WRB—Sept. 14, 2024
Few critics have even admitted that the Washington Review of Books is the primary problem, and its Managing Editors only secondary. And the Managing Editors have had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in the Managing Editors a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization.
N.B.:
WRB Presents will return this Tuesday, September 17, with an evening featuring readings from Helen Chandler, K. T. Mills, Samuel Kimbriel, and Kayla Jean. The Managing Editors have graciously excerpted, as always, samples of their writing so you will know the quality of our guests. Being convinced of this, you will join us by signing up at the link below:
The next monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “Can we choose our beliefs?”, will take place on Saturday, September 28. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In Aeon, Joseph M. Keegin on America’s nineteenth-century Platonists and Hegelians:
Members of the Platonist school of Illinois came from a range of intellectual and religious backgrounds; no creedal or confessional orientation was necessary for joining, and members were free to interpret Plato and other philosophic texts in whichever direction they took them. They operated no less than three journals—The Platonist, Bibliotheca Platonica, and the Journal of the American Akademe—and at their final meeting in 1982, 433 of the town’s fewer than 20,000 residents had at one time been members.
The ultimate object of the group’s common effort was not the production of scholarship, but rather the production of good human lives through a project of collective education and edification. Jones held regular public lectures, and was famous for his “wonderful insight into Platonian philosophy.” But the primary form of group engagement was the seminar, in which members made contributions to a shared discussion guided by a common object of study—a dialogue of Plato, perhaps, or a work of Neoplatonic philosophy.
[I love America. —Steve]
In the Berlin Review, A. V. Marraccini on Monet and planes:
A sideways-ness applies to this same intimacy, to the glancing of light off of Giverny’s ponds. As for Rilke with nénuphar, there’s no lower deck cutoff, no closure of the self with refusal; the MiG-29 can fly low, engines as open as lily blossoms, closer to mountains, cliffs, and cities than any other comparable fighter plane. That is what supermaneuverability means; an “angles fighter” can take the edges of the landscape in stride, accommodate their difficulties, and render them an advantage. The way for me to know this, is in sideways language too: the manual for the MiG-29 is only declassified as the MiG-29E, the export version once flown by NVA pilots in East Germany, then used as part of a reunified German air force in the 1990s and translated again into English for American fighter pilots, who traveled to Germany to try them. NATO MiGs have a slightly different weapons and cockpit configuration. It’s the translated one we came to know; the normalized exotic, nénuphar from Sanskrit into French into German and English, those lilies on the wall at MoMA in big fat, round to ovoid, almost alien strokes, because immediacy has no literal translation either. They may look like lilies, too, but not if you come too close to the wall, when the red-pink blotch in the middle is like a targeting acquisition circle lit up and ready for missile lock. Then they look like they might be abstraction, infinite ripple, nothing that resolves into lilies at all, but remain just paint.
[Get close enough and it’s all the medium—paint—but it’s also all technique. As is flying, so they tell me. —Steve]
In The London Magazine, Kira McPherson on not using speech marks in fiction:
The need for clarity in such a novel can sometimes lead to an overreliance on language that was previously invisible: he says, she says, he smiles, she laughs. Speech tags become a de facto punctuation, pacing the dialogue, identifying the speaker and cueing the reader’s response. This is especially true when adhering to the perspective of one character. So while Henry James can say of Isabel Archer that she should “awaken on the reader’s part an impulse more tender and more purely expectant,” a contemporary author observing a strict third-person limited point of view in one of her very successful novels might have to say, “She laughed and covered her face.”
Deference to the point of view character means that we cannot be sure we are seeing anyone else as they are, as might be the case with clear dialogue or other modes of direct address. Even letters, emails and text messages tend to occupy a more marginal position in these novels, giving the reader a break from undifferentiated prose rather than fuelling the plot with the drama of conflicting perspectives, as found in a classic like Dangerous Liaisons or a more recent metafictional novel like Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013). The conflict between Marianne and Connell may seem unbridgeable, but the ambience of the novel lightens the prognosis: despite their apparent differences, the overall experience of being these characters is remarkably similar.
Reviews:
In the Literary Review of Canada,
reviews a memoir by a middle-aged woman (I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris, by Glynnis MacNicol, June):Celebrating her birthday at the beach with friends, MacNicol comes close to facing such doubts. “I sometimes have to work to understand my life not as one long missed opportunity,” she concedes. “The writing career not entered into earlier, when pay rates could actually support a life. The self-knowledge, so long in coming. The sex not had. The love not given or taken. But not today.” That choice —“not today”— defines I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself. It precludes storyline, character development, resolution. In its wake, there are no revelations, no insights, no transformations. In this context, what pleasure can be found is a distraction from answering life’s more pressing questions. Pleasure is not a radical act here but a diversion.
[Cf. various reviews of similar books. “Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris” has a nice ring to it, although I understand that this is the usual reason for Americans to go to Paris. —Steve]
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mitch Therieau reviews Greil Marcus’ new book (What Nails It, August):
Maybe this is the key to understanding the difference between public scholarship and criticism. Public scholarship claims authority through credentials: a gesture which the dreaded words “Historian here!”—portents of incoming truth bombs—reduce to its barest form. Criticism, by contrast, claims authority through style. The unnamed teenager who interrupted The Pirates of Blood River was just some kid, and yet through his bombastic performance, he claimed the right to pronounce judgment and “nominate” the movie for its ignominious prize. Stylish criticism, like good art, gives sensible form to feelings we didn’t think or realize we had. Or, as Marcus says of an overwhelming encounter with Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin, which temporarily short-circuited his belief that popular culture contains expressions of the human condition equally significant to those in classical high culture: “What art does, maybe what it does most completely, is to tell us, make us feel, that what we think we know we don’t.” Criticism gives us concepts for understanding these alien feelings, their sources, their consequences.
[We linked to what I gather is an essay adapted from the book in WRB—Dec. 13, 2023. The first generation of rock critics certainly made their claim for legitimacy with their style, but Marcus came the closest to scholarly endeavor—not in credentials but in approach. Who else would have written Mystery Train (1975), which is, one, a book, and two, a book intent on tracing the lineage of rock music? In a very different context, Kenner writes “Pound omits, omits, but knows what he is omitting and can restore on demand, but behind Eliot’s resonances there is frequently nothing to restore.” Most of the first rock critics (especially Christgau) were of the school of Eliot, reviewing by private resonances, but Marcus has always been after something different. Any of them could have written the first four words of Marcus’ review of Self Portrait (1970). Only Marcus would have written the rest. —Steve]
Two in our sister publication on the Hudson:
Kathryn Hughes reviews a collection of entries from women’s diaries (Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries, edited by Sarah Gristwood, February):
Indeed, such is Gristwood’s clever editing that at times her diarists appear to be calling to each other across the centuries. On November 29 Ellen Weeton’s 1818 pious exhortation, “Oh never, never let me rest, my God, when my heart wanders from Thee,” is followed by Nella Last, another North Country diarist, who in 1939 declares herself baffled by a neighbor who “prays to God to strike Hitler dead. Cannot help thinking if God wanted to do that he would not have waited till Mrs. Helm asked him to do so.” Under June 28 we hear from Hannah Cullwick (1871), a kitchen maid who relishes her heavy manual labor and is reluctant to accept her employer’s offer of marriage because “it’s too much like being a woman.” (Reader, she did marry him—eventually.) This is capped by Anne Lister, the cross-dressing Yorkshire landowner, who reports delightedly on the same day in 1818, “The people generally remark, as I pass along, how much I am like a man.” Gristwood doesn’t include editorial matter between her extracts, nor does she use footnotes, a decision that trusts the readers to make the connections for themselves.
[Cf. ’s review of Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries (February), linked to in WRB—Jan 27, 2024; “The champions of Oulipo explicitly emphasized syntax over semantics, and Heti’s work, too, declares itself to be an adventure in form.” —Steve]
Alice Kaplan reviews a new translation of the last volume of Michel Leiris’ autobiographical project (Frail Riffs: The Rules of the Game, Volume 4, 1976, translated by Richard Sieburth, April):
Yet reading Frail Riffs, appearing in English nearly fifty years after its initial French publication, I realize how much our attraction to autobiography owes to Leiris. In his existential manifesto “On Literature Considered as a Bullfight,” a preface to the 1946 edition of Manhood, he contemplates the bombed-out port of Le Havre and wonders what difference an intimate memoir could possibly make when the world is in ruins. To succeed, he argues, writing needs to show us at least the shadow of bulls’ horns—it needs to find words that put the author in danger.
It wasn’t clear to Leiris in 1946 where the bull’s horns would come from. Like so many intellectual men of his generation, he was subject throughout his life to moments of high drama and low depression, including a suicide attempt after a failed love affair and an erotic fascination with a local prostitute during his army service in Algeria. He harbored a series of aching dissatisfactions—with the shape of his body, with the limits of his prose, with his political misjudgments. His melancholy is offset by moments of levity—affection for his tailor, stories about walking his dog, Puck, to stay in shape. Not the least of his achievements is to have created stories and images of himself strangely devoid of narcissistic self-display.
In 3:AM Magazine,
reviews Gillian Linden’s new novel (Negative Space, April):There are other questions to be asked, as for instance what Linden is going for in her bureaucratic scenes, a confab with Robin about the possible misconduct by Jeremy, the older teacher, then a more formal meeting with Robin and Tonya of Human Resources. These are subtly styled, with initially plausible dialogue and manners, followed by the beginnings of a Seinfeldian discourse on the difference between a “nudge” and a “bump” (while the narrator harbors the more accurate “nuzzle”), and Robin’s odd, unprofessional impertinence which might remind readers of office functionaries from early Evelyn Waugh (Scoop or Vile Bodies). There are hints of nightmare or dystopia here, something other than just light satire. Linden has her cultural targets set out, like the school’s requirement that its teachers write “narratives” that gently explain why Jasper or Olivia got a B minus, or the parents’ specialized claims that Aria has a perfect memory or that Louisa is “unimaginative in a clinical sense”, but it seems there is something different and disquieting going on, something beyond the affluent folly, the COVID or the curriculum wars.
In Engelsberg Ideas, Mathew Lyons reviews a book about Italian MSG [I think I got that one from a food guy on YouTube. —Steve] (A Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavored Western Cuisine, by Christopher Beckman, October 1):
The British, as a result of their own imperial adventures, picked up on the anchovy’s potential in sauces and condiments. Traders in East Asia seemingly first encountered ketchup as a fish sauce on Java and Sumatra; the word itself derives from the Hokkien language of Fujian and Taiwan. The first British recipe, adapted to the native tradition of pickling, appears in Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife in 1727. Smith’s recipe contains 12 or 14 anchovies. A century later, William Kitchiner was using a quarter of a pound of them in his “Tomata Catsup.” One eighteenth-century ketchup recipe boasted that it would keep for 20 years. Clearly, these were puissant sauces in more ways than one, which seems to be how the British liked it. It’s no wonder that John Burgess’ Genuine Anchovy Paste accompanied Nelson to the Battle of the Nile and Captain Scott to the Antarctic.
Italian anchovy sauces, meanwhile, were a different kettle of fish. Giovanni Francesco Vasselli’s version, highly regarded in seventeenth-century Italy, paired the fish with vinegar, cinnamon, cloves, pepper, candied orange zest and a kind of spiced biscuit. A few decades later Antonio Latini, chef to a cardinal, developed a sauce which he named “Little Sassy One.” It captures, Beckman writes, “the ambiguous status of anchovies that often followed them throughout history: flavorful, but rather common and loose.” True, but surely—side-eyeing Britain’s fondness for prosaically named, punchy condiments—there is something of the national character in there, too.
[The best-named British condiment (also containing anchovies) is, no doubt, “Patum Peperium: The Gentleman’s Relish.” I would also note that Worcestershire sauce features in the excellent Moxie cocktail Chris occasionally besmirches in these pages. —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
The contenders for the National Book Award for Fiction have been announced.
- laments the fate of the Internet Archive.
Historical fiction is in vogue.
Jackson Browne on “These Days.”
“The argument for meeting famous people” [Are Managing Editors of the Washington Review of Books famous people? —Steve] [In the future, everyone will be a Managing Editor for fifteen minutes. —Chris]
The world’s oldest cookbook.
New issues:
Literary Review of Canada October 2024 [As linked to above.]
Meanjin 83.3 Spring 2024 [The southern hemisphere, you know. —Steve]
Local:
The Northeast Neighborhood Library is having a used book sale from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. today.
Poem:
“Dirge” by George Darley
Prayer unsaid, and mass unsung,
Deadman’s dirge must still be rung:
Dingle-dong, the dead-bells sound!
Mermen chant his dirge around!Wash him bloodless, smooth him fair,
Stretch his limbs, and sleek his hair:
Dingle-dong, the dead-bells go!
Mermen swing them to and fro!In the wormless sands shall he
Feast for no foul gluttons be:
Dingle-dong, the dead-bells chime!
Mermen keep the tone and time!We must with a tombstone brave
Shut the shark out from his grave:
Dingle-dong, the dead-bells toll!
Mermen dirgers ring his knoll!Such a slab will we lay o’er him
All the dead shall rise before him!
Dingle-dong, the dead-bells boom!
Mermen lay him in his tomb!
[Needless to say this is not escaping “Full fathom five,” and the explanation the poem feels obligated to provide doesn’t help. (Can you explain what “Those are pearls that were his eyes” means, as a physical process? I can’t. It isn’t the point.) But it still has its charms; the frequent sibilants of “Wash him bloodless, smooth him fair, / Stretch his limbs, and sleek his hair” sound like the water flowing over the dead man and purifying him. Also clever (and not trying to domesticate “Full fathom five”) is the presentation of nature’s treatment of the body. It serves as a substitute for religious observance (“Prayer unsaid, and mass unsung”); the “wormless sands” and the exclusion of the grave-robbing shark echo the place “where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.” The preservation of the body becomes the proof of incorruption after death.
I learned about Darley from Housman, who uses another passage of his about the sea to make fun of Swinburne by comparison. Darley, he says, is an author “few of you know and most of you never heard of,” and this a century ago; hard to say his work would justify another fate, but sometimes something valuable turns up in obscurities. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
William Morrow | September 17
Rejection
by Tony Tulathimutte
From the publisher: Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.
In “The Feminist,” a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics” spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,” a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.
These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.
Also out Tuesday:
Hogarth: A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell
NYRB: Overstaying by Ariane Koch, translated by Damion Searls
Princeton University Press: Broadcasting Fidelity: German Radio and the Rise of Early Electronic Music by Myles W. Jackson
Two Dollar Radio: Us Fools by Nora Lange
What we’re reading:
Steve read more of The Pound Era.
Critical notes:
- reviews the reviews of Garth Greenwell’s new book (Small Rain, September 3) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Aug. 31, 2024; we linked to a review there and in WRB—Sept. 4, 2024, and we linked to a review and an interview with Greenwell in WRB—Sept. 7, 2024.]:
This is why I don’t believe what critics say about a book. Because guess what—nine out of ten sophisticated readers do not enjoy reading Proust. They do not enjoy Gaddis or late Henry James. And yet nine out of ten book critics claim to love Greenwell’s book, which is equally difficult and (in my opinion) much less rewarding. That simply doesn’t make sense!
Listen, book critics are not special. The only difference between me and a book critic is that if a critic picks up a book and knows immediately that it’s terrible, they have to force themselves to keep reading it, because they’re paid to. Maybe the process of forcing yourself to read a book somehow trains you to like it? I have no idea. But nobody else experiences books that way. The rest of us only read books that we enjoy reading. We pick them up, we start reading them, we find the experience enjoyable, and we keep reading.
- on “the great American malaise”:
Despite the hideousness of the American empire, at home, there was a sense of growth, transformation, self-renewal, and originality that could redeem American life and suggest new pathways for it. There was always a sense of invention and play: of radical Whitmanian originality. There have been many new chapters added to Leaves of Grass, covertly, by other writers, as Whitman would have wanted.
Since 9/11, that energy has been subject to great entropy. Now, and this wouldn’t have been true thirty years ago, there's no real American equivalent, for instance, to the career of Jon Fosse or Annie Ernaux. Eccentrics don’t get to build careers, don’t get to write books, until the broader public notices. The publishing world, with its immense resources relative to small publishers, cannibalizes and displaces anything that's too radical or weird. The literary publication system doesn’t want to call its own bullshit—doesn’t want readers, or rather, book buyers, to know there's an “outside.”
The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.
The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.
[The first thing I want to say is that this isn’t my day job. (Subscribe to the WRB!) But, as the material situation goes, things have never been good. Ezra Pound spent much of his time in London and Paris trying to scrounge up money for his friends. At various points in their lives Melville and Whitman made their living doing something other than writing. This is lamentable, but, barring some sort of Great Awakening to literature, it is probably unsolvable. Maecenas has his reputation for a reason.
“Our lives are stuck . . . because nothing new has happened for thirty years except for the phone, and because the phone, in turn, reduces our collective ingenuity,” Sure—I’m pretty willing to accept any anti-phone claim anyone wants to make. But whoever said that things should happen in life? If they happen more frequently in the past couple centuries, it is because the rate of technological progress has changed; the human heart has not. If we want something new in an age where the phone is, in fact, distracting us and making us forget, all we have to do is remember and so discover. Latin poetry was vivified by its encounter with Greek forms and models; the troubadours by the music of Spain; Chaucer by France and Italy; Italy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by classical antiquity; Romanticism by (its idea of) the medieval world, various modernisms by all kinds of archaizing impulses, the postmodern novel by the eighteenth-century novel, and so on, and so on. I don’t know what it will be—if I did I would be at work on it—but what we need is somewhere in there. All we have to do is find it. —Steve]