WRB—Sept. 7, 2024
What, if some day or night a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “The Washington Review of Books as you now read it and have read it, you will have to read once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in the Washington Review of Books will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—and likewise this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and likewise this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence will be turned over again and again, and you with it, you speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the Managing Editor who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”
N.B.:
WRB Presents will return in September 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 September 28. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In the Slant Books blog, Morgan Meis on Goethe and Eckermann:
The difference, by the way, between saying no being can decay to nothing and that all things must decay to nothing is really a direct glimpse into the war within Goethe between his Romantic impulses and his Neoclassical impulses. I’ll always, personally, prefer the Sturm und Drang Goethe. But Goethe will always be great because of the war that raged in him, and the result of that war was that he often upbraided himself for his own stupidity. Delightful, actually, and we would never have had such a direct glimpse into Goethe’s contradictory soul without the slavish, adorable sycophancy of Johann Peter Eckermann.
Donald Barthelme’s “Conversations with Goethe”: “English is the shining brown varnish on the sad chiffonier of civilization.” [I think we mention this every time Goethe appears. It’s still funny every time. —Steve] [We do mention it every time Goethe appears. That’s in the style guide. —Chris]
In The Yale Review, Meghan O’Rourke interviews
about his new book (Small Rain, September 3) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Aug. 31, 2024; we linked to an earlier review there and in WRB—Sept. 4, 2024.]:Writing is such a private act; for the years that I work on a book, I’m not thinking at all about who might read it. I do think art is useful to us, but I think that usefulness is hugely mysterious—you can’t engineer it. I sometimes think that the usefulness of art depends on a commitment to defending art’s uselessness. What I mean is that it’s only through an utter commitment to its own private, often formal or aesthetic ambition, however sealed off from utility it might seem, that art can become publicly useful—that it can “shine a light onto human realities,” in your beautiful phrase. I’m being vague; I’m not sure I can do better. Maybe what I mean is that we can never know how our books are going to be received, how they will be useful (or fail to be useful) to other people. The idea that we can know the effect of anything we make is always an illusion. But for art to have a chance of reaching other people at all it has to have integrity first and foremost as art.
In Compact, Valerie Stivers’ review:
During a discussion of the phrase smalle rayne from the poem the Westron Wynde, the source of the book’s title, the narrator explains that he loves the way its “cracked syntax . . . becomes not just a message but an object of contemplation.” Rain can’t really be “small,” so the gap between the two words becomes thought-provoking. “Isn’t the nonsense what makes it bottomless, what lets us pour and pour our attention into it,” the narrator asks. In a similar way, the book offers the narrator’s experience up for contemplation, not offering conclusions, but instead allowing them to arise and coalesce.
Reviews:
Two in the LRB:
- Taylor reviews Rachel Kushner’s new novel (Creation Lake, September 3) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Aug. 31, 2024; we linked to an earlier review there as well.]
A friend once described the Lehman Trilogy as “Wikipedia in play form.” I’ve thought of this description often, when reading recent novels which seem to confuse looking things up for erudition. I thought of it again, keenly, reading Creation Lake. The effect of plowing through paragraph after paragraph of factoids about Neanderthals and geography and economics and evolutionary psychology was not that of encountering a great mind at work. Rather, it was as though someone had assembled some facts, given their sheaf of papers a shuffle and put them all into a novel so that some unsuspecting critic would hail it as “discursive.” This shoddy pseudo-thought is a blight. Shallow, rapidly swirling narrative consciousness has come to define the refugees of the Attention Span Wars, those writers whose capacity for concentration has been so compromised by the internet that they leave us not with a fragmented form—which might still have something to offer readers—but with the fragmentation of concentration itself.
[We finally made the VORTEX operational; the only problem is that it destroys your attention span. “We have Online for wafer / Twitter for circumcision.” —Steve]
Stefan Collini reviews a collection of James Fitzjames Stephen’s writing (Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen: On the Novel and Journalism, edited by Christopher Ricks, 2023):
The essays in this volume repeat this charge relentlessly. Dickens presumed to use fiction as a form of social criticism, though he had no qualifications to pronounce on these matters: “He is utterly destitute of any kind of solid acquirements.” The later novels were particularly egregious in this respect. A Tale of Two Cities does not display “a solid knowledge of the subject matter to which it refers”; “the literary execution of Little Dorrit is even worse than its inflated and pretentious sermonizing object,” and so on. He greatly prefers the light comedy of The Pickwick Papers to the portentous campaigning of Bleak House—a striking inversion of modern critical opinion. But although Dickens was undeniably popular, “it does not appear to us certain that his books will live, nor do we think that his place in literary history will be by the side of such men as Defoe and Fielding, the founders of the school to which he belongs.” In one of his earliest pieces Stephen held up Robinson Crusoe as a fictional model, in which “all the incidents described are to the last degree simple, natural and regular.”
[We linked to an earlier review in WRB—June 29, 2024.]
- Taylor reviews Rachel Kushner’s new novel (Creation Lake, September 3) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Aug. 31, 2024; we linked to an earlier review there as well.]
In the TLS, Seth Whidden reviews a new complete works of Baudelaire (Œvures Complètes, May):
Benjamin quoted Jules Laforgue’s statement that Baudelaire was “the first to speak about Paris as someone condemned to live there every day.” This idea of the Parisian Baudelaire has long defined how we read and talk about his work. Taking Benjamin’s lead—reading the “Tableaux parisiens” section of Les Fleurs du mal, the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris—takes us straight to the heart of the modern age, an age that still feels very much our own. Buildings are put up and torn down in the blink of an eye; new gadgets bring new ways of seeing, being, moving, feeling, loving, describing; news travels faster and faster; we feel moments whizzing by and wonder what will be here tomorrow. Baudelaire put his finger not only on his modernity, but also on ours: “Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable” (my translations throughout). All the upheavals offer plenty of fodder for poetry; as the poet asks Beauty in the opening verse of “Hymne à la Beauté,” “Do you come from the deep heavens or rise from the abyss?” And, a few lines later, “Do you rise from the black abyss or come down from the stars?” Qu’importe?—whatever—he shrugs twice in the final stanza. Either is fine, Beauty and Baudelaire can deal with both.
Kenner, on another approach to combining the transient and the eternal (Swinburne turning his reaction to one line of Sappho into eight lines of his own):
Would Dr. Johnson have carried on so? . . . and the art of attending to radioactive moments, “simply,” in Pater’s phrase, “for those moments’ sake,” had preoccupied two English generations. A central tradition of nineteenth-century decadence, a hyperaesthesia prizing and feeding on ecstatic instants, fragments of psychic continuum, answered a poetry time had reduced to fragments and endorsed the kind of attention fragment exact if we are to make anything of them at all, a gathering of the responsive faculties into the space of a tiny blue flame.
Having collected its attention, however, the impulse of this tradition was to dilate on attention’s object: to reduplicate, to amplify, to prolong.
[Set aside Dr. Johnson; even Keats doesn’t do this. The closest he gets to the text in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is calling it “loud and bold.” The concern with picking out specifics and seizing on the emotion attached to each one is not that different from Baudelaire in “Correspondances” (translation by Roy Campbell):
Nature’s a temple where each living column,
At times, gives forth vague words. There Man advances
Through forest-groves of symbols, strange and solemn,
Who follow him with their familiar glances.
The rest of the poem describes what these things are like. It’s all right there; but you might as well try to pin a live butterfly. And in the end it’s all interior: “each sings / The transports of the senses and the soul.” Read life like a text, a text like life. —Steve]
In The Hudson Review, Mark Jarman reviews a new biography of Edgar Allan Poe (Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by Robert Morgan, 2023):
The poetry remains second-rate to my ear, even though Morgan recognizes its elegiac value. Whatever it was that Baudelaire and Mallarmé heard and saw in Poe’s verses, I can only shrug and say, “Figurez-vous, ça.” But Morgan does an excellent job of seeing Poe’s work as Symbolist avant la lettre and expressive of the kind of decadence that the French were looking for in the Second Empire. I wonder, however, if we would pay attention to Poe today without “The Raven” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” or even without Griswold, who seems to exist to be debunked while adding spice to Poe’s legend. Would we profit from Poe’s unique inventions? They may not grow out of Poe’s literary theory, but they certainly prepare us, with that theory, for what we will be encountering early in the twentieth century, in the literary theories of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In an important way, Poe’s essay and polemic “The Poetic Principle” with its emphasis on compression and unity of effect is hard to get rid of. Morgan is right to call Poe the greatest critic of his day and in fact an inventor of American literary criticism, who looks ahead to the New Criticism. So, there is Poe, again, making his descendants feel uncomfortable, for his overwriting, for his wealth of genius, and for his undisciplined talent.
[I, like Eliot, don’t believe him when he says he worked out “The Raven” “with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem,” but even to claim that such a thing is possible is a new direction. Even slavish devotion to the Aristotelian unities isn’t math. —Steve]
In The New Yorker, Katy Waldman reviews three books by “digitally supercharged heirs to the original literary Brat Pack” (Brat, by Gabriel Smith, June; My First Book, by Honor Levy, May; and Mood Swings, by Frankie Barnet, May):
But trolls were bitter and alienated and politically toxic. Brats are hot, fun, and apolitical; they’ve been feminized and miniaturized and upgraded to a more consumer-friendly model. When they joke, they are not trying to infuriate anyone. They’re selling themselves as aspirationally edgy and unique. They’re flattering an audience that would prefer not to know when it is being pandered to, that would rather believe that it is being tested or confronted. They’re the mash-up of trolldom and capitalism, hoping to elicit a softened form of outrage, an exasperation mingled with admiration and longing. They would like you to believe that their indecision reflects a particular attunement to ambiguity and nuance. But in truth they just won’t know where they stand until they’ve figured out where you do.
[We linked to earlier reviews of Brat in WRB—July 27, 2024 and WRB—Aug. 31, 2024; My First Book was the Upcoming book in WRB—May 11, 2024, and we linked to earlier reviews in WRB—May 1, 2024 and WRB—May 29, 2024. Waldman doesn’t use this language, but throughout I kept thinking of vaccination; what it is, how it works, what it does. —Steve]
In Jacobin, Robert T. Tally Jr. reviews Fredric Jameson’s new book (Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization, May):
The curious title deserves a word. As with the titles of so many of Jameson’s books, which critic Phillip E. Wegner has rightly called “theoretical novels” themselves. Inventions of a Present is an allusion to a line from Stéphane Mallarmé: “There is no present [. . . .] No—a present does not exist,” and that “those who would declare themselves their own contemporaries” are misinformed. It is in this task of inventing the present that the novel is most indispensable. Novels are a means through which we can undertake the impossible project of historicizing the current moment. Regardless of the political outlook of their author, they synthesize the world, and a Marxist dialectical criticism of the sort to which Jameson has devoted his entire career can help to make sense of the ways artists make sense of the world. “In these novels,” as Jameson puts it, reflecting on the Mallarmé quote, “we can begin to hear, however faintly, the voices of contemporaries.”
[We linked to an earlier review in WRB—Aug. 21, 2024.]
In the Journal, David Kirby reviews a book about the marriage of George Jones and Tammy Wynnette (Cocaine and Rhinestones: A History of George Jones and Tammy Wynette, by Tyler Mahan Coe, with illustrations by Wayne White, September 3):
Drinking has long been a theme in country music; there’s an entire channel on Sirius XM called “Red, White & Booze.” But George took overindulgence to another level. Mr. Coe notes that the singer would sometimes upend a bottle and guzzle until he was sick to his stomach—then immediately resume. He took on a cocaine habit “like it was his job.”
And in a way, it was. Performing the role of the soulfully suffering inebriate became part of George’s act. As Mr. Coe says, “everyone in the industry and most of his fans saw him drunk off his ass at least once in the 1950s and 1960s,” and they not only expected it, they liked it. Contemporary country songbird Patty Loveless has a tune called “You Can Feel Bad,” the chorus of which begins, “You can feel bad if it makes you feel better,” a phrase that could sum up dozens of country classics. In Mr. Coe’s words, there’s an “inherent sadism” to being a George Jones fan, because “no matter how bad you felt, there was someone out there who felt even worse.” From Dolly Parton to Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard, his peers honored him as a titan, yet he seemed bent on killing himself.
[This review got me to order the book before I had finished its first paragraph, which has to be some kind of record. (It was somewhere in the middle of reading the sentence “There is even an account of the rivalry of Catherine de’ Médici and Diane de Poitiers for the affection of Henri II in sixteenth-century France.”) —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
The Internet Archive lost its appeal in its case about ebook lending.
An excerpt from a new book about Katharine S. White (The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at the New Yorker, by Amy Reading, September 3):
But notice too that as the gatekeeper for one of the most influential magazines of the twentieth century, White was hardly a dragon. Instead of compromising Sarton as an artist, taking something away from her writing, Katharine is a giver of gifts, a possessor of magic, a generous friend whose bestowals are valued entirely outside of the capitalist marketplace.
[This is also true of the Managing Editors. Like Virgil I have a magic egg which sustains a castle outside Naples, where I compose each and every installment of the WRB. —Steve]
- on Willa Cather’s publication history.
[We linked to two pieces on Cather in WRB—Aug. 7, 2024.]
Rudyard Kipling’s satire of bureaucracy.
- in praise of reference books.
- : “Is great writing also the kind that sounds best out loud? I am not sure.”
The Pentium chip as a Navajo weaving. [I think this is cool. —Chris]
“Away from the algorithm, do unique travel experiences still exist?” [Caelum non animum. Read a book. Read the Washington Review of Books. —Steve]
New issues:
The Baffler no. 75—Facing the Future
BOMB 169 / Fall 2024
The European Review of Books Issue Six
The Hudson Review Summer 2024 (Volume LXXVII, No. 2) [As linked to above.]
Noel Parmentel Jr. died on Saturday, August 31. R.I.P.
Local:
Jifeng Bookstore, which closed in 2018 in Shanghai, is now open in Dupont Circle.
Lost City Books is holding its fall salon at The Line D.C. on Wednesday, September 25 at 7 p.m.
The 2024 Rosslyn Jazz Fest will take place at Gateway Park today starting at 1 p.m.
Dvořák Dreams, “a monumental public artwork that blends contemporary art, music history, and cutting-edge technology,” is being exhibited at the Kennedy Center until Tuesday, September 24.
The D.C. Shorts International Film Fest runs until tomorrow, September 8.
Poem:
“quartz lake, Alaska” by Lucille Clifton
deep autumn, and all the tourists have gone
south with the geese and the fickle sun
only those things remain which can bear
the frown of winter: the ice stars,
the raven, the moon, and this solitude,
keeping their long faith with forsaken things.
the lake turns its cold face,
is no one’s mirror,
and the sky pouts back,
everything wakes and sleeps in forest time,
to the soft drum of wind
among the pines, to the snow forever falling and
the long dark bringing its constellations,
bright cruciforms against the sky
lighting the quiet way on snow
for winter migrations of caribou,
or wolf, or phantom grief moving out
and away in a silent
ritual of passage
[This is from Clifton’s How to Carry Water: Selected Poems. —Julia]
Upcoming books:
Coach House Books | September 10
Mary and the Rabbit Dream
by Noémi Kiss-Deáki
From the publisher: Mary Toft was just another eighteenth-century woman living in poverty, misery, and frequent pain. The kind of person overlooked by those with power, forgotten by historians.
Mary Toft was nothing. Until, that is, Mary Toft started giving birth to rabbits . . .
In Mary and the Rabbit Dream, the sensational debut novelist Noémi Kiss-Deáki reimagines Mary’s strange and fascinating story—and how she found fame when a large swath of England became convinced that she was the mother of rabbits.
Also out Tuesday:
Liveright: Quarterlife by Devika Rege
What we’re reading:
Steve read more of The Pound Era.
Julia read more of Gravity’s Rainbow and The Trip to Echo Spring, more Robert Hass, along with some of Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s collection Song and James Wright’s Collected.
Critical notes:
At first blush, the aims of immediacy—authenticity, directness, truth, reality—don’t seem all that threatening. In fact, they might appear salutary in contrast to the pervasive artifice of social media. The issue, in part, is that these cultural products only convey a sense of immediacy, they do not actually evade the distorting effects of mediation.
It was a great shift. The fading of any literary tradition is a bad loss. But things got worse. Later, for a period in the 2010s, a certain laissez-être sentiment bore fruit among would be writers in the form of a cliché reclamation project. It was insisted that cliché was morally good, the proud idiom of The People. (NPR in 2012: “At The End Of The Day, Clichés Can Be As Good As Gold,” in which Hephzibah Anderson, author of Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year Without Sex, wanly argues that clichés “create a sense of camaraderie.”) At that awful time, if you disdained the hip new pro-cliché notion, you were considered haughty, backward, a purity obsessive. So, dusty old phrasings and wooden platitudes arose from the swamp and had their merry comeback, the implications of which have not dissipated but remain relevant to the Anglosphere’s literary production today.
[“Create a sense of camaraderie”—with whom? I’d like to know before I start feeling this sense. —Steve]
Robert Alter (from Patrick Kurp):
Perhaps the most straightforward answer to this question is that these were simply two different topics that interested me, reflecting my incurable condition as someone who could never be a peasant and was not attached to the ancestral soil of one field. There may be, however, more substantive connections between my engagement in modern literature and my engagement in the Bible. I would begin explaining this in a rather general way by confessing that as a critic I have always been an inveterate literary enthusiast.
When we reread, we discover how a text can multiply in its variety and its plurality. Rereading offers something beyond a more detailed comprehension of the text: it is, Barthes claims, “an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us ‘throw away’ the story once it has been consumed (‘devoured’).” I’m not so sure.
If we take Barthes’ argument to its limit, we can imagine an ideal literary culture in which there is only one book and a community of avid readers returning to it over and over, unfurling its infinite field of potential in ever-more-elaborate interpretations. It reminds me of the Orthodox synagogue I attended growing up, where each year, sometime in October, the old men would finish reading the final portion of the Torah—with Moses standing on the mountain overlooking the Promised Land—and then start again at the Beginning. At the time, this hardly felt like “an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society.” More a timeworn method for reaffirming tradition and safeguarding community. It could also get boring.
[OK, but there’s definitely at least one person out there doing this with Proust. —Steve]