my only real skill as a critic is in drawing connections, making things relate. Like Jones’ protagonist Helen, who, after she loses her precious, in-progress manuscript about Conrad, takes to arranging and rearranging the index cards that hold her handwritten notes for the project. The cards are, Helen likes to think, a row of handkerchiefs pulled from a magician’s sleeve—or, perhaps, the pleated pages of a leporello. “The cards reminded Helen that by instinct she was unsystematic, that the appeal of images, not syllogism, held special sway. This next to this, and strung together. Always more meaning than one might expect.” Also like Jones herself, who in the essay, “A Dreaming, A Sauntering” (2006), asked, “What might it mean to take the fragment or the trace as a paradigm of knowledge and to assume that assemblage, not reconstitution, is our critical task?”
[As regular readers of the WRB will know, Pound and his descendants have done a number on my brain—but I cannot help feeling that “I sometimes think that my only real skill as a critic is in drawing connections, making things relate” is the equivalent of “I sometimes think that my only real skill as a cook is in preparing food.” Yeah. That basically is the job description. Nothing exists in isolation; how could it be understood in isolation?
Or, to quote Bob Dylan:
The names themselves are not solitary. It’s the combination of them that adds up to something more than their singular parts. To go too much into detail is irrelevant. The song is like a painting, you can’t see it all at once if you’re standing too close. The individual pieces are just part of a whole.
—Steve]
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Fintan O’Toole reviews Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel (Glorious Exploits, March):
There is a political point here. Lennon, picking up on Murray’s challenge to imperialist glorifications of the Greeks, uses this Irish speech to create an off-center perspective on Athens and its disastrous dreams of empire. Lampo and Gelon are Hiberno-Hellenes, of but not quite in the dominant culture of the Greek “mother country.” Just as Ireland and other colonies produced writers who infiltrated the British imperial ethos from its peripheries, Syracuse functions as a place from which golden age Athens can be both hated and loved, exposed and embraced. Its polis is admirable not because of its swagger but because it can produce a play, like The Trojan Women, that reveals swagger as cruel conceit.
Glorious Exploits owes its emotional impact to the clear-eyed skepticism that makes its hopefulness hard-won. Lampo is moved because he can see, beneath the ragged costumes of the Athenians playing Hecuba, Andromache, and Cassandra, the withered, bony legs and the chained ankles of the enslaved actors: “Everything about them that’s fucked and broken fits with this play.” The Syracusans who gather to watch the show can likewise be moved by the way it touches on the pain they have shared with their enemies: “’Cause for the briefest moment, Syracusans and Athenians have blended into a single chorus of grief for this make-believe.” Lennon’s artistry allows him, without being naive or pious, to make the case for art. Lampo knows how crazy their whole enterprise is but comes to wonder whether there might not be “wisdom in a faith-filled lunacy.” Art is the belief, maintained against repeated evidence to the contrary, that there must be.
N.B. (cont.):
“What’s the Point of Epigraphs Anyway?” [The point of epigraphs is for writers to show their readers that they have read at least one other book, specifically, the book from which the epigraph is taken. Or at least that they can pretend to have read at least one other book. —Steve]
A trip to Ireland’s National Leprechaun Museum.
Listening to music at work.
[I would try the Guinness shandy, but then of course I would. —Steve]
“He is less interested in investigating how bookstores might survive than in asking: How should a bookshop be?”
Using digital technology to rediscover ancient texts.
A. E. Stallings has a new newsletter about poetry.
New issues:
Harper’s November 2024 [As linked to above.]
The Lamp Issue 25 | Christ the King 2024 [As linked to above.]
Literary Review of Canada November 2024
Poem:
“The Last Performance” by Thomas Hardy
“I am playing my oldest tunes,” declared she,
“All the old tunes I know,—
Those I learnt ever so long ago.”
—Why she should think just then she’d play them
Silence cloaks like snow.When I returned from the town at nightfall
Notes continued to pour
As when I had left two hours before:
“It’s the very last time,” she said in closing;
“From now I play no more.”A few morns onward found her fading,
And, as her life outflew,
I thought of her playing her tunes right through;
And I felt she had known of what was coming,
And wondered how she knew.
[Belloc once wrote of Homer:
The whole point of Homer is knocking one down with a verb and a noun and a conventional adjective. How it is done nobody knows. It is done in the New Testament: “Confidite, ego vici mundum.” It is done in the song of Roland: “To God on His Holy Hill in the City of Paradise.” It is done in the Border Ballads over and over again. It is done in the twelfth century, Angevin French singing the burial of Iseult: “She by him and he by her.” How it is done nobody knows. If anyone could know, anyone could be a poet.
I quote at such length merely to say that, however it is done, “Silence cloaks like snow” is doing it. These are the right words—anyone who has walked through the woods on a winter morning after a snowstorm can attest to that—and all it takes is four of them. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Sutherland House Books | October 22
The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading
by Sam Leith
From the publisher: The stories we read as children extend far beyond our childhoods; they are a window into our deepest hopes, joys and anxieties. They reveal our past—collective and individual, remembered and imagined—and invite us to dream up different futures. In a pioneering history of children’s literature, from the ancient world to the present day, Sam Leith reveals the magic of our most cherished stories, and the ways in which they have shaped and consoled entire generations. Excavating the complex lives of beloved writers, Leith offers a humane portrait of a genre—one acutely sensitive to its authors’ distinct contexts.
[We linked to a review in WRB—Children’s Literature Supplement, Sept. 2024.]
Also out Tuesday:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir by Sarah Moss [We linked to a review in WRB—Aug. 28, 2024.]
What we’re reading:
Steve is still making his way, very slowly, through The Historical Novel. [I have finally finished the section on Walter Scott; progress is being made. The main thing I learned is that I need two years off so I can work my way through La Comédie humaine. But it’s the kind of book where every paragraph contains at least one thing you always knew on some level but had never managed to articulate, and so the experience of reading it is the experience of someone doing the work of cleaning up and sharpening your own thoughts by telling you where to look and making the connections. Based on Lukács’ discussion of epic as something where the events are more interesting than the epic hero and the good historical novelist having a sense of historical necessity I am trying to have some ideas about the Pentateuch, which I might return to in here if I can make anything solid out of it. —Steve]
Critical notes:
- ’s contribution to the discussion about whether culture is stagnant [As linked to and discussed in WRB—Oct. 9, 2024.]:
In a certain fundamental sense, all cultural criticism is always a debate between optimists and pessimists—and the debate is always worth having. It’s always risky, because prognostication is impossible and blindspots are guaranteed. There was stupid shit in 1962, as in 1922; there were cultural doomers then too, but they were wrong (because those years were expressive of a polyphonic, nuanced braiding of traditional, canonical, the folk, and the radically new and technological). But the point, really, is not to be right, to score points, to guess correctly about what will be remembered. What matters is to analyze and critique the conditions under which culture exists. Is it easier or harder for originals to find an audience? Are the different regions of cultural production talking to each other? Is there cross-pollination? Is there curiosity? Are audience and artist pushing each other to greater degrees of cultivation and sophistication, or is the cycle inverted: are artist and audience making each other dumber?
- ):
The inner lives we invent for the people we meet can be so much smaller and blander than the one we experience for ourselves. There is a lesson there.
- on energy for creative work:
Other people can be an excellent source of energy too, though depending on your constitution that also has to be managed. This is why co-writing works. A conversation, even a well-placed note, can give the right sort of boost as well. I find large groups of people both energizing and exhausting at the same time however, so have not been able to write after teaching or meetings. That period is useful for taking down notes, to be expanded on at a calmer time. But I’d love to learn how to write after teaching—it would potentially be lifechanging.