But it is reasonably true to say that the first generation of admirers of the Washington Review of Books is not only alive today, but consists mostly of readers who were not born when the first installments of the WRB were published, and became interested while the last ones were being written.
Links:
In The Paris Review, Srikanth Reddy interviews Eliot Weinberger:
Reddy: I take it you’re less interested in the tradition of the personal essay, from Montaigne onward, than the impersonal one?
Weinberger: People are always asking me about Montaigne when the essay comes up, and I just think, If you’re a contemporary American poet, you’re not asked about Edmund Spenser. It’s interesting to me that, in the twentieth century, there was this tremendous avant-garde in poetry and fiction, but the essay never moved beyond the eighteenth century. We’re stuck with a certain vision of what an essay should be, when in fact its possibilities seem limitless. That’s what attracted me to it—it was this kind of unexplored territory. I do find it dreary that these essayists end up writing about themselves so much. Even if they’re taking documentary information, they add a lot of personal response to it, which seems to be what the new quote, unquote lyric essay is. I have no interest in first-person investigation. Personally, I’ve never found myself an interesting person.
[The problem with these essayists writing about themselves so much is that they retreat into writing about themselves so they can avoid having to assert their authority on other subjects. I don’t dispute that the essayists have superior knowledge of their own experiences of things; but criticizing an object is one thing, and criticizing your response to an object is another. (I wrote about a book that suffers from this disease in WRB—Aug. 23, 2025.) And if you don’t trust yourself to analyze something, why should I, the reader, trust you?
I am tempted to say that the essay got stuck in the eighteenth century because nobody has figured out how to do it better than Dr. Johnson, but there’s more to it than that. The tremendous avant-garde in poetry and fiction that Weinberger mentions beat any hypothetical new kinds of essay to it, and an essay that attempted to borrow those techniques would be understood as an essay with elements of poetry or prose fiction in it. The difficulty extends even beyond writing; we could imagine, say, something calling itself the “Cubist essay,” which, inasmuch as it is possible in a written text that takes time to read, aims to present an object from several different points of view all at once. It could be interesting—I am not sure I have seen it done—and to describe it I have borrowed the name of an art movement that is over a century old.
To Weinberger’s credit, he doesn’t seem to think about any of this very much when writing. He just has interesting things he wants to show his readers, and he is unafraid to do whatever he needs to show them most effectively. (Much more about this approach in Critical notes below.) —Steve]
Greg Gerke on Poussin:
Poussin is alive for me now, even though I can only briefly get close to him at the Met (and the paintings are in separate rooms—distanced thousands of feet away no doubt due to the benefactors’ stature). I’ve often tried to see him, that is to grok, to feel his special sense of the seventeenth century, and, inside it, the ancient world, and inside that the invisible worlds of the Bible and mythology (for the other world is in the one we are in, care of Paul Eluard). World-making (world-building is too porcine a construction) as in the Wallace Stevens poem “Bantams in Pine Woods”: “Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal. / Your world is you. I am my world.” After lying dormant, Poussin is much more vibrant though so reserved as well. I look at him with blank admiration for means and color, since it takes years to understand space and form, not just as an artist, but as a spectator (reader, an experiencer), so that all the art one shirked off in one’s twenties can reassemble before one’s eyes as transformed, thickened, and honeyed images or texts, and, one can, soon enough, start to engorge on that sweetness—to be drunken on it, to be happy and sad and alive. (Pascal—“a picture includes absence and presence, pleasant and unpleasant.”)
[“World-building” is the thing they do in fantasy novels. And Joni Mitchell: “Every picture has its shadows / And it has some source of light.” —Steve]
Two in The Yale Review; first, Adina Hoffman on the excavation of Cycladic sculptures:
But all those circles and all that gold are only one piece of this insular puzzle, and ancient is, again, a relative term. These sophisticated classical poets and the inky circuits they composed around Apollo’s birthplace belong practically to recent history, at least compared with the Bronze Age islanders who created and first possessed what we now call “Cycladic figurines.” We have no idea, meanwhile, how those islanders referred to their islands, let alone their figurines. We don’t know what language they spoke. We can’t say whether Delos played a role in their beliefs or had a place on their mental maps. How long, I wonder, might the memory of such things have persisted? And could an inveterate civilizational cataloguer like Callimachus, writing some two millennia after the demise of Early Cycladic culture, have answered those questions? Among his own many lost works are one tract titled On the Founding of Islands and Cities and Changes of Names and another, titled Curiosities Collected All Over the World According to Place.
[I first encountered the Cyclades in Horace’s Odes 1.14, a plea for the badly damaged ship of state to remain in port where it will be safe. It ends like this:
Interfusa nitentis
vites aequora Cycladas.
“May you avoid the waters flowing between the shining Cyclades.” (“Shun the seas,” if you want to really lean into the Biblical connection between the sibilant-making animal and something that looks tempting but is deadly. Substitute in “strewn with,” too.) No doubt Horace was thinking of white marble on the islands catching the sun as seen from a passing boat, but the phrase applies to the white marble sculptures as well. And the ambiguity of Horace’s final image—why does the poem end not with something about the ship of state, or Horace’s feeling about it, but with this reference to glittering islands?—carries over to the art as well. As Hoffman (and Guy Davenport, as quoted on Saturday) mentions, the work of various modernist artists has made it somewhat more familiar to us, but that familiarity can obscure how little we actually know about these sculptures. They may not be dangerous, as the islands are to Horace’s boat, but the glitter is still mysterious. What are they, really?
And one thing I am always saying is that poetry has become far too inattentive to the founding of islands and cities, changes of names, and curiosities collected all over the world according to place. If we are looking for new kinds of essays, why not a poetic essay about these subjects? We could even revive Pope’s habit of writing essays in heroic couplets, along the lines of
When Horace, thinking of the Cyclades,
Requests the ship of state to shun the seas,
He fears the marble, shining in the sun,
Will—what? Will wreck the ship? Will blind and stun
The sailors? Its white beauty might obscure
Some mystery beyond its bright allure.
Cycladic sculpture, which we read about
In the new Yale Review that just came out,
Is made of the same marble Horace saw.
Can archeology explain our awe?
Et cetera. —Steve]
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
Similarities between Goodnight Moon (by Margaret Wise Brown, 1947) and The Cantos of Ezra Pound
Send more cards and letters; you never know what will happen to them
A Poem by H. D. and even more things in ancient Greece that are white
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 below.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. I appreciate it. 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 telling your friends about us. —Steve]
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