1. crazy review of books
2. review of books in turmoil
3. review of books out of balance
4. review of books disintegrating
5. a review of books that calls for another way of living
Links:
In The New Statesman, George Monaghan on Joyce Carol Oates:
There is something hard to know about Oates, both because she has said so much and because she says so little. She much sooner asks about your life, family and reading than muses on her own life. When some of her letters were published by her biographer Greg Johnson, she couldn’t read them. “Would you like to read something written by yourself when you were much younger? I think you’d probably be cringing! It’s the sort of thing that is ephemeral—like who cares?”
About her past words, too, there is reticence. She once said a fine fate for writers is dying “with one’s romantic fantasies intact”: what were hers? “I don’t know that I really had any.” But didn’t she say her first stories differed from Hemingway’s because they were “much more romantic”? “I never was writing romance in my fiction.” What about the end of Finnegans Wake, that she reads to her students for its “glorious,” “heartbreaking,” “almost overwhelmingly beautiful emotion” as a character grows old and changes from her husband—has she ever felt like that? “I don’t know how to answer that. That’s a mythic character, not really a specific character.”
[Hard to pin anyone down like this, I think. You can build up a sense of someone out of ephemeral remarks, but asking them about specific things they’ve long since forgotten they said seems designed to get the response “yeah, I don’t know, I guess, maybe.” (Or, in the case of the line about Hemingway, “I have no idea what I was talking about there. It must have made sense at the time.”)
And Oates’ preference for asking about other people’s life instead of thinking about hers is probably unavoidable for anyone who has written as much fiction as she does. Not for nothing are many of her plots taken from real events. Thinking about your own life isn’t going to give you new raw material for plots. That has to be sought out elsewhere. (Perhaps even on Twitter—maybe it will take an author born in 1938 to finally give us the great novel of that place.) —Steve]
In the Wall Street Journal, Kelly Franklin on Emily Dickinson’s “Death sets a Thing significant”:
Great lyric poems chart experience, bringing us through a process of thought or feeling that moves and goes somewhere. Dickinson offers no static picture of grief, but a poetic dramatization of grieving. She spends three stanzas working herself up to expressing her pain. Was she hiding behind generalities? We do this ourselves: “All good things come to an end,” “She’s in a better place.” Anything to avoid confessing, “I am broken by this loss.” Sharp-eyed Dickinson shows us our defense mechanism. Then, when her speaker is ready, she moves beyond it to admit personal suffering. Then the final utterance of grief: “Now—when I read—I read not— / For interrupting Tears— / Obliterate the Etchings / Too costly for Repairs—.” The poem ends not with aphoristic words but with tears interrupting words altogether, blinding the speaker as she tries to read, and blurring—maybe washing away—the friend’s irreplaceable pencil marks left on the pages.
[Did the editors at the Journal see that over at the NYT they aim their pieces about specific poems at seven-year-olds who don’t know what a poem is and decide that this left them an opening? Good for them.
The archetypal Dickinson move is defamiliarization; language extremely simple that somehow requires careful parsing, images both intuitive and bizarre. It even extends to little phrases that normally attract no notice—the “here and there” in the penultimate stanza is such a concession, and comes even before the poem tells us what it concedes. All that’s left of the dead person are desultory traces. —Steve]
In Engelsberg Ideas, Alexandra Wilson on Jean Renoir:
There are party scenes too, of course. In his book City of Light, the cultural historian Rupert Christiansen characterizes mid-nineteenth-century Paris as “a ceaseless carnival,” which acted as “catnip for the strait-laced, the pious and the hypocritical.” When painting a group of revelers on a small islet on the Seine in La Grenouillère, Renoir himself remarked that: “It was a perpetual party, and what an assortment of people!” The centerpiece of this exhibition is Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, a painting familiar from countless greetings cards, mugs and jigsaws, yet on display in Britain for the first time. Seeing it in person, you admire Renoir’s vivid evocation of movement and hubbub, imagining the raised voices and music of the dance hall drowning out the distant hum of construction noise from Paris, into which the village of Montmartre had only recently been incorporated.
You also notice that the characters in the foreground, some of them Renoir’s real-life-friends, seem oddly disconnected. Each person looks wrapped up in their own world and Renoir has not succeeded in drawing a convincing glance or conversation between any of them. This impression is repeated throughout the exhibition, as you gradually begin to realize that painting after painting features blank-faced protagonists, who stare ahead or look right past each other.
[If you start looking for this in crowd shots you see it everywhere. —Steve]
[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:
A Poem by George Hebert and a pun
We need real sickos (in both senses) to write about sickness
Koyaanisqatsi (1982) in praise of the modern world
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.
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]
