And it is my conviction that the schools are responsible for the gross foolishness of our young men, because, in them, they see or hear nothing at all of the Washington Review of Books, but only pirates standing in chains upon the shore, tyrants scribbling edicts in which sons are ordered to behead their own fathers; responses from oracles, delivered in time of pestilence, ordering the immolation of three or more virgins; every word a honied drop, every period sprinkled with poppy-seed and sesame.
Links:
In The Paris Review, David Schurman Wallace goes to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival:
At Caesar, an older man—silver-haired in a purple polo shirt, still vigorous—had been sitting behind us, discoursing to his two women companions. “When they talk about ‘woke,’” he said, “it means that they feel defensive. They feel bad about themselves, and then they want to take it out on other people.” Maybe, though when I watch these modern renditions, I feel the drip of self-satisfaction more than anything. As long as I’ve been going to see Shakespeare, he has been a harbor for the politically correct. This says something about liberal politics and its seizure of the canon, sure, but it also says something about the playwright’s essential generosity. Call it the “dyer’s hand,” that ability to remove a singular interpretation and let all the dueling voices echo and intertwine. Diversity is inside the plays from the beginning—anyone might inhabit the words and infuse them with their own voice. But in Fat Ham, a direct monologue about inherited intergenerational trauma lands with the thud of received wisdom. The strange friction of Shakespeare’s thinking about fathers and sons is reduced to a formula.
The play winds up with a happy ending (and a drag show to boot), as the characters ask us if we deserve better than tragedy. We’ve been doing this, too, as long as Shakespeare has been performed, perhaps most famously in a 1681 revision of King Lear by Nahum Tate: Cordelia marries Edgar, and everyone can feel good on the way home. I think there’s still something more subversive in Shakespeare’s protean originals. Isn’t Hamlet a little on the side of madness of revenge? Maybe “not to be?” is more than the rhetorical question that we take it for. I’m still waiting for the production that tells me that suicide is painless.
[“Generosity” is one way to put it. “Negative capability” is another. Dr. Johnson put it a third:
It is incident to him to be now and then entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express, and will not reject; he struggles with it a while, and if it continues stubborn, comprises it in words such as occur, and leaves it to be disentangled and evolved by those who have more leisure to bestow upon it.
Adapting Shakespeare provides the opportunity to disentangle and evolve. And his work frequently has no idea what it is about; Hamlet, when enumerating some of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, comes up with
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office,
All bad, yes, but on a list of Hamlet’s biggest problems by Act 3, Scene 1 “the pangs of dispriz’d love” and “the law’s delay” are not particularly near the top. Perhaps Shakespeare wrote this speech for something else and pasted it in (a lot of Hamlet makes more sense as a collage), but, wherever it came from, it speaks to the source of Shakespeare’s generosity. He is always trying to stuff absolutely everything into his plays—hence the problem plays, hence moments like “Kill Claudio”—because he trusts that, as long as everything in his plays is good and true to life, it will all come together in the end. To quote Dr. Johnson’s preface again:
Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind, but in one composition. Almost all his plays are divided between serious and ludicrous characters, and, in the successive evolutions of the design, sometimes produce seriousness and sorrow, and sometimes levity and laughter.
That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature. The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing. That the mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy cannot be denied, because it includes both in its alterations of exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life, by shewing how great machinations and slender designs may promote or obviate one another, and the high and the low co-operate in the general system by unavoidable concatenation.
Dr. Johnson is certainly correct to say that all things are connected, but it is also true to the experience of life. A lot of things happen, and they all happen without regard for whatever genre people may imagine they live in. Shakespeare composes with this knowledge.
Patrick Kurp had some notes on Dr. Johnson’s definition of “composition” the other day:
Dr. Johnson identifies nine meanings for composition in his Dictionary. The first—“the act of forming an integral of various dissimilar parts”—recalls Aristotle’s notion that perceiving similarities among dissimilar things constitutes genius. A basic human drive is to find pattern in the seemingly random.
The amount of situations and incidents and ideas Shakespeare fits into his plays affords him the opportunity to connect them all.
I do not personally have any Shakespeare modernization horror stories, but I did once go to a (very good) production of Macbeth in which all the characters were dressed like bikers. If this was intended to convey that the governance of eleventh-century Scotland was basically rule by the kinds of people we would now find in biker gangs, I did not pick up on that at the time.
And I am not sure that liberals seized the canon (the canon! All those dead white men!) as much as they found it in the gutter. As the titular character in J R (1975) says:
I mean how many messages are you suppose to get acrost in this here hour where it takes this band half of it to play this one symphony for these here people which aren’t hungry where this other crap takes like three minutes each, I mean what do I care what they play there! Like we’re paying them for this here whole hour aren’t we? I mean if they could get through these here symphonies in like five minutes where we’re getting this bunch of messages in we’re paying for I mean what do I care what they play! I mean who’s paying them to play all this here great music these people which aren’t hungry like at Russia? where the government makes everybody listen to it?
—Steve]
In The New Statesman, Ian Thomson on Arvo Pärt at 90:
Pärt first came to notice in the West in 1977 with Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, written for strings and tolling tubular bell. With its overlapping sheets of sound, this mesmeric six-minute work developed Pärt’s now famous technique of tintinnabuli (Latin for “little bells”), where melody acquires a steady-state, bell-like resonance. The compositional method is not to be taken literally—it is a poetical metaphor—but Pärt’s best-known works since the mid-1970s, whether neo-Baroque instrumental scores such as Fratres or large-scale choral works like Berliner Messe, were composed with a doleful sound of bells in mind.
. . .
For eight years until 1976 he wrote little of consequence other than soundtrack music, though he immersed himself in the works of Dante, and filled notebooks with time signatures, bar lines and quotation from the Psalms, synagogue cantillation and classic vocal polyphony. In Johannes Ockeghem’s hypnotic fifteenth-century Requiem, Pärt found an aesthetic of purity and reduction that changed utterly the way he thought about music.
[Thomson talks about Pärt leaving behind “the dense tangle and complexity of modernism,” but I would say—distinctions like this always being a little vague—that there are many modernisms, not all of which are tangled and complex. The obsession with bells links Pärt to Debussy and Ravel (my favorite piano piece by the latter is “La vallée des cloches”—“The Valley of the Bells”) and their incorporation of gamelan music into their work. And going back to some of the oldest music we have is in line with Guy Davenport on modernism’s discovery of the archaic:
What is most modern in our time frequently turns out to be the most archaic. The sculpture of Brancusi belongs to the art of the Cyclades in the ninth century B.C. Corbusier’s buildings in their Cubist phase look like the white clay houses of Anatolia and Malta.
This kind of archaism emerged in music later; we might take up Davenport’s formulation and say that the music of Pärt, or of other minimalists, sounds like Pérotin. Steve Reich has been explicit about that debt:
This is an idea which has had an enormous effect on me. The most obvious piece is a piece I wrote in 1970, Four Organs, which is all about short chord gets long.
I wrote that in my music notebook—I woke up in the middle of the night: “short chord goes long,” back to bed. And then I spent several months working out the piece. It never would have happened if I hadn’t heard Pérotin.
“Short chord gets long”—“eternity in an hour,” making timelessness out of sound in time.
I will confess that I am not sure what to make of Thomson’s decision to refer to Pärt’s “sheets of sound,” using a phrase coined to describe the wild arpeggiation of John Coltrane’s soloing, but the directions it points fascinate me. —Steve]
Reviews:
In 4Columns, Brian Dillon reviews a book about zoos (Animal Stories, by Kate Zambreno, September 16):
If this were all Zambreno had done—tracing a certain history of colonial and commercial exploitation of animals, and some of the ways writers have given us to think about that shameful history—then Animal Stories would be an interesting exercise in cultural-natural history. But this is also for Zambreno an intensely personal endeavor, in which they “report” on their visits to the zoos of New York, before and after pandemic lockdowns. What exactly is an adult, and a parent, looking at when they tour a zoo with a child or two? A memory of their own early trips to the zoo, and some hope of passing on—what? Horror, pity, laughter, at best a curiosity ill-served by fences and moats? Profound questions animate “Zoo Studies,” but Zambreno often stops a train of thought or inquiry before answers appear, sections ending in rhetorical questions—they may as well be speaking to a lion. No doubt this is intentional, and perhaps a way of setting themself at odds with the writers they quote: all too willing to pronounce.
[I go to zoos basically entirely for the peacocks—the last time I went I think I spent as much time at the peacock exhibit as I did at all other exhibits combined. The purpose of the zoo, then, is to let me see the peacocks. The purpose of all the other exhibits at the zoo is to entice other people to visit, thereby keeping the zoo in operation and enabling me to see the peacocks. (I should also say that where I currently live there are tons of wild turkeys, which are the American equivalent of peacocks, running around—I see them from my window basically every day. The element of surprise makes it more fun than the zoo.)
While I have never taken a kid to the zoo, “at best a curiosity” seems to me to sell it too short. Some of the animals there can still inspire awe even when in an enclosure and behind a fence. I was originally going to quote the most famous poem about a tiger, but then I remembered that the second-most famous references a cage:
The tiger
He destroyed his cage
Yes
YES
The tiger is out
Where did Nael, age 6, get the idea of a tiger in a cage? A zoo, I assume. (Do people still go to the circus?) —Steve]
In the Journal, Kathryn Hughes reviews a biography of Charlotte Brontë (The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life, by Graham Watson, August) [The Upcoming book in WRB—July 30, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Aug. 16, 2025.]:
Despite her foreboding, Gaskell, the author of such novels as Cranford and North and South, was genuinely surprised that her biography riled so many. As a writer of fiction she was used to thinking of her characters as subject to her will, so it was disconcerting to find them stepping out of The Life of Charlotte Brontë to complain about the way they had been treated. Patrick Brontë, who had initially urged Gaskell to tell the unvarnished truth about his daughter’s life—“No quailing Mrs. Gaskell! No drawing back!”—was dismayed to find that she had included anecdotes about his terrible temper, including the time he had rolled up the hearth rug and thrown it in the fire. Meanwhile, Nicholls was disturbed that so many of his wife’s letters had been reproduced verbatim in Gaskell’s book in a manner he thought “little short of desecration.”
[A novelist who discovers that all her characters are mad at her would be a great bit. I’d be mad too; going through life thinking that you were a real person only to discover that you were, in fact, a character in a novel would be pretty humiliating. I can’t decide if it would be worse to be in a bad novel or a good novel. It would be a further humiliation to be associated with a bad novel, but if you were in a good novel the chances that the novelist has you dead to rights are much higher. (Imagine Emma Bovary complaining to Flaubert about the way he portrayed her.) Maybe the problem is with the novel, period—or with being the creation of the sort of person who writes novels. I’m sure that, if you told Achilles that he was going to appear in a novel that people would never stop reading, he’d have been much less enthused about the whole κλέος ἄφθιτον thing. Epic poetry—that’s where you want to show up. —Steve]
In the Literary Review of Canada, James Chatto reviews a book about menus (Tastes and Traditions: A Journey Through Menu History, by Nathalie Cooke, June):
Cooke saves many of her most interesting discoveries for her final chapter, entitled “Riddle Me This: Menus That Intrigue.” Here we find eighteenth-century English “Enigmatic Bills of Fare” and nineteenth-century American “Conundrum Suppers,” both designed to entertain dinner guests by disguising the names of dishes as riddles to be solved. “The First Temptation in a Small Blast of Wind,” for example, was an apple puff. Such deliberate acts of obfuscation lead Cooke into a consideration of the persistence of “menu French” on English and American cartes du jour, “inhibiting all but those diners familiar with ‘la langue de Molière’ from understanding and visualizing dishes clearly.” From there, she offers a lengthy analysis of Alchemist, the revered restaurant in Copenhagen created by the visionary chef Rasmus Munk. Dinner there consists of up to fifty courses and can last five or six hours, involving live music, video, and theatre. Munk’s food is frequently camouflaged as something else or used as provocative metaphor. Ironically, while customers have access to a massive wine list, presented on a digital tablet, Alchemist has no menu.
[While attending a “Conundrum Supper” sounds exceptionally annoying, attending a six-hour dinner where food is used as provocative metaphor sounds even more annoying. But this goofiness with food has a long history. The medieval era was full of dubiously clever presentations and elaborate symbolic displays with food. (Here is a YouTube video that follows a fourteenth-century recipe for making pork meatballs that look like apples or oranges.) Trimalchio’s banquet in the Satyricon is also full of ridiculous over-the-top presentations of each course and wacky attempts to make one kind of food look like a different kind of food—have people been reading the Satyricon for the last two millennia and coming to the conclusion that Trimalchio is a cool guy worthy of imitation? Actually, this would explain a lot. —Steve]
N.B.:
The latest in tree crime.
“Why everyone still wants to dress like Sade” [I’ll answer this one: because “Smooth Operator” is one of the coolest things anyone’s ever heard. —Steve]
“In Praise of Writing in Cemeteries” [“A dreaded sunny day / So I meet you at the cemetery gates / Keats and Yeats are on your side.” I’ve never been much for this kind of thing. I write at my desk. If I have an idea when I’m not at my desk I write it down and then turn it into something once I’m back at my desk. —Steve]
The architecture of Oxford’s libraries. [This opens by invoking Matthew Arnold’s “city of dreaming spires,” but I like the conversation in Jude the Obscure when Jude asks a workman which way to Thomas Hardy’s stand-in for Oxford:
“You can’t often see it in weather like this,” he said. “The time I’ve noticed it is when the sun is going down in a blaze of flame, and it looks like—I don’t know what.”
“The heavenly Jerusalem,” suggested the serious urchin.
“Ay—though I should never ha’ thought of it myself. . . . But I can’t see no Christminster to-day.”
I suppose you wouldn’t, in fact, think of it yourself. But then I went to a football school in the Midwest with a library that I would describe as “functional.” Apparently one of the basketball schools in the Midwest has a nice library, though:
You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when—like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by nineteenth-century English gentlemen—there appears . . . a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone.
—Steve]
New issue: Literary Review of Canada October 2025
Meanjin will cease publication after its final issue in December 2025. [Real shame. Good magazine. The Australians get up to lots of stuff that doesn’t get much coverage in American or British publications. —Steve]
Poem:
“Three Landscapes: Pt. 2: Greenbrier” by Maurice Manning
There was a vine whose leaves stay green
in wintertime, and thorns stick out
to help it slowly climb a tree.
In bare woods it’s like seeing a string
of green flags raised in the air.
The stubborn, heart-shaped leaves.
I think it is a lovely vine.
A blessing to see it in the woods,
high and silent and motionless.
Hillbillies who move to cities to find
a mindless job are sometimes called
briers, because they stick together.
And Greenbrier is also the name
of a place, a section of a county
in Kentucky where some of my people lived.
Every one of them is gone,
as though they never were alive.
But something of them is alive in me.
Maybe they’ve reached the City of God
and live in eternal light and joy,
or maybe they’re just down in the ground.
I think I think too much about it.
But to name a place for a vine adorned
with thorns is moving to me, something
green and stubborn climbs in my mind.
To name a place symbolically
with the symbol all around—well, that
is deep, and there’s some sadness in it.
[Greenbriers overran the yard of my childhood home, and I must admit I never had cause to think of them as lovely. These vines were first and foremost my antagonist. I lost several chunks of hair, and destroyed no small number of shirts, crawling through the underbrush in pursuit of errant toys. Gripes aside, in this poem, greenbriers are a counterpoint to departure: the hillbillies, fleeing toward a barren future, Manning’s ancestors, lost to heaven or the grave. But the briers, surrounding their namesake, remain. —K. T.]
Upcoming books:
Yale University Press | September 16
Into the Weeds
by Lydia Davis
From the publisher: When asked why she writes, Lydia Davis confesses that the question makes her uncomfortable. Maybe she would rather not know. Instead, Davis considers how she writes her stories, how other writers write, and what insights the how might provide into the why.
In this free-ranging exploration, Davis discovers that one reason she writes is for pleasure: the pleasure of encountering something that demands to be treated in language, of handling and manipulating the language into the form it ought to take, and, finally, of seeing a story exist where it didn’t exist before. As she observes the processes of some of the authors who interest her the most, she finds that there seem to be as many reasons to write as there are writers: to relive an experience, to share an experience, to articulate something one has not quite comprehended.
Reflecting on an eclectic mix of thinkers, including James Baldwin, Kate Briggs, Walter Raleigh, Christina Sharpe, Knut Hamsun, Grace Paley, Josep Pla, John Ashbery, and John Clare, Davis undertakes a clear-eyed, patient inquiry into the manifold reasons we choose to put pen to paper and begin something new.
Also out Tuesday:
Knopf: Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell [We linked to a review in WRB—Sept. 6, 2025.]
Simon & Schuster: History Matters by David McCullough, edited by Dorie McCullough Lawson and Michael Hill
Transit Books: Animal Stories by Kate Zambreno [We linked to a review earlier today.]
What we’re reading:
Steve is still reading The Faerie Queene.
Critical notes:
- Moul on a sixteenth-century English poem that references Dante:
So why does this quite popular bit of topical invective, composed in a rather “unliterary” style bound to irritate any ambitious humanists, refer directly to Dante, an author rarely alluded to in mid-sixteenth century England? As we’ve seen, Dante himself depicts usurers in Hell, and does so in a way—via their emblems or coats of arms—that links directly with the poem’s use of the Gresham grasshopper. In that sense, with Dante might just mean like in that bit in Dante where he meets the usurers. Alternatively, or additionally, there might possibly be an anti-Catholic connotation. A contemporary account of Gresham’s funeral, mentioned by Manning and Bray, implies that he was a Catholic at the time of his death, which fell within the five-year period in which England briefly reverted to Catholicism under Queen Mary I.
[Now, if you really want to talk about a crown in the gutter—topical invective in poetry. —Steve]
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