Conspicuous Consumption

   Every so often it's good to give the brain a workout with some cutting-edge literary criticism. The Calamity of Form was, for me, good in that way. The argument, to the extent that I succeeded in following it, is that romantic poetry responded to the changing social conditions brought about by the industrial revolution by, in essence, not responding to it. That is, they used a variety of rhetorical moves—catachresis, obscurity, apostrophe—that rather than clarifying their response to the changes the industrial revolution brought about, obscured those changes. The poets achieved what Nersessian calls nescience , because the tools of the poet offered no plausible way to respond to the situation in which they lived. In the course of making her argument, which she does in clear lively prose, the author appeals not only to canonical romantic poets, but also to painters such as John Constable (his cloud paintings) and contemporary artists and musicians such as Kate Bush (clouds ...

 I enjoyed this book, but suspect I would have liked it even more when I was young person taking slow trains (Shout out to the Eurail pass!) around Europe. This is partly because it is a (lightly?) fictionalized account of just what it is like to be a young person wandering around Europe for no particular reason. While I did my wandering on my own or in the company of other temporarily rootless young people, de Terán's more sensational wanderings are in the company of a Venezuelan bank robber and two guerillas in exile who are his partners. She has married the bank robber on what can only be called a whim at the age of sixteen—he was about twenty years older—and follows in his wake for most of this novel. It's a pleasant ramble, mostly in Italy, but one does rather tire of the protagonist's almost complete lack of agency and her difficult to understand devotion to her not terribly pleasant husband. Apparently this is an early entry in the currently popular sub-genre that we...