Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor

From Jérémie Koering’s Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images (Zone Books), translated from the French by Nicholas Huckle, a description of the Egyptian Statue of the Healer Djedhor (320 B.C.E.): 

The statue includes a wide variety of magical, biographical, and dedicatory inscriptions, and we find a dual system of basins carved into its plinth. The first of these, running around the main figure, allowed for the collection of water poured over both it and the stela, while the second, sculpted deeper and connected to the first by a channel, formed a sort of reservoir into which a container might be dipped. The two basins were clearly intended to be the statue’s magico-medical end point. 

From evidence pointed out by Lacau, we can see that the object was intended primarily for a procedure of “washing” rather than for reading. … The magical inscriptions are generally positioned so as to face the healer figure, notably so with the second basin, in such a way that they appear intended to be read not so much by the officiating priest, but rather by the statue itself. … The artifact was principally activated by the running of the water that the sick person, or an intermediary, would then draw from the basin. The liquid poured over the surface of the object is a substitute, therefore, for the ritual of incantation.

But how are we to understand this piece of legerdemain? What could authorize such a slippage? It is hard to believe that the invocation, whose importance is so well known in ancient Egyptian culture, might have been entirely sidelined, at least conceptually. The solution is most likely to be found in the analogy one could make between the act of reading and the running water. The contact and the movement of the water were possibly likened to the experience of reading: the physical action of the water, running from top to bottom and adapting itself to all the reliefs and hollows of the engraved object, must have seemed equivalent to the work of the reader’s eyes, moving down the sculpture from the top to the base, activating the magical potential of the written story. … The liquid, as it is poured over his body and over the stela of Horus, might be likened to the flow of a murmured voice. Essentially, the water would be called upon to activate an always possible, potential reading.

… The water running over the stela carries out a process that reading aloud is unable to achieve, mixing image and text in a flow that makes no distinction between these two material parts of the object. It gathers the trace of the images and writing into a material, dynamic, and continuous substance, creating thus a remedy that, still active and in motion, could then be taken and given to the sick person. 

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Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor

From Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night (newly reissued by Riverhead), translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones:

He was often prone to falling into a mindless state, staring at the world in front of him as if it were a picture. Down below, people walked along the asphalt road, herding cows; dogs were running, a man burst into sudden laughter, little bells tinkled on the sheep’s necks, skin itched, higher up a man carried a hare he’d poached, he waved to someone, smoke from the chimneys drifted into the sky and birds flew to the west. This picture goes on forever; it seems to be eternal. It’s a scene that people happen to, rather than it happening to people.

On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve this young border guard, with a face as ruddy and glowing as a Bath bun, was riding his huge motorbike slowly through the snow.

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Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

From A. S. Hamrah’s Last Week in End Times Cinema (Semiotexte), a daily bulletin of movie news:

April 28, 2024

Selling point of Deadpool & Wolverine is that it doesn’t require any “Marvel homework”

WBD and Amazon “may have unknowingly” used North Korean companies for animation work on two of their TV series

Studios have begun hiring some directors based on the Rotten Tomatoes scores of their recent movies

Kalshi, a financial exchange and predictive-market company, offers a betting product for Rotten Tomatoes scores. “Now anyone can make money by being a movie critic,” is how they sell it

WBD CEO David Zaslav’s $49.7 million salary is more than the entire operating budget of WBD’s Turner Classic Movies, flagship channel of American film history

Instead of reporting subscriber numbers, Netflix will use a new metric they call “Fandom,” which is based on how many people watch trailers or parts of trailers on their platform. “Over six billion impressions every month,” they claim, as if that means anything

Comedian–Unfrosted director Jerry Seinfeld says “the movie business is over,” replaced by “depression, malaise, confusion—disorientation.” This succinct, not untrue statement has got him mocked on social media

Jean-Luc Godard’s last film, Scénarios, completed the day before he died, will debut at Cannes, then be distributed and sold by an NFT company, Roadstead

Rapper-director Kanye West launching adult entertainment studio, Yeezy Porn

Writer-director Aaron Sorkin is planning an antidisinformation J6 movie that is also a sequel to The Social Network

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom star Chris Pratt and wife Katherine Schwarzenegger, author of the book The Gift of Forgiveness: Inspiring Stories from Those Who Have Overcome the Unforgivable, have torn down the architecturally significant modernist Zimmerman House in Brentwood, built 1950. The couple purchased the house for $12.5 million and will replace it with a 15,000-square-foot “modern farmhouse”-style mansion

A saggy, older, deflated appearance is characteristic of the emaciation now known in Hollywood as “Ozempic face,” named after the prescription weight-loss drug that’s overprescribed in Los Angeles. Using too much of it too quickly is causing an endemic zombielike look, with sunken eyes and gaunt cheeks

Things Change writer-director David Mamet insists his two actor daughters, Zosia and Clara, are not nepo babies, because learning from being on set earned them a spot in the bigs. “They haven’t benefited from any type of privilege,” he says

Writer-director-actor Ben Stiller announces he was shocked no one liked Zoolander 2. The comedy sequel came out in 2016

Lucasfilm has partnered with a dairy company to make and sell Star Wars Blue Milk. Formerly only available at Disney theme parks, the liquid food product will be sold in grocery stores and through DoorDash

Tram derails at Universal Studios Hollywood as it passes too quickly through the Jurassic Park exhibit. Fifteen injured, some seriously. California Highway Patrol investigating.

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Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

From Nora Claire Miller’s Groceries (Fonograf Editions), a book-length poem:

I hand ▯s to the teller, imperfect amount after imperfect amount. ▯s aren’t money but they can come close. shapes, we call them, because there is no living thing with which a ▯ lines up. we call something good when we don’t feel like performing a comparison. we call something lit up when its conceit cannot be described. we call something impractical when it has a meaning we are not involved in. we call something dumbfounding when it is floating in thin air.

From Lance Richardson’s biography True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen (Pantheon):

Peter had started seeing a woman in Reno named Lisa Barclay Bigelow, a great beauty (she would model on the covers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar) who’d been in Nevada to secure a divorce of her own. Lisa lived in New York, and on November 19, Peter took her and his two children to the Coney Island aquarium, which had recently installed an Amazon River scene complete with piranhas and live tropical birds. Along the way, they all stopped at Pier B in Red Hook to examine the MV Venimos, which would soon ferry Peter to the genuine Amazon. “I don’t think I’ve ever been around the world,” Luke said after hearing the plan. Peter pointed out that his seven-year-old son was nevertheless a world traveler of sorts, having sailed from Italy on the Andrea Doria, which was now at the bottom of the Atlantic after sinking near Nantucket in 1956. Sara Carey, aged five, listened to this shocking news, then warned her father that he, too, would end up at the bottom of the ocean if he tried to go around the world, and sharks have “very sharp teeth.” She did not believe he was really leaving on the MV Venimos. He could barely believe it himself, though he showed no sign of trepidation. The next day at the pier, he said goodbye to Bill Styron, who’d come to bid him bon voyage. Styron was struck by his friend’s equanimity: “his spectacles planted with scholarly precision on his long angular face, he might have been going no farther than Staten Island, so composed did he seem, rather than to uttermost jungle fastnesses where God knows what beast and dark happening would imperil his hide.”

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Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

From Barbara Pym’s novel The Sweet Dove Died, originally published in 1978 (NYRB Classics):

‘We specialize in porcelain and bronzes and small objects—you know the kind of thing.’

‘Objets d’art et de vertu,’ she murmured, with a delightful accent.

‘Exactly.’ Humphrey bent towards her admiringly to refill her glass with the hock he had chosen as being particularly appropriate to the occasion. That this exquisite creature should have been exposed to the contaminating presence of the dealers, for the sake of some trifling little Victorian flower book, hardly bore thinking of and filled him with horror. A book sale was certainly no place for a woman; had it been a sale of pictures or porcelain, fetching the sort of inflated prices that made headline news, or an evening sale—perhaps being televised—to which a woman could be escorted after being suitably wined and dined—that might have been another matter altogether.

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