{"id":107948,"date":"2017-02-22T09:02:35","date_gmt":"2017-02-22T14:02:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=107948"},"modified":"2017-02-22T10:30:22","modified_gmt":"2017-02-22T15:30:22","slug":"whitmans-secret-novel-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/22\/whitmans-secret-novel-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Whitman\u2019s Secret Novel, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_107949\" style=\"width: 771px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/whitman_with_butterfly.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-107949\" class=\"wp-image-107949\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/whitman_with_butterfly.jpg\" width=\"761\" height=\"596\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/whitman_with_butterfly.jpg 761w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/whitman_with_butterfly-300x235.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-107949\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Whitman, butterfly. Not pictured: secret serialized novel.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Look, we all have crappy novels that we\u2019ve anonymously serialized in some small-time regional newspaper. (Mine is about a family of panda bears who vacation at the North Pole, where they befriend some itinerant polar bears.) We go to the grave expecting these novels never to be revealed. But now some hotshot grad student has tracked down <em>Life and Adventures of Jack Engle<\/em>, a swashbuckling mystery novel by one Walt Whitman, who published it without credit in New York\u2019s <em>Sunday Dispatch<\/em> circa 1852. The novel, as Jennifer Schuessler writes, boasts \u201cantic twists, goofy names, and suddenly revealed conspiracies,\u201d but it\u2019s at its best when its hero loses the plot and pauses for some <em>Leaves of Grass<\/em>\u2013style musing: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/02\/20\/arts\/in-a-walt-whitman-novel-lost-for-165-years-clues-to-leaves-of-grass.html?_r=2&amp;mtrref=undefined&amp;mtrref=www.nytimes.com&amp;gwh=31890CE503633864195B7943423875C4&amp;gwt=pay\" target=\"_blank\">Jack enters the cemetery at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, and the madcap plot grinds to a halt in favor of reveries about nature, immortality and the oneness of being that strikingly echo the imagery of Whitman\u2019s great work<\/a>. \u2018Long, rank grass covered my face,\u2019 says Jack, the first-person narrator. \u2018Over me was the verdure, touched with brown, of trees nourished from the decay of the bodies of men.\u2019 Jack wanders among those bodies of men, copying out the inscriptions of the tombstones of Alexander Hamilton, the War of 1812 hero Capt. James Lawrence (of \u2018Don\u2019t give up the ship!\u2019 fame) and other lost lives. Then, he exits onto the streets, where \u2018onward rolled the broad, bright current\u2019\u2014and quickly and rather indifferently wraps up his own story.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Salamishah Tillet on the power and the glory of black marching bands: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/daily\/2017\/02\/16\/the-thrill-of-the-black-marching-band\/\" target=\"_blank\">In Jules Allen\u2019s\u00a0<em>Marching Bands<\/em>, a stunning collection of social documentary, portraiture, and panoramic photography, he takes us into this behind-the-scenes world of African-American marching bands all over the country<\/a>. \u2018Whenever a marching band would come through, it would take me to pieces,\u2019 Allen has said. \u2018In particular, Morgan State. They were just something else: the rhythm, the movement, the precision, the timing. What I call now the pulse and beat of what they were doing. It all seemed so particular to an African-American sensibility\u2019 \u2026 In one of my favorite images, we spy a school marching band in downtown Durham, North Carolina. Flanked by a school bus and a parked car, everyone is in motion\u2014they are either preparing for a parade or getting back on the bus. Drums are littered everywhere, even a trumpet on the ground, while one young man holds his arm up, trombone to his side, as if mentally rehearsing either his first notes or remembering his last ones. Behind him a young trombonist looks on, while to his right, a trumpeter in full costume stares. Band members walk in opposite directions, some smiling, some somber, as a mural, \u2018The Black Wall Street Community,\u2019 creates a telling backdrop.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In the literature of the twenty-first century, Geoff Shullenberger sees a natural tendency toward gossip, jealousy, and rivalry\u2014the byproducts of a world in which authors can sit around Googling themselves. And Ren\u00e9 Girard saw it coming: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/tankmagazine.com\/issue-70\/features\/geoff-shullenberger\/\" target=\"_blank\">In his classic study\u00a0<em>Deceit, Desire and the Novel<\/em>, Girard argued that the most profound insights of novels concern their characters\u2019 jealous fascination with others, their tendency to compare themselves with peers and their desire to be admired by others or simply to be another, which in turn gives rise to rivalry and enmity<\/a> \u2026 The simultaneity of malice and infatuation, the jealousy hidden beneath mockery\u2014all these link gossip to Girard\u2019s theory of imitative, or mediated, desire. When we desire imitatively, we borrow our objects of desire from someone else, who serves as a model or \u2018mediator.\u2019 According to the counterintuitive vision offered in the novels analyzed by Girard, envy precedes desire, and jealousy precedes love.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Quickly, quickly, let\u2019s check in on a debate roiling the Shakespeare scholars of the world. Here\u2019s Daniel Pollack-Pelzner on Gary Taylor, whose <em>New Oxford Shakespeare<\/em> is the first edition of the plays to give Christopher Marlowe a coauthor credit for <em>Henry VI<\/em>: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/page-turner\/the-radical-argument-of-the-new-oxford-shakespeare\" target=\"_blank\">Taylor has been accused of hating Shakespeare, which isn\u2019t true<\/a>. He admires Shakespeare. But he thinks that our veneration of the playwright\u2019s genius has blinded us to the brilliance of other writers, such as Marlowe and Middleton\u2014and to the political alternatives they envisioned. \u2018Shakespeare\u2019s favorite subjects are monarchy, monogamy, and monotheism; not coincidentally, his most famous speeches and sonnets are monologues\u2019 \u2026 Rather than include single-authored scholarly introductions (or \u2018critical monologues,\u2019 as they call them) for each play, this edition offers snippets from a range of critical responses. \u2018You might think of this as tapas Shakespeare,\u2019 the general editors\u2019 preface suggests. This approach upsets conventions that the editors associate with Shakespeare himself. Shakespeare, they argue, \u2018specializes in one-and-onliness.\u2019 Taylor, on the other hand, believes \u2018in a democracy of readers who are not being told what they have to like,\u2019 he told me over the phone.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>And last, news from Iceland, where the president, Gu\u00f0ni Th. J\u00f3hannesson,\u00a0faced a firestorm of controversy after claiming that he was \u201cfundamentally opposed\u201d to putting pineapple on his pizza: \u201c\u2018<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2017\/feb\/21\/icelands-president-would-ban-pineapple-on-pizza-if-he-could\" target=\"_blank\">I do not have the power to make laws which forbid people to put pineapples on their pizza<\/a>,\u2019 Gu\u00f0ni, a former history professor at the University of Iceland, wrote. \u2018I am glad I do not hold such power.\u2019 Presidents should \u2018not have unlimited power,\u2019 he continued. \u2018I would not want to hold this position if I could pass laws forbidding that which I don\u2019t like. I would not want to live in such a country. For pizzas, I recommend seafood.\u2019 \u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s roundup: Walt Whitman wrote a zany mystery novel, Christopher Marlowe is officially credited as Shakespeare\u2019s coauthor, and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[27396,27398,23022,1045,6453,1822,27399,3769,27395,504,27397,747,100,12632,21280,264,2295],"class_list":["post-107948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-anonymous-novels","tag-black-marching-bands","tag-christopher-marlowe","tag-google","tag-gossip","tag-iceland","tag-jules-allen","tag-leaves-of-grass","tag-life-and-adventures-of-jack-engle","tag-literature","tag-marching-bands","tag-novels","tag-photography","tag-pizza","tag-rene-girard","tag-walt-whitman","tag-william-shakespeare"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Whitman\u2019s Secret Novel<\/title>\n<meta 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