Reading towards enthusiasm: This summer marked the fifth anniversary of this newsletter. I’ve read something like 20,000 reviews and essays in that period and probably skimmed twice that. I am working on a piece now on what I’ve learned about writing today, but I’ve also learned a few things about reading, too, and about how reading to share things can sometimes be different from reading for a review. In his forthcoming book on faith and poetry, Christian Wiman puts it this way: “One of the great things about editing…is that it teaches you to read toward enthusiasm. This is not necessarily the best stance for a critic, whose praise, if it’s going to have any authority and credibility at all, should be rare and hard-won…An editor, though, especially one responsible for a monthly magazine, and especially one whose literary predispositions are, let us say, snarlish, quickly discovers that if complete critical approval is the only criterion for inclusion, then either he or the magazine is going under.”
One problem with being a critic is that it can be hard to turn off the critical apparatus, and you sometimes find yourself reading all of life with the same scrutiny and demanding the same impossible standard—“complete critical approval”—of those around you (without, I’ll add, applying the same standard to yourself—reviewers are the worst!). I’m not encouraging naiveté or cheap positive thinking in saying this, but it may be that reading “towards” enthusiasm helps one live “towards” enthusiasm, too, and if so, that’s not a bad thing. Of course, let me add quickly lest you think I’m planning a literary self-help book, that it’s also important to remember that life and people are often terrible, and we’re all going to die.
Since I’m on the topic of reading and newsletters, Conor Friedersdorf edits a weekly newsletter called The Best of Journalism. Over at the Atlantic, he shares 100 “fantastic articles” from 2017.
Francis Fukuyama talks to Evan Goldstein about how identity politics has turned the liberal arts into a kind of therapy, which is a bad thing for democracy: “Instead of saying we want to read authors that are outside the canon because they’re important educationally and historically and culturally, the way it’s framed by that student leader is that the exclusion of those authors hurts people’s self-esteem: Because my people are not equally represented, I feel less good about myself. That is part of the motive that drives administrators and professors to expand the curriculum, to fulfill an understandably therapeutic mission. But I think it can get in the way of universities’ fulfilling their educational missions. What makes students feel good about themselves is not necessarily what’s most useful to their education.”
Tom Gregory writes about what it was like to swim across the English Channel at 11 years old: “At various points he fell asleep, hallucinated, developed agonising shoulder and hip pain, and cried so much that his goggles filled with water. If you are thinking: ‘Who would put a young kid through an experience like that?’ the answer is Bullet, a maverick coach who ran the swimming club in Eltham, south-east London.”
A new book details the “harrowing period in the life of Vincent van Gogh, including the names of the men who shared his year of confinement in an asylum in the south of France, and his mental collapses when he tried to poison himself with his own paints.”
What’s the big thing in video gaming these days? Nostalgia.
Louis C. K. returns to stand-up.
A Reader Recommends: Thomas Berner recommends James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor: “Cozzens won the Pulitzer Prize, so perhaps he doesn’t count as a forgotten author, but I always found his middle period very rewarding, when his books always involved an upper-middle-class individual (lawyers, an Episcopalian priest, a doctor, an Army Air Force General, etc.) facing a number of professional challenges over the course of a short amount of time (ranging from a single evening to a month), causing the individual to attain a significant amount of maturity very quickly. Guard of Honor takes place on an Army Air Force base in Florida, where a newly minted Major General has to deal with issues ranging from a racial incident to a fatal plane crash over the course of a weekend. As someone who joined the USAAF in World War II despite being beyond draft eligibility, Cozzens was sure-footed in his understanding of the way the military worked, and many consider Guard of Honor to be the best fiction that came out of the war, even though the only combat that occurs is a punch in the nose. I consider it second best, after James Jones’ trilogy, but it sure beats the runners-up, including Catch-22 and The Naked and the Dead, by fathoms and kilometers.”
Essay of the Day:
In The Weekly Standard, Dominic Green revisits the late style of John Coltrane:
“Jazz was in a sense always a late style, a timekeeper’s music out of time. In the 1920s, while jazz musicians were playing early show tunes and improvising with rudimentary harmony, the Second Viennese School was pushing ahead into total chromaticism and atonality, and Stravinsky, Milhaud, Prokofiev, and Ravel were experimenting with jazz’s musical signature—its fixed pulse, syncopated rhythm, and emphasis on flattened thirds and sevenths. Jazz was modern long before Modern Jazz was named in the 1940s, for the harmonic modernity of bebop was the chromaticism of Liszt, Chopin, and Wagner. In the wider chronology of Western music, jazz’s harmonic development is a long game of catch-up, finished too late—around 1972, when Miles Davis heard Karlheinz Stockhausen for the first time. Davis had already reached the same conclusions as the joyless German but without losing the funk.
“No jazz musician incarnates the legend of late style more than the saxophonist John Coltrane. His early style is undistinguished; he was a bluesy sideman whose grasp of the instrument falls short of the reach of his ear. His middle style, stertorous and ambitious, began in his mid-1950s stint with Miles Davis’s quintet. Coltrane in this period is still less melodious than Hank Mobley and less witty than Sonny Rollins, but his chops are catching up with his ear. Only Johnny Griffin has fleeter fingers and only Rollins can beat him for persistence. Coltrane thinks aloud and never stops thinking; he is the perfect foil for Davis, who is also ironic and intellectual, also latent with eroticism and violence, but who never shows his working, only the finished idea. Coltrane’s sound waves are square and heavy, metallic and dark like lead. He is both implacable and lazy, like a bull elephant: You never know where the charge will take him, only that—as he himself admitted to Davis—once he gets going, he doesn’t know how to stop.
“Coltrane’s late style emerged in his 1960s quartets. Now leading and writing for his own group, and newly clean of drink and drugs, he was finally able to pursue his vision and the possibilities of the music to the limits of form and expression—and ultimately beyond both. The further he went, the more ambitious and less accessible the music became, until it was incomprehensible to almost all of his audience and even to some of his closest collaborators. In the logic of modernism, further means better. But ‘faster’ and ‘louder’ aren’t necessarily better, so why should ‘further’ be the supreme critical value? To judge Coltrane’s late-style art is, in an important sense, to judge modernism itself, and especially American modernism. And we have now an opportunity to listen afresh, with the release this summer of what may well be the last significant studio recordings of Coltrane’s classic quartet, Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album.”
Photos: Kyrgyzstan
Poems: Ute von Funcke, “Three Poems” (translated by Stuart Friebert)
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