WRB—September 13, 2023

“feel beautiful”

The name of this newsletter is the Washington Review of Books. That’s what it’s about.

Links:

• Three profiles:

  • In The New Yorker, Isaac Chotiner profiles Ross Douthat:

    When Douthat was in high school, Snow converted to Catholicism—which, he said, came as a relief. “I was extremely happy to end up in a church where you memorized the prayers and you could sit in the back,” he told me. “The famous unfriendliness of Roman Catholicism was perfectly congenial to my sixteen-year-old self. The lack of spontaneity, the fact that there’s a ritual for everything, was quite welcome to me after this long charismatic sojourn.” Douthat converted as well, along with his father and his younger sister, Jeanne. He told me, “I had a conventional, ‘Read C. S. Lewis, read G. K. Chesterton, read some Catholic apologetics, find it persuasive,’ kind of experience, which was quite different from my mother’s more mystical encounter.”

    [Douthat really is the best in the game. The Times doesn’t get enough credit for having more or less the top opinion columnist of every stripe, whether or not the stripe is particularly interesting or not. Now that The Week (R.I.P.) is no longer in the opinion business there’s not even a particularly close second. —Steve]

  • Also in The New Yorker, Judith Thurman profiles Emily Wilson:

    Wilson has spent the past decade contemplating her kinship with these warriors. “My childhood self was an Achilles,” she said, “holed up in protest, then emerging later to reveal his power. But I also had a dutiful Hector self, doomed by compliance.” I told her that I thought Hector’s speech to Andromache, with its vision of her degradation, was tinged with sadism, but she disagreed: “Brusqueness is often a mark of fear. You push people away when you worry that you need them too much.” And it rankles her that men whom she considers self-appointed guardians of the Western canon have questioned a woman’s fitness to do Homer justice. “Any woman who has lived with male rage at close range has a better chance of understanding the vulnerability that fuels it than your average bro. She learns firsthand how the ways in which men are damaged determine their need to wreak damage on others.”

  • In New York, Shawn McCreesh profiles Walter Isaacson:

    Certain things in the original version of the book were excised. Andy Hertzfeld, an original Apple employee, had speculated that Powell Jobs had been “scheming” to meet Jobs. Gone is this quote from Hertzfeld: “Laurene is nice, but she can be calculating and I think she targeted him from the beginning … Her college roommate told me that Laurene had magazine covers of Steve and vowed she was going to meet him. If it’s true that Steve was manipulated, there is a fair amount of irony there.” (Isaacson included her denial in all versions of the book.) Elsewhere, a nine-sentence paragraph about Jobs being a neglectful father to some of his children simply disappeared.

    It goes to an interesting tension between biographer and subject. Jobs wasn’t alive to react negatively to Isaacson’s book, assuming he would have. Musk, who can be wrathful, childishly mocking, and unrelenting, will be. “I’m brutally honest about everything about Musk,” says Isaacson. “It’s just that sometimes people who are — especially children who didn’t ask to be part of the story — you have to balance how hurtful it will be to a person who’s not central to the story and is young versus how necessary it is for the reader. Maybe that was the case back with the parts I revised out of Jobs.”

• In The American Scholar, Joseph Horowitz visits Carnegie Hall and South Dakota to understand how to give classical music a future:

  Early on, Chris Eagle Hawk, an honored elder of the Oglala Lakota Tribe, took me aside to share an axiom. One should listen with one’s heart, he said, and only later process words with one’s brain. In the meantime, one’s mouth should remain shut. Though (as Chris had noticed) this is a lesson I have never learned, I shut my mouth sufficiently that a singular South Dakota Symphony Dvořák program emerged. The second half—something I have produced innumerable times—combined the New World Symphony with a “visual presentation” extrapolating its American accent: African-American and Native-American imagery, as well as iconic paintings of the American West. The 75-minute first half, unique to South Dakota, featured the Creekside Singers of the Pine Ridge Reservation in a symphonic composition by the Native American composer Brent Michael Davids. Thiesz contributed a mini-tutorial on the structure and vocal techniques of Lakota song. Chris Eagle Hawk eloquently described the role of music in Lakota culture and the sanctity of the Black Hills. Gier contrasted Longfellow’s “noble savage” trope with such 20th-century Indianist kitsch as Victor Herbert’s “Dagger Dance” (which I remember hearing as a child via cartoon commercials for Hamm’s beer).

• In Lapham’s Quarterly, an excerpt from Michael Wood’s Marcel Proust (August):

  An earlier consensus suggested that we are enjoying the very novel the narrator says he is about to start work on and will complete if he has time. It is not an accident (as they say) that the last sentence of the completed work begins with, “At least, if” and ends with “in Time.” The view is too simple and too smooth, but sometimes we need simplicity and smoothness. The chief problem with it, apart from many narratological hitches, is that it loses sight of, or buries, at least two other serious and moving possibilities: the narrator didn’t finish his book, he just got to the point where he thought he might; the book we are reading, in spite of many alluring invitations to the contrary, may be nothing like the work the narrator planned to write or could write.

[Behind the paywall: what Chris read while stuck in New York, some musings from Steve on the potential of a relationship advice column, and Julia’s commentary on an interesting transformation of the epithalamium, in addition to more links and reviews, carefully selected for you. If you aren’t already a paid subscriber, why not sign up? What’s the worst that’s going to happen? You’re going to look more sophisticated and well-read at a party this weekend?]