Hi, I'm Becca. I am the non-fiction book critic of the Washington Post, an editor at The Point, and a contributing editor at The Boston Review . My essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, will be by Metropolitan Books in the US and Virago in the UK this April. You can pre-order it here. Finally, I am also a PhD candidate (on indefinite hiatus) in philosophy at Harvard, but i remain perhaps delusionally convinced that someday I will finish my dissertation. These days I live in Washington, DC, with this person, whom I love. Here you can find all of my Washington Post pieces, which will come out each week, generally speaking.
To keep up with my writing/rantings, subscribe to my substack here. As a writer: I have contributed essays, book reviews, and the occasional art review to publications like The TLS, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Liberties, Bookforum, Art in America, The Yale Review, The Baffler, and more. These days, I write mostly for the Washington Post about non-fiction, but occasionally I write essays on fiction and whatever else for other venues. I am the winner of the first annual Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism (see more here) and the 2023 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing (see more here). In 2017, I was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the essays/criticism category. A few authors I especially love are Joseph Roth, Italo Svevo, Henry James, Henry Green, Heinrich von Kleist, Marie de France, and Norman Rush. My agent is Anna Sproul-Latimer of Neon Literary. As a (lapsed?) philosopher: I am primarily interested in aesthetics (especially aesthetic value and its relationship to other types of value), the philosophy of love and sex, and the history of German philosophy, especially Martin Heidegger, although I have increasingly consuming secondary interests in political philosophy. In "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," published in The British Journal of Aesthetics, I defend aestheticism, the view that aesthetic value is sometimes a partial grounds of moral value. I describe aestheticism in more detail in a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art. If I ever get around to completing it, my dissertation will be about some combination of the following: what it is to be a beautiful person, why evolutionary psychologists are wrong about human beauty, the ethics of exclusionary romantic/sexual/aesthetic preferences, and what role the state should play in ameliorating inequitable distributions of intimate "goods." I hold a first-class MPhil in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge and a B.A., summa cum laude with high honors, from Dartmouth College, where I studied philosophy & German (and cultivated an enduring distaste for fraternities). I receive many emails asking for advice about graduate school applications. I have answered some frequently asked questions on this page. As I note there, I do not consider myself an expert in how to write a successful graduate school application, and I urge all prospective grad students to consult resources online, as well as supervisors who have served on admissions committees, rather than me! Before the pandemic, I followed Hegel in regarding nature as geistlos, but now, like any good Heideggerian, I am a big fan of hiking. Here I am in the Berkshires, which I love
|
According to medieval Jewish commentaries on the Torah, heaven will be dazzling and dramatic. It will contain chambers “built of silver and gold, ornamented with pearls.” New arrivals will pass through gates guarded by 600,000 angels and bathed in “248 rivulets of balsam and attar.” The righteous will attend elaborate feasts and lounge in lavish gardens. As a rule, paintings of heaven are more vague and more amorphous than paintings of hell, but avuncular artists still stuff them with cherry-cheeked cherubs. In the New Testament, John promises his followers that God’s “house has many rooms.”
I don’t know for sure whether any of this is literal—whether the saved will have real bodies to bathe or eat with, whether the cherubs will dirty any actual diapers. What I do know is that if these are metaphors for anything, they are metaphors for novelty. Whatever life in heaven is really like, even if it does not involve winged babies and banquets, it will never be boring. The many rooms there, be they physical or figurative, will each loom larger than the last. Read more here.
0 Comments
In On Being Blue (1975), the philosopher and novelist William Gasslamented that we lack “a language which will allow us to distinguish the normal or routine fuck from the glorious, the rare, or the lousy one – a fack from a fick, a fick from a fock”. If we do not differentiate sharply enough between good sex and bad sex – or criminal sex and uncomfortable sex – we differentiate all too crudely between the pious and the perverts.
As JoAnn Wypijewski suggests in her daring essay collection, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo, the impoverishment of our sexual vocabulary is related to the simplicity of our moral lexicon. It is precisely because we are so insensitive to the convolutions of desire that we are so ready to revert to “primitive forms of social discipline” in our confrontations with abusers. To regard lust as a brute appetite, isolated from the social contexts that form and foment it, is to ignore what may explain (and even sometimes excuse) wrongdoing. But as Wypijewski argues, we are often blinded to such social subtleties in our haste to castigate. Read more here. As I write this, I have on or beneath my desk, to name but a few of the more prominent items, a packet of doughnut stickers; the program for a conference I organized last year; a watch, beloved in college, that ticked itself to death last month; an old tube of ChapStick, its tip gone dry and chalky; two packets of cat-shaped Post-its; a key to a forgotten door; a collection of Robert Hayden’s poetry; a stack of Goya postcards; a commentary on Kant that I have been dreading for years and have yet to crack open; a lone Christmas sock of unknown provenance; and the front cover of my disintegrating copy of Moby-Dick.
The theorist Jean Baudrillard, whose books I do not keep on my desk, accuses stockpilers and squirrelers of imposing their personalities onto their pliant belongings: “No object ever opposes the extension of the process of narcissistic projection to an unlimited number of other objects,” he writes in The System of Objects. By his lights, the collector aims to surround herself with her own image, until at last she sees herself reflected back no matter where she looks. “What you really collect,” Baudrillard concludes, “is always yourself." Read more here. IN 1806, the Prussian writer and neurotic Heinrich von Kleist was wretchedly constipated. In a letter to a colleague, he wrote, “I sit here as though by an abyss . . . I have for several months now been plagued with the most stubborn constipations. . . It is a great disorder in my nature, I know; but so it is.” Read more here.
SOMERVILLE, MASSACHUSETTS--At first I couldn’t read. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the crisis was as immediate as an intruder in the apartment I was not supposed to leave. It felt physical, lurking. I knew I was lucky to be housed and on health insurance, to say nothing of young and healthy, but I only felt grateful in theory. In practice, I felt scared, for myself and for everybody, and the fear lingered on in my body. I opened books and closed them again. Read more here.
he Swiss author Peter Stamm writes books about writing books. More specifically, he writes books about writing the books he has written. His latest novel, The Sweet Indifference of the World, is about a writer writing a novel. The book the narrator describes sounds suspiciously similar to the book we are reading. It also sounds suspiciously similar to Agnes (1998), Stamm’s enigmatic debut, which was reissued this year and which centres on the composition of a book called “Agnes”. Read more here.
Although speaking is not my preferred medium, and although I cannot promise I don't sound like an idiot because I am too appalled by the sound of my own voice to listen to these, I had a lot of fun recording them! They're with two very smart women, both of whom I like a lot and both of whom are merit further internet-stalking (in an admiring but non-creepy way, of course):
On Lolita with Jennifer Frey on her podcast, Sacred and Profane Love: https://thevirtueblog.com/2020/01/17/episode-19-love-and-lust-in-lolita/ On Marie Kondo and negative book reviewing with B.D. McClay on the inaugural episode of her podcast, Stet: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stet/id1498659735#episodeGuid=9d382c82-e486-4947-941c-bf2f260504e8 The Irish novelist Sally Rooney is a normal person. Or so she is always insisting, often with a trace of defensive desperation. Never mind that she published her debut novel, Conversations with Friends (2017), at the tender age of 26, or that her second novel, Normal People (2018), was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Never mind that she is the youngest-ever recipient of the Costa Book Prize. No, Rooney protests, her many accolades and immense popularity notwithstanding, she is just like everyone else. Here she is in Vanity Fair: “I do think it’s very possible I’ll look back on this period of my life when my books were being talked about on Twitter and think, ‘Wow, what a crazy thing to happen to a just totally average person.’” And in O, The Oprah Magazine: “I feel pretty much like everyone else.” And in the Belfast-based literary journal the Tangerine: “Everyone has a life. I haven’t had a particularly interesting one.”
Of course, genuinely normal people do not have the chance to advertise their normalcy in Vanity Fair or Oprah’s magazine. Would Rooney still be so eager to downplay her achievements if there were any risk that she would actually succeed in deflecting attention? I have to say, I hope not. Read more here. James Wood, haters claim, is a hater. The New Yorker’s most influential and polarizing critic hates gaudy postmodernists like Paul Auster and cute sentimentalists like Nicole Krauss. He can’t stand the Cambridge fixture George Steiner, whom he pillories as “a statue that wishes to be a monument,” and he dismisses Donna Tartt as “children’s literature.” Most famously, he loathes fidgety, frantic novels by the likes of Thomas Pynchon and Zadie Smith, works of so-called “hysterical realism” that can’t shut up and sit still. In 2004, the editors of n+1 denounced him as a “designated hater.”
In fact Wood’s talent for appreciation far outstrips his gift for denigration. Of the twenty-eight essays collected in Serious Noticing, an anthology of pieces Wood has published over the past twenty years, only two are negative. And even when he is hating, Wood remains eager to discover something to admire. In “Hysterical Realism,” published in 2000, he emphasizes that Zadie Smith “seems capable of almost anything”; in “Paul Auster’s Shallowness,” from 2009, he prefaces his assault by insisting that Auster’s novel Invisible “has charm and vitality in places.” Read more here. Magda Szabo’s novel “Abigail” begins with an ending. When we first encounter 14-year-old Gina Vitay, “the change that came about in her life robbed her of so much it was as if a bomb had destroyed her home.” The change in question — the sudden dismissal of Gina’s beloved governess — is just one of many upheavals soon to launch a cosseted teenager into an abrupt adulthood. Read more here!
|
Archives
June 2022
Categories |