plus ça change...

The stack of reading in my bathroom currently includes the Winter 1996 issue of The Paris Review. This section of TPR's interview of Helen Vendler leapt out at me:

INTERVIEWER: What is your perception of your own power?

VENDLER: I can see that it seems a great deal of power to a young writer to be reviewed or not reviewed in The New York Times . . . as though it could make or break the book. Reviewing may seem like power, but it's very ephemeral power. Yes, if I review a book in The New York Times or The New Yorker more libraries will buy it, but that doesn't mean it will be looked on favorably in fifty years. There are millions of books that have been bought by libraries that nobody will ever read again after the year in which they're published.

INTERVIEWER: I wondered how you felt being depicted in The New York Times recently by a caricaturist as a head on a tank.

VENDLER: I thought it was very funny. My son, much amused, said, "My mother is a tank." The odd thing for me in seeing it is that I write mostly appreciative reviews, so a tank armed with a phallic howitzer, or whatever my fountain pen was supposed to be, seemed to me not quite the right representation for the kind of admiring reviews that I normally write. However, since a female who expresses herself decisively seems to this world someone armed with ammunition, it's probably fair enough.