A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest, as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books.
Links:
In The Public Domain Review, James Brown on gin consumption in England in the 1700s and early 1800s, illustrated with etchings, engravings, and woodcuts:
Like other novel intoxicants, gin created an entirely new species of urban space organized around its sale and consumption. As cocoa spawned the chocolate house, coffee the coffeehouse, opium the opium den, and tea the tearoom and tea garden, so gin brought into being the gin or dram shop. Described variously by contemporaries as “receptacles for wretches,” “seminaries of mischief,” or “the nurseries of all…vice and wickedness,” these unfamiliar environments were mainly a metropolitan phenomenon, and proliferated from the early decades of the eighteenth century. A committee of Middlesex justices convened in 1726 estimated there to be six thousand gin shops in that outlying London county alone, a ratio of up to one in five houses in some parishes. As the below mezzotint intimates, gin shops were far more rudimentary than the traditional inns, taverns, and alehouses that had hitherto made up England’s victualling hierarchy, and which, by the Hanoverian period, had become increasingly sophisticated and regulated under licensing laws. All that was needed to begin trading was a supply of the “pestiferous draught” (either distilled on the premises or acquired from a boutique manufacturer.) Chairs and tables in these shops were kept deliberately sparse to encourage off-sales as well as “perpendicular drinking,” both guaranteeing rapid churn of a predominantly poor clientele who lacked the funds for lengthy on-site drinking sessions.
In the Journal, Cecilia Rabess on the rise of novelists with M.B.A.s:
There’s another kind of story that business school privileges: stories of failure. M.F.A.s certainly tolerate failure, but M.B.A.s celebrate it. M.F.A.s are inevitably comfortable with rejection, but M.B.A.s romanticize and even fetishize failure. Fail fast, fail often. Fail better. Fail forward. In business there is almost as much advice for how to fail as how to succeed. Which is, of course, helpful and necessary in an increasingly competitive publishing landscape.
After all, the moment a manuscript is sold to a publisher, a work of art becomes a product and the writer becomes an entrepreneur. There may be a team of savvy sales, marketing and promotional experts behind a book, but there is only one name on the cover. An M.F.A. may teach students how to lay their souls bare on the page, but an M.B.A. teaches students how to market, sell and serve their souls up on a platter for public consumption.
[As long as they don’t get into the email newsletter space, I think we’re safe. —Chris]
In Orion, Zarina Zabrisky on returning to Chernobyl:
“Samosely, squatters, live in zona illegally, and authorities evict them in vain,” says Luda. “As of 2016, a hundred samosely lived in the town of Chornobyl. The average age was seventy-six. We will meet some, but for now we are driving by the Wormwood Star Memorial.” Chornobyl—from chornobylnik, literally “black herb” in Ukrainian—means “wormwood.” Many believe that the book of Revelation predicted the disaster. “The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter.”
In Plough, David Schaengold on his childhood in New Mexico and the American relationship to its landscapes and its past:
My mother often told the stories of Navajo traditional religion to me and my brother, and I accepted them as fact. She forbade us from mentioning the word “coyote” during the summer, as doing so might invoke the coyote’s spirit and cause trouble. I took this taboo extremely seriously, and would never have uttered the animal’s name even in private during the forbidden months. Whether this proscription squared with the doctrines of our Adventist church never troubled me. We celebrated some Jewish holidays, too, my father being Jewish, and I never considered what Maccabees might think of our affection for Changing Woman, another Navajo deity, when we downed latkes during Hanukkah. Children are happy syncretists. But my straightforward belief in the reality of the Shiprock story meant that the journey down 666 to school was not without an element of religious terror. I put my nose up against the glass of the bus windows and wondered if I would have felt sick to see the bird when it was alive, wings two miles across and ten thousand Navajo berthed in the feathers of its back.
[Ever since reading Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) a few weeks ago, I have been intensely nostalgic for the time I got to spend in the Southwest deserts as an adolescent. I might up and buy a flight and go die in the wilderness soon. Stay tuned. —Chris]
In The Atlantic, Jenisha Watts recounts her own story of transformation and reinvention against the background of family ties and history:
By then I knew how to mingle with literary types at networking events. But I always felt like my worth was tied to my job, or my education, or my family background. This night was different. I didn’t have to prove myself. It was assumed that everyone here was important, because who else would possibly be invited to Maya Angelou’s brownstone? In my head, I created stories about who I might be to these people. Maybe I was a young poet of great promise, or a family friend of Maya’s, or even her granddaughter. Having Maya Angelou as my grandmother would have been nice. Toni Morrison, too. And James Baldwin for a granddad.
I’d done this as a child as well, imagining who I could have been if I’d had a different kind of family. Who I could have been had my mother been a professor, an artist, a writer.
But I didn’t grow up in a Harlem brownstone. I didn’t have a professor or an artist or a writer for a mother. And Maya Angelou wasn’t my grandmother.
I was Jenisha from Kentucky, and I was raised in a crack house.
[This one is quite long but it is worth your time. —Steve]
In Literary Hub, a preface by Ottessa Moshfegh to Dinah Brooke’s Lord Jim at Home (1973):
This isn’t the only freakish thing about the book. For example, I would argue that Giles, the main character, is not really a character in any usual sense. He lacks the lowest level of agency and self-definition, although to describe him as passive would be incorrect. More like a human being who has been mostly lobotomized. And yet I feel I understand him, and know him. He is familiar. Simultaneously, I have no anxiety about his well-being. But I do cringe as I read of the cruel abuses by his nurse and parents. I don’t really care what tragedies he suffers during the war, but I like to imagine them. I have no skin in the game at all, in the end, when his fate is up for review. Am I a monster? Or has the book taught me to opt out of the usual mind games that a novel plays with a reader? Worry usually provides suspense. But you have to care in order to have worries. I didn’t care, and I didn’t worry, but I was suspended, consistently and dramatically, in the mirage of the novel, a world that baffled me and yet made perfect sense.
Reviews:
In the Beacon [The local, free “Beacon.” —Chris] Christopher J. Scalia reviews Lorrie Moore’s novel I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (June):
The novel is largely about fending off grief, in part with humor. Lily was a grief therapy clown. She donned a dopey nose to cheer up sick children and was buried in her clown shoes—then again, she also tried to use the laces to kill herself. She and Finn engage in witty banter in part to avoid the serious weirdness of their situation. Jokes are their way of staving off the harsh realities of life, including illness, death, and grief. “Jokes are flotation devices on the great sea of sorrowful life,” says Lily. “They are exit signs in a very dark room.” When she walks out of Finn’s life for the last time, it’s an emotionally powerful moment lightened by a sight gag: She’s still wearing the floppy footwear.
Eventually, Finn cannot rely on humor as a defense mechanism. In its final pages, the novel leaves the world of the living dead and gives us glimpses into Finn’s lonely and grief-stricken new world. At his computer, “continually he had to verify online that he was not a robot.” Not a robot, sure—but what kind of life is he living?
In Law & Liberty, Nicholas A. Anderson reviews Richard Velkley’s novella Sarastro's Cave: Letters from the Recent Past (2021):
Velkley prepares the reader for the kind of Socratic education that eludes Mendling. He shows us that such an education begins for us moderns with a genuine examination of the premises of the Enlightenment, which still shape our political thought and moral psychology. Our politics, from the most progressive to the most reactionary, tend to harbor the hope for a harmonious fusion of beauty and truth that is inspired by the Sarastros and Freemasons of the Enlightenment, but without an awareness of the historical circumstances and philosophical problems that motivated the postulation of premises we often take for granted.
In the TLS, Philip Womack reviews a sci-fi collaboration between Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché (Prophet, August):
The title of this collaboration between Helen Macdonald (best known for her nature memoir H Is for Hawk, 2014) and the sci-fi author Sin Blaché refers to a strange, liquid-like infectious substance. This “Prophet” does not, however, confer a vatic ability on to those exposed to it, but instead orientates them towards the past. The substance delves into the psyches of its subjects and physically manifests objects (at least at first) of nostalgic significance: board games, childhood bicycles, Furbies (small furry robots, for those who missed that particular craze.) These items appear in their thousands around a US airbase in the United Kingdom, an onslaught of kitsch that comes to a head with the sudden appearance, in Suffolk, of an eerily perfect American diner, incongruous, shining, a symbol of out-of-control consumerism, of the continued dominance of American popular culture and of a warped nostalgia for things that never were. Readers are not recommended to try the milkshakes.
In the LRB, Clair Wills reviews a biography of Shirley Hazzard (Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life, by Brigitta Olubas, 2022):
The staging is of a piece with her tragi-comic plots, stuffed with fateful encounters, characters in disguise, family members substituted for one another, mistaken identities. They look like romances, but the women rarely get to choose. Agency, when it appears, is all for men. Early on in The Transit of Venus, Ted Tice, who is an astronomer, tells Caroline the story of Guillaume Legentil, who traveled to India to observe the 1761 transit of Venus but “was delayed on the way by wars and misadventure. Having lost his original opportunity, he waited eight years in the East for that next transit, of 1769. When the day came, the visibility was freakishly poor, there was nothing to be seen . . . His story has such nobility you can scarcely call it unsuccessful.” It’s a typically extravagant, indeed cosmic figure for the lifetime of missed opportunities that will compromise the relationship between the two. And since this is a book about the catastrophe of information withheld or misconstrued, Hazzard has fun with literal withholding, including delivering sentences with bits missing. (“These are the cells for solitary confinement, here is where they.”) The feelings generated in her characters are subtle, and delicately unpacked, and the contrast with the ornate detail and stylistic jokes with which she likes to point up significance is gloriously peculiar, like the interior of a baroque church offered as the setting for the sound of a single violin.
In 4Columns, Eric Banks reviews a new novel by Ismail Kadare (A Dictator Calls, tr. John Hodgson, September 19):
The phone call lasts three to four minutes. It’s placed by a tyrant (Joseph Stalin) to a writer (Boris Pasternak), about a third writer (Osip Mandelstam), who has been arrested, possibly for the insulting lines contained in his “Stalin Epigram,” aka “The Kremlin Mountaineer,” which some will (dubiously? strategically?) distinguish in the moment as more satire than poetry and which has occasioned (and will occasion) the ongoing intercession of various Soviet writers on behalf of Mandelstam, who would, four years later, die in internal exile, in 1938. During the call, Pasternak is addled and fumbling; Stalin grows annoyed and, dissatisfied with the writer’s answers, hangs up. A strange episode, the content of which remains malleable, from teller to teller, and the point of which remains a riddle. “Why did Stalin telephone and why was Pasternak confused?” Ismail Kadare asks in A Dictator Calls. “The arrest of a great poet might come as a shock in London or Paris, but not in Moscow in 1934.” (Or Tirana, for that matter, during the Albanian writer’s most formative years.) “What did the poet and the tyrant expect of one another, were they hiding something and were they both afraid of what they were hiding?”
N.B.:
Dissent is hiring an associate editor and a development director/manager.
A list of all the books nominated for the National Book Awards.
On being offline at New York Fashion Week.
h/t
“Animals by Frank O’Hara is the only poem Zadie Smith knows by heart.”The Spring 2023 edition of Meanjin is now out. [It’s an Australian publication. —Steve] [They’re very brave for this. —Chris]
Our social media person,
, is launching a newsletter about fashion and style.
Local:
The Writer’s Center in Bethesda is hosting free creative writing workshops followed by a panel discussion today from 1:30 p.m. to 4:15 p.m.
Today and tomorrow, there’s the Silver Spring Ukrainian Festival.
The Literary Hill BookFest is happening tomorrow 11 a.m. to 3 p.m at Eastern Market.
On Saturday, September 23, Ryan Shea will lead a workshop on “Seeing and Language: Experienceing Meaning in Nature through Creative Reading and Writing,” about which you should email 23duqueramrez@cua.edu if you are interested in attending or in receiving more information.
Poem:
“Still” by A. R. Ammons
I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I’ll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything ismagnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got upand ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: no one was paying
him any attention: everyone went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:I whirled through transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!
[This poem was first published in Ammon’s 1964 Expressions of Sea Levels, his second poetry collection, but is also in his more widely-available The Selected Poems: 1951-1977.
There’s so much I love about this poem. Those second and third stanzas alone! So much of this poem is in abstraction—we don’t really get a clear image until the mention of dry-burnt moss—and yet it remains so grounded throughout.
I love the enjambments we get in nestling in I / found / below the brown exterior. The way the lines shorten so quickly feels like a moment of lowering in the ground and nestling where the form matches the content. —Julia]
[Behind the paywall: the Upcoming books, Chris’ notes on a French book and Steve’s, of course, on the Brontës, and some more notes by Steve on writing about pop music. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one: it’s easy, it’s cheap, and we promise it’s worth it.]
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Washington Review of Books to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.