The Managing Editors of the Washington Review of Books set their satirical newsletters in a “never and nowhere” which nevertheless faithfully reflects the essential characteristics of contemporary Washington. They grasp the salient features of their city with a bold and penetrating realism.
N.B.:
This month’s WRB Presents, with readings from Osita Nwanevu, Lewis Page, Lyle Jeremy Rubin, and Tonya Riley, will take place on Tuesday, October 15.
This month’s 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.
Links:
Two in Liberties:
Ryan Ruby on Kafka and Dickinson, writers of letters:
In fact, once one abandons the teleology of print, one can see that it is also technically incorrect to say that Dickinson did not publish. Rather, her network of correspondents was itself a small-scale publishing operation built by her for the express purpose of having her poems read as close to the way she intended as possible. It was a publishing operation centered on Amherst, though it extended as far as Worcester, Springfield, Boston, Brooklyn, and Geneva, New York. At first, Dickinson’s long-distance letters and letter poems were delivered by stagecoach; after her father helped secure the funding to build the first railroad connection in Amherst, an event commemorated in her poem “I like to see it lap the Miles,” they were delivered by iron horse.
And here we can return to Kafka. In carving her own postal network out of the existing system and integrating her literary and epistolary activities, Dickinson not only anticipated his practice, she arguably transcended it. True, like Browning, Dickinson was a more explicit allegorist than Kafka—there is no doubt, for example, about the identity of the country gentleman who offers a ride in his carriage to the speaker of her best-known poem—and thus seems easier to interpret, but through her denaturing of poetic form she arrived first at many of the effects we more commonly associate with his name.
[We linked to reviews of a recent collection of Dickinson’s letters (The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, April) in WRB—Apr. 13, 2024, WRB—May 18, 2024, and WRB—Aug. 17, 2024. In the “envelope poems” Dickinson turns the envoi into a physical fact—the envelope is itself the sending-off of the poem, no airiness about finding readers required. The attention to the physical fact echoes Catullus 1, which specifies that the book is arida modo pumice expolitum, recently polished with a dry pumice stone. To put a poem on the outside and not the inside, as Dickinson does, also requires polishing. (More on Catullus 1 later.) —Steve]
Ramachandra Guha on Rabindranath Tagore’s environmentalism:
In another essay, published five years later, Tagore called the forests “the one great inheritance” of India and Indians. He offered an intriguing contrast between how forests shaped Indian history and how the sea had shaped the history of northern Europe. “In the sea,” he wrote, “Nature presented itself to these [European] men in her aspect of a danger, of a barrier, which seemed to be at constant war with the land and its children. The sea was the challenge of untamed Nature to the indomitable human soul. And man did not flinch; he fought and won . . . ” Tagore contrasted the European conquest of the sea with the level tracts of peninsular India, where “men found no barrier between their lives and the Grand Life that permeates the Universe. The forest gave them shelter and shade, fruit and flower, fodder and fuel; it entered into a close living relation with their work and leisure and necessity, and in this way made it easy for them to know their own lives as associated with the larger life.”
Reviews:
Two in our sister publication on the Thames:
Matthew Bevis reviews two collections of Thomas Hardy’s work (Thomas Hardy: Selected Writings, edited by Ralph Pite, May; and Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems, edited by David Bromwich, 2023) and a book about the poems he wrote after his first wife died (Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry, by Mark Ford, 2023):
Hardy must be the first, I think, to have smuggled the word “whang” into a poem. It’s a remarkable line, partly because people, and not objects, are capable of being “in a world of their own,” and in a universe where a car can be accorded a glimmer of consciousness, it’s equally possible that a person could be swallowed into the thingness of their surroundings (“a blacker air” is also an apt description of Hardy’s utterance). But Hardy often wants more than a merely tolerable sadness. He wants an anxiety he can replay and reinhabit, hence the self-lacerations of his lyrical present—a time in which a car “comes up” (not, say, “goes by”) forever, even though it’s always gone. The poem first appeared in the collection Human Shows, along with a date: “9 October 1924.” Inserted for “personal and local reasons” no doubt. Pite’s note says that Hardy was waiting for Florence to return from London, where she had just undergone an operation to remove a tumor. And yet the mood soars beyond the personal. “It has nothing to do with me.” This is part of what poetry is for Hardy—a spectral lyre swept (not “played”) by a spectral hand, a realm in which these words can somehow occur even though he’s “mute.” “Makers of things,” he suggested in a notebook, “e.g. painters, writers, builders, furniture makers, are present as ghosts before their works.”
[Cf. Rebecca West on Hardy (as quoted in WRB—Nov. 23, 2022). The telegraph wire in “Nobody Comes” that becomes “a spectral lyre” reminds me of “Wichita Lineman” and its shimmering violins. (The violins of “Chanson d’automne” are also in the background.) There too the lyric fixes a moment which is all moments—“the Wichita lineman is still on the line”—because he will always be on the line. He may “need a small vacation” but the work he has to do keeps him there. He may hear (or want to hear) the woman he longs for in the lines, but like in Hardy’s poem he is alone: “I stand again alone, / And nobody pulls up there.” —Steve]
Katherine Harloe reviews Oswyn Murray’s account of the reinterpretations of ancient Greece (The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present, September):
If considered as a memoir, however, the book’s selectivity and partiality are intrinsic parts of its design and interest. By setting out so clearly his choices of who and what matters in ancient historiography, Murray is exercising both historical judgment and liberty of thought—the most important gift, as he sees it, of ancient political thought and practice to the modern world. He is also giving readers the story of the people and places that have mattered to him. The intellectual ancestors he lingers over are those who were formative for his own work, shaping his outlook as an internationalist who has combined a life committed to the serious study of the past with a conviction of the seriousness of human action in the present, the importance of historical consciousness in informing that action and the imperative of upholding cosmopolitan ideals of intellectual community even in unpropitious circumstances. This is part of the attraction for Murray of Braudel’s vision of ancient Greek history as part of world history. It helps to explain why he includes a vignette of Braudel composing the first draft of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and a photograph of Vernant, a commander in the French Resistance, in military fatigues at the 1944 liberation of Toulouse.
In the local Post,
reviews Mark Haber’s new novel (Lesser Ruins, October 8) [An Upcoming book today.]:What emerges in the end is an ode to distraction, an entire book composed of distractions that are, paradoxically, absorbing. Of course, if distraction is the book’s true subject, then its distractions are not distractions at all. On the contrary, they are the point. What is plain to the reader—and to the narrator whenever he stops diverting himself—is that it is not his wife who distracted him from his book on Montaigne, so much as his book about Montaigne that is distracting him from his wife’s death. Even his circumambulatory movements around the house—he is always “making circles, taking laps”—are part of an effort to “avoid my dead wife’s closet,” which still smells of her. Beneath the narrator’s frantic mental chatter lies a “silence which has assumed the proportions of a creature.” To drown it out, he talks and talks.
In the TLS, Emma Smith reviews new editions by Brian Vickers of Thomas Kyd and John Ford (The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd: Volume One, March; and The Collected Works of John Ford: Volume Four, 2023):
For instance, one of the scholarly claims of this volume is that ’Tis Pity, first published in 1633 and typically dated within two or three years of publication, was in fact written in 1617–18. Vickers uses two distinct methodologies to reach this conclusion. One, familiar from the Kyd volume, depends on plot. ’Tis Pity is seen in close parallel to the “Italianate revenge tragedies of Webster and Middleton”, and particularly Cyril Tourneur’s play The Atheist’s Tragedy (1610), though the possibility that this might comprise consciously retro writing, rather like the allusions to Romeo and Juliet, is not considered. Vickers is clear that this play has no transcendence or heroism, unlike the later Ford, suggesting that it sets “abnormal psychology . . . against the background of a wholly corrupt society in a tragedy offering no consolation”: an early date allows Ford the moral and aesthetic opportunity to recover.
In The Hedgehog Review, Ed Simon on Anne Sexton as religious poet:
By mining their own often tortured experiences and indiscretions (with the exception of Sexton’s horrifying sexual abuse of her own daughter, later disclosed by the victim), the confessional poets took part in the venerable tradition of the religious autobiography. The name of the movement could hardly be incidental; they both psychoanalyzed the sacrament and sacralized psychoanalysis, in homage as much to Augustine as to Freud. This aspect of their work, I would argue, is the primary reason for attending to them today. Far more than being the precursors of the reveal-all social media influencers, the confessional poets fundamentally were makers of spiritual verse. Interpreting the popularity of the (mostly culturally Protestant) confessional poets as simultaneous with the openness of Vatican II, Giles Mebane Robertson, in an unpublished dissertation for Fordham University, The Ultraquists: Locating Religion in Confessional Poetry, writes that the otherwise secular movement “may serve as a substitute for religion for both writer and reader.”
In Meanjin, Grace Roodenrys reviews Judith Beverige’s new collection of poetry (Tintinnabulum, July):
In the final section, “Choirwood,” Beveridge uses a motif of sound to sing praise for ecology itself: “the flowing, spinning, changing / dynamics . . . choiring everything / into existence.” Her imagery in these poems is some of the best in the book, partly because of how resourcefully it does the impossible—to translate across the senses, to imagine sight as sound and vice versa (this is also why “Listening to Cicadas” reads a little like a corrupted file, i.e., cicadas as heard as smelt as tasted). Light is something heard in “Estuary”: “if it could be heard as it touches the shallows . . . it would be / a singing bowl of seven metals or a set / of water-tuned musical glasses.” In “Harbor Park at Dusk,” the “chop from a ferry’s wash tattle[s] up” “brief notes from xylophones and toy pianos.” Do these metaphors work? Read them closely. Tintinnabulum aims less to score an existing reality than to tune it continually to another key, and Beveridge has astute hearing.
In The Nation, Nicolas Liney reviews a new translation of Catullus (Catullus: Selected Poems, translated by Stephen Mitchell):
But fidelity to meter generally requires minor sacrifice. In the Latin, Catullus’ book is not just a “slim book of verse,” but also “elegant” (lepidum) and “new” (novum)—key terms for Catullus’ poetics, which here go up in smoke, as does his strictly material reference to the pumice stone (pumex, which Mitchell elides comfortably enough into “polished”), a tool that can smooth out edges and erase errors but is also used to soften skin, which introduces a whiff of the sexy and subversively effeminate. The struggle with translating Catullus is to find ways of conveying the full range of meanings that he manages to cram in, without losing his economy of expression or completely unraveling the complex knot of his language games. While Mitchell gets it just right more than once, we are often confronted with a slightly attenuated, two-dimensional Catullus.
[Catullus feels new at the present time beyond the way that all great art does because his work feels like the work of someone who has spent a decent amount of time on the internet. Probably a combination of the attention to self-presentation and its connection to the art (this is why Mitchell not translating Catullus 16 is disappointing), the politics, the brevity of most of his work, and the Hellenistic influence. (Liney: “It’s helpful to think of the creation of the Library of Alexandria as a paradigm shift equivalent to the invention of Google.”) —Steve]
In the Journal, Donna Rifkind reviews a book about Dorothy Parker’s time in Hollywood (Dorothy Parker in Hollywood, by Gail Crowther, October 15):
“It is time to take a fresh look at Parker and encompass the fullness of her achievements,” Ms. Crowther writes in the book’s epilogue. She deserves much credit for identifying Parker’s Hollywood years as a valuable subject. But she ventures no further than the threshold of assessment, offering only that Parker “paid the price for somehow never quite fitting into her time.” Really? Parker is pinned to her era like a moth on a board, as a figure all but epitomizing the idealism and anxieties of her American moment. Other vital questions that get only cursory attention offer invitations for future scholarship. Why does Parker continue to endure as an object of fascination? How best to appraise her film work in relation to her poems, stories, criticism? Was Parker wasting her abilities in Hollywood, as she herself believed, or is it possible that screenwriting was the apotheosis of her highly concentrated talent?
“Brevity is the soul of lingerie,” Parker famously observed. But of biography, not so much.
[Cf. on Parker’s reviews, as linked to in WRB—Feb. 3, 2024.]
N.B. (cont.):
- ranks the Rooney reviews. (Including her own.)
Bubble tea has “gone into hyperdrive” in China.
One for the train guys: the sixtieth anniversary of the first Japanese bullet train was Tuesday.
In defense of Alma Mahler.
New issues:
The Brooklyn Rail October 2024 [As linked to below.]
The Dial Issue 21: America
Liberties Volume 5 - Number 1 | Autumn 2024 [As linked to above.]
Local:
The 51st, a project started by former DCist staff, is now up and running.
This year’s Literary Hill Bookfest will take place today at North Hall from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The Friends of Petworth Library are having a used book sale there today from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Poem:
“Salem” by Robert Lowell
In Salem seasick spindrift drifts or skips
To canvas flapping on seaward panes
Until the knitting sailor stabs at ships
Nosing like sheep of Morpheus through his brain’s
Asylum. Seaman, seaman, how the draft
Lashes the oily slick about your head,
Beating up whitecaps! Seaman, Charon’s raft
Dumps its damned goods into the harbor-bed,—
There sewage sickens the rebellious seas.
Remember, seaman, Salem fishermen
Once hung their nimble fleets on the Great Banks.
Where was it that New England bred the men
Who quartered the Leviathan’s fat flanks
And fought the British Lion to his knees?
[You may have noticed that one thing about poems I like is consonance. This sonnet is incredible to read aloud, which is high on my list of “ways to decide if I like a poem.” Lowell's “Salem” is from his 1946 collection Lord Weary’s Castle.
The first lines repetitive hiss of the breaking waves and of the sand and water droplets skidding across the dock. The S carries through, reminding me constantly of the sickly chill of the windblown spray (spindrift) from the first line. It's persistent and a little dreadful. Then, the turn. Halfway through— “Dumps its damned goods into the harbor-bed.” Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Then an immediate return to the S, but we are left without a rhyme for “sewage sickens the rebellious seas” until the last line. As we wait for the rhyme to conclude, Lowell asks questions about the past. Do you remember? Where are these men? Where did they come from? Where have they gone? What are we left with, besides the salt spray on our lips? —Grace]
Upcoming books:
Verso | October 8
The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present
by Fredric Jameson
From the publisher: Fredric Jameson introduces here the major themes of French theory: existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, semiotics, feminism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. In a series of accessible lectures, Jameson places this effervescent period of thought in the context of its most significant political conjunctures, including the Liberation of Paris, the Algerian War, the uprisings of May ’68, and the creation of the EU.
The philosophical debates of the period come to life through anecdotes and extended readings of work by the likes of Sartre, Beauvoir, Fanon, Barthes, Foucault, Althusser, Derrida, Deleuze, groups like Tel Quel and Cahiers du Cinéma, and contemporary thinkers such as Rancière and Badiou. Eclectic, insightful, and inspired, Jameson’s seminars provide an essential account of an intellectual moment comparable in significance to the Golden Age of Athens, historically fascinating and of persistent relevance.
[We linked to an excerpt in WRB—Sept. 11, 2024.]
Also out Tuesday:
Coffee House Press: Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber
Princeton University Press: Shakespeare’s Tragic Art by Rhodri Lewis
Random House: Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst
Stanford University Press: New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age by Adam Kelly
What we’re reading:
Steve read more of The Historical Novel.
Critical notes:
Belinsky (quoted by Lukács in a discussion of Walter Scott’s “mediocre heroes”):
This has indeed to be the case in a work of purely epic nature, where the chief character serves merely as an external central hub round which the events unfold and where he may distinguish himself merely by general human qualities which earn our human sympathy; for the hero of the epic is life itself and not the individual. In epic, the individual is, so to speak, subject to the event; the event over-shadows the human personality by its magnitude and importance, drawing our attention away from him by the interestingness, diversity, and multiplicity of its images.
[True of the modernist epics Belinksy lived too early to see; true in a more interesting way of Paradise Lost. —Steve]
If the technics of this antimodern were unlimited in their capacity for oppression, brutality, and evil, for erasing the very understanding of the modern of what it meant to be human, one thing that linked Benjamin, Aragon, and Chtchelgov was the philosophical conviction, or instinct, that the totality had to be resisted, even chipped away, even defeated, by the fragment: the street, the sign, the name, the face, the aphorism, the evanescent, the ephemeral, the worthless, the unimportant, the meaningless. “What form do you suppose a life would take that was determined at a decisive moment precisely by the street song last on every one’s lips?”
Shakespeare:
Polonius: What follows then, my lord?
Hamlet: Why,
As by lot, God wot
and then, you know,
It came to pass, as most like it was—
the first row of the pious chanson will show you
more, for look where my abridgment comes.
[Cf. Ophelia before she dies, or, while we are on the subject:
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
. . . .
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
—Steve]
Richard Serra (in conversation with Hal Foster)
How has my work been assimilated, if at all? Probably by misinterpretation. Did some people take advantage of it in ways I couldn’t foresee? Yes. Do I think the work is open enough to allow people to deal with it in a lot of different ways? I hope so. Sculptors and architects will figure it out; some performers, dancers, and others will find it useful—or again that’s my hope. Duchamp said that you’re lucky if you get thirty or forty years. Warhol said all we get is fifteen minutes. Who knows? The fact is you can’t know. In the end I still believe that matter imposes its form on form; that’s why it’s important for me to stick with materials I understand.
- on the poems of winter:
Wallace Stevens’ most famous poem, “The Snow Man,” owes much to Dickinson, I think. The poem remarks how “One must have a mind of winter” to regard “the frost and the boughs/ of the pine-trees crusted with snow” or the “distant glimmer of the January sun” and avoid “any misery in the sound of the wind.” Being able to behold winter without projecting my own feelings as an interested party requires unusual mental discipline. Maybe I’ve spent too much time with Kierkegaard and am losing the world to my own quest for real inwardness. The inwardness should let me see the thing itself, I think. But “The Snow Man” challenges us to remove ourselves from our observations, but it also locates a particular problem in doing so when it comes to winter. At the same time, the beauty of Stevens’ descriptions of the winter landscape—“junipers shagged with ice,” “spruces rough in the distant glitter”—is hard to register as beauty when we are reminded of the chill wind “blowing in the same bare place.” The winter mind tries in earnest to get out of the way, and let the snow be the snow. Even if I have to be earnestly invested in my own life, can’t I make this attempt at gelassenheit? Stevens concludes “The Snow Man” by suggestion that winter teaches us the necessary limits of our own thinking, which is a prelude to genuine beholding: “And nothing himself behold / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
Philip Larkin in an unfinished poem:
Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.