on the pleasures of reading the new york review of books.
When limits, or choices, are displayed in the service of the possibility of meaning, in the making of art objects, we call the result beautiful. That is, we stand before a painting by Vermeer, or we read a poem by Paul Celan, or we listen to Shostakovich’s Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues for Piano, and we say this is beautiful. But what we are really announcing is our pleasure and gratitude in the fact of the choices the artist has made. We recognize something in how one stroke of the brush brushes up against another stroke of the brush; how one note moves toward and away from the next in an astounding sequence; how one word attaches itself to another and to another and to another until something that has to do with all the words separately – the history of their meanings – gathers into a nexus which allows us, which invites us, to experience something like the meaning of meaning.
– Ann Lauterbach
One of the great pleasures of the New York Review of Books is the subtle brilliance of how its editors sequence articles. It is the same pleasure that came in college from having something in one class connect to another, seemingly by serendipity.
In the 17 July 2008 issue, Stephen Greenblatt’s review of new productions of Macbeth explored the original play’s positioning between a world of magic and secularism. Soon thereafter, Claire Messud’s review of Lousie Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves used a memory of the contrast between Messud’s Catholic and Protestant sides of her family to explore a similar theme. Then, two articles later, Linda Colley’s review of J.H. Elliott’s Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 picked up the thread of contrasting Catholic and Protestant sensibilities.
Did the editors put these together knowingly or without awareness? Part of the fun is that the connections emerge without intention from the editing, so that one cannot quite be sure if he or she is being led or forging the connections independently.
It’s a small instance of intellectual life in the electric synapse between purpose and accident, a space in which wonder gets produced.
Will this mundane but delicious interplay between editor, publication, and reader remain in the digital era? Hypertext seems to replicate, even expand, the pleasurable effects of editorial sequencing.
But the editing of serendipity will only persist if cultivated and appreciated. It must be relished as a secret whispered from editors to readers across the connective and collective bandwidth.