Last night in bed, rather than watch the sixth game of the World Series, Hania read Janet Malcolm’s essay on Susan Sontag in The New Yorker. “What does ‘rebarbative’ mean?” she asked midway through the fourth inning.
It was one of those words I used to know but, through years of absence, I had forgotten. I googled it and told her “unattractive and objectionable.”
A few minutes later I came across this sentence in The Spectator, which I was reading between pitches: “Any Arnoldian attempt to separate culture from anarchy is stymied by the queasy spectacle of Yeats’s flirtation with fascism or Ezra Pound’s rebarbative anti-Semitism.”
