In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me an issue of the Washington Review of Books that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
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.
Save the Date: The next WRB Presents will be November 12, featuring Ralph Hubbell, Johannes Lichtman, Mikra Namani, and Danuta Hinc.
Links:
In The Marginalian, Maria Popova on Kafka’s diaries:
The most paradoxical thing about creative work is that it is both a way in and a way out, that it plunges you into the depths of your being and at the same time takes you out of yourself. Writing is the best instrument I have for metabolizing my experience and clarifying my own mind in such a way that I am no longer captive to it. All creative work is at bottom a means of self-liberation and a coping mechanism—for the loneliness, the despair, the chaos and contradiction within. It is the best means we have of transmuting that which gnaws at us into something that nourishes, and yet how little of that private ferment is visible in the finished work.
This is why I love diaries, with their rare glimpse of the inner worlds that lavish our own with beauty and truth, with nourishment of substance and sweetness that endures for epochs after the lives that made it are no more.
[Imagine the motivations for writing an email newsletter, which combines the worst aspects of creative work with the worst aspects of a diary. —Steve]
In The New Yorker, Lydia Davis on memories of school:
I live with fixed memories of my classmates as children, memories that do not have access to what they were “really” like, inside themselves, within their families, with their closest friends. For me, they are still full of youthful energy, passion, or disgust, riotous laughter or tearful hurt, inspired by ideas quickly conceived and as quickly abandoned, in the setting of a large, warm, late-afternoon homeroom, probably as we were all milling about before going home. “Blessings to all of you for your deep sharing and our knowing each other for almost all of our lives,” one of my classmates recently wrote in an e-mail to us all. And it is true that we have “known” one another for most of our seventy-six or seventy-seven years. Some girls I admired because they were pretty, or generous, some I admired for how well they drew, some I disliked for their coolness, or sarcasm, or superiority. They are so present as they were, in my memory, that I struggle to remember they are no longer rambunctious children but calmer, slower elderly women like me, with our various disabilities, tragedies or joys, difficulties, and gifts. I can become used to my own gradual aging but have a harder time imagining theirs. (And some are gone, having reached the ends of their lives either abruptly or after a gradual decline.)
[I went to a high school with uniforms, and so in my head all my classmates are wearing theirs. Now, when I see them wearing something else, it takes my brain half a second to realize that they can, in fact, wear these clothes. —Steve]
In The Georgia Review, Elisa Gabbert on the architecture of essays:
I think of an essay as a realm for both the writer and the reader. When I’m working on an essay, I’m entering a loosely defined space. If we borrow Alexander’s terms again, the essay in progress is “the site”: “It is essential to work on the site,” he writes, in A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (1977); “Work on the site, stay on the site, let the site tell you its secrets.” Just by beginning to think about an essay as such—by forming the intention to write on an idea or theme—I’m opening a portal, I’m creating a site, a realm. It’s a place where all my best thinking can go for a period of time, a place where the thoughts can be collected and arranged for more density of meaning. This place necessarily has structure, if it feels like a place. There’s a classic architecture book called Why Buildings Stand Up (1980). We call any building, or part of a building, or thing like a building, a structure, if it succeeds in standing up. The structure is the system of elements in the building that make things go up—the load-bearing elements, walls and beams and columns, that counteract gravity. They counteract quote-unquote nothing, so empty space becomes a place.
[Behind the paywall: Steve on the ending of Mansfield Park, the future of scholarship, the limits of art, and a poem by Robert Browning; also included below are Gary Indiana, Weird Tales, Annie Ernaux, Joan Didion, fiction, the monoculture, 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.]
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