“I suppose,” he began, once there was a cup of tea for each of us on the cocktail table between our chairs, “that I’m writing this in my late style.” He wasn’t reading from pages, as he had before. It took me a moment to realize that he was counting on the notebook that I thought it had been my idea to bring. I started scribbling. “My very latest! I’ve never been entirely sure what late style is supposed to be. A conscious simplicity—digging a channel in the hope that its sides will contain the yaw that cognitive decay knocks into the boat? Or is it the resignation that an older artisan is likely to feel about the familiarity of his tools? The overfamiliarity. I imagine a pianist, at the end of her career, thinking, Oh, just these notes, then? There aren’t any others in the keyboard, by any chance? But it’s not notes, exactly, I don’t think, that she would be getting tired of. Any more than it would be words for a novelist. Or for a philosopher, for that matter. I think it’s more likely to be phrases, for a musician. Or ways of shaping phrases. And characteristic moves, for a philosopher. Logical and, as it were, procedural moves. Moves in the game. Maybe what’s meant by late style is that one gets tired of one’s own manner, of the little ways of solving the little problems, ways that have become so habitual they no longer feel chosen—ways of opening an inquiry, say—sidling up to it or attacking it head-on—whatever your personal predilection happens to be—and instead of finding new ways, instead of experimenting the way a young person does, you accept the familiarity, accept the simplicity of not choosing, and make an effort to attack a new problem, or maybe an old problem, of greater scope, using the old ways of solving as tools. At its best, anyway, that’s what I think late style would be.”
Caleb Crain, “Trying to Find the Right and True Way to Talk About Death Is Funny”
[W]hat of progress? Well, I put it to you that The Known World is neither a progression nor a devolution from Macbeth, no more than the music of Stevie Wonder is a devolution from or an advance upon, say, the work of Beethoven. Unlike science and technology, art is not subject to the logic of growth or Moore’s law. It won’t definitely get smaller or faster or bigger and more lethal. It is produced in strong and weak economies alike, during war and peace. When it is good, as [E. M.] Forster notes, it will tend to outlast the human disorders that surround it, but it doesn’t get any better or worse at doing that. The odds of making a piece of art that truly matters never really improve. And while we can certainly interpret [Edward P.] Jones’s portrait of black people as a progressive leap forward from Shakespeare’s portrait of Othello, the gap between Macbeth and The Known World is still quite unlike the one between washing your clothes by hand in a stream and using a washing machine. The process of reading them both will require, from you, much the same human faculties. You’ll have to imagine, think, and engage with a make-believe world, created by a stranger. An analogy for this is love. Is the love I feel for my children an advance upon or a devolution from the love a fourteenth-century woman felt for hers? Not all human experiences are subject to progress.
Zadie Smith, “Art for Our Sakes”
Although theater is not a form that [Ben] Lerner has seemed particularly conversant with in the past, Transcription feels like a step towards drama. It is by far his shortest novel—a short novel by anyone’s standards—and much of it is dialogue. Each of its claustrophobic acts is named after a hotel, as if the story were being staged in traditional, walled settings. Shortly after arriving at the Hotel Providence, the narrator notices that the building is situated across the street from a church that once hosted an experimental theater space. He saw a play there as an undergraduate […] and, in the present, he is “distracted by the idea that a version of myself was still watching the play.” Later, Thomas asks the narrator for reassurance that he is recording [their interview]. “Otherwise we repeat ourselves and it grows unnatural,” he says. “We will sound like bad actors. Even the transcript will show that we have rehearsed.”
Hannah Gold, “The World’s Worst Journalist”
Helen of Nowhere owes more to the closet drama, a play meant for reading rather than performing. The structure works to subdue the man’s speech by pushing other characters into the limelight even as he remains onstage, reminding the reader that we know only what these other characters are saying, not what they’re thinking. It’s as if the man believes this were a novel about him and the tragic, misunderstood end to his career, but the novel knows that it is a multivocal drama about the problem of change. […] In reading Helen of Nowhere, I had thoughts in the back of my mind that more usually come up in the theater: Who hasn’t spoken yet to whom? How on earth is this going to end?
Joanna Biggs, “Enter Man”
Short Talks is the moment before [Anne] Carson moves from portraying lyric mindstage to staging encounters between and among characters. In light of this trajectory Autobiography of Red’s Geryon was a revelation. This enactment of character and voice did not only occur in Carson’s own poetic fictions; her contemporized translation of Greek tragic plays corrupt those delineations that so often fence off lyric poetry from fiction and drama.
Over the past decades Carson has shown us how to pull very old poetry up through the crust of very new poetry. Her body of writing is renowned for its original, pithy, unruly theatricization of anticipation, desire, insight, terror, shame and resistance. The window frames have exploded: the profuse leakage, onslaught of fire and lava, appears formally alongside something brutally reconstructive in Carson’s present work, all of it engined by the evolution of discernible characters involved in some quotidian, occult, intensely private and profusely choral encounter with perception and mortality.
Margaret Christakos, introduction to Anne Carson, Short Talks
Sixty-six times have these eyes
beheld the changing scene of autumn
I have said enough about moonlight,
Ask no more.
Only listen to the voice of pines and cedars
when no wind stirs.
The world is not simple.
Anyone will tell you.
But have you ever washed a person’s hair
over a tin bucket,
gently twisting the rope of it
to wring the water out?
At the end of everything,
dancers just use air as their material.
A voice keeps singing even
without an instrument.
You make your fingers into a comb.
Jenny George, “Tin Bucket”
[Vigdis] Hjorth’s newly translated novel, the aptly named Repetition (its title nods to Kierkegaard’s book of the same name), is a slender volume that elaborates an episode that appears in compressed form in Will and Testament, like a magnified detail from a painting.
Elaine Blair, “Where Is the Story?”
When [Otto] Frisch and [Rudolf] Peierls wrote their now-famous memo in March 1940, estimating the mass of Uranium-235 that would be needed for a fission bomb, they didn’t publish it in a journal, but communicated the result through military channels only. As recently as February 1939, Frisch and Meitner had published in Nature their theoretical explanation of recent experiments, showing that the uranium nucleus could fission when bombarded by neutrons. But by 1940, Frisch and Peierls realized that the time for open publication of these matters had passed.
Similarly, at some point, the people doing detailed estimates of how many physical qubits and gates it’ll take to break actually deployed cryptosystems using Shor’s algorithm are going to stop publishing those estimates, if for no other reason than the risk of giving too much information to adversaries. Indeed, for all we know, that point may have been passed already.
Scott Aaronson, “More Information on Whether Useful Quantum Computing Is ‘Imminent’”
And in this condition she had been aware of a stately, simple musical phrase, playing and repeating itself, in the shadowy ungraspable way of auditory memory, following her to the bedside, where it played again as she took a shoe in each hand. The familiar phrase—some might even have called it famous—consisted of four rising notes, which appeared to be posing a tentative question. Because the instrument was a cello rather than her violin, the interrogator was not herself but a detached observer, mildly incredulous, but insistent too, for after a brief silence and a lingering, unconvincing reply from the other instruments, the cello put the question again, in different terms, on a different chord, and then again, and again, and each time received a doubtful answer. There was no set of words she could match to these notes; it was not as if something were being said. The inquiry was without content, as pure as a question mark.
Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach
When one looks at [Georges] La Tour’s paintings, it is hard not to see signs of the devotional culture of his time: a Counter-Reformation Catholic world that valued stillness, interior reflection, and meditative attention, and that found spiritual meaning in restraint and candlelit quiet. This devotional context is not just part of what makes the paintings so moving, but what allows them to speak across four centuries to the question of attention. In today’s grief over the loss of it and the largely ineffective rallying cries to gain it back, the consequences are often measured by how much less we are able to learn or accomplish, but not as much is said about attention as a form of love, as perhaps the only means available to humans to elevate a person or a thing into the realm of the sacred, and how the loss of it strips us of the chance to bestow it. La Tour has something to tell us about true drama that Caravaggio doesn’t, really—about the way that it is not about drawing attention but about giving it, and how it unfolds not in the moment of action or at the apex of emotion, but in the stillness of looking so closely for so long, that it has the power to transform.
Nicole Krauss, “Out of Light”
“How can you stand it?” a man asks a woman, seated on a building’s stoop as I pass by. The air is still and warm, conducting sound.
“First of all,” she says, “I can’t.”
Cora Lewis, Information Age