In Praise of Print

Also: The life of a literary freelancer, revisiting Andre Dubus’s only novel, the work of Bert Meyers, and more.

Aug 14, 2023

On the front porch with *Harper’s*, *The Lamp*, and George Michael.

I am a bit of a strumpet when it comes to print subscriptions. I subscribe to two or three, let the subscription lapse, dither, subscribe again, let the subscription lapse again, etc. Right now I receive Harper’s (I think I just got the renewal notice in the mail that is someplace in a pile of papers underneath a stack of books on my desk), First Things, Spectator World (gratis—thank you, whoever is in charge over there now), Plough (also gratis—but I would pay for this lovely quarterly), Humanities (always a pleasure), and The Lamp. I have let my subscription to The New Criterion lapse, but I have been meaning to re-subscribe (sorry, James!), and I stopped paying for The Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Edition when we moved to Virginia, and I could simply walk over to the library and read it there.

I just received the latest issue of The Lamp in the mail, and it’s a beaut. The centerpiece is a symposium on Cormac McCarthy, with contributions from Joseph Bottum, Sam Sacks (fiction critic at the Journal), John Wilson, William Giraldi, Gregory Wolfe, Jessica Hooten Wilson, Paul Mariani, and others. There’s also Peter Brown on writing his Augustine biography all those years ago (which is an excerpt from his latest book, which I somehow missed, Journeys of the Mind, and which I now need to pick up) and Nic Rowan on marathon reading sessions and Ulysses. Nic’s piece was a pleasure from beginning to end. This is how it starts:

I am not one for marathon readings, and I can recall only two books that I have blown through in one sitting. The first is a detective novel by Ottessa Moshfegh. I picked it up at a shop in Rome after a terrific fight with my wife (shouting, slammed doors, fists pounded on the wall) and devoured it in the basement of the McDonald’s behind the Vatican. The second I actually read twice in one sitting. I was in the last row on a long-haul flight from Amsterdam to Washington, and had nothing on me but Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus. When I reached that heavy final phrase—“the great gasp of hull and ocean as a ship goes down”—I remembered the appraisal of Hazzard’s husband, Francis Steegmuller: “No one should have to read it for the first time.” So I did my due diligence and found, as I re-examined that crystalline tragedy, that a third read would likely be required as well.

It gets better from there.

There’s also Aaron James on the life and music of Orland di Lasso, Paul Hundt on a long friendship coming to an end, Timothy Nerozzi on fashion and his first Ralph Lauren polo shirt, Joseph Epstein on a bio of Mel Brooks, and more.

It’s very Catholic—the tag is “A Catholic Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Etc.”—but that adds to the charm, at least for a dyed-in-the-wool Presbyterian like me. Matthew Walther, occasional New York Times opinion writer and formerly an editor at The American Spectator and The Washington Free Beacon, is the editor. Nic Rowan is the managing editor, and William Borman is the publisher. They are based in Three Rivers, Michigan.

A print publication should look and feel amazing. The Lamp does. I’m off hooch right now for the refinement of my soul and my cycling legs, but The Lamp pairs perfectly with a couple of fingers of Bourbon, neat, and a smoke on the front porch in the evening before dinner. The paper is heavy enough and of the right texture to make each issue an object, not just a medium, and every issue is sprinkled with lovely reproductions of drawings and prints. (I think I recall reading somewhere that Matthew’s wife picks these, but I could be mistaken.) The point is that reading print should be a complex aesthetic experience that uses multiple senses (touch, sight, smell) to compliment the words.

In fact, I like the look and feel of The Lamp so much that I do to it what I don’t do to any other publication (well, almost any other publication): I cut it up. I cut out images and text and use them in homemade cards, which I started making last year for family and friends.

Let me confess right away that it pains me to do this because I keep all magazines—even Golf—on a shelf in my library in a neat line or stack. But I can’t help it. The little reproductions—and text layout—are too good, and they look and feel great on a card. I don’t do this with every issue—I couldn’t do that—but every eighth or so.

So, it’s a multi-purpose publication—a text, an aesthetic object, and fodder for a middle-aged man’s evenings of card-making. I hope Matthew, Nic, and William aren’t offended. Do subscribe.

In other news, Nick Ripatrazone revisits Andre Dubus’s only novel: “The Lieutenant was published in 1967, and then re-released by Green Street Press in 1986. But the novel has faded from view, living mostly as an obscure bit of trivia: It was the only novel that Andre Dubus ever published. Godine, Dubus’s publisher since 1975, re-released the novel this week under its Nonpareil imprint. The book, hopefully, will send some new readers to Dubus’s work. He deserves it.”

Timothy Farrington reviews John Szwed’s life of Harry Smith:

The 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music was the canon shot heard ’round the world. The six-LP set delivered postwar listeners a trove of riches from what the critic Greil Marcus later called the “old, weird America”—white Appalachian country, black Delta blues, Texas fiddle music, Alabama gospel and wheezy Cajun waltzes. The detailed liner notes in an accompanying handbook mixed scholarly precision with deadpan humor and strange caprice.
The “Anthology” fed the 1960s folk revival, and Jerry Garcia, Neil Young, Patti Smith and Elvis Costello, among others, have since drawn on it like a musical seed bank. Bob Dylan has covered 15 of its 84 tracks, including “Stackalee” by Frank Hutchison and “James Alley Blues” by Richard “Rabbit” Brown. The collection was curated by one man, a gnome-like polymath named Harry Smith, who viewed it as a “collage,” a hybrid of document and art.

The life and work of Bert Meyers: “‘I want to change. / Even a wall gets painted again,’ writes Bert Meyers in the closing lines of his poem ‘A Citizen.’ Like so much of Meyers’s work, these lines are striking for their simplicity and clear-mindedness, for how utterly devoid they are of conceit in both sentiment and expression.”

Why did Tom Hanks write a novel? “The title of Tom Hanks’s first novel, The Making of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece, certainly sounds sarcastic: The proximity of the words ‘another’ and ‘masterpiece’ suggests a pithy, dishy critique of the industry that he conquered. But Hanks, who’s written short stories and screenplays en route to his long-form literary debut, is sincere—occasionally to a fault, as it turns out. Early on in the book, an entertainment journalist is queried by a filmmaker about the kinds of movies that he might “hate-walk out of”—a setup, we hope, that will reveal the author’s own veiled prejudices. ‘I don’t hate any films,’ comes the reply. ‘Movies are too hard to make to warrant hatred. If a movie is not great, I just wait it out in my seat. It will be over soon enough. Walking out of a movie is a sin.’ Now it’s been said that to love cinema is to love all of cinema, but there are limits: Obviously, the character in question has never seen The Flash.”

The life of a literary freelancer:

It is 9.45 on a brisk April morning at the flat overlooking Clapham Common and Mark has been at work for the best part of an hour. His flatmates — a trainee solicitor, an advertising executive and the research assistant to a Tory MP — are long gone and, favouring comfort over monasticism, Mark has relocated himself to the front room.
Here, surrounded by last night’s takeaway containers and their congealing residues, a Fender bass guitar and some rugby kit hung up to dry over the fireplace, he is busy texting an ally on the Times Literary Supplement.
“How abt I do new Deborah Levy?” Mark proposes. There is a brief delay, during which Mark browses the books section of the previous week’s Private Eye. “Sorry, already fixed,” Mark’s friend texts back.
The Bookseller’s Summer Fiction Supplement to hand, Mark tries again. New Amanda Craig might be good, he suggests. Sorry, Bunty doing, his friend ripostes. Chastened by this rebuff, Mark decides to email a contact on The Times arts desk to whom, a month ago, he pitched a provocative piece on the kind of audiences that turn up at Glyndebourne these days, only to discover that she had just gone on a two-week holiday.

David James Duncan’s first novel in 31 years was published last week: “In 1992, a few months before Bill Clinton was elected president for the first time, David James Duncan published The Brothers K, a long, big-hearted novel about baseball, religion and the Vietnam War told through the lives of the Chances, a family in the Pacific Northwest. The book followed The River Why (1983), a bona fide cult classic about a young man named Gus and his spiritual and romantic and fly-fishing quests in the waters of Oregon. The novels — with their wisdom-seeking, devotion to nature, vibrant family antics, old-fashioned storytelling, and enthusiastic use of vernacular, puns, exclamations and italics — had fervent fans, and fit on a shelf with a motley, crowd-pleasing, very American crew that includes Mark Twain, Edward Abbey, Norman Maclean and John Irving. (For the reason of energetic typography, you might throw in Tom Wolfe, too.) They left his readers wanting more. But of all the things that have happened since 1992, a new novel from Duncan had not been one of them, until now.”

West Virginia University cuts all its foreign language programs and courses: “Financially beleaguered West Virginia University is proposing eliminating 9 percent of the majors and 7 percent of the full-time faculty members at the flagship Morgantown campus, including the entirety of the department of world languages, literatures and linguistics, the university announced Friday. ‘The university is reviewing plans to eliminate the language requirement for all majors [and] is exploring alternative methods of delivery such as a partnership with an online language app or online partnership with a fellow Big 12 university,’ WVU said in its news release.”

Colleges’ curious language rules: “When Dickinson College updated its style guide in June, it added a curious new word to the lexicon of diversity, equity, and inclusion: ‘crip.’ In the recent past, says the guide, this slang term for a handicapped person was ‘used to stigmatize or oppress people with physical disabilities.’ Now, however, ‘it has been reclaimed by some in the disability community,’ and so Dickinson lists ‘crip’ among its ‘terms generally preferred.’ Still among the Pennsylvania school’s ‘terms generally discouraged’ is ‘crippled.’ . . . The rules are different at Colorado State University, where a web page on ‘inclusive language’ published by the Student Disability Center labels ‘crip’ as ‘less appropriate’ than other formulations. It suggests swapping ‘That guy’s a crip’ for ‘Tom is unable to walk.’”

Amazon removes books generated by AI that were listed for sale under an author’s name: “Five books for sale on Amazon were removed after author Jane Friedman complained that the titles were falsely listed as being written by her. The books, which Friedman believes were written by AI, were also listed on the Amazon-owned reviews site Goodreads. ‘It feels like a violation, because it’s really low quality material with my name on it,’ Friedman told the Guardian.”